Hey! Trying out this format of writing a periodic journal of life updates & thoughts for my friends. This is issue #1. Thanks for reading ♥️.
🤸 What I’ve been up to
I visited NYC in December for ~2.5 weeks!
The official work reason was that I was leading the Notion “databases frontend performance summit.” The unofficial reason was that I wanted to visit NYC and some friends (one at Recurse Center who swears it was the most life-changing experience of her life and reinvigorated her love of computing), and the perf summit seemed like a great two-birds-one-stone sort of opportunity to get the trip sponsored.
As a result, I got to attend two work holiday parties and had a lovely time visiting the city.
[NYC] a few of the many people working on making Notion fast.
[SF] my work team. the holiday parties were “high school prom” themed!
My favorite event was going to Synth Night at NYC Resistor, where folks demoed their homemade synthesizers and played their songs.
yes, he was playing the bananas & lemons
i have no idea what is going on here
The lineup included artists like Disposable Planet (video-game inspired ambient chiptunes) and The Way Up (synthwave ambient vaporwave electronic music).
This event helped me understand the allure of NYC. With so many people concentrated in one space, full of creative and social energy, you can find your weird funky corners of the city that you love. Afterwards, I told a friend that I’d move here for spaces like this (maybe, temporarily).
December and January were mostly clouded by being sick. I probably have some recurring ENT & asthma issues that I haven’t resolved, which typically manifests in a very long lingering cough after a cold :’(.
In my downtime I’ve been indulging in my love of rogue-like deck-builder games — I finally beat Balatro’s gold stake and Slay the Spire ascension 20. I briefly took part in the Pokemon TCG Pocket craze. I also played online poker with friends and then decided to take a break after realizing how all-consuming and sometimes-unhealthy poker can get.
I’ve been playing a lot of piano (improv as usual). Someone went and finally built the product that I’ve been procrastinating on finishing for years — an always-on, automatic recording music journal!
I emailed and met with the founder Chip Weinberger irl about how we converged & diverged on various ideas, how cool his implementation was, and how he had finally made what I’ve wanted for years a reality.
jamcorder — his version with a ESP32 microcontroller and companion app (see HN post).
my app focused on the web interface, and I never got to building the hardware companion (which we both felt was the most important part to reduce the friction of recording).
It’s cool to see something you’ve personally spent so much time ideating and planning come to life in the form of someone else’s project, infused with their own unique taste and ideas. I had kanban boards detailing a multi-year roadmap of product ideas, copious notes on the MIDI file format and javascript libraries, and an ongoing code rewrite, but never finished my project.
At first I thought I’d feel some sense of loss as Chip beat me to the punch, but then I realized that I don’t have to build my project anymore; his version is great, and I can just text him my feature requests and build an interface on top of his work 😛.
I’ve been thinking about health a lot more this past year (is this something everybody does at this age and a general trend in tech circles with the rise of Bryan Johnson, Huberman, etc?).
After moving to San Francisco, I mostly had lost my running habit. Most of my physical activity was an occasional gym visit to Mission Cliffs, a weekly-ish soccer game, and walking to work.
Last year, my coworker Julie started up a team run club — and we’ve been going weekly to Kezar Stadium in Golden Gate Park. At the end of our first session, I ran an all-out 100m dash, trying to re-enact my high school track days, and then puked shortly after.
I think the whole gym-once-in-a-while routine doesn’t feel as sufficient anymore.
I’m using Beeminder to help track and motivate some habits, like exercise. I get fined every time I miss a habit. I met one of the creators at Manifest (a sort of nerd-camp conference I attended for prediction market fans and rationalists) and really liked their spiel.
“We live amidst a deluge of opportunities for instant gratification, especially in the form of food and entertainment, and most of us don’t handle it well. The general problem, known as akrasia, is this: you understand your own best interests when you consider them dispassionately, but in the moment your decision-making is distorted. The best time for, say, a workout is always “tomorrow”. And the best time to start working is after “just one more” clip of [redacted; save yourself!] on YouTube…
Knowing that the problem boils down to time scales (hyperbolic discounting) implies the fundamental solution: commitment devices. For example, many people buy cost-inefficient individual-sized packs of cigarettes or candy, paying a premium to throttle their future consumption. Deleting games from your computer or going somewhere without internet access to get work done is another common example. You need to lock yourself in to your chosen course of action, like maintaining a healthy weight, eating right, or getting blog posts written every month.”
from Flexible Self-Control (Daniel Reeves)
my 3 habits tracked on beeminder.
if I go under the line, I am fined $30.
So I guess I’m going to the gym more again (or else Beeminder will fine me).
Recently Eric and I found out that our apartment has quite poor CO levels when the windows are down…
Thankfully, this is a mostly resolvable issue: we just need to open our windows & doors more. But yeah, watch your CO levels… 🙃
🖋️ On writing
One of my goals is to write and publish an article every ~1.5 months on wustep.me. I’ve mostly written about software, product, and personal mental models.
I recently wrote Headspace — an exploration of seeing the self through the aspirational lens of navigating a free-form headspace.
Lately I've loved the idea that writing is a form of thinking — it's how we cement ideas onto a canvas, explore possibilities, and create new connections. The clearer we write, the clearer we communicate, and the clearer we think. In sharing, we broadcast our brains for others to decide if they like living in them.
“Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It's like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can't stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.”
from Bird by Bird (Anne Lamott)
I’m hoping to turn some of my dozens of unfinished drafts into something you’ll read. 🙂
In these journals, I’ll sometimes add an optional rabbit hole underneath a toggle block. Click the ▶ to open.
🐇 Rabbit hole: on memory
Sherlock: “Get out. I need to go into my mind palace”
Dr: ”Your what?”
John: ”His mind palace. It’s a memory technique. It’s a mental map… You deposit memories there and theoretically you can never forget anything, all you have to do is find your way back to it.”
Sherlock proceeds to maniacally wave his hands around like a conductor to mentally navigate words in various fonts in his mind palace until he uncovers “Liberty, Indiana. H.O.U.N.D.”
I’ve always been fascinated by chess grandmasters who can simultaneously play multiple games blindfolded. My attempts at single chess board visualization (as a 1200 ELO chess.com player 😂) have not been so successful.
I've always thought of myself as having poor memory, but this may stem from rarely taking time to revisit memories or just not being present enough. I’m typically quite future-oriented, preferring to predict the future rather than revisit the past.
But I recently got a targeted ad for an app called memoryOS and gave it a try. In it, the memory champion Jonas von Essen teaches various memory techniques (chaining, storytelling, mind palace, using a peg list).
Jonas von Essen is the real deal, despite what memoryOS’s growth-hacky marketing might suggest.
“On 7 March 2020, he recalled 24,063 digits of pi, setting a new personal, Swedish, and European record. His aim was to recall the first 100,000 digits but he made a mistake on the 24,064th. Three days later he became the first person to pass the "Olympus Mons of Memory Tests", being tested on samples from the first 100,000 digits. A random sequence of nine digits were read out and Jonas recalled the nine digits preceding and following these. This was repeated 50 times in a row without error to complete the challenge.” (wikipedia)
One of the app’s features is allowing you to navigate and practice recalling virtual mind palaces. A mind palace lets you associate specific memories (ideas, concepts, etc) with locations & objects in that space, making it easier to recall information by mentally walking through that space later.
Personal mind palaces (like childhood homes, apartments) have some limitations — you can’t always easily access and practice recalling that space, and they may evolve over time, so they can be harder to anchor on. Virtual mind palaces address these limitations since they're easily accessible on devices, customizable, and stable. Some folks have even built virtual mind palaces in VR.
With a few weeks of spaced repetition recall practice, I think most people should be able to construct these mind palaces with 5+ rooms storing 50+ items. Aphantasia probably makes this much harder, but the research is mixed.
This “Japanese Palace” from memoryOS has 5 rooms and 50 items in total. The app lets you walk through the palace, add notes to individual items, and practice recalling rooms.
To test my newly cemented mind palace, I convinced my friends to play Order Overload Cafe — a board game about memorizing progressively higher quantities of cafe menu items.
At each level, the team works together to recall [level] x [# of players] menu items, with levels going up to 7. A dealer reads all menu items aloud quickly, then distributes the cards to players. Players take turns naming one menu item held by their teammates. If anyone makes a mistake (names must match exactly), they can no longer participate in recalling items.
So in my mind palace’s tea room, there’s a table, a tea pot, tea cups, a sushi set, and chopsticks. I might imagine the table with a light green texture for a Matcha Latte, or the chopsticks made out of ham & cheese for a Ham & Cheese Sandwich. In the dojo room, there’s a wooden training dummy that I’d replace with two life-sized Sonic the hedgehog statues to represent a Double Espresso.
It was interesting to hear what my friends used for their representations of menu items and try various techniques. One might imagine the items visually laid out on tables, clustered thematically (sweets in one section, lattes in another). Or bucket the words directly (hot coffee x 2 + iced coffee without ice || apple juice + apple pie). Or create a story chain (Italian man with a Mario cap [cappuccino] carrying a [milkshake] is trying to pull lemons from a tree [iced lemon tea]).
I haven’t really used these new memory skills for anything quite useful yet… but if you ever want to quiz me on the top 10 countries by land mass, let me know. 🙈
![[NYC] a few of the many people working on making Notion fast.](https://www.notion.so/image/attachment%3Afb47150e-5f89-47d3-bd03-f38c48488615%3A000CD78A-F4EB-4D3F-BC17-476F7841C955_1_105_c.jpeg%3FspaceId%3D30725683-e071-41f1-988d-e6e6fa72abd8?table=block&id=1885cb08-cf2c-806e-a75d-eb85ba5c5140&cache=v2)
![[SF] my work team. the holiday parties were “high school prom” themed!](https://www.notion.so/image/attachment%3Af5a72598-f5f7-4778-8c18-0c36ac04e907%3AC7D90A53-B357-4452-928A-0FE4BF7EA63D_1_105_c.jpeg%3FspaceId%3D30725683-e071-41f1-988d-e6e6fa72abd8?table=block&id=1875cb08-cf2c-80dd-9d1f-cfb227c2f693&cache=v2)
