Wait long enough to write and the updates are bound to be interesting! I’ve gone through many lives since I last wrote, back in July of 2020, mid-pandemic. Leaving Google for… Computer Algebra? I quit my job at Google at the end of 2021. I’m not sure I ever wrote about starting this job back in 2019. Yes, for about 15 months I was a *Staff Research Engineer *at *Google X, *a dream job on paper! In reality, fairly pedestrian and factory-like. ...
Memento Mori. In English, this Latin phrase means something like “remember that you must die”, or “Remember Death”. The Stoic philosophers were big pushers of this idea as the core insight of a daily meditation practice. Are you worried that there are things you’re going to regret about your life when you die? What if you died today? It is absolutely certain that you are going to die; you might as well sit down each morning and imagine it. Do any regrets flare up about your day, or your life? ...
I hope you’re all doing well during these strange times of quarantine and uncertainty. I’ve been passing the time by playing my guitar, and the experience has generated a few insights that I think are worth sharing. First, some background, then the nuggets. I played as a teenager for a few years, and had a fairly cramped relationship with music. I was good, technically, but I didn’t have much feel for music, and compensated for this by learning really difficult solo jazz arrangements of songs I didn’t listen to, like Autumn Leaves or Lullaby of Birdland. I can still feel the prickling shame and performance anxiety I’d feel at big family gatherings when my uncle or mom would ask me to play something. A test! And I had no repertoire that was fun for anyone else, no chords, no ability to lift myself or anyone else up with music. ...
Well, here we are, close to 18 months after I left my job at Stripe and put out the call for subscribers to this newsletter. In the future, expect notes on my new, strange identity as an “AI research engineer”, working on machine learning and evolution; notes on information theory, set theory, linear algebra and friends, squeezed through my mind and decorated with as much non-symbolic intuition as I can manage; how to take a run at difficult things outside the usual set of difficult things everyone thinks they want. Today, a note I wrote after a day out working on the RV10 4-seater airplane I’m building in the garage. ...