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Books I Read in June, 2026

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 09:33:57 +0530

Got quite a bit of reading done this month, because there was little else to do with the root canal and other things that kept popping up. Reading kept me sane.

Empire Podcast: Spice Wars, The Battle of the East India Companies, Episodes 358-360
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While India had the EIC later, Indonesia and its surroundings were ground earlier under the boot of the VOC. According to Wikipedia:

Statistically, the VOC eclipsed all of its rivals in the Asian trade. Between 1602 and 1796, the VOC sent nearly a million Europeans to work in the Asia trade on 4,785 ships, and netted for their efforts more than 2.5 million tonnes of Asian trade goods and slaves. By contrast, the rest of Europe combined sent 882,412 people from 1500 to 1795. The fleet of the English, later British East India Company, the VOC’s nearest competitor, was a distant second to its total traffic, with 2,690 ships and one-fifth the tonnage of goods carried by the VOC. The VOC enjoyed huge profits from its spice monopoly through most of the 17th century.

The series details the history of the two early corporate raiders and plunderers, and the carnage they wrought in South East Asia and the Indian subcontinent.

The Rest is History, The Fall of the Incas, Episodes 644-649
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I don’t know why but I always assumed South America was colonised east to west. This series along with the Simon Bolivar series last month gives me the idea, that it went from the Caribbean to Mexico and then downwards towards the top of South America and down the west coast. I should read more history about the continent.
This series, somehow, felt even more heart breaking than the Aztecs. The greed and the avarice and the deception and the desperate, brutish, violence of it all, should leave you shaking with rage.

The Secret Pilgrim, John le Carré
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The probably will be my last le Carré for a while. Too much bleakness, while real life is in a tumult is not good. A collection of stories big and small, with Smiley playing the framing device. This is more about Ned and his adventures in the service. I loved it.

Platform Decay, Martha Wells
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Yay! New Murderbot episode! Bought and read in a day flat. Not as good as the older Murderbots, but even a middling Murderbot book is much better than most other books. Loved it to bits. Plot is the same as every other Murderbot. Murderbot rescues someone. What else is new? Murberbot now has regular “check-ins” with its feelings.

Control, Andy Diggle, Angela Cruickshank, Andrea Mutti & Vladimir Popov
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A modern hardboiled comic … err graphic novel. Cleaned out a lot of my comics. Most of the old ones have not aged well. And most of the new ones are just out there to shock you. Alan Moore really raised the bar. Nothing really comes close. His are the only ones I’ve held on to. V for Vendetta is the only one of two hardback I have. The other is my lovely Sandman series (written by the asshole who shall not be named, and illustrated by Keith, Dringenberg et al.)
Back to Control. This plays like an old potboiler. Detective is framed. Detective has to break the law to get justice and show her innocence. Pretty decent writing. But lovely art.

Chung Ju-yung & Hyundai, Farnam Street Podcast
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This is Shane Parrish trying to pull an Acquired like episode. Really, really, really good.
The (hagiographic) story of Chung Ju-Yung’s life and how he built Hyundai and was a major driving force behind South Korea turning into one of the largest economies in the world.

Steve Jobs in Exile, Geoffrey Cain
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If Becoming Steve Jobs, tracked Jobs and his personal growth through his Next years, this one fleshes out nearly everything Schlender talked about in his book. If you are interested in biographies or Steve Jobs, this is definitely worth a read. I bought it because this is the only era of Jobs’ life and career that I’m interested in. The turnaround of Apple was something started just as I entered the workforce and was something I lived through. The early Apple, I already know lots about. So I’ve always wanted to know what happened in the “lost decade.” Becoming Steve Jobs and Steve Jobs in Exile are a good duology to know everything about that era.

Apple: The First 50 Years, David Pogue
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If you want an grand overview of Apple’s history, look no further. Pogue probably leveraged damn near every connection he must have had to write this. It’s a lovely history of the company. Gets a little sloggy in parts, but a good book nonetheless.

Learning Object-Oriented Programming, Design and TDD with Pharo, Stéphane Ducasse & Damien Pollet
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I just had to understand what message passing meant, and what Objects were, in the way the original authors intended it. Pharo is a spiritual descendant of Smalltalk, and like Lisp, works in a self contained environment where darn near everything is an object and can be reconfigured. This book gave me a really good base on which to build my further programming knowledge when it comes to Object Oriented Programming. This book—along with others—is freely available on the Pharo website.

Data Structures the Fun Way, Jeremy Kubica
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Reading a No Starch book is always fun. And I read this to get a handle of just what the big picture was on Data Structures. This is a really good book that does that. Examples are clear. Ideas are well explained. And nothing gets too dreary. The coffee analogies are just … barista’s kiss!

The Art of Reading, Timothy Spurgin (The Great Courses)
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This is the companion to Adler’s, How to Read a Book. Adler is about the craft, while Spurgin is about the art. They both complement each other. Adler comes from how to use your mind to tackle the rectangular piece of dead tree in front of you, in a methodical manner. And once you have that, Spurgin then takes you on a journey of just how large the world of reading is. How to think about narration. And the basics of storytelling. Of plots and plotting. The rise of metafiction. What it means to read closely and carefully. And how even small details all contribute the the work as a whole. It truly has made me want to be, what Spurgin calls, “an artful reader.”
This series of lectures was something I bought on a whim when I was trying to learn Mathematics via the Great Courses during Covid.¹ And it just sat on the shelf, until I realised, I could just convert the videos to audio and then listen to them as I potter about the kitchen in the mornings. Halfway through the book, I also found that the Great Courses were available as audiobooks on Audible as well. So my wishlist is damn near full for the next two years now. 😂 So hopefully there will always be one of these courses I do every month. These are really lovely.
Going through this course, also finally helped me clarify to myself, just what it is that I consider a really good book. It has to be beautifully written. And the writing has to match the world and the genre. It also makes me realise books like these are few and far between, so now it also makes me a more patient book buyer :)
Some examples: Richard Powers in The Overstory, Ursula K Leguin and Tamsyn Muir with all their works of fantasy, and Peter Watts too with his hard edged, dark, science fiction. And then there’s always the classics, which I am now slowly discovering and enjoying. Wish me luck!

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don’t ask why. ↩︎

Books I Read in May, 2026

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 15:17:30 +0530

courtesy, Encyclopædia Britannica

Didn’t read as much as I wanted to. Too much, as they say, of life happened! Been reading in the small snatches of time that I get.

Sherlock & Co. Podcast
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The Three Garridebs, Season 43
Mariana (Mrs. Hudson) Ametxazurra (the amazing Marta da Silva), helms this one.
Because John is, uhm, out of the picture somehow.
This one is not filler (even though I love their fluffy episodes very much, as well) and is a bit dark.
Addictive listening as usual.

The Empty House, Season 44
The House across No. 22B Baker Street is empty!
Is the spider still around?
Once again Mariana untangles the pieces. Also Sherlock creates a pillow fort!

Vanguard, Spring 2026, Episode 3, Acquired Podcast
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St. Jack, needs no introduction to you folks if you invest in the markets (specially if you are a die hard Boglehead).
Jack Bogle took a very blue collar, common sense, attitude to investing.
And then, he brought it to the masses.
And then, he spent the rest of his life, preaching it.
If you think index funds are the bees knees, you have Jack to thank!
The podcast goes through his life and reveals just why Jack had to do things, the way he did them.

Smiley’s People, John le Carré
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George spends twenty years obsessing over a lighter and then when he actually gets it back, does not want it.
Well, that’s one way of spoiling the novel 😂
To me, it sort of put an end to one era of le Carré’s novels.
We end at another border crossing in Berlin and Smiley gets some form of closure.
If you enjoy bleak, nihilistic, yet well crafted novels, le Carré’s your man.

Empire Podcast: Simon Bolivar: the Liberator, Episodes 354-357
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“Freedom is often the first casualty of war.”
— Gabriel García Márquez, The General in His Labyrinth

A rapid run, through the complex life of the man who led six countries to freedom! (ergo, El Libertador)
He wanted freedom, but mostly for his class, not for the underclass.
And yet to gain that freedom, he ranged so wide and rode thousands of miles on horseback, leading folks to call him Iron Ass!
He fought Spain and he fought the jungle and he fought tuberculosis.
He jailed and killed his own supporters out of paranoia.
He finally had to be stripped of power and yet remains one of South America’s biggest heroes.
Well worth a listen.

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Matthias Endler Built His Own Newsletter Setup

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 22 May 2026 16:13:29 +0530

Intended Audience

Mostly me (confirmation bias. slight gloating 😂)

I’m writing this post today, because I monkeyed with my newsletter template. Again!
So this post is just to make sure there are no more hiccoughs :)

Matthias Endler, he of the fantastic Rust in Production podcast (and the Corrode rust consultancy) just published a post on his newsletter setup and how he went about building it.

His reasons (and his story) are really similar to mine.¹
Tinyletter => Mailchimp =>
Wanting to have a semblance of control after being burnt => Self hosting!

He settled on Plunk, while I use my Sendy + Amazon SES combo. (they look pretty similar to me)
Newsletters live in a git controlled repo. Same.
Write in my favourite editor. Ditto.
One markdown file per letter. Same pinch!

The only difference, is his workflow is controlled by a fancy cli, while I depend on ye old copy & paste.

Having someone with a visible presence do this, hopefully serves as an inspiration to others.
I just wish more of my nerd kinfolk do this!

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except for his audience ofcourse! Which is orders of magnitude larger than my dinky little circle of friends ↩︎

Books I Read in April, 2026

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 16 May 2026 05:30:00 +0530

April was as busy as March, with hardly any time, between returning from Kubecon, catching up with everything and then once again getting ready to visit a client in early May. Did get quite a bit reading done though.
As you can see above, I was enchanted by the magic of Dolly Parton all this month!

Deep Questions, Cal Newport, Episodes 391-400
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I’m going to stop counting these episodes as books now.
Cal’s getting more prolific and repetitive.
Neither of which are bad things at all.
But this means that I now listen to him, like I listen to my old songs or Ziglar tapes.
Just so that I can hear their voices and remember their principles.
400 seems to be a lovely place to stop counting.
His advice and work on the intersection of life and craft, is invaluable to me, and you can be sure, I’ll be listening as long as he is sharing his thoughts.

Lincoln the Unknown, Dale Carnegie
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This is a book I read when I was a child and when I came across it in a flea market, I picked it up out of sheer delight and nostalgia.
It presents Lincoln as a moral guide with plenty of stories of his life, his family and his work. No critical or academic study here. It has quite a few facts and a great deal of hagiographic admiration as well.
I absolutely loved it!

Empire Podcast
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Indian Uprising 1857, Episodes 322-329
The First War of Independence, the Indian Uprising of 1857, the Great Sepoy Mutiny, it goes by so many names.
This series goes into quite a bit of depth on the events upto and during the war for independence and presents many, many points of view.
This was a wonderful listen.

The Bronze Age Apocalypse, Episodes 332-337
A small series on a old civilisation extant in the Levant and its relationships with other places in the Mediterranean.

The Middle East: From the Arab Cold War to the Israeli Invasion of Lebanon, Episodes 346-353
If you want to know all the context for what’s happening in Iran now, go listen to this series. Very insightful.

The Beryl Coronet, The Stockbroker’s Clerk, The Six Napoleons, Sherlock & Co. Podcast, Season 40, 41 & 42
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A series of tiny adventures stringing along a much larger arc. Who is the Spider? Is it Moriarty lurking in the shadows? It’s getting thrillier and thrillier!

Literature Ideas, You Really Need to Know, John Sutherland
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Lots of concepts very simply explained and thought through. Everything I found here, will help me be more introspective about all future (good) books I read. I learned quite a lot. Here’s a bit about classics …

‘Classic’ – a debased term? Eliot’s question (what is a classic?) remains tantalizing; and the abuses of the term he joked about are still everywhere. ‘Classic comedy’ is more likely to mean Carry On Up the Khyber than Aristophanes. Football matches, rock-and-roll and tea cakes are all given honorific ‘classic’ status (cigars are also labelled ‘Hamlet’ – but that, like nags called Dante, is something else).

Overused and abused as the term is, literature still needs it. Properly applied, the idea of ‘classic’ points towards something that we hold to be centrally important – although defining that something is tricky.

Eliot saw classics as fruit of the society in which they happened. ‘A classic,’ he told his Virgilian audience, ‘can only occur when a civilization is mature; when a language and a literature are mature. And it must be the work of a mature mind.’ He doubtless made this lofty statement in an auditorium where the blackout blinds were pulled down, as part of the protective measures against German bombers aiming to blast the assembled classicists to pieces. Whatever epithet one chose in 1944¹ for the civilization that had produced Virgil (currently under the heel of Mussolini), ‘mature’ would not be it.

The classic and empire: [Frank] Kermode was sharper in his sociology than Eliot. It was not a civilization but an empire – with all the temporal (and, if necessary, brutal) cultural power imperialism implies – that supplied the foundation for the classic. If a language is, as linguists like to joke, a dialect with an army behind it, then classic literature is writing with an imperium behind it. This is easily enough tested with reference to the European Union, which currently has some 27 member countries. Which of those countries can be said to have classic literatures, as opposed to some impressive works of literature? The answer would be those which – before the twentieth-century winds of change blew – had great empires (Britain, France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Germany, Holland, Austria, Belgium). Does Luxembourg have its classics? Or Moldova? Where are their Shakespeares, Racines or Cervantes?

In a brilliant critical move Kermode argues that it is the very pliability of the classic that is its essence. It ‘accommodates’ – makes itself at home – wherever and whenever it finds itself. It is the classic’s ability to be both antique, yet modern, its infinite – but never anarchic – plurality that defines it. A work like King Lear, Kermode argues, ‘subsists in change, by being patient of interpretation’. Every generation will read, or understand, King Lear differently insofar as every generation is different from its predecessors. No final version, or interpretation, of the play can be achieved. But every generation will find its own satisfactory interpretation. And the classic is tolerant of each and every different explanation of itself.

The condensed idea
The classic is the gold standard of literature – but all that glistens is not classic

Songteller: My Life in Lyrics, Dolly Parton
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I listened to this on audio first, because I wanted to hear Dolly sing, just as I wanted to hear Sara Bareilles tell of her songs in her book and Judi Dench speak of her perfomances in hers. And then I went and bought it as an ebook as well, because I wanted to see all the pictures as well :)
My childhood was Dolly Parton (and Kenny Rogers and Willie Nelson and other country artists). And I probably listened to her as she hit her stride as an extremely successful solo artist. Because I had no idea of her variety show on television and all her work with Porter Wagoner for close to two decades before her solo work, seventies onwards.
I loved hearing her voice, humming along and laughing along and telling stories of her dad and her husband and all her big family and the struggles she faced and the way she handled fame, showcased in short, rapid vignettes. If you love her music, this is a must listen. Dolly’s amazing!

Dolly, talking about her song, “The Sacrifice” as well as reminiscing on her journey.²

This is a song that I wrote that just came out of my heart and soul, my gut. Sometimes you wonder if you’ve made all the wise choices. Would you do things differently if you could?

People say, “How come all of this success happened to you?” I say, “Because I sacrificed whatever I had to in order to get it.” You can’t veer off into this and that. You can’t lose your momentum if you’ve got a dream and a focus. I always felt like God was directing me. So I’m not going to let up until He says, “Stop.” I just keep going, like a horse with blinders on.

I wrote “The Sacrifice” because somebody asked me that question. Well, the answer is, I gave up time with family and friends. I gave up vacations for work. I “carried my pail.” Like the song says, “You don’t drink the water, if you don’t drill the well.” One of my favorite lines I ever wrote is, “I was gonna be rich, no matter how much it cost / And I was going to win, no matter how much I lost.”

It’s only in the wee hours, when you’re fading off to sleep, that you ask, “Is it worth the sacrifice?” I think I probably wouldn’t have done anything different, because I believe that this is what I was supposed to do. Who am I not to sacrifice to make things better for the people here that I am responsible for?

Yes, I would do it all again. No doubt about it.

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Eliot was addressing the Virgil Society on the subject of classics in 1944 ↩︎
This text closes the audiobook. But I’ve chosen the paraphrased text from the ebook though. Dolly’s actual ramble while lovely to listen to, meanders somewhat before it gets to her very emphatic No doubt about it :) ↩︎

Books I Read in March, 2026

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 12:10:41 +0530

courtesy, Penguin Random House

Between getting ready for Kubecon EU, 2026 (creating my poster) and getting ready for Kubecon EU, 2026 (dealing with all the travel sutff), March was a busy month.
Did get quite a bit of reading done. Did not have enough time to listen to my favourite history podcasts though :)

The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, Stieg Larsson
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This is a pattern that I now see everywhere when I now read a trilogy (or series).
The first book sets up the world, the rest of them then just tell a very good story set in that world. Millennium (this series) is a very good example of this trope. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (which I read last month) sets up the bleak, colourless, cold, misogynistic world. And now Fire and Hornet’s Nest tell a single long story in that world. These should have been one book.

This time the focus is on Salander and her life. Something’s happened in the past, which leaves her broken. In the meanwhile, there are old men dying in hospitals, gang members getting beat up and stuff happening at the highest levels of government. How do all of these events tie together?
It’s immersive and wonderfully told. Lisbeth Salander is fire, like the title suggests!
I hope some other similar heroine catches my attention soon!

The Looking Glass War, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and The Honourable Schoolboy, John le Carré
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More greedy old men trying to hang on to power.
MI6 is compromised, by the wily and smart, anti-Smiley, Karla. Who is the mole leaking British secrets to Russia?
An empathetic gangster, and an honourable schoolboy have a standoff at an island outside Hong Kong.

Le Carré was the one who saw and taught me how British influence waned on the world stage when all the while, the system still hung on to dreams of their “glory” days. He also taught me how to see in shades of grey.

The Bear and the Nightingale, The Girl in the Tower and The Winter of the Witch (Winternight trilogy), Katherine Arden
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I do not know what you should choose. Every time you take one path, you must live with the memory of the other: of a life left unchosen.
Decide as seems best, one course or the other; each way will have its bitter with its sweet.”

Here is a clearing on the border between winter and spring. Once Vasya would have said that the cusp of spring was a moment.
But now she knew that it was also a place, at the edge of the lands of winter.

I read these in two weeks in the bracing cold of Europe.
And once again, this felt like a duology rather than a set of three. The Bear and the Nightingale sets up the world while the Girl in the Tower and the Winter of the Witch feel like a long and beautiful story set in that world.
I had read a big book of Russian folk tales as a child, and they still linger in my heart and soul to this day. I don’t remember what it was called or who wrote it, save for the fact that it was a big grey hardback with a wolf head embossed on the cover. But I read about phoenixes and big grey wolves and Tsars and Baba Yaga and Vasilisa and so many wonderful characters and stories then.
Arden takes all of them (and more that I did not read about) and weaves a beautiful story through fable and history and time. She’s a lovely storyteller. The prose is lovely too! Nature comes alive. Old faith and tradtitons tangle with the new. All against the backdrop of cold wintry nights. I absolutely loved reading Vasilisa’s coming of age and finding her path through life, all the time being framed in events that were true yet beautifully enhanced by the fantastic. I hope these books entrance young folk, while also make them read and fall in love with the old tales as well.

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Books I Read in February, 2026

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 11:30:00 +0530

from https://picclick.it/Pan-THE-SPY-WHO-CAME-IN-FROM-THE-296332075807.html, via DuckDuckGo

Better late than never, so let’s begin!
This month I moved from history to historical fiction.
From modern spy novels to medieval detective fiction, I had centuries worth of fun!

Deep Questions, Cal Newport, Episodes 381-390
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Some non fiction first.

I finished catching up with all the episodes of the podcast and now I’ll keep listing them as soon as I finish a batch of ten (around 8+ hours of listening to something counts as book length to me. Unless it’s a four hour Dan Carlin episode. Those are dense 😂)
The new episodes hew toward philosopical discussions about how to live in a world that is slowly being infected with AI. What is true? What is art? Is AI really taking over the world? Is AI really an apt term for what we are seeing? Pretty interesting listen.

Beyond the Rift, Peter Watts
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Whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts.
— James Nicoll

Watts is one of my favourite authors. I often wonder why he did not get popular.
The Rifters trilogy is my favourite science fiction series. Nothing has come close yet. Power is now taken from geothermal vents in the oceans. The only folks who can adapt to this environment are folks with psychological disorders. They’re given iron gills and other alterations to withstand deep sea pressure. Murder and mayhem ensue. Between the crazy beasts in the dark of the ocean and the crazies themselves.
Techno lingo mixed with poetry, crazy doomsday scenarios and lots of potty mouthedness! Nobody writes quite like him. Nobody writes what he does either. Hard biological sci-fi.
If you’d read the adventures of Lenie Clarke, then nothing about today’s creeping AI world and its dumb “intelligence” would surprise you. And that is precisely why I want to go read Starfish, Maelstrom and Behemoth once more. To see if the books still engage.
You can too! The novels are available as ebooks in various formats for free on his website.
(If you are going to print them, then caveat printor! These are chonky beasts.)

But all this is besides the point. Beyond the rift, is a lot of short stories in the world of the Rifters. It clears up, follows through or talks about other things in that setting. I loved it.

Pspsps, some short stories are available on the link I shared above as well!

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, John le Carré
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Daddy gave me a even more battered copy of the book, than the pic above.
I don’t know what possesed him to do that. I don’t know what his fascination with Le Carré (& Forsyth) was. For a man who would normally be pretty optimistic and generaly full of hope, to be suggesting I read a book with such a cold, inhospitable view of the world was quite out of character. But I loved reading all about Smiley and the circus. And I spent most of my boyhood, learning about WWII and the cold war world via Smiley and gang.

The book is a modern classic, though I don’t know why. Probably just a luck of the draw? I’m not complaining though. It’s a wonderful piece of spy drama.
On teensy flimsy actions, on such tiny wings does the world turn. What if Liz and Leamas didn’t get together? Would Smiley’s plan have worked then? A cynical yet bemused Le Carré would say yes and invent some other small thing that would have things just as bleak as they turned out to be.

Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality
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These came before Spy did, and read more like dark Christie novels. More detective than spy. Good fun!

Falco, The Official Companion, Lindsey Davis
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Medieval detective fiction is no longer enough. I’m now going to ancient Rome for some crime!
I found Lindsey Davis’ Falco who is a soldier turned detective in ancient Rome. (with some Britain thrown in.)
This book is a non fiction companion to the series and the world ala GRRM’s, A World of Ice and Fire. These are Davis’ thoughts and recollections on how she created Falco, the history (actual and imagined) of the world at the time, the impetus behind why he behaves the he does and all sorts of other bits and bobs. She shares her day, her writing process and lots of intersting tidbits from here there and everywhere. This was tonnes of fun. I’m going into the series, really pumped!

The Novice’s Tale, The Servant’s Tale, and The Outlaw’s Tale, Margaret Frazer
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I turned away from Frazer’s group of players in her Joliffe series (which I began last month) and went a few decades earlier to meet Dame Frevisse.
She is a hosteller when I meet her in the Novice’s tale, which solves the problem of how a nun in a convent, is able to meet and talk to people. She’s also Chaucer’s niece which gives her a wee bit of influence.
She reads like a more wonderfully written Sexton Blake. The way they solve crimes is not a coming together of what you may have observed, but something that is happens or is shown at the very end. I hope it gets better with the solution and the foreshadowing as I go deeper into the series. What makes me want to read though is the journey, Frazer takes us on and the conversations these people have and the expositon of the lives they lead. All that is wonderfully done!

In Novice, a crazy rich woman, comes to get her niece back from the convent where Frevisse is and then gets murdered.
Servant, brings in Joliffe who I read last month into this world when his band of players come to the convent, bearing the dead body of a villager who they claim they found on the way. One of the players is blamed, and accusations fly across the three engaged parties. Who killed that loathsome villager?
Outlaw, seems like an episode of a serious K drama, where the main cast takes off to Jeju island for a holiday and something happens there. Dame Frevisse is accompanying her fellow nun to her home for a baptism, when they are kidnapped! The kidnapper is Frevisse’s cousin! And then he’s murdered!

Frazer writes good page turners!

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson
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Modern detective fiction! A journalist plays detective in this one.
Take a girl on the autistic spectrum, give her a really bad childhood, and have still be as normal as possible.
An old man, keeps getting flowers on his dead grand-daughter’s birthday for close to thirty years after she dies.
A self absorbed yet talented journalist who loses darn near everything and now has such a stain on his integrity that no one will believe him.
Bring them all together, add in a pile of dead bodies in the freezing countryside of Sweden and you have a thriller!
I read it when it was first published and I turned to it again. It still holds up. It’s a fun read.
Larsson supports women and is a feminist, yet does not quite know how to write women. He still makes the book work though.

Lisbeth Salander is a woman who hates men who hate women. And she really is badass!

More next month! À bientôt!

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Books I Read in January, 2026

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 12:15:39 +0530

This was a good reading month. I think I have become a history geek, thanks to podcasts and books and those are going to be what I read heavily for quite a while now. Some books intentionally read, some comfort reads.
All recommended.

The Thin Man, Dashiell Hammett
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A mystery whodunit. I am finally in my Noir phase. And enjoying it.
Drunk retired detective, socialite wife, multiple red herrings, 30s America, what’s not to like?!

The Rest is History, The Nazis at War, Hitler Strikes West, Parts I-IV
#

Every year, the company of Holland and Sandbrook, walk through the events (slowly) of World Wars One and Two, in order to make up for the travesty of the coverage that they started the show with! Then entire French Revolution in 20 minutes if I remember correctly. 😂 This time, they covered the events of Nazi Germany’s march on and upto the fallo of France. The duo are lovely when they are in flow and these episodes are worth a listen.

The Rest is History, Jack the Ripper, Parts I-IV
#

More from the podcast, this time covering the ghastly killings of the Whitechapel Murderer. Between reading about the events with morbid fascination as a child and then growing up and reading different versions of the events (I liked Alan Moore’s, From Hell if you are a comics person or the ITV miniseries featuring Michael Caine), I thought I had heard all and seen all. The duo surprised me by telling the story from distinct and different perspectives. One was how the media influenced the events, drawing parallels to today, and the other, more importantly, was the lives of the victims, and the events from their perspective leading to their sad demise. The series leaned heavily on a Hallie Rubenhold book, The Five to do that. I bought it and it is now on the pile. This probably is the least I felt I could to to erase young Jason’s fevered fascination with killers.

The Second Stain, The Man with The Twisted Lip, and The Muskgrave Ritual, Sherlock & Co. Podcast, Seasons 37, 38 & 39
#

This is the other boyhood fascination that still remains. Sleuths and detectives and whodunits.
This series has several lovely takes on the original Doyle stories and are worth your time, if you want to be entertained! When they began, I felt their voices were too akin to the modern BBC series featuring Cumberbatch & Freeman, but now they’ve grown on me and the reverse feels true. Some stories are fun and relaxed and some taut all through. All of them are lovely.

Mania for Subjugation III, Hardcore History, Episode 73
#

This is Alexander as never told before. In true Carlin style, you wait eight months to a year between episodes, but when they come, oh boy, do they deliver. We are at the third episode in the series and Alexander has just about started his journey to conquering the world as he knew it. If you want deeply researched history, Dan Carlin’s your man. The amount of books and time and work that goes into each episode is incredible. My only nitpick, is if he could be more humane. The man comes from the other end, a wargamer who loves what-if scenarios (like young Jason with his fascination for murderers and sociopaths). He’s come a long way from his earlier episodes, but I wish for just a little more humanity. The stories have enough pathos though and he always does them justice.

Sister, Maiden, Monster, Lucy A. Snyder
#

I thoroughly disliked this one. This feels like someone read the Book of Revelations¹ when high and then based a sci-fi novella on it. Deliciously unhinged, reads a review. It’s unhinged, alright.

I normally don’t mention or list books that I hate or do not finish or do not agree with. This is not that. This is a prime example of a “this is not for me” book. And this probably is the first book I read, that I felt this about. The writing is competent, but it did nothing for me. So no. Not for me. A pandemic rages through the world, and people get affected differently, in different manners. All gruesome.

I think only one person does horror, the way I want and love. And I remain grateful to the stories and work of Guillermo del Toro.

The Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel
#

I loved the old timey self help folks. Carnegie, Ziglar et al. Simple truths told with lovely stories.
Housel is the modern form of that persona. Observations on how you think about money, what is wrong with it and suggestions on how one ought to actually think. All interspersed between engaging stories. I wrote a post about the book, if you want to know more.

Shattered Lands, Sam Dalrymple
#

This soothed an itch, that’s been there since my childhood. Raised as I was, in the last remnants of empire and with a father and grandfather—who sometimes were sad about what was lost—I was always fascinated with British India. To learn about the length and breadth of the British Indian Empire, was both novel and yet unsurprising. More thoughts in a post I wrote when I finished the book. If you love reading Indian History, this is a must get, must read book.

History of the Alphabet, Kevin Stroud
#

This one felt like I already had so many disparate pieces of some whole and Stroud made them all fit, to form a beautiful tapestry.
I’m following his History of English podcast², and I bought the History of the Alphabet to try and support him, not expecting much, but I was pleasantly surprised. Weaving through times and peoples, from Egypt to the Levant to Greece to Italy with the Eruscans and later the Romans, to France and beyond. It’s a lovely tale!

A Play of Isaac, Margaret Frazer
#

This is a lovely piece of historical detective fiction. Set in Oxford in the middle 15th century, it follows a company of players who are staging Abraham and Isaac for a local lord and someone dies at their doorstep.

More than this specific book itself, I want to write a bit about this class of author, whose writings I have really come to enjoy. I have no name for the kind of writing they do. But I love the prose to bits. Gail Lynn Brown (writing as Margaret Frazer), is the latest. The other two I found so far were Edith Pargeter (writing as Ellis Peters) and Rosemary Kirstein.
I found Edith first, with her monumental Cadfael series of books. By the time I was in book two, I was amazed by this man who could do nuance so perfectly (Of course, it turned out to be a woman 😂). But yes, it is the nuance, the way they do turns of phrase, the way they write their characters … I don’t know what binds them togther, what the likeness is. It can’t be genre, because while Pargeter and Brown write historical detective fiction, Kirstein does not.(She seems to have created a unique genre/niche of her own.)
So like I said, while I don’t know what unites them, I will continue to ravenously read everything they write. The writing is letter perfect to my mind and heart. I enjoy them, with emphasis on joy.

These are all for now. I hope you found something in the list above that tickled your fancy.
À demain!

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Which is already kooky in the first place ↩︎
The language. Not the English people. There are a lot of peoples in this story :) ↩︎

Focus on How Long You Read, Not How Much, aka The Best Advice I Could Give You About Reading Lots of Books

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 05:45:00 +0530

Old Post

This is just an old post, about reading, that has moved from the personal section to here.

via a Tom Gauld Book¹

Ever so often, after one of my reading updates on social media, some of my young friends ask me how I get so much reading done.

So, I decided to answer it here for posterity and then just point folk here.

You are not me.
a. I am a book worm.
b. I am much older than you, with lots more practice.
You most probably want to rush through a hard, technical book.
a. I find them as hard as you.
b. I read them at, as slow a pace as you.
c. I interleave the hard stuff, with a lot of easy, “I-Love-This” fiction
Speed Reading is Bullshit!
Once you read a lot of books, you can pattern match and speed up or slow down, through whole blocks and paras and chapters and pages.
Reading for studying’s sake is work and unavoidable and not quite related to reading for reading’s sake.
a. These I pucker up and do anyway, just like taking bad medicine.

The only things that matter, when it comes to reading are …

Be consistent. Read a little bit, daily.
The trick to reading a lot, is to read a little every day.
And the trick to reading a little every day is to, make it a habit.
Be curious. Read whatever you want. Read whenever you want. Read wherever you want.
Quit Books.
You don’t have to finish it. You don’t have to slog through it.
Set it down. Come back to it, tomorrow … or in a few decades.
Or just throw it out and forget all about it.
And if reading really becomes a sort of calling for you, then learn how to do it properly.²

That’s about it for now. If I remember something more, I’ll come back and tack it on here.

I forget which one! ↩︎
totally optional. I learnt this really late in life and while it has enriched my reading experience, it had nothing to do with my love of reading. ↩︎

Books I Read in the First Quarter of 2025

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 21 May 2025 05:45:00 +0530

This newsletter went out to the mailing list on April 21st.
If you want to read them as soon as they come out, Subscribe!

I’m tired of making excuses for my tardiness 😂
So, like Don Cheadle says in Iron Man 2, “Look, it’s me. I’m here. Deal with it. Let’s move on.”

While I tell you about the books I loved, you can also click each month to find the complete list of titles I loved.

January
#

I think this year continues my fascination with Agatha Christie.
January was mostly spent in the world of Marple. I think I’ll be back doing Christie runs in the coming months. I don’t know what it is about her worlds, but I keep coming back to them ove and over again.
(even more than Doyle and Holmes, though I love the new fresh takes in the Holmesian world. While David Suchet and his run will always remain the canonical Poirot to me, I have no such qualms with anyone else doing Holmes)

So I spent January with Ms. Marple. The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side was my favourite. The sudden, heart-stopping realisation of what must have happened, by one of the main characters, the immense grief that must have rolled down on them all over again, summed up in the lines from Tennyson’s poem that give the book its title.

She look’d down to Camelot.
Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror crack’d from side to side;
‘The curse is come upon me,’ cried
The Lady of Shalott.

I also love following these pretty webs, authors lay for me. Thanks to Agatha Christie penning these words in 1962, I went looking for a poem from 1832 and thoroughly enjoyed it :)

Honourable mention to the Sherlock & Co. podcast.
I began listening to it, just for curiosity’s sake and have now been looking forward to each new adventure of our intrepid heroes. My favourite parts are when other hosts from the Goalhanger universe come in to do cameos, like Will Dalrymple and Anita Anand (Empire) did in one of my recent favorites, The Sign of Four (Season 22 on iTunes) or when Dominic Sandbrook (The Rest is History) played a crazy, stressed lawyer in The Norwood Builder (season 27 on iTunes). It’s really fun!

February
#

February started me on the road of my (hidden) goal of reading at least one technical book a month. Learning Go, by Jon Bodner taught me the language. One thing I’ve learnt though, is that I almost nearly always need 2-3 authors / books before I understand whatever it is I need to learn. I’ve realised that I have been spoiled with authors in other domains when it comes to explaining things lucidly. (plus any topic in tech is vast and no single author can fill in all the gaps of my ignorance.) My solution to this is to be a syntopical reader and figure out whatever it is I need from multiple texts.

I learnt well enough from Bodner, and Ricardo Gerardi’s Powerful Command-Line Applications in Go to go write a tool I sorely needed in Go lang. A small tool to generate RSS feeds for my audiobooks, I call Rederb. It’s still raw and unpolished, but it got my audiobook ducks in row, so I could listen to whatever struck my fancy on the recent break.

I also discovered Grant Snider this month. While full of whimsy, they are also really thought provoking. I devoured The Art of Living, and The Shape of Ideas. Highly recommended! The one that started it all for me and was specifically written for me, was I Will Judge You by Your Bookshelf.

Honourable mention to Anita Anand and William Dalrymple for doing the Three Kings (Empire Podcast, episodes 212-214), explaining the confluence of Byzantine and Persian cultures, myths and history.

March
#

was spent mostly in the company of the aforementioned Anand & Dalrymple charting the rise and fall of the Mughal Empire (Empire Podcast, episodes 205-211, and 215-222). This engaging series filled in so many gaps in my head and what the landscape of our country was like. I need to now go see what my land was like, before the Mughals.

More history was in the offing with part two of The Rest is History’s continuing history of the French Revolution. I listened to Parts Two and Three this month. (Episodes 503-507 and 544-547). Part one was last year (Episodes 475-482).
A really refreshing change of pace by Holland and Sandbrook, considering they have covered the Revolution once before in two twenty minute episodes! I love the slow, measured march this time. The more I listen, the more I wonder how much of history hinges on chance events! I also love their slightly irreverent and self deprecating tone. We’re still not done, and I look forward to revisiting France during the revolution, soon.

Honourable mention to the Acquired Podcast’s coverage of Rolex. This was one of the few I really enjoyed, besides their story on Hermès. I think I just like old company stories. Hopefully someday we’ll get Nintendo and Yamaha.

And that’s it for now. I hope you folks find something in here, that interests you too :)

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P.P.S. Feed my insatiable reading habit.

Feedback on this post?
Mail me at feedback at this domain or [continue the discourse here][3].

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Books Saved My Life

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 10 Feb 2023 05:45:00 +0530

This post was first sent to my newsletter on January 27, 2023.
You really ought to subscribe :)

From A Velocity of Being. Art by Yara Kono

An extract from the page I read today from A Velocity of Being.

Dani Shapiro writes …

My Dear Future Friend,

I will probably never know you. We may not ever walk this earth at the same moment. But listen carefully.

Books saved my life.

In the stillness of reading. the silence save for the sandpapery sound of my fingers turning the page, I was born. In the quiet of a summer afternoon spent in a hammock, of a winter night spent sneaking under the covers with a flashlight, dawned the awareness, slow but unmistakable, that I was not alone. That I was not insane. That my heart was not so very different from everyone else’s.

Books made me feel less ashamed. Less weird. Less different.
They connected me deeply to my own humanity.

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Reading Page a Day Books

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Tue, 17 Jan 2023 05:45:00 +0530

This post was first sent to my newsletter on January 10th, 2023.
You really ought to subscribe :)

I took close to a year to finish two of the books from last years reading list.
That’s because I was reading them, in tiny bits, in small chunks, a day at a time

I was already reading a poem a day and then some time early last year I serendiptioustly ran into this Ryan Holiday post, which spoke to the virtues and pleasures of page-a-day books and daily wisdom.¹
So, along with my daily poem, I read a Robert Greene reader called The Daily Laws as well as the Ryan Holiday–Stephen Hanselman collection of Stoic meditations in The Daily Stoic.

I absolutely love it.
It gives me varied nuggets of wisdom, from various perspectives.
It let’s me start the day on a tranquil, aware, intentional note.
And it calms the unfounded nagging fear, I always have in the back of my head; that I’m not reading enough.

So what’s a boy to do when he stumbles across something good?
Well … do lots more of it!

I looked around for some more books that I’d like to read this way.²
And decided to read several Anthony De Mello books that I read growing up.
Looking in the bookshelf yielded One Minute Wisdom and The Prayer of the Frog (Vols. I & II) as well as the book that made me fall in love with him, The Song of the Bird.
There’s lots of overlap and repetition in the fables and teaching across the books. That’s just a bonus to my mind.

And finally I decided to read Maria Popova’s, A Velocity of Being.
I have two of her books. The other one is called Figuring.
I resisted, so strongly resisted, reading either of them, because I’m in love with her beautiful prose and her sense of syntopia and her unique lens on the world.
I was always waiting to be marooned on an island, with only her books for company, because I wanted to savour them slowly.
The last couple of months though, in some sense, I have been lost at sea. So I gave in and read A Velocity of Being.

It’s a series of letters from people, young and old, big and small, across varied paths of life, all united in one common purpose. To tell young readers, why they think reading is important and the various ways reading changed their life.
It’s a letter a page³, each letter accompanied by an extravagant, lush, often sensuous piece of art.

I leave you with the letter I read today.
Laura Brown–Lavoie, rejoices in the way she gets lost in a book.
Happy Reading!

Lioness Illustration, by Ping Zhu

Sometimes when I’m reading a good book and I’m under a blanket and no one’s trying to talk to me, I forget that I’m reading. The tall grass of the story grows up around me, and I’m just another silent creature whose heart beats in that world.
If I sit still and keep reading that way, sometimes a sentence stalks by as lovely as a lioness. Blood around its mouth; that fresh, that killer. I read it once, and I know I have to read it again, not look away, watch closely how it moves.
And then I start to notice my eye muscles moving my eyeballs back and forth again, and see the black of the letters on the gray of the page, and I’m just plain reading under a blanket. It’s still fun.
But the reason I read is for the lionesses. For the sentences that pull me in with all their teeth.
Love, Laura

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I was also raised to read the Bible daily, which, while I no longer do, the habit still echoes in my bones ↩︎
The rest of the books on the Ryan post, did not appeal to me ↩︎
which lends itself to a page-a-day :) ↩︎

Maria Popova’s Favourite Books of 2022

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 11 Jan 2023 05:00:00 +0530

This post was first sent to my newsletter on December 11th, 2022.
You really ought to subscribe :)

Hello, hello, it me! :)

With all that is going on in my life, I don’t have the will or wherewithal to compile the annual reading list this year.
So I’ll keep sending you folks, the lists that I come across and find compelling enough to share.

I’ve always ended my annual books-to-read list with the Marginalian.
(the erstwhile Brain Pickings aka Maria Popova)
And I always say, Maria saved my life.
For nearly a decade, during times of deep dark despair, it was her posts that kept me going.

I’ve always wished that I could weave word tapestries like she does.
(Or be as succinct and pithy as Mandy Brown. Someday I will be.)

Without further ado, here’s Maria’s list.
From art to philosophy to whimsy, there’s something for everyone.
The one I look forward to reading the most is Haleh Liza Gafori’s rendition of Rumi.

I hope you find something in there too!
Happy Reading :)

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Moving Tasks Between Org Files in Emacs

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Tue, 23 Aug 2022 16:13:08 +0530

More diving into Org Mode and Emacs.

I have a stuff-to-do.org file, that serves as an inbox for most long term tasks that I want to tackle. Stuff that needs doing, books that I want to buy, books that I want to read, courses that I want to learn, movies or tv shows that I want to watch, stuff on the web that I want to catchup on, etc. etc. etc.

And all this while, I have been moving tasks into my daily-tasks.org as and when I tackle them. This meant I needed to open both files, and then cut said task out of one and paste it into the other. And as usual, I am now doing this often enough, that it’s become bothersome. Because there are a couple more files as well, that serve as inboxes.

And the same question arises, as usual. Can Emacs help with this?
The answer as it almost always is, is a big, resounding, Yes!

I know it had to do something with what Org calls a refile, since I keep using C-c C-w to move items between different headings in my daily tasks file.
So after a bit of reading the manual, reading blog posts, spelunking through the emacs stackexchange, stalking the Org Mode reddit and an hour of head scratching, I roughed up something that does what I want :)

In a nutshell, what I am doing is what Org calls, a Refile and Copy. The manual page let me know that I could do this across files too. This was exactly what I wanted. It also told me that I needed to configure org-refile-targets variable to tell Org a list of locations, that it would then let me refile my tasks to.

Having split my emacs init.el file into a set of logical files, I opened up the file that held my org settings (very imaginatively called emacs-org-mode-settings.el) and then thought a bit about what files I would want Org to pop up when I wanted to file tasks to.
Would just my daily tasks file do? What if I wanted to file something out of my daily tasks file? Or what if I wanted crisscross transfers between all my task inboxes and daily task file?

I then realised that I was already telling Org Agenda to scan my tasks folder (which holds all my productivity system files) for tasks and dates and schedules and deadlines. I decided to use the same set of files as my targets for refiling. And this turned out to be easier to do than expected. I just had to tell Org to use org-agenda-files as the value for org-refile-targets

It looks a little bit like this.

1
2
3


(setq org-refile-targets
 '((nil :maxlevel . 1)
	 (org-agenda-files :maxlevel . 1)))

I’m telling org-refile-targets on line 1, to look for targets in two locations.
Line 3, is what we were talking about above. Org will look to the same location that org-agenda-files points to, for its refile targets.
Line 2, is where I tell Org to include my current file, the one I am working on, as a target. It helps me move stuff in my daily tasks file from one day to another.
The maxlevel bit is to tell Org the level of headlines to show as targets. Org has headlines and sub-headlines and sub-sub-headlines.¹ I just need the first level, which is why it’s set to 1.
It seemed to work, until I ran into a small stumbling block. Org would not let me refile my task at level 0, i.e. the root of the file as a level 1 headline. It could only nest under an existing headline. So, line 4 below, fixes that for me.

1
2
3
4


(setq org-refile-targets
 '((nil :maxlevel . 1)
	 (org-agenda-files :maxlevel . 1)))
(setq org-refile-use-outline-path 'file)

And tada! It works! You can see it in action below.
Click any of the images below to view them, larger.

The waiting task on the right (writing this post), needs to come in to my daily tasks file on the left

So I hit C-c C-w and Org Mode helpfully pops up what target it thinks I want to move my task to.²
I can hit the tab key to get a list of other files and targets.

Once I do that, the task hops over to the right place!

It’s an outliner after all :) ↩︎
The daily tasks file, under today’s date ↩︎

Notes to Self on Renewing Wildcard Certbot Certs

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 20 Aug 2022 11:45:54 +0530

(Update, 2024-03-15: I now use lego. will update this post later.)

After struggling to renew my certs for the third time in a row, hopefully these pointers should keep me on track for the next time.

Namecheap does not yet support automatic wildcard renewal for the Letsencrypt/Certbot combo. Check next year.
Have your Namecheap control panel open and ready.
Switch to root or run the command below with sudo
Command to renew: certbot certonly --manual --manual-public-ip-logging-ok --preferred-challenges dns-01 -d *.domain.com -d domain.com
certbot will then, print a couple of lines that you need to add as a TXT record in the Namecheap DNS control panel.
When you do that, make sure you set the TTL of the record, to a minute, so that you can redo stuff quicker, if you mess up.
certbot might ask you to do multiple records. Read the instructions carefully.
When you check to see if the TXT record is set, search for the whole domain name. For e.g. _acme-challenge.domain.blah instead of just domain.blah
If you’ve done all of the above, hopefully things should go smoothly and the certificate should renew.
Restart Nginx and you’re done.
If you have multiple machines, figure out a way to securely transfer the certs there too.

Splitting an Unwieldy Emacs `init.el`

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 13 Aug 2022 14:43:45 +0530

I started with a very simple init.el when I started using Emacs.
Rather than learning it in a structured manner, I just decided to jump in at whatever end of the pool and figure it out as I go.

I may not know Emacs, but I do know what I want out of a general purpose text editor.
And bending Emacs to do my will, to do what I want it to do or behave in the manner I want it to behave. And Emacs to my eternal gratitude, is flexible to do all I want, thanks to the last forty six years worth of hard work and ideas of people from all over.

Want your screen to be a certain width, because you miss CGA screens? Emacs can do that.
Want your font to be monospaced, because it helps you write? Emacs can do that.
Want to tweak the space between your lines, because your font looks better that way? Emacs can do that.
Want to save your place in the file, so you can come back to where you were? Emacs can do that.
Themes? Want your editor to look a certain way? Emacs can do that.
Love Markdown? Emacs does that.

That’s just the core editor and that’s just me setting up my writing environment.
That’s just me scratching the surface.
I haven’t scratched the universe that is setting it up as an IDE, or using it as a Git frontend, or to read mail, or be an IRC client or play games or the million other things it can do.

As, for me, I have slowly branched out my use of Emacs too.
In addition to its use as a daily general purpose text editor, I use Emacs in three specific domains.

As an editor for all my blog posts, and prose writing. I use Markdown Mode to accomplish this.
As a second brain. To write down notes and references and ideas and to link them all together. A syntopical sort of linking. A Zettelkasten, in fact. Org Roam is the tool I am using to build this edifice.
And as a tool to manage my productivity, my day and my sanity using the awesome Org Mode.¹

Which brings me to my current conundrum.
All those tweaks I mentioned above?
They are all in a file called the init.el, which Emacs reads everytime it starts up.
And given my propensity to be a control freak, while at the same time verbosely documenting every change I make, my file had already grown to 300 lines and counting.
Going back to read stuff and change existing things meant scrolling up and down or searching across 300 odd lines.
And I quickly tired of that.

Which is when I learnt Emacs let me organise my init files too!
Between learning to load lisp files and how to organize my init files, I quickly divided my main file into a total of four files.

The base init.el file, containing things I thought were absolutely needed²
A miscellaneous file, that would hold everything else Emacs.³
A file to hold my Org Roam Zettelkasten settings.
A file to hold my Org Mode settings.

And then, within my base file, I called the other three, like so … ⁴

(load "~/.config/emacs/emacs-misc-settings.el")
(load "~/.config/emacs/emacs-org-mode-settings.el")
(load "~/.config/emacs/emacs-org-roam-settings.el")

And that gave me space to breathe :)
Everything is now properly organised.
I can just go look in the appropriate file (or add one) for the appropriate setting.
And life is peachy again.

Of course, once again, I am barely scratching the surface, compared to other folks’ vastly elaborate setups.
But this works for me, and I’m really happy!

The principles, of course are Cal Newportian. ↩︎
font, package installs, theme, backup folder ↩︎
nearly everything else, I mentiond above, page column width, line height, recent file, save place, etc ↩︎
I’m sure there are better ways of writing this, but I didn’t want to go bikeshedding ↩︎

Writing as Gardening

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 09 Jul 2022 11:32:28 +0530

GRRM in his latest not-a-blog-post, references this video on the two types of authors, he lumps writer-folk into.

Just like him, I try to structure and outline what I write, I really do, and just like him, I can do it fairly ok, and still never really enjoy the process.

I never quite understood why, until I realised I was a gardener.
This also helped me understand, why the recent move to the Zettelkasten process is helping me write without the stress that I previously used to encounter when I attempted writing something even a teensy bit long or complex.

Like he says, I know what I want to write about, a tiny bit of structure helps.
But the trick is in the syntopical thoughts, the seeds that germinate and the cross pollination of words and ideas and the thrilling uncertainty of waiting for my plants to take root and to see, in time, what comes of what I sow.

One of my favourite authors thinks and writes, just like I do.
The only thing that I need to become so good that I cannot be ignored is to show up and do the work and tend to my garden.

Today, reading GRRM reminded me of my Zettelkasten, which needs regular tending, which reminded me of Cal Newport’s ideas on slow productivity and showing up daily and whose book on being great was inspired by Steve Martin, all of which led me to writing this post.
This is where my garden path led me today!

Showing up daily to tend my garden!
This is liberating.
This is … freedom!

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P.P.P.S. And if you are a ASOIAF aficionado like me, definitely read the post to know what is happening in those lands.

Zettelkasten

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Tue, 28 Jun 2022 09:07:51 +0530

Just a little note to mark the beginning of my Zettelkasten journey.
While I’ve always had a commonplace book of sorts, all my life, and I’ve always taken tons of notes on books I pay attention to, I’ve never really been able to come up with a way of writing what I think syntopically.
Or I can, but its like pulling teeth.
Writing what I learnt in Antifragile, took months, and a lot of cursing through gritted teeth.
But I want to. I really do.
I so want to write about what I learn and read and then intermingle them all together and put my bundle of thoughts down.

And then this perfect storm of stuff happened recently.
I have a lot to learn this year.
I am taking a lot of notes, but just full text search, does not cut it for me.
So I’ve been casting about for a way to take notes and thoughts and relate all of this together.
And I ran across the Zettelkasten method across a lot of people I pay attention to.
Despite all the new fangled tags of “personal knowledge management” and “knowledge graph” and who knows what else, the Zettelkasten method’s old and it’s Lindy.
So definitely worth my time to learn and invest in, if it helps me write and share more.

At its heart, all it is, is a system to take and refer to your notes and your thoughts.
Folks have recommendations about how to take notes, the types of notes, the way to store the notes, and various ways and means to link and refer to them notes.¹
I found David Kadavy’s long post as well his book and Sascha Fast and Christian Tietze’s posts over at the zettelkasten.de website really helpful with me getting started.

I decide to use Org-roam as my tool of choice.
It’s very loosey-goosey² and flexible.
It’s Lindy.
It’s plain text.
And it is built on Org mode and Emacs.
Wouldn’t recommend you use this, unless you want to put in the time to learn about Emacs. There are plenty of user friendly options out there.

I spent about a week putting in lots of stray notes, I had.
And some time building up links between them.
And some more time, reading a couple of books and then taking notes and linking them as I went.

This is how my notes currently look.

And I realised two things, both good for me.

This is turning out to be a sustainable, lifelong habit. One that I enjoy
Building up links and doing highlights and jotting thoughts, all lead to me having a coherent view of what I just read and learnt as well as having something, a lot of raw yet fertile somethings, that I can use to build something derivative out of, create a larger work from, expand on much more easily.

I’ll revisit this in a year and tell you how it went :)

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It’s notes (and footnotes) all the way down! :) ↩︎
Yes, that is the exact, technical term to describe it. ↩︎

All the Stuff I Wanted to Share in 2022

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 11 Jun 2022 13:15:00 +0530

I’ve been in this rut all year, and I don’t know how to get out of it.
So I’m declaring thought / newsletter bankruptcy.

I don’t know how to share what I collected, so I’ll just put a set of links down here to all of them.

This is all the work/tech stuff. And this is all the other, personal / life stuff!
Enjoy!

Hopefully, clearing my mind should get me going, get me writing, even if in a small but consistent way.

P.S. Subscribe to my mailing list!
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P.P.P.S I forgot that i had quite a few, year in reading, best of, book lists handy.
So here they are. Happy Reading!

Ryan Holiday
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Farnam Street
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and finally, the woman who saved my soul …

Maria Popova
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Old Tech/Work Links of Interest 2022

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 11 Jun 2022 13:10:05 +0530

All the stuff, I’ve been hoarding over the past year for the newsletter.

Seth Godin on the ethical use of our newly gained technological capabilities
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No wonder we’re a bit dizzy. We just multiplied our minds by many orders of magnitude. It’s easy to confuse someone else’s memory (or manipulation) with our hard-earned ability to remember things that actually happened to us.

And we’re now realizing that we have the power (and perhaps the obligation) to use shared knowledge to make better, more thoughtful decisions. And to intentionally edit out the manipulations and falsehoods that are designed to spread, not to improve our lives.

Intel to Build Silicon for Fully Homomorphic Encryption
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When considering data privacy and protections, there is no data more important than personal data, whether that’s medical, financial, or even social. The discussions around access to our data, or even our metadata, becomes about who knows what, and if my personal data is safe. Today’s announcement between Intel, Microsoft, and DARPA, is a program designed around keeping information safe and encrypted, but still using that data to build better models or provide better statistical analysis without disclosing the actual data. It’s called Fully Homomorphic Encryption, but it is so computationally intense that the concept is almost useless in practice.

So whether that means combining hospital medical records over a state, or customizing a personal service using personal metadata gathered on a user’s smartphone, FHE at that scale is no longer a viable solution. Enter the DARPA DPRIVE program.

DARPA: Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
DPRIVE: Data Protection in Virtual Environments
Intel has announced that as part of the DPRIVE program, it has signed an agreement with DARPA to develop custom IP leading to silicon to enable faster FHE in the cloud, specifically with Microsoft on both Azure and JEDI cloud, initially with the US government. As part of this multi-year project, expertise from Intel Labs, Intel’s Design Engineering, and Intel’s Data Platforms Group will come together to create a dedicated ASIC to reduce the computational overhead of FHE over existing CPU-based methods. The press release states that the target is to reduce processing time by five orders of magnitude from current methods, reducing compute times from days to minutes.

Programmable optical quantum computer arrives late, steals the show
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Excuse me a moment—I am going to be bombastic, over excited, and possibly annoying. The race is run, and we have a winner in the future of quantum computing. IBM, Google, and everyone else can turn in their quantum computing cards and take up knitting.

One key to quantum computing (or any computation, really) is the ability to change a qubit’s state depending on the state of another qubit. This turned out to be doable but cumbersome in optical quantum computing. Typically, a two- (or more) qubit operation is a nonlinear operation, and optical nonlinear processes are very inefficient. Linear two-qubit operations are possible, but they are probabilistic, so you need to repeat your calculation many times to be sure you know which answer is correct. A second critical feature is programmability. It is not desirable to have to create a new computer for every computation you wish to perform. Here, optical quantum computers really seemed to fall down. An optical quantum computer could be easy to set up and measure, or it could be programmable—but not both.

So, what has changed to suddenly make optical quantum computers viable? One is the appearance of detectors that can resolve the number of photons they receive. A second key development was integrated optical circuits. performance has gotten much, much better. Integrated optics are now commonly used in the telecommunications industry, with the scale and reliability that that implies.
The researchers, from a startup called Xanadu and the National Institute of Standards, have pulled together these technology developments to produce a single integrated optical chip that generates eight qubits. The internal setting of the interferometer is the knob that the programmer uses to control the computation. In practice, the knob just changes the temperature of individual waveguide segments. But the programmer doesn’t have to worry about these details. Instead, they have an application programming interface (Strawberry Fields Python Library) that takes very normal-looking Python code. This code is then translated by a control system that maintains the correct temperature differentials on the chip.

What is more, the scaling does not present huge amounts of increased complexity. In superconducting qubits, each qubit is a current loop in a magnetic field. Each qubit generates a field that talks to all the other qubits all the time. Engineers have to take a great deal of trouble to decouple and couple qubits from each other at the right moment. The larger the system, the trickier that task becomes. Ion qubit computers face an analogous problem in their trap modes. There isn’t really an analogous problem in optical systems, and that is their key advantage.

Two exhaustive articles on the historical significance of the Arpanet and how the protocol worked
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This is what was totally new about the ARPANET. The ICCC demonstration didn’t just involve a human communicating with a distant computer. It wasn’t just a demonstration of remote I/O. It was a demonstration of software remotely communicating with other software, something nobody had seen before.
So what I’m trying to drive home here is that there is an important distinction between statement A, “the ARPANET connected people in different locations via computers for the first time,” and statement B, “the ARPANET connected computer systems to each other for the first time.” That might seem like splitting hairs, but statement A elides some illuminating history in a way that statement B does not.

In a section with the belabored title, “Technical Aspects of the Effort Which Were Successful and Aspects of the Effort Which Did Not Materialize as Originally Envisaged,” the authors wrote:

Possibly the most difficult task undertaken in the development of the ARPANET was the attempt—which proved successful—to make a number of independent host computer systems of varying manufacture, and varying operating systems within a single manufactured type, communicate with each other despite their diverse characteristics.

There you have it from no less a source than the federal government of the United States.

The 1Password blog with a high level overview of their Smart Password Generator
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Long, random passwords just aren’t convenient. If you need to enter 45 randomly-generated characters on another device often enough, you’ll inevitably change that password to something like password123 because it’s easy to type and remember. It’s also - you got it - not strong.

While a lengthy, unintelligible password may appear stronger than a smart one, it’s mainly illusion. Pronounceable syllables make a smart password look human generated and, therefore, weaker. But a human-generated password could never be chosen uniformly and, therefore, can’t be accurately assessed for entropy.

We’ve made a compromise of sorts. We’ve sacrificed a few bits of (theoretical) entropy, that don’t affect real-world security, to gain a whole lot of convenience, compatibility, and accessibility — and those certainly are real world, which is what really matters.

Mahmoud Hashemi talks about Changing the Tires on a Moving Codebase
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We realized that CI is more sensitive than most users for most of the site. So we focused in on testing the highest impact code. What’s high-impact? 1) the code that fails most visibly and 2) the code that’s hardest to retry. You can build an inventory of high-impact code in under a week by looking at traffic stats, batch job schedules, and asking your support staff.
…
We realized that CI is more sensitive than most users for most of the site. So we focused in on testing the highest impact code. What’s high-impact? 1) the code that fails most visibly and 2) the code that’s hardest to retry. You can build an inventory of high-impact code in under a week by looking at traffic stats, batch job schedules, and asking your support staff.

And it really is important to develop close ties with your support team. Embedded in our strategy above was that CI is much more sensitive than a real user. While perfection is tempting, it’s not unrealistic to ask a bit of patience from an enterprise user, provided your support team is prepared. Sync with them weekly so surprise is minimized. If they’re feeling ambitious, you can teach them some Sentry basics, too.

My main takeaways

Everyone has a plan ’till they get punched in the mouth, — Mike Tyson
Prioritise work on what actually matters. Perfection can wait.
People and their feedback comes first. Matters a lot more than data driven decisions. After all, software is used by by and for people, in the first place.

A Bear? Where? Over There — Strapping a giant teddy bear to a car in the name of highway safety
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You’re adapting my what? When activated, adaptive cruise control uses forward-looking radar to maintain a specific distance to a vehicle in the lane ahead, slowing down or speeding up (to a maximum of whatever speed cruise control was set to) as necessary. Lane-keeping systems use forward-looking cameras to detect the lane markings on a road to keep the vehicle between them, and when both are active together, the vehicle will do a pretty good facsimile of driving itself, albeit with extremely limited situational awareness.

Which is where the human comes in. Under the SAE’s definitions for automated driving, in Level 2 the car controls braking, acceleration, and deceleration, but the human is responsible for providing situational awareness at all times. Of course, this raises the question of whether the driver is actually paying attention.

To test whether drivers were actually paying attention while using a Level 2 system, IIHS recruited participants and then had them drive for roughly an hour, either using the car’s Level 2 system or not. At three predetermined locations on the test route, a second car—the one with the large pink bear attached to its trunk—would overtake the participant’s vehicle. At the end of the study, the drivers were asked if they saw anything odd, and if so, how many times.

Crazy obsessions like this, are why even I got into writing software. TT2020 is an advanced, open source, hyperrealistic, multilingual typewriter font for a new decade!
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From the problem page,

In the second image, there are three ‹N›’s. Yet, they all look exactly the same. A real typewriter can, quite rarely, have one of its letters damaged, or misaligned, such that that letter regularly makes an inferior strike to all the other letters. However, this degree of regularity is impossible; could Underwood or Remington have acheived it, they would have leapt for joy.
While working on the project, incredibly, another bad typewriter scene intruded upon my life. I don’t often sit around and watch movies, so I suppose there are only two possibilities:

a. There are so many of these unrealistic typewritten documents in late-2010’s cinema that almost any movie with a typewritten document in it will be hopelessly unrealistic, or
b. The universe, nay, God himself, was urging me on to complete this project in lieu of others I could finish!

The Font is here.

Did you know, some planets can generate new atmospheres?
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In general, we don’t currently have the technology to image exoplanets unless they’re very large, very young, and a considerable distance from the star they orbit. Yet we can still get some sense of what’s in their atmosphere. To do that, we need to observe a planet that transits across the line of sight between Earth and its star. During a transit, a small percentage of the star’s light will travel through the planet’s atmosphere on its way to Earth, interacting with the molecules present there.

Those molecules leave a signature on the spectrum of light that reaches the Earth. It’s an extremely faint signature, since most of the star’s light never even sees the atmosphere. But by combining the data from a number of days of observation, it’s possible to get this signature to stand out from the noise.

That’s what scientists have done with GJ 1132 b, an exoplanet that orbits a small star about 40 light years from Earth. The planet is roughly Earth’s size and about 1.5 times its mass. It also orbits extremely close to its host star, completing a full orbit in only 1.6 days. That’s close enough to ensure that, despite the small, dim star, GJ 1132 b is extremely hot.

It’s so close and hot, in fact, that the researchers estimate that it’s currently losing about 10,000 kilograms of atmosphere every second. As the host star was expected to be brighter early in its history, the researchers estimate that GJ 1132 b would have lost a reasonable-sized atmosphere within the first 100 million years of its existence. In fact, over the life of the planet, the researchers estimate that it could have lost an atmosphere weighing in at about five times the planet’s current mass—the sort of thing you might see if the remaining planet were the core of a mini-Neptune.

So, researchers were probably surprise to find that, based on data from the Hubble, the planet seems to have an atmosphere.
How’d that get here?

Moderation in Infrastructure – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
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Detailed interviews here

It was Patrick Collison, Stripe’s CEO, who pointed out to me that one of the animating principles of early 20th-century Progressivism was guaranteeing freedom of expression from corporations:

Exactly the same kind of restraints upon freedom of thought are bound to occur in every country where economic organization has been carried to the point of practical monopoly. Therefore the safeguarding of liberty in the world which is growing up is far more difficult than it was in the nineteenth century, when free competition was still a reality. Whoever cares about the freedom of the mind must face this situation fully and frankly, realizing the inapplicability of methods which answered well enough while industrialism was in its infancy.

This is why I take Smith’s comments as more of a warning: a commitment to consistency may lead to the lowest common denominator outcome Prince fears, where U.S. social media companies overreach on content, even as competition is squeezed out at the infrastructure level by policies guided by non-U.S. countries. It’s a bad mix, and public clouds in particular would be better off preparing for geographically-distinct policies in the long run, even as they deliver on their commitment to predictability and process in the meantime, with a strong bias towards being hands-off. That will mean some difficult decisions, which is why it’s better to make a commitment to neutrality and due process now.

Excel Never Dies
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Excel may be the most influential software ever built. It is a canonical example of Steve Job’s bicycle of the mind, endowing its users with computational superpowers normally reserved for professional software engineers. Armed with those superpowers, users can create fully functional software programs in the form of a humble spreadsheet to solve problems in a seemingly limitless number of domains. These programs often serve as high-fidelity prototypes of domain specific applications just begging to be brought to market in a more polished form.

If you want to see the future of B2B software, look at what Excel users are hacking together in spreadsheets today.

Pair with, These SaaS Companies Are Unbundling Excel – Here’s Why It’s A Massive Opportunity

On The dance between the long tail and the short head
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The disconnect occurs when producers and creators try to average things out and dumb things down, hoping for the big hit that won’t come. Or overspend to get there. The opportunity lies in finding a viable audience and matching the project’s focus and budget to the people who truly want it.

And the dance continues.

Ten reasons to write a book (I’d say these translate well to blogging too!)
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Here’s four …

It clarifies your thinking.
It’s a project that is completely and totally up to you.
Because it’s a generous way to share.
It will increase your authority in your field.

Brent Simmons on How NetNewsWire Handles Threading
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Advice

Some developers I’ve known seem to think that being good at concurrency makes them badass. Others seem to think that senior developers must be great at concurrency, and so they should be too.

But what senior developers are good it is eliminating concurrency as much as possible by developing a simple, easy, consistent model to follow for the app and its components.

And this is because concurrency is too difficult for humans to understand and maintain. Maybe you can create a system that makes extensive use of it, and have it be correct for one day. But think of your team! Even if you’re a solo developer, you and you-plus-six-months makes you a team.

I know you’re worried about blocking the main thread. But consider this: it’s way easier to fix a main-thread-blocker than it is to fix a weird, intermittent bug or crash due to threading.

Laurie Barth on Human-Readable JavaScript
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Experts don’t prove themselves by using every piece of the spec; they prove themselves by knowing the spec well enough to deploy syntax judiciously and make well-reasoned decisions. This is how experts become multipliers—how they make new experts.

So what does this mean for those of us who consider ourselves experts or aspiring experts? It means that writing code involves asking yourself a lot of questions. It means considering your developer audience in a real way. The best code you can write is code that accomplishes something complex, but is inherently understood by those who examine your codebase.

And no, it’s not easy. And there often isn’t a clear-cut answer. But it’s something you should consider with every function you write.

Len Kleinrock: The First Two Packets on the Internet
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AnandTech Interview with Jim Keller: ‘The Laziest Person at Tesla
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First, I was at Digital (DEC) for 15 years, right! Now that was a different career because I was in the mid-range group where we built computers out of ECL - these were refrigerator-sized boxes. I was in the DEC Alpha team where we built little microprocessors, little teeny things, which at the time we thought were huge. These were 300 square millimeters at 50 watts, which blew everybody’s mind.

So I was there for a while, and I went to AMD right during the internet rush, and we did a whole bunch of stuff in a couple of years. We started Opteron, HyperTransport, 2P servers - it was kind of a whirlwind of a place. But I got sucked up or caught up in the enthusiasm of the internet, and I went to SiByte, which got bought by Broadcom, and I was there for four years total. We delivered several generations of products.

I was then at P.A Semi, and we delivered a great product, but they didn’t really want to sell the product for some reason, or they thought they were going to sell it to Apple. I actually went to Apple, and then Apple bought P.A Semi, and then I worked for that team, so you know I was between P.A Semi and Apple. That was seven years, so I don’t really feel like that was jumping around too much.

Then I jumped to AMD I guess, and that was fun for a while. Then I went to Tesla where we delivered Hardware 3 (Tesla Autopilot). So that was kind of phenomenal. From a standing start to driving a car in 18 months - I don’t think that’s ever been done before, and that product shipped really successfully. They built a million of them last year. Tesla and Intel were a different kind of a whirlwind, so you could say I jumped in and jumped out. I sure had a lot of fun.

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Old Links of Interest 2022

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 11 Jun 2022 13:08:05 +0530

All the stuff, I’ve been hoarding over the past year for the newsletter.

Ryan Holiday’s 100 (Short) Rules for a Better Life
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4 - Say no (a lot).
15 - It’s not about routine but about practices.
71 - Go the f*ck to sleep.
81 - Don’t just read books, re-read books.

Maria Popova, on How Reading Is Like Love
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Now you are being read.
Your body is being subjected to a systematic reading, through channels of tactile information, visual, olfactory, and not without some intervention of the taste buds. Hearing also has its role, alert to your gasps and your trills. It is not only the body that is, in you, the object of reading: the body matters insofar as it is part of a complex of elaborate elements, not all visible and not all present, but manifested in visible and present events: the clouding of your eyes, your laughing, the words you speak, your way of gathering and spreading your hair, your initiatives and your reticences, and all the signs that are on the frontier between you and usage and habits and memory and prehistory and fashion, all codes, all the poor alphabets by which one human being believes at certain moments that he is reading another human being…

Shane Parrish posits Your Thinking Rate Is Fixed
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A good metaphor is installing an update to the operating system on your laptop.
Would you rather install an update that fixes bugs and improves existing processes, or one that just makes everything run faster? Obviously, you’d prefer the former. The latter would just lead to more crashes. The same is true for updating your mental operating system.

Ryan Holiday presents A Practical Philosophy Reading List: A Few Books You Can Actually Use in Real Life
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You must know by now: I don’t believe that philosophy is something for the classroom.
It’s something that helps you with life.
It shouldn’t be complicated.
It shouldn’t be confusing.
It should be clear, and it should be usable.
As Epicurus put it, “Vain is the word of the philosopher which does not heal the suffering of man.”

Leo Babauta on the First Two Steps to Creating Resilience
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The first step is to remove things that are adding unnecessary stress.
The second step is to do things that help us feel replenished.

David Ogilvy had skin in the game! Who knew?
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The Ogilvy agency … was founded by a man who didn’t have an MBA, or even a college degree.
Before he became the King of Madison Avenue, Englishman David Ogilvy was an Oxford dropout who worked as a chef in Paris, a door-to-door salesman, a researcher for George Gallup, an agent of the British Intelligence Service during WWII, and a farmer in Pennsylvania.

In fact, while most agencies had subordinates present campaign ideas to clients, Ogilvy often made these presentations himself; he wanted to be directly involved, and felt it made the pitches more memorable (“One orchestra looks like every other orchestra, but there is no confusing one conductor with another”).

Ogilvy also rejected around 60 potential new clients each year. A common reason for this rejection was the chairman’s lack of confidence in the product that a company wanted his agency to pitch. Ogilvy used all the products he advertised, and wouldn’t create campaigns for those he couldn’t personally back, believing that it was “flagrantly dishonest for an advertising agent to urge consumers to buy a product which he would not allow his own wife to buy,” and that it was impossible to craft an effective ad for something you couldn’t earnestly get behind …

The beauty of Seth Godin¸ is that every post on his is darn here quotable. This is him, on the weight of repetitive tasks …
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If we’re lucky enough to work indoors, with free snacks and podcasts in the background, we might not get physically exhausted the way we would moving thousands of pounds of bricks. But the cognitive and emotional toll of repetitive tasks is real, even if doesn’t leave callouses.

The discipline is to invest one time in getting your workflow right instead of paying a penalty for poor digital hygiene every single day.

Hacking your way through something “for now” belies your commitment to your work and your posture as a professional. Get the flow right, as if you were hauling bricks.

The Art of Manliness podcast have a ton of episodes on making and breaking habits, which they have collected into one handy page
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If you’ve failed at habit building or breaking in the past, you might think you just need more willpower.
That’s not what James Clear argues in this interview. Rather, it’s simply about crafting optimal systems for behavior change. Clear walks the listener through his own research-backed 4-step process for effective habit formation.

What is the key to making risky decisions? Scott H Young has thoughts
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The correct approach to thinking about risky decisions is not to ignore the odds, but to model your decision and explicitly include things like the benefits to coming in second place.

A good decision model ought to include:

What is the baseline likelihood of success?

What information do you have that makes you different from the average competitor?

What are the outcomes for less-than-ideal results?

What are the emotional and financial costs of going forward?

Leo Babauta on Staying at the Edge of Uncertainty
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When we get into a situation that feels uncertain, most of us will immediately try to get to a place of certainty.
Instead of having a difficult conversation, we’ll stay in a crappy situation for longer than we need to.
Instead of putting our art out into the world, we’ll hide it in the safety of obscurity.
When things feel chaotic and overwhelming, we look for a system that will feel ordered and simple.

All of us do this in most areas of our lives. Sometimes, we are able to voluntarily stay in uncertainty, but those times are relatively rare, and usually we don’t like it so much.

Here’s the thing: the edge of uncertainty and chaos is where we learn, grow, create, lead, make incredible art and new inventions.
The edge of uncertainty is where we explore, go on adventures, get curious, and reinvent ourselves.
The edge of uncertainty is where we can find unexpected beauty, love, intimacy, vulnerability, meaning.
Everything we truly crave is at the edge of uncertainty, but we run from it.

The trick is to stay in it.

You’ve read the classic works of stoicism. What now? The Daily Stoic helps with, Assembling A “Bible” of Stoicism: What To Read After The Romans, https://dailystoic.com/bible-of-stoicism
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The world in which a man lives shapes itself chiefly by the way in which he looks at it, and so it proves different to different men; to one it is barren, dull, and superficial; to another rich, interesting, and full of meaning. On hearing of the interesting events which have happened in the course of a man’s experience, many people will wish that similar things had happened in their lives too, completely forgetting that they should be envious rather of the mental aptitude which lent those events the significance they possess when he describes them. . . . All the pride and pleasure of the world, mirrored in the dull consciousness of a fool, are poor indeed compared with the imagination of Cervantes writing his Don Quixote in a miserable prison.

—Schopenhauer, The Wisdom of Life (1851)

P.S. If you are new and want to explore the Stoic way of thinking about life, I heartily recommend Ryan Holiday’s trilogy for a gentle introduction. The Obstacle is the Way, Ego is the Enemy and Stillness is the key are short yet surprisingly deep and engaging books.

Speaking of reading, Ali Abdaal teaches us, The Art of Reading More Effectively and Efficiently
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Level 4: Syntopical Reading
The final level of reading is about our understanding of a subject more generally. Whereas analytical reading focuses on our comprehension of a specific book, syntopical reading helps shape our opinion and increase our overall fluency of the wider topic through understanding how different books relate to one another. This may sound a little abstract, but bear with me.

“The benefits [of syntopical reading] are so great that it is well worth the trouble of learning how to do it” — Adler

The first step is to begin by deciding the subject we want to tackle (eg: productivity or habit-formation). We can then draw up a bibliography of books on the topic, and select just a handful of them that we believe to be most relevant.

Having compiled the list of books, we can begin reading syntopically. This means reading each of the books analytically and building mental connections between each of them. I try to define common subject keywords in my own words, identify and answer the most pressing questions that the books collectively address, and make an informed decision about the strengths of each author’s argument.

“Creativity is just connecting things” — Steve Jobs

Through syntopical reading we’re connecting the best ideas on a subject, which acts as a powerful catalyst giving rise to creative solutions and real insight. It’s truly game-changing (when we actually do it).

Shane Parrish distills Mortimer Adler’s advice from How to Read a Book: The Ultimate Guide by Mortimer Adler
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I bet you already know how to read a book. You were taught in elementary school.
But do you know how to read well?
There is a difference between reading for understanding and reading for information.
If you’re like most people, you probably haven’t given much thought to how you read. And how you read makes a massive difference to knowledge accumulation.
A lot of people confuse knowing the name of something with understanding. While great for exercising your memory, the regurgitation of facts without solid understanding and context gains you little in the real world.
A useful heuristic: Anything easily digested is reading for information.
Consider the newspaper, are you truly learning anything new? Do you consider the writer your superior when it comes to knowledge in the subject? Odds are probably not. That means you’re reading for information. It means you’re likely to parrot an opinion that isn’t yours as if you had done the work.
This is how most people read. But most people aren’t really learning anything new. It’s not going to give you an edge, make you better at your job, or allow you to avoid problems.

“Marking a book is literally an experience of your differences or agreements with the author. It is the highest respect you can pay him.”
— Edgar Allen Poe

Learning something insightful requires mental work.
It’s uncomfortable. If it doesn’t hurt, you’re not learning.
You need to find writers who are more knowledgeable on a particular subject than yourself. By narrowing the gap between the author and yourself, you get smarter.

Farnam Street has an awesome page chockful of articles, that help us become better readers
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You can’t get where you want to go if you’re not learning all the time. One of the best ways to learn is to read.

Reading habits don’t need to be complicated, you can start a simple 25 page a day habit right now. While it seems small the gains add up quickly.

Above all else remember that just because you’ve read something doesn’t mean you’ve done the work required to have an opinion.

Ryan Holiday on Marginalia, the Anti-Library, and Other Ways to Master the Lost Art of Reading
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Step three, be ruthless about acquiring knowledge through books. If you see anything that remotely intrigues you–just get it.
Quit books that don’t hold your interest or deliver the goods.
Swarm onto topics that do, even if there is no immediate relevancy to what you’re doing. After all, creativity comes from combining old ideas into something new. Reading a variety of topics gives you more ammo than your competition.

If something enthralls you and you want to deeply understand it, go at it. You don’t have to slowly trudge along through a book. Think of someone like Frederick Douglass, who brought himself up out of slavery by sneaking out and teaching himself to read, or Richard Wright who forged notes from his white boss so he could check out books from the library. Books weren’t some idle pursuit or pastime for these great individuals, they were survival itself.

Ed Latimore on How to stop hating someone and holding grudges
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You don’t stop hating someone because it’s the right thing to do or because they’ve done something to finally make it acceptable for you to stop hating the person. You stop hating because if you don’t stop, then there are very consequences to your mental, physical, and emotional health.

You’re the only who pays the cost and you get absolutely nothing of value in return. In fact, when you hate someone, you’re paying this cost to have things of value taken from you. Mainly, your peace of mind, love of other people, and openness to the world.

This is why releasing and removing hatred is an important goal.

Ryan Holiday on How to Digest Books Above Your “Level”
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I shouldn’t be able to read most of the books on my shelf. I never took a single classical history class and I cheated through most of Economics 001. Still, the loci of my library are Greek History and Applied Economics. And though they often are beyond me educationally, I’m able to comprehend them because of some equalizing tricks. Reading to lead or learn requires that you treat your brain like the muscle that it is–lifting the subjects with the most tension and weight. For me, that means pushing ahead into subjects you’re not familiar with and wresting with them until you can–shying away from the “easy read.”

This is how I break down a new book: …

Ryan Holiday on How To Read More — A Lot More
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When you read a lot of books people inevitably assume you speed read. In fact, that’s probably the most common email I get. They want to know my trick for reading so fast. They see all the books I recommend every month in my reading newsletter and assume I must have some secret. So they ask me to teach them how to speed read.

That’s when I tell them I don’t have a secret. Even though I read hundreds of books every single year, I actually read quite slow. In fact, I read deliberately slow, so that I can take notes (and then whenever I finish a book, I go back through and transcribe these notes for my version of a commonplace book.

So where do I get the time?

Look, where do you get the time to eat three meals a day? How do you have time to do all that sleeping? How do you manage to spend all those hours with your kids or wife or a girlfriend or boyfriend?

You don’t get that time anywhere, do you? You just make it because it’s really important. It’s a non-negotiable part of your life.

Ryan Holiday on How And Why To Keep A “Commonplace Book”
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This is why I have the Commonplace Blog too! And also why, I am now creating a Zettelkasten to help me think and write.

Some of the greatest men and women in history have kept these books. Marcus Aurelius kept one–which more or less became the Meditations. Petrarch kept one. Montaigne, who invented the essay, kept a handwritten compilation of sayings, maxims and quotations from literature and history that he felt were important. His earliest essays were little more than compilations of these thoughts. Thomas Jefferson kept one. Napoleon kept one. HL Mencken, who did so much for the English language, as his biographer put it, “methodically filled notebooks with incidents, recording straps of dialog and slang” and favorite bits from newspaper columns he liked. Bill Gates keeps one.

… And if you still need a why–I’ll let this quote from Seneca answer it (which I got from my own reading and notes):

“We should hunt out the helpful pieces of teaching and the spirited and noble-minded sayings which are capable of immediate practical application–not far far-fetched or archaic expressions or extravagant metaphors and figures of speech–and learn them so well that words become works.”

Book I’m reading - The Code Breaker, lovely article on Ars Technica
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You were in the middle of reporting this book when something seismic happened in the world of CRISPR. In 2018, a Chinese scientist named He Jiankui revealed he had not only edited human embryos but started pregnancies with them, leading to the birth of twin girls. How did that affect the trajectory of the story you were trying to tell?

That really became a crucial turning point in the narrative. Because now all these scientists were forced to wrestle with the moral implications of what they’d helped create. But then things changed again when the coronavirus struck. I wound up working on the book for another year to watch the players as they took on this pandemic. And that actually caused my own thinking about CRISPR to evolve.

How so?

I think I felt a visceral resistance at times to the notion that we could edit the human genome, especially in ways that would be inheritable. But that changed both for me and for Doudna as we met more and more people who are themselves afflicted by horrible genetic problems or who have children who are suffering from them. And when our species got slammed by a deadly virus, it made me more open to the idea that we should use whatever talents we have in order to thrive and be healthy. So I’m now even more open to gene editing done for medical purposes, whether that’s sickle cell anemia, or Huntington’s, or Tay-Sachs, or even to increase our resistance to viruses and other pathogens and to cancer.

I still have worries. One is I don’t want gene editing to be something only the rich can afford and it leads to encoding inequalities into our societies. And, secondly, I want to make sure we don’t reduce the wonderful diversity that exists within the human species.

Annual Letters, from folks I listen to and learn from …
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The Neuroscience of Motivation
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When the Eiffel Tower was a Parisian Startup Laboratory
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During the pandemic, the Eiffel Tower has been undergoing a fresh paint job ahead of the 2024 Olympics that harkens back to its golden hue of the early 20th century. But at that time, the Eiffel Tower was more than just an attraction: Gustave Eiffel was using his new tower as a his personal laboratory of scientific innovation. In 1909, Eiffel built its first wind tunnel at the foot of the tower, which was made available to the earliest pioneers in aviation and aircraft design. The wind tunnel, still in service in Paris, inside “the oldest aeronautical test laboratory still in working order,” can be considered one of Eiffel’s littlest-known monuments.

Why We Struggle to Motivate Ourselves
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While it’s easy to think about pain in the most dramatic terms, it’s often the small pinches and itches that really derail progress.
How many people fail to set up retirement accounts because the thought of trying to understand their 401k program makes them feel a bit anxious? How many get stuck in dead-end jobs because the thought of reaching out to talk to a few people in different career spaces feels awkward?

How to Improve Your Self-Awareness
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Self-awareness comes from building a richer, more accurate model of yourself. This combines not only theory, but experience.

Having more self-awareness leads, straightforwardly to more success. If you understand how you operate, both as an individual and as a human being generally, you can be more successful with your ambitions.

But the benefit of self-awareness is much deeper than this. Understanding yourself transcends just trying to make more money or have a better job, because it helps you realize why you want to pursue those things in the first place. In some places, this will strengthen your ambitions, as you recognize a deeper purpose to your goals, in other cases it may change what you pursue entirely, leaving some pursuits that you recognize won’t actually make you fulfilled.

Here’s 10,000 Hours. Don’t Spend It All in One Place.
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On October 20, 1874, in Danbury, Connecticut, a child was born who would grow up to be one of the greatest American composers of classical music. More than a half-century ahead of his time, he combined late romanticism, American folk, and avant-garde techniques in a way that revolutionized music.
On the very same day, in the same town, a child was born who would grow up to transform the business of financial planning. An actuary, successful insurance entrepreneur, and well-known financial author, he devised ingenious life-insurance products and created the modern practice of estate planning.

It was not a coincidence that the great composer and the celebrated financial innovator shared a birthday and birthplace. They were the same man: Charles Edward Ives.

There’s an old proverb that goes, “Duos qui sequitur lepores neutrum capit”—“He who follows two hares catches neither.” Perhaps that’s so, but he who chases two hares can at least have a great time trying, which can be more important in a good life. Many of my graduate students in public policy and business administration have a strong background and interest in subjects unrelated to their academic discipline. My advice to them, based on the truths above, is to not abandon either one.
The interests don’t have to be alike. After all, Ives didn’t catch two hares—it was more like a dolphin and a rhinoceros.

A Crash Course in Real World Self-Defense
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#1. Use your brain and walking shoes first. Most of the time, you can avoid fights altogether if you just keep a cool head. Keep in mind that any fight can potentially put someone in the hospital or worse; to that end, walking away or using words to deescalate the conflict is often the best defense. So when you make the choice to engage in combat, ask yourself if it’s worth it. Even if you manage to come out on top, you could be looking at heavy legal fines, or the guilt of knowing you caused another person long-term injury, so it’s best to walk away whenever possible. Even better yet is to avoid environments that can put you in antagonistic situations in the first place, such as parties or bars where there might be excessive consumption of alcohol. To repeat the old adage, “Discretion is the better part of valor.”

#7. Keep it simple. “Okay, first, your opponent grabs your lapel. Turn your hand. Now grab his wrist with both your hands. Next turn away from him, pivoting on the balls of your feet. After that you’re going to step under his elbow, pull his arm, then shift your body weight so that he’s moving towards you. Now catch his head with your calf muscle and . . .” Have you ever seen someone teach this sort of complex technique? Such maneuvers tend to not work so well, and that’s largely because they’re too complicated. A joint lock or hold that’s too complicated causes problems for two reasons. First, if any “link” in the chain of moves is weak, then the entire technique can fail. When you factor in the different body sizes and levels of strength that you’re likely to encounter, it adds yet another variable. Second, it requires too much memory and concentration, and when you’re in a fight, those are two things that won’t come easy to you. In short, complicated techniques usually aren’t worth your time, at least in the context of a street fight. The more simple and boring a technique is, the more reliable it tends to be. Let’s rewrite that complicated technique above to make it more simple: “Punch the guy in the face until he lets go, then run.” Much easier to remember, right?

Mandy Brown asking Remote to Who?
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If remote work gives us anything at all, it gives us the chance to root ourselves in a place that isn’t the workplace. It gives us the chance to really live in whatever place we have chosen to live—to live as neighbors and caretakers and organizers, to stop hoarding all of our creative and intellectual capacity for our employers and instead turn some of it towards building real political power in our communities.

This Is How To Have A Long Awesome Life: 5 Secrets From Research
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If you ever wanted to be guilted in a very happy and helpful way, into exercising, then Eric Barker is here to do just that

Daniel Lieberman decided to do an informal — and very sneaky — study.

While at an academic conference, he counted how many people took the escalator vs the stairs. In ten minutes, 151 people walked past him and only 11 used the stairs. That’s just 7 percent.

Thing was, this was a meeting of the American College of Sports Medicine.

And the name of the conference was “Exercise Is Medicine.”

Actually, these results weren’t as bad as you might think — formal studies of the general populace show, on average, only 5% of people take the stairs. We all know exercise is good… but most of us just don’t do it.

Farnam Street has a concise summary of the evergreen classic, How to Win Friends and Influence People.
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I shan’t summarise it here. A summary of a summary would be redonkulous, non? 😂

Go Read.
Ok, one quote that always resonates with me.

If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.

Carnegie was echoing Maimonides of old. Munger too, later echoed Carnegie when he spoke of the work required to have an opinion

“The ability to destroy your ideas rapidly instead of slowly when the occasion is right is one of the most valuable things.
You have to work hard on it.
Ask yourself what are the arguments on the other side.
It’s bad to have an opinion you’re proud of if you can’t state the arguments for the other side better than your opponents.
This is a great mental discipline.”

The World Map of the Internet in 2021
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I was going to send this to the work newsletter, but the drawings are too gorgeous to restrict to just that subset.
There’s all sorts of stuff; protocols that undergird the net, browsers in use, & how the world is slowly amalgamating into huge walled continents of a few centralised websites.
These maps are a joy to watch. (and a bit unsettling to reflect on.)

Reminds me a little bit of this map of food corporates.

Maya Angelou’s Paris Review Interview, on writing and language and life and growing up. Watching this could probably the best hour of your life.
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On Making it Look Easy …

I try to pull the language into such a sharpness that it jumps off the page. It must look easy, but it takes me forever to get it to look so easy. Of course, there are those critics — New York critics as a rule — who say, Well, Maya Angelou has a new book out and of course it’s good but then she’s a natural writer. Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing. I work at the language.

On Wisdom …

“Most people don’t grow up.
It’s too damn difficult.

What happens is most people get older. That’s the truth of it. They honor their credit cards, they find parking spaces, they marry, they have the nerve to have children, but they don’t grow up.
Not really. They get older.

But to grow up costs the earth, the earth. It means you take responsibility for the time you take up, for the space you occupy. It’s serious business. And you find out what it costs us to love and to lose, to dare and to fail. And maybe even more, to succeed.”

P.S. Subscribe to my mailing list!
Forward these posts and letters to your friends and get them to subscribe!
P.P.S. Feed my insatiable reading habit.

On Reading

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 26 Dec 2021 05:45:00 +0530

This post was first sent to my newsletter on December 19th, 2021.
You really ought to subscribe :)

image, courtesy The Toymaker’s Journal

Lots of links in this letter, because there won’t be a work letter later, this month :)
This one is all about, drum roll … Reading :)

You know the drill. Click the headers to wander off to the original articles.

Books I Read Last Month
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So Good They Can’t Ignore you, is a book I strangely keep coming back to.
Lots to learn about how to build a sustainable career
Needle Points, You need to do the work required to hold a fair opinion. Tablet’s long form piece helped me understand vaccine hesitancy.
I finally got tired of waiting for the old man to finish his series, and started reading everything around it, to immerse myself in The World of Ice & Fire This was almost as fun as discovering and reading A Game of Thrones in the late 90s. Only for completionists though. It’ll feel like a slog for anyone who is not a fan. If he still keeps dilly dallying, I might have to go watch the TV series next.
And Discipline Equals Freedom, just for that semi regular kick in the pants.

My dirty little reading secret. Folks ask me how I read so much. The answer is when I read for pleasure, I read what I like, when I like, and don’t bother completing it if I don’t and just dropping it, never to return to it or maybe coming back to it some other time. Also I read a lot more than I list here. I pick up ten, drop seven or eight, guiltily enjoy two to three, and probably feel comfortable listing a couple.

You’ve read the classic works of stoicism. Now what? The Daily Stoic helps with, Assembling A “Bible” of Stoicism: What To Read After The Romans
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The world in which a man lives shapes itself chiefly by the way in which he looks at it, and so it proves different to different men; to one it is barren, dull, and superficial; to another rich, interesting, and full of meaning.
On hearing of the interesting events which have happened in the course of a man’s experience, many people will wish that similar things had happened in their lives too, completely forgetting that they should be envious rather of the mental aptitude which lent those events the significance they possess when he describes them …
All the pride and pleasure of the world, mirrored in the dull consciousness of a fool, are poor indeed compared with the imagination of Cervantes writing his Don Quixote in a miserable prison.

— Schopenhauer, The Wisdom of Life (1851)

P.S. And if you haven’t read the classic works and if you are new and want to explore the Stoic way of thinking about life, I heartily recommend Ryan Holiday’s trilogy for a gentle introduction. The Obstacle is the Way, Ego is the Enemy and Stillness is the key are short yet surprisingly deep and engaging books.

Ali Abdaal teaches us, The Art of Reading More Effectively and Efficiently
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Level 4: Syntopical Reading
The final level of reading is about our understanding of a subject more generally. Whereas analytical reading focuses on our comprehension of a specific book, syntopical reading helps shape our opinion and increase our overall fluency of the wider topic through understanding how different books relate to one another. This may sound a little abstract, but bear with me.

“The benefits [of syntopical reading] are so great that it is well worth the trouble of learning how to do it”
— Mortimer Adler

The first step is to begin by deciding the subject we want to tackle (eg: productivity or habit-formation). We can then draw up a bibliography of books on the topic, and select just a handful of them that we believe to be most relevant.

Having compiled the list of books, we can begin reading syntopically. This means reading each of the books analytically and building mental connections between each of them. I try to define common subject keywords in my own words, identify and answer the most pressing questions that the books collectively address, and make an informed decision about the strengths of each author’s argument.

“Creativity is just connecting things”
— Steve Jobs

Through syntopical reading we’re connecting the best ideas on a subject, which acts as a powerful catalyst giving rise to creative solutions and real insight. It’s truly game-changing (when we actually do it).

Shane Parrish distills Adler in How to Read a Book: The Ultimate Guide by Mortimer Adler
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I bet you already know how to read a book. You were taught in elementary school.
But do you know how to read well?
There is a difference between reading for understanding and reading for information.
If you’re like most people, you probably haven’t given much thought to how you read. And how you read makes a massive difference to knowledge accumulation.
A lot of people confuse knowing the name of something with understanding. While great for exercising your memory, the regurgitation of facts without solid understanding and context gains you little in the real world.
A useful heuristic: Anything easily digested is reading for information.
Consider the newspaper, are you truly learning anything new? Do you consider the writer your superior when it comes to knowledge in the subject? Odds are probably not. That means you’re reading for information. It means you’re likely to parrot an opinion that isn’t yours as if you had done the work.
This is how most people read. But most people aren’t really learning anything new. It’s not going to give you an edge, make you better at your job, or allow you to avoid problems.

“Marking a book is literally an experience of your differences or agreements with the author. It is the highest respect you can pay him.”
— Edgar Allen Poe

Learning something insightful requires mental work. It’s uncomfortable. If it doesn’t hurt, you’re not learning. You need to find writers who are more knowledgeable on a particular subject than yourself. By narrowing the gap between the author and yourself, you get smarter.

Farnam Street has an awesome page, chockful of articles, that help us become better readers
#

You can’t get where you want to go if you’re not learning all the time. One of the best ways to learn is to read.

Reading habits don’t need to be complicated, you can start a simple 25 page a day habit right now. While it seems small the gains add up quickly.

Above all else remember that just because you’ve read something doesn’t mean you’ve done the work required to have an opinion.

and also

Quit Books

Bad books are a grind. Good books almost read themselves.

When you pick up a good book you feel it instantly. Not only are they well written and packed with ideas and insight, but they’re well organized. You want to read the next page.

Start books quickly but give them up easily. One of the biggest things that holds people back when reading is our desire to finish what we start. Good books finish themselves. You can’t put them down. Trying to finish a bad book, on the other hand, is like walking through the mud with a wheelbarrow full of bricks. Life is too short.

When it comes to reading, you don’t need to finish what you start.

Once you realize that you can quit bad books (or reading anything for that matter) without guilt, everything changes. Putting a bad book down creates the opportunity and space for a great book.

Skim a lot of books. Read a few. Immediately re-read the best ones twice.

That’s all for now, folks. See you in the new year!
But before I go, this beautiful Gaiman poem (the pic above) reminds me,

Sometimes it only takes a stranger, in a dark place,
to hold out a badly knitted scarf, to offer a kind word, to say
we have the right to be here, …

So, this Christmas …
I’m grateful, you’re a part of my life.
I’m grateful, you’ve made me a part of yours.
I’m grateful, you’ve given me the right to belong to your world!
I wish you be happy, I wish you love, and as ever I wish you warmth!
Merry Christmas!

P.S. Subscribe to my mailing list!
Forward these posts and letters to your friends and get them to subscribe!
P.P.S. Feed my insatiable reading habit.

On Woman Computers, Long Tails & Reasons to Write

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 26 Nov 2021 05:45:00 +0530

This post was first sent to my newsletter on November 20th, 2021.
You really ought to subscribe :)

Ok, I’m a day late, but hopefully not a dollar short¹ :)
This work letter is going out to all of you my friends, because there’s not much technical stuff in here.

And because I have a spot of good news to share.
I got a jobby job!
I’ve been trying the past few years, to switch my career to something that wasn’t as taxing, as consulting on hardware and networks and integrating systems.
While I loved the work, it was a lot of work, for not enough money and it took a toll on my physical health.²
So writing software from the comfort of my home, is it.
And two weeks in, the team’s taken me under their wing and they are guiding me along and I’m loving it!

And now that’ve gotten all that happy Wheeeeeee! out of my system, on to our letter :)

*You know the drill. Click the headers to wonder off to the original articles (also, most emphases mine)…*

Human Computer: The Forgotten Women’s Profession
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![mnwci][mnwci]

By WWII, with all hands needed for the war effort, the Army hired a group of women computers to calculate artillery trajectories. These women worked as support to the engineers and were brought on because computing was still thought to be menial and low status work; too dull for the highly educated men on staff who wanted more exciting jobs. This disregards the fact that in order to solve these equations these women would have to re-work the same calculations over and over again for hours. Former computer, Marilyn Heyson, recalled in an interview that the job was intellectually interesting, but a marathon. These calculations not only required great mental endurance, patience, and attention to detail, but advanced mathematical skill.

The dance between the long tail and the short head
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The disconnect occurs when producers and creators try to average things out and dumb things down, hoping for the big hit that won’t come. Or overspend to get there. The opportunity lies in finding a viable audience and matching the project’s focus and budget to the people who truly want it.

And the dance continues.

Ten reasons to write a book
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I’d say these translate well to just writing and publishing yourself on your blog, in general too!
Here’s four …

It clarifies your thinking.

It’s a project that is completely and totally up to you.

Because it’s a generous way to share.

It will increase your authority in your field.

So long and see you next month folks :)

P.S. Subscribe to my mailing list!
Forward these posts and letters to your friends and get them to subscribe!
P.P.S. Feed my insatiable reading habit.

I used to think that this was something from the days of the American wild west; turns out this idiom came much later, probably during the Depression in the 30s. ↩︎
Folks say, they have the scars to prove it. Well, I have three slipped discs and daily physio to prove it. ↩︎

On Reading News, Remembering, and Why We Write

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 14 Nov 2021 05:45:00 +0530

A few days late, but Happy Diwali, folks! :)

A small ask of you, to begin with.
Like I wrote in the past, I don’t have any sort of tracking in these mails.
There are no ads, nothing to push. Just a labour of love.
So I have no idea whether these posts resonate or I’m just howling into the storm that is your inbox.
If you like it, hate it, agree/disagree, write me :)
All I get to see are a couple of folk leaving, every once in a while, and my list, my tribe in fact is really tiny and it feels a bit discouraging.¹

So share this with friends and ask them to subscribe and write to me and tell me how much you love the letters and make me happy :)
What is a festive season without a bit of emotional, tugging of the heartstrings? 😂

On to our letter!
You know the drill! Click the headers, to wander off to the original articles and read them :)

Why You Should Stop Reading News, Shane Parrish
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Rarely do we stop to ask ourselves questions about the media we consume:
Is this good for me?
Is this dense with detailed information?
Is this important?
Is this going to stand the test of time?
Is the person writing someone who is well informed on the issue?
Asking those questions makes it clear the news isn’t good for you.

“[W]e’re surrounded by so much information that is of immediate interest to us, that we feel overwhelmed by the never-ending pressure of trying to keep up with it all.”
#

— Nicolas Carr
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Shane, once again on, How to Remember What You Read
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If you only remember six things after reading this article, it should be the following truths about reading:

Quality matters more than quantity. If you read one book a month but fully appreciate and absorb it, you’ll be better off than someone who skims half the library without paying attention.

Speed-reading is bullshit. Getting the rough gist and absorbing the lessons are two different things. Confuse them at your peril.
Book summary services miss the point. A lot of companies charge ridiculous prices for access to vague summaries bearing only the faintest resemblance to anything in the book. Summaries can be a useful jumping-off point to explore your curiosity, but you cannot learn from them the way you can from the original text.
Fancy apps and tools are not needed. A notebook, index cards, and a pen will do just fine.
We shouldn’t read stuff we find boring. Life is far too short.
Finishing the book is optional. You should start a lot of books and only finish a few of them.

Complement with Nicky Case’s amazing website, applet, spaced repetition teaching aid, explorable explanation, How To Remember Anything Forever (…ish)

Tony Stark nearly gasped as a gloved hand trailed down his spine. The steady pressure was smooth and almost reassuring. Obama chuckled. “You mean, the–

This is why we write, Neil Gaiman
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This little piece on Neil’s blog is so heartwarming, empowering and inspiring, that I refuse to spoil it for you.
Go read and smile :)

So long for now, and I’ll play catch up next month :)
Remember to write! ²

P.S. Subscribe to my mailing list!
Forward these posts and letters to your friends and get them to subscribe!
P.P.S. Feed my insatiable reading habit.

P.P.P.S If you love language and word jokes as much as I do, this should keep you chuckling.³ (once when you read the thread and then for the next couple of days as you keep thinking about it.)

Even though it shouldn’t be. I do it all the time, myself. Time and attention are the most precious things we have! :) ↩︎
in your blogs, or your journals or wherever! And write to me! ↩︎
via James Clears’ newsletter ↩︎

On Planetary Atmospheres, Cloud Infrastructure and the Undead!

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 29 Oct 2021 05:45:00 +0530

This post was first sent to my newsletter on October 22nd, 2021
You really ought to subscribe :)

via NASA Johnson on Flickr

Welcome to the October work letter! :)
As usual, click the headers to wander off to the orginal articles.

Over at Ars Technica, Researchers think a planet lost its original atmosphere, and built a new one
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In general, we don’t currently have the technology to image exoplanets unless they’re very large, very young, and a considerable distance from the star they orbit. Yet we can still get some sense of what’s in their atmosphere. To do that, we need to observe a planet that transits across the line of sight between Earth and its star. During a transit, a small percentage of the star’s light will travel through the planet’s atmosphere on its way to Earth, interacting with the molecules present there.

[…] It’s so close and hot, in fact, that the researchers estimate that it’s currently losing about 10,000 kilograms of atmosphere every second. As the host star was expected to be brighter early in its history, the researchers estimate that GJ 1132 b would have lost a reasonable-sized atmosphere within the first 100 million years of its existence. In fact, over the life of the planet, the researchers estimate that it could have lost an atmosphere weighing in at about five times the planet’s current mass—the sort of thing you might see if the remaining planet were the core of a mini-Neptune.

So, researchers were probably surprise to find that, based on data from the Hubble, the planet seems to have an atmosphere.
How’d that get here?

Moderation in Infrastructure by Ben Thompson
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Read the more detailed interview, that the article references, here.

It was Patrick Collison, Stripe’s CEO, who pointed out to me that one of the animating principles of early 20th-century Progressivism was guaranteeing freedom of expression from corporations:

Exactly the same kind of restraints upon freedom of thought are bound to occur in every country where economic organization has been carried to the point of practical monopoly. Therefore the safeguarding of liberty in the world which is growing up is far more difficult than it was in the nineteenth century, when free competition was still a reality. Whoever cares about the freedom of the mind must face this situation fully and frankly, realizing the inapplicability of methods which answered well enough while industrialism was in its infancy.

This is why I take Smith’s comments as more of a warning: a commitment to consistency may lead to the lowest common denominator outcome Prince fears, where U.S. social media companies overreach on content, even as competition is squeezed out at the infrastructure level by policies guided by non-U.S. countries. It’s a bad mix, and public clouds in particular would be better off preparing for geographically-distinct policies in the long run, even as they deliver on their commitment to predictability and process in the meantime, with a strong bias towards being hands-off. That will mean some difficult decisions, which is why it’s better to make a commitment to neutrality and due process now.

Excel Never Dies
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This is an awesome piece, on the amazing longevity and entrenchment of Excel in the face of competitors nibbling away at and creating billion dollar companies from just a fraction of Excel’s capabilities.

Excel has been around a long time, so we can expect Excel to be around for a long time.

That’s the Lindy Effect at work: the longer something lasts, the longer it can be expected to last. Something that has been around for a year is expected to be around for another year, but something that has been around for 100 years is expected to be around for another 100 years.

There are a couple of reasons for that:

Quality. Cream rises to the top, and only the strong survive. Part of the Lindy Effect can just be explained by the fact that some things are higher-quality than others, that people recognize and appreciate quality, and that over time, higher-quality things tend to outlast lower-quality things. If you put Aristotle’s The Nicomachean Ethics on a permanent bookshelf and had people choose between it and some modern high kid’s philosophical ramblings in an ongoing tournament, generation after generation would recognize that Aristotle is better, and Aristotle’s work would survive.

Network Effects. As people recognize something’s quality and as it lasts longer, they become more comfortable building on top of it, which increases the odds that the thing sticks around. That’s a form of network effect, specifically a Two-Sided Platform Network Effect. As Aristotle’s work persists, more philosophers build on top of it, and more philosophy professors build their curricula around it, which creates lock-in and makes it even more likely that his work survives for millennia hence.

Excel is Lindy software.

So long, folks! :)

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On the Weight of Repetitive Tasks, Forming Habits and the Pursuit of Knowledge

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 10 Oct 2021 05:45:00 +0530

This post was first sent to my newsletter on October 3rd, 2021.
You really ought to subscribe :)

*A long leisurely ride, in a shikara amongst the lakes of Shrinagar*

It’s October! Time to play catchup with Jason’s letters! :)
As usual, click the headers to wander off to the originals.

I read a few books and wrote about them!

Brave Enough

The first two, I believe, should be mandatory reading for every growing adult.

Seth Godin on The Weight of Repetitive Tasks
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The beauty of Seth Godin¸ is that every post of his is darn near quotable!

If we’re lucky enough to work indoors, with free snacks and podcasts in the background, we might not get physically exhausted the way we would moving thousands of pounds of bricks. But the cognitive and emotional toll of repetitive tasks is real, even if doesn’t leave calluses.

The discipline is to invest one time in getting your workflow right instead of paying a penalty for poor digital hygiene every single day.

Hacking your way through something “for now” belies your commitment to your work and your posture as a professional. Get the flow right, as if you were hauling bricks.

The Art of Manliness page on Habit Formation
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If you’ve failed at habit building or breaking in the past, you might think you just need more willpower.
That’s not what James Clear argues in this interview. Rather, it’s simply about crafting optimal systems for behavior change. Clear walks the listener through his own research-backed 4-step process for effective habit formation.

The Daily Stoic on the Pursuit of Knowledge
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Does the pursuit of knowledge ever end? We need to keep at it, says the Daily Stoic.

So when does this all culminate and coalesce into wisdom? When are you good?
Never. The answer is never.
“Until when is a person obligated to study Torah?” Maimonides once asked, rhetorically.
“Until the day of one’s death.”

So here’s to ever pursuing knowledge! I’ll see you next month, folks :)

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On Teddy Bears in Cars, Font Obsessions and Home Password’s Pwnd Password Kerfuffle

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 24 Sep 2021 05:45:00 +0530

This post was first sent to my newsletter on September 17th, 2021.
You really ought to subscribe :)

via Michelle Scott on Pixabay

Welcome folks, to the September work letter! :)
As usual, click the headers to wander off to the orginal articles.

A Bear? Where? Over There — Strapping a giant teddy bear to a car in the name of highway safety
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You’re adapting my what?
When activated, adaptive cruise control uses forward-looking radar to maintain a specific distance to a vehicle in the lane ahead, slowing down or speeding up (to a maximum of whatever speed cruise control was set to) as necessary. Lane-keeping systems use forward-looking cameras to detect the lane markings on a road to keep the vehicle between them, and when both are active together, the vehicle will do a pretty good facsimile of driving itself, albeit with extremely limited situational awareness.

Which is where the human comes in. Under the SAE’s definitions for automated driving, in Level 2 the car controls braking, acceleration, and deceleration, but the human is responsible for providing situational awareness at all times. Of course, this raises the question of whether the driver is actually paying attention.

[…] To test whether drivers were actually paying attention while using a Level 2 system, IIHS recruited participants and then had them drive for roughly an hour, either using the car’s Level 2 system or not. At three predetermined locations on the test route, a second car—the one with the large pink bear attached to its trunk—would overtake the participant’s vehicle. At the end of the study, the drivers were asked if they saw anything odd, and if so, how many times.

TT2020 is an advanced, open source, hyperrealistic, multilingual typewriter font for a new decade!
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Crazy obsessions like this, are why even I got into writing software.
From the problem page,

In the second image, there are three ‹N›’s. Yet, they all look exactly the same. A real typewriter can, quite rarely, have one of its letters damaged, or misaligned, such that that letter regularly makes an inferior strike to all the other letters. However, this degree of regularity is impossible; could Underwood or Remington have acheived it, they would have leapt for joy.
While working on the project, incredibly, another bad typewriter scene intruded upon my life. I don’t often sit around and watch movies, so I suppose there are only two possibilities:

a. There are so many of these unrealistic typewritten documents in late-2010’s cinema that almost any movie with a typewritten document in it will be hopelessly unrealistic, or
b. The universe, nay, God himself, was urging me on to complete this project in lieu of others I could finish!

The Font is here.

Home Assistant decided to implement password security checks by integrating Pwned Password lookups at the Have I Been Pwned project and all hell broke loose. Here’s Troy Hunt’s measured look at the situation.
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I’ve written before about how IRL analogies are terrible and this one is no exception. You will not die if you use a weak password. There aren’t government regulations defining how the software is built. You can be any age to operate it. Home Assistant is free. And so on and so forth.
Cars warn you about a number of unsafe decisions and so does Home Assistant, but that’s where the similarities end. Everything else can be adequately discussed by simply talking about the technology rather than trying to find things IRL to compare to.

If it’s in Pwned Passwords, I’ve seen it in plain text. If I’ve seen it in plain text, hackers have seen it in plain text. It doesn’t matter how many letters and numbers and symbols you’ve got in your password, if it’s in Pwned Passwords then it’s floating around the web where plenty of other people have access to it. The guidance from NIST I quoted earlier said not to use “passwords obtained from previous breach corpuses” - there is no caveat that says “unless you think it’s a really good one”!

Pascal has already indicated this will be configurable and as I said earlier, I agree. With the benefit of hindsight, I suspect he’d do things differently in the first place, even though the intention was good.
I do agree with the comments that people should be free to be dicks and deal with the consequences. What I’d like to encourage people to do, however, is to take this as an opportunity to get a password manager and strengthen all passwords that require it.

Until the next letter folks!

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On Resilience, Philosophy and Creative Success

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 12 Sep 2021 05:45:00 +0530

It’s September! Time for a new letter :)
As usual, click the headers to wander off to the originals.

Leo Babauta on the First Two Steps to Creating Resilience
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If you’ve known me for any length of time in the past decade, you know I set great store on being Antifragile..
While Leo says these are two beginner steps, to my mind, these two will bear the brunt of all the resiliency / antifragile weight. It’ll take you more than half the way there.

The first step is to remove things that are adding unnecessary stress.
The second step is to do things that help us feel replenished.

Ryan Holiday presents A Practical Philosophy Reading List: A Few Books You Can Actually Use in Real Life
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Any philosophy forged in the crucible of action and subject to hardship, endures.
Like Stoicism did.

You must know by now: I don’t believe that philosophy is something for the classroom. It’s something that helps you with life. It shouldn’t be complicated. It shouldn’t be confusing. It should be clear, and it should be usable. As Epicurus put it, “Vain is the word of the philosopher which does not heal the suffering of man.”

David Ogilvy had skin in the game! Who knew?
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Continuing with our theme of action and doing, even the creative process is not all in the mind.
It requires digging down in the mud and blood and sweat and tears …

The Ogilvy agency … was founded by a man who didn’t have an MBA, or even a college degree.
Before he became the King of Madison Avenue, Englishman David Ogilvy was an Oxford dropout who worked as a chef in Paris, a door-to-door salesman, a researcher for George Gallup, an agent of the British Intelligence Service during WWII, and a farmer in Pennsylvania.

In fact, while most agencies had subordinates present campaign ideas to clients, Ogilvy often made these presentations himself; he wanted to be directly involved, and felt it made the pitches more memorable (“One orchestra looks like every other orchestra, but there is no confusing one conductor with another”).

Ogilvy also rejected around 60 potential new clients each year. A common reason for this rejection was the chairman’s lack of confidence in the product that a company wanted his agency to pitch. Ogilvy used all the products he advertised, and wouldn’t create campaigns for those he couldn’t personally back, believing that it was “flagrantly dishonest for an advertising agent to urge consumers to buy a product which he would not allow his own wife to buy,” and that it was impossible to craft an effective ad for something you couldn’t earnestly get behind …

Until next time!

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On Arpanet, Passwords and Moving Codebases

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 27 Aug 2021 05:45:00 +0530

Welcome to August’s work letter :)
As usual, click the headings to wander off to the original articles

A couple of my own posts
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I wrote about my thoughts on my Kindle Oasis …

I got it.
I used it.
And decided within a day, that I was not going back to a Paperwhite, ever.
I realised that the Oasis, to me, is not a “premium” device.

and joining images using ImageMagick.

Two exhaustive articles on the historical significance of the Arpanet and how the protocol worked
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This is what was totally new about the ARPANET. The ICCC demonstration didn’t just involve a human communicating with a distant computer. It wasn’t just a demonstration of remote I/O. It was a demonstration of software remotely communicating with other software, something nobody had seen before.
So what I’m trying to drive home here is that there is an important distinction between statement A, “the ARPANET connected people in different locations via computers for the first time,” and statement B, “the ARPANET connected computer systems to each other for the first time.” That might seem like splitting hairs, but statement A elides some illuminating history in a way that statement B does not.

In a section with the belabored title, “Technical Aspects of the Effort Which Were Successful and Aspects of the Effort Which Did Not Materialize as Originally Envisaged,” the authors wrote:

*Possibly the most difficult task undertaken in the development of the ARPANET was the attempt—which proved successful—*to make a number of independent host computer systems of varying manufacture, and varying operating systems within a single manufactured type, communicate with each other despite their diverse characteristics.

There you have it from no less a source than the federal government of the United States.

The 1Password blog with a high level overview of their Smart Password Generator
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Long, random passwords just aren’t convenient. If you need to enter 45 randomly-generated characters on another device often enough, you’ll inevitably change that password to something like password123 because it’s easy to type and remember. It’s also - you got it - not strong.

While a lengthy, unintelligible password may appear stronger than a smart one, it’s mainly illusion. Pronounceable syllables make a smart password look human generated and, therefore, weaker. But a human-generated password could never be chosen uniformly and, therefore, can’t be accurately assessed for entropy.

We’ve made a compromise of sorts. We’ve sacrificed a few bits of (theoretical) entropy, that don’t affect real-world security, to gain a whole lot of convenience, compatibility, and accessibility — and those certainly are real world, which is what really matters.

Mahmoud Hashemi talks about Changing the Tires on a Moving Codebase
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We realized that CI is more sensitive than most users for most of the site. So we focused in on testing the highest impact code. What’s high-impact? 1) the code that fails most visibly and 2) the code that’s hardest to retry. You can build an inventory of high-impact code in under a week by looking at traffic stats, batch job schedules, and asking your support staff.

And it really is important to develop close ties with your support team. Embedded in our strategy above was that CI is much more sensitive than a real user. While perfection is tempting, it’s not unrealistic to ask a bit of patience from an enterprise user, provided your support team is prepared. Sync with them weekly so surprise is minimized. If they’re feeling ambitious, you can teach them some Sentry basics, too.

My main lessons from Mahmoud’s post …

Everyone has a plan ’till they get punched in the mouth. — Mike Tyson
Prioritise work, on what actually matters. Perfection can wait.
People and their feedback comes first. Matters a lot more than data driven decisions. After all, software is used by and for people.

Until the next letter, folks … :)

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On How Reading is Like Love and Rules for a Better Life

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 08 Aug 2021 05:45:00 +0530

This post was first sent to my newsletter on August 1st, 2021.
[You really ought to subscribe][1] :)

*Clouds sailing across [Pangong Tso][wpt]. Click to enlarge*

New month, new letter!
As usual, click the headers to wander off to the original articles

Maria Popova on How Reading Is Like Love
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Now you are being read. Your body is being subjected to a systematic reading, through channels of tactile information, visual, olfactory, and not without some intervention of the taste buds. Hearing also has its role, alert to your gasps and your trills. It is not only the body that is, in you, the object of reading: the body matters insofar as it is part of a complex of elaborate elements, not all visible and not all present, but manifested in visible and present events: the clouding of your eyes, your laughing, the words you speak, your way of gathering and spreading your hair, your initiatives and your reticences, and all the signs that are on the frontier between you and usage and habits and memory and prehistory and fashion, all codes, all the poor alphabets by which one human being believes at certain moments that he is reading another human being …

Related watching: Max Joseph’s awesome video on, How to Read More Books in the Golden Age of Content.
It’s 40 minutes long, but definitely worth every minute of your time.

Ryan Holiday’s 100 (Short) Rules for a Better Life
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4 - Say no (a lot).
15 - It’s not about routine but about practices.
71 - Go the f*ck to sleep.
81 - Don’t just read books, re-read books.

After all,

via, Ricardo Siri

Shane Parrish posits Your Thinking Rate Is Fixed
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A good metaphor is installing an update to the operating system on your laptop. Would you rather install an update that fixes bugs and improves existing processes, or one that just makes everything run faster?
Obviously, you’d prefer the former. The latter would just lead to more crashes. The same is true for updating your mental operating system.

Have a lovely August! Until next time …

On Cheap Programmable Quantum Computers, Hardware Homomorphic Encryption Support, and Ethical Use of Technology

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 30 Jul 2021 05:45:00 +0530

This post was first sent to my newsletter on July 23rd, 2021.
[You really ought to subscribe][1] :)

New month, new work letter.
Before I begin though, please hit reply to these letters and let me know what you think, whether you like them or not and if there is anything you’d want me to write / hunt & research about!
Like I wrote in the introduction to April’s letter, both the letter and the website have zero tracking.
So I have no way of knowing, whether you like stuff or not, whether it resonates or not, whether I am preaching to throngs or shouting into the void, unless you tell me!
Let’s dig into it. As usual, click the headers, to wander off to the orginal articles :)

Programmable optical quantum computer arrives late, steals the show
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Excuse me a moment—I am going to be bombastic, over excited, and possibly annoying. The race is run, and we have a winner in the future of quantum computing. IBM, Google, and everyone else can turn in their quantum computing cards and take up knitting.

One key to quantum computing (or any computation, really) is the ability to change a qubit’s state depending on the state of another qubit. This turned out to be doable but cumbersome in optical quantum computing. Typically, a two-(or more) qubit operation is a nonlinear operation, and optical nonlinear processes are very inefficient. Linear two-qubit operations are possible, but they are probabilistic, so you need to repeat your calculation many times to be sure you know which answer is correct. A second critical feature is programmability. It is not desirable to have to create a new computer for every computation you wish to perform. Here, optical quantum computers really seemed to fall down. An optical quantum computer could be easy to set up and measure, or it could be programmable—but not both.

So, what has changed to suddenly make optical quantum computers viable? One is the appearance of detectors that can resolve the number of photons they receive. A second key development was integrated optical circuits. performance has gotten much, much better. Integrated optics are now commonly used in the telecommunications industry, with the scale and reliability that that implies.
The researchers, from a startup called Xanadu and the National Institute of Standards, have pulled together these technology developments to produce a single integrated optical chip that generates eight qubits. The internal setting of the interferometer is the knob that the programmer uses to control the computation. In practice, the knob just changes the temperature of individual waveguide segments. But the programmer doesn’t have to worry about these details. Instead, they have an application programming interface (Strawberry Fields Python Library) that takes very normal-looking Python code. This code is then translated by a control system that maintains the correct temperature differentials on the chip,

What is more, the scaling does not present huge amounts of increased complexity. In superconducting qubits, each qubit is a current loop in a magnetic field. Each qubit generates a field that talks to all the other qubits all the time. Engineers have to take a great deal of trouble to decouple and couple qubits from each other at the right moment. The larger the system, the trickier that task becomes. Ion qubit computers face an analogous problem in their trap modes. There isn’t really an analogous problem in optical systems, and that is their key advantage.

Intel to Build Silicon for Fully Homomorphic Encryption
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When considering data privacy and protections, there is no data more important than personal data, whether that’s medical, financial, or even social. The discussions around access to our data, or even our metadata, becomes about who knows what, and if my personal data is safe. Today’s announcement between Intel, Microsoft, and DARPA, is a program designed around keeping information safe and encrypted, but still using that data to build better models or provide better statistical analysis without disclosing the actual data. It’s called Fully Homomorphic Encryption, but it is so computationally intense that the concept is almost useless in practice.

So whether that means combining hospital medical records over a state, or customizing a personal service using personal metadata gathered on a user’s smartphone, FHE at that scale is no longer a viable solution. Enter the DARPA DPRIVE program.

DARPA: Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
DPRIVE: Data Protection in Virtual Environments

Intel has announced that as part of the DPRIVE program, it has signed an agreement with DARPA to develop custom IP leading to silicon to enable faster FHE in the cloud, specifically with Microsoft on both Azure and JEDI cloud, initially with the US government. As part of this multi-year project, expertise from Intel Labs, Intel’s Design Engineering, and Intel’s Data Platforms Group will come together to create a dedicated ASIC to reduce the computational overhead of FHE over existing CPU-based methods. The press release states that the target is to reduce processing time by five orders of magnitude from current methods, reducing compute times from days to minutes.

Seth Godin on the ethical use of our newly gained technological capabilities
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No wonder we’re a bit dizzy. We just multiplied our minds by many orders of magnitude. It’s easy to confuse someone else’s memory (or manipulation) with our hard-earned ability to remember things that actually happened to us.

And we’re now realizing that we have the power (and perhaps the obligation) to use shared knowledge to make better, more thoughtful decisions. And to intentionally edit out the manipulations and falsehoods that are designed to spread, not to improve our lives.

Until next time …
Don’t forget to write! :)

On Coconut Flowers and Antifragility

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 11 Jul 2021 05:45:00 +0530

Abby calls it Chinese Gulab, while I, in honour of all the hard work Abby puts in (and the natural pot she’s made for it), call it my coconut flower. It’s a Moss Rose (Portulaca grandiflora.)

Click the section headers to wander off to the original articles.

My notes on Antifragile
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I spent a ton of time on this.
Because I did not just want my beloved Antifragile to be only an annual read.
This series reinforces whatever I’ve learnt and done, with the book so far.
From the book’s prologue …

Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire.

Likewise with randomness, uncertainty, chaos: you want to use them, not hide from them. You want to be the fire and wish for the wind. This summarizes this author’s nonmeek attitude to randomness and uncertainty.

We just don’t want to just survive uncertainty, to just about make it. We want to survive uncertainty and, in addition—like a certain class of aggressive Roman Stoics—have the last word. The mission is how to domesticate, even dominate, even conquer, the unseen, the opaque, and the inexplicable.

How?

The Feynman Learning Technique on Farnam Street
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Shane starts with the familiar aspects of the popular technique used for learning things, and then amps it up to 11.

If you’re after a way to supercharge your learning and become smarter, the Feynman Technique might just be the best way to learn absolutely anything. Devised by a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, it leverages the power of teaching for better learning.

The Feynman Learning Technique is a great method to develop mastery over sets of information. Once you do, the knowledge becomes a powerful tool at your disposal. But as Feynman himself showed, being willing and able to question your knowledge and the knowledge of others is how you keep improving. Learning is a journey.

The best writing advice from Colson Whitehead’s 60 Minutes interview
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If you’re going to listen to anyone about the process of writing, Colson Whitehead is a pretty good choice: the MacArthur Genius Grant recipient won back-to-back Pulitzers for his novels The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, making him the only writer to win that prize for consecutive novels in history.

…

Write for yourself, because time is short.

[I write] really for me, which sounds very selfish. Should I have written a zombie novel? It made perfect sense to me. I grew up loving horror movies and then horror fiction. Is that something I should be doing as a literary author? I don’t know . . . if it gives me pleasure, if it’s exciting, you know, our time on earth is pretty short. I should be doing what I feel like I should be doing.

Hope you enjoyed this edition. Until next time …

Stephen Wolfram speaks, as does the Psion

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 25 Jun 2021 05:45:00 +0530

This post was first sent to my newsletter on June 18th, 2021. [You really ought to subscribe][1] :)

I have two, count ’em, two articles from Stephen Wolfram today.
And a fantastic historical restrospective on one of the early handhelds, the Psion!

What Is Consciousness? Some New Perspectives from Our Physics Project

Stephen Wolfram, has the amazing ability to go on long Talebesque side journeys, different flaneuresque trips through various domains and then bring it all back and tie it up in a bow, with the point he wants to make. If you love long, slow, deliberate posts, look no further :)

So, What Is Consciousness?

What’s special about the way we humans experience the world? At some level, the very fact that we even have a notion of “experiencing” it at all is special. The world is doing what it does, with all sorts of computational irreducibility. But somehow even with the computationally bounded resources of our brains (or minds) we’re able to form some kind of coherent model of what’s going on, so that, in a sense, we’re able to meaningfully “form coherent thoughts” about the universe. And just as we can form coherent thoughts about the universe, so also we can form coherent thoughts about that small part of the universe that corresponds to our brains—or to the computations that represent the operation of our minds.

Stephen Wolfram on Tini Veltman (1931–2021): From Assembly Language to a Nobel Prize

The best thing I love about his blog though, are his biographical and historical reminiscings. This one on Martinus Veltman is a recent example.

So far as I know it all started from a single conversation on the terrace outside the cafeteria of the CERN particle physics lab near Geneva in 1962. Three physicists were involved. And out of that conversation there emerged three early systems for doing algebraic computation. One was written in Fortran. One was written in LISP. And one was written in assembly language.

I’ve told this story quite a few times, often adding “And which of those physicists do you suppose later won a Nobel Prize?” “Of course,” I explain, “it was the one who wrote their system in assembly language!”
… One of the important predictions of what became the Standard Model were so-called neutral currents (associated with the Z boson). In the end, neutral currents were discovered in 1973. But Tini explained that many years earlier he started telling people at CERN that they should be able to see neutral currents in their experiments. But for years they didn’t listen to him, and when they finally did, it turned out that—expensive as their earlier experiments had been—they’d thrown out the bubble chamber film that had been produced, and on which neutral currents should have been visible perhaps 15 years earlier.

Psion: the last computer

This one is an oldie but an amazing part of early handheld computer history and totally worth your time, if you are a tech history buff.

The Series 5 pocket computer from Psion was launched 10 years ago this week (1997. the article was written in 2007 — mjb). It was a remarkable achievement: entirely new silicon, a new operating system, middleware stack and applications were developed from scratch in just over two years.

This was the last time anyone undertook such a daunting task: it may be the last time anyone ever tries, either. Companies or projects that are formed to achieve simply one of these four goals typically end in failure: to achieve all four successfully, and put them in a product that was successful, too, was a triumph of creativity and management.

White Eyes

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 06 Jun 2021 05:45:00 +0530

Snow clouds rolling down a mountain peak, near Se La

I don’t know the name of this bird,
    I only imagine his glittering beak
        tucked in a white wing
                while the clouds—

which he has summoned
    from the north—
        which he has taught
                to be mild, and silent—

thicken, and begin to fall
    into the world below
        like stars, or the feathers
                 of some unimaginable bird

that loves us,
    that is asleep now, and silent—
        that has turned itself
                into snow.

White-Eyes, Mary Oliver

Work Edition

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 28 May 2021 05:45:00 +0530

This post was first sent to my newsletter on May 21st, 2021.
[You really ought to subscribe][1] :)

Welcome to another edition of the work letter :)
Let’s just dive into it. Click the headers to wander off to the original articles.

OS X Reviewed
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Sometime earlier this year, the operating system known as Mac OS X aka OS X aka macOS, stepped into its 21st year of existence, marking two decades of steady iterative movement.
That its underpinnings are older, by at least another decade, is story for some other time.
I put this in here, not for the OS itself but for the reviews of the OS, by John Siracusa. From it’s fledgling days, through the first ten releases upto 10.10, John covered it all.
In painstaking detail.
Other folks wrote reviews. John wrote introductory books to each new OS.
Every other line was linked someplace I could learn more.
It meant that everytime, I sat to read and learn from a John Siracusa review, I would have to set aside a couple of days to finish it.

From why spatial interfaces matter, to covering the rise of Webkit (which would soon be the bedrock of the modern web) to kernel changes to single handedly goading Apple into creating a new filesystem for their devices,¹ John wrote about it all.

If you want to learn about operating systems and design and how stuff comes together, you owe it to yourself to read John’s chronicles of Apple’s desktop operating system.

And for the curious, yes I have been using Macs (and Mac OS) that long (longer in fact), only to have shifted to Linux in the last couple of years, because I don’t agree with or like the direction Apple seems to be taking it in. I used System 7 and Mac OS 8, then tried the OS X DP2 hotness, got horrified with how agonizingly slow it was and stuck with Mac OS 8 until 10.2 was released in 2002.

Researchers build a swimming robot that works in the Mariana Trench
#

From the Ars Technica post,

But that may not be entirely necessary, based on a report in today’s Nature. In it, a team of Chinese researchers describe adapting hardware so that it could operate a soft-bodied robot in the deep ocean. The researchers then gave the robot a ride 10 kilometers down in the Mariana Trench and showed that it worked.

Mention robots, and for many people, the first thing that comes to mind are the collections of metal and cabling that make up things like the dancing Atlases from Boston Robotics. But over the last decade, plenty of researchers have demonstrated that all that rigid hardware isn’t strictly necessary. Soft-bodied robots work, too, and can do interesting things like squeeze through tight spaces or incorporate living cells into their structure.

## [Intel’s x86 Designs No Longer Limited to Intel on Intel][itpvt] Intel’s found itself in crises before, but as far as I remember, they’ve made such a daring, bet the company, shift only once before. In the era of the [Intel trinity][tit] (the mid 80s), they moved [from being a memory company, to one that focussed on making CPUs][imrc] for the then burgeoning micro computer market. This move by one of their spiritual descendants, Pat Gelsinger, brings back to mind the same audacity. Will it yield similar results? Only time will tell. > For the last 20-25 years, Intel has been steadfast in keeping the crown jewels of its product design firmly inside its very protective walls […] limiting use/production for Intel-only use has enabled the company to improve that design with laser focus, manufacturing not-withstanding. Keeping the cores for internal use only means that neither customers nor competitors were able to see the raw design specifications, and for a long time this has enabled Intel to keep key features, such as its branch predictors, away from all but the most prying eyes. > > In a twist to the norm, Intel is now set to dissolve those walls keeping its x86 cores it itself.

The key phrase here is ‘core of Intel’s compute offerings’. It could be interpreted in two ways: at the core of a CPU design is a CPU core, which would mean an x86 design unless Intel were to skew away from x86 (unlikely). The other alternative could be an IO chiplet, which is also a ‘core part’ of a compute offering. Paul Alcorn from Tom’s Hardware has confirmed from Intel that the key element here is ‘compute cores’, and although Intel hasn’t specifically said the ISA of those cores, we are set to believe that Intel does indeed mean x86.

This means that other foundries will have access to the floorplans of Intel’s x86 designs, which used to be a big no-no at Intel. […] the fact that Intel is even letting another foundry build x86 cores that is the highlight of this announcement.

All-in-all, Pat Gelsinger is enabling a roadmap that allows Intel to pivot, and pivot hard.

That filesystem bit might not be true, but to my mind, it absolutely just is. John willed it so, and therefore Apple made APFS :) ↩︎

On Why Farmers Agitate, The Best Online Classes You Can Take and Love Letters to Trees

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 09 May 2021 05:45:00 +0530

This post was first sent to my newsletter on May 2nd, 2021.
[You really ought to subscribe][1] :)

New month, new newsletter! :)
Let’s get right into it, shall we?

An informed look on the why of the farmers agitation.

Vivek Kaul’s post on how Bihar fared when they did away with APMCs in 2006, shows why the farmers are up in arms.
Read them here, part 1, part 2, & part 3

The farm prices at which farmers sell continue to be depressed compared to the MSPs and given that difference has only increased in recent years, weakens the argument forwarded by supporters of the new farm laws which extrapolates deregulation to improved price realization for farmers. Economic theory doesn’t always fall in line with things actually happening on the ground.

… while the net income of farmers in Bihar rose from 2007 to 2010, nevertheless, it has been declining continuously since 2010, up to the point we have data for. The declining income is explained by a rise in costs of agriculture inputs (seeds, power, labour, fertilizers, cost of finance, etc.) without a commensurate increase in sales revenue. The net income per hectare farmed, has moved alarmingly towards zero.

Scott Young, on the best online classes he took

It’s the holidays! Why not spend sometime learning something new? Scott Young lists some of the best online courses, he’s learnt. It’s a wide ranging, cross disciplinary list, with subjects from Law to Physics to Medical Neuroscience. I am partial to the most meta course of them all, [Learning How to Learn][lhtl]. This kickstarted the learning pivot in my life a couple of years ago, helping me learn so much stuff. [Check out the entire list of ten courses (plus a few honourable mentions) here.][sycl]

Hermann Hesse’s beautiful love letter to trees!

Read here, Watch here
(definitely worth the 5 minute or so watch. Natascha McElhone mesmerises with her voice)

A tree says: My strength is trust.
I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me.
I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else.
I trust that God is in me.
I trust that my labor is holy.
Out of this trust I live.
…
So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts:
Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours.
They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them.
But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy.
Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is.
That is home. That is happiness.

So here we are, ending our letter on that beautiful soothing note.
Catch you folks, next month!

NeXTSTEP, Shopify and Bash History

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 30 Apr 2021 05:45:00 +0530

This post was first sent to my newsletter on April 23rd, 2021.
[You really ought to subscribe][1] :)

Welcome to a tech edition of the letter.
I’m trying something new with this now, since I am in that strange valley, where I don’t know enough about programming to write opinions of my own and yet I need to talk to my techie friends.

So, taking a leaf out of Kushal’s newsletter, I will share stuff that I come across as I read.
And reading and jabbering about tech is something I can do.
And the stuff I share will definitely be the best links and articles I find from the wide variety of sites I read.
At most three a letter; I don’t want to overwhelm you :) So, like Kushal, but not as niche as him. Definitely not wide ranging either. Let’s see :)
Also, please let me know how you like it :)
Here we go …

Brad Cox, passed away on January 2nd this year.
#

The throwaway language he created to sell his software libraries was picked up by a computer company as the cornerstone language to base its operating system around. That failing company was then bought out by another company at death’s door, for the operating system and the libraries they’d created with Brad’s language.
Read all about it in The Deep History of Your Apps: Steve Jobs, NeXTSTEP, and Early Object-Oriented Programming,

NeXT had already invented the future back in 1988, but because NeXT never shipped more than 50,000 computers, only a handful were lucky enough to glimpse it in the 1990s.
Steve Jobs needed to return to Apple to distribute that future to the rest of the world.

Ben Thompson always has awesome insight on the meta, in technology.
#

Here’s his take on The Web’s Missing Interoperability,

from a big picture perspective this is clearly a case of Shopify, one of the most exciting companies in tech and the seeming leader of The Anti-Amazon Alliance, effectively moving into Facebook’s garden, because the web is increasingly a barren wasteland for small businesses. The cause is Apple: its approach to cookies makes platform-based web storefronts increasingly difficult to monetize effectively (Shop Pay performed magic in this regard), and its attack on “tracking” — which goes far beyond the IDFA — makes it increasingly impossible to acquire users in one place and convert them in another. The solution is to do user acquisition and user conversion all in one app — i.e. on Facebook — which is why Shopify is helping merchants move off the web and onto Facebook.

Again, it’s a good solution for Shopify, and Facebook deserves credit for recognizing that Shopify is a complement to their service, not a competitor, but I find it disappointing that once again elevating privacy above every other tradeoff is entrenching Facebook, the biggest incumbent of all.

Jump more efficiently into bash history
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The third tip on Max Hoffman’s post solved an really sore and irritating need I had.

The last tip aims for faster retrieval of commands from history. Usually, the up-arrow jumps to the previous command in the history. However this quickly becomes very tedious if one jumps 5 or 10 or more commands back in history. Instead if you put

bind '"\e[A":history-search-backward'
bind '"\e[B":history-search-forward'

into your /.bashrc and start typing part of a command it will only jump to those commands in the history which start with the same fragment of a command. This is useful for any command line work and you may already know if from e.g. IPython but it is also useful for cd. So …

cd <up-arrow><up-arrow> …

let’s you quickly navigate through previous cd commands.

That’s all folks! :)

Books That Underlie and Gird Cal Newport’s Philosophy of a Deep Life

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 15 Mar 2021 00:45:00 +0530

This post was first sent to my newsletter on March 7th, 2021.
[You really ought to subscribe][1] :)

Before we get into this weeks newsletter, I’d like to take a moment and recognise the loss of my grandmother, who passed away on the 24th, last month.
She was a simple, thoughtful and kind woman, who raised a village.
I miss her dearly. This was my eulogy to her.

Back to the letter and back to something that is related to the last one.
I’d shared Cal Newport’s podcast with you folk and I’m still making my way through the list.¹

And at the tail end of episode 49, came this question, on what books he’d suggest, to be a part of the Deep Life / Deep Work canon.

This was the list.
Some I’ve read. And the rest I will this year.

All of James Gleick
I don’t quite remember if he said *all* of James Gleick, but having read Gleick’s biographies of Feynman and Newton, I’d say you ought to really, really, read all of Gleick

Lincoln’s Virtues, William Lee Miller
Abe, David Reynolds
Giants, John Stauffer
Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman
This one seems to have had a big influence on Cal. He’s referenced it repeatedly in his posts, interviews and even previous podcast episodes
Technopoly, Neil Postman
Technics and Civilization, Lewis Mumford
Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl
I read this as a youngster. I’ll revisit it this year.
God in Search of Man, Abraham Heschel
The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell
the book expands on this interview
Hero With a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell
The Case for God, Karen Armstrong

He ends with,

“The bigger key here is not that this book or that book is gonna change your life, but instead that a commitment … to reading deeply, encountering deep ideas and reflecting on your own life and trying to structure and integrate these ideas into your own life; that general commitment is what is gonna give rise to depth.
So let’s all shut down our phones and unsubscribe from these social media channels and open up a big book and go deep”

Here’s to more deep, intentful reading :)

The man puts out episodes at twice the speed I can spare the time to listen. Talk about being prolifically productive! ↩︎

Consolidated the Subscription Page on the Site

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Thu, 25 Feb 2021 11:38:33 +0530

Since I am a little out of sorts today, I decided to clean up the subscriptions options on the site.

Both the mail and the rss feeds are on one page now. For easy findability¹.
The feeds are also categorised into work and personal, if that’s your jam.
Here ya go!

Subscribe!

Yes, that is the technical term for it. Yes, of course I made it up. This is my domain. I get to make up everything around here! ↩︎

A Eulogy for Mai

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 24 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I lost my Mai today.

Until my mid 30s, I rued the gulf that stood between Mai and me.
While my parents insistence on teaching us English, as our primary language has benefited me immensely, in most everything I do, the one thing that I feel sad about is that I speak my mother tongue (Konkani) in a slow halting manner. ¹
Which meant that I never could talk well with my grandmother.
I am one of her oldest grandchildren, and I never got to have heart to heart conversations with her, the way my other cousins did.
And yet …

My earliest memories are full of her.
Mai means mother. Odli Mai (Big Mother) is grandmother.
But to a young me, Mummy was Mother and Mai was grandmother.
Born as I was, to a young girl in her early twenties, what I got from mummy was fierce love and passionate discipline.
What Mai gave me was gentle love and wisdom.
What Mai gave me was a patient ear.
I could talk a mile a minute, and Mai understood nothing of my English gibberish.
She’d just make coo noises and hug me (and then figure out what it was that I just blabbed, from Mummy.)

I know nothing of her childhood or youth.
I know nothing of what she was as a wife and the mistress of the farm, eking a hard existence from the land.
I only know snippets of her, as a mom of a large brood of nine children.
The only thing I know, is that she was my Mai.
And that she loved me as no one else ever could.

I wish I could have kept the shirt, made out the cloth she stole and sneaked into my arms when no one was looking. All because I thought every other godmother gave their god children gifts and mine ought to, too! ²
I wish I could have kept a seed out of all the fruits she plucked for me, from the trees on the farm. (I was too busy sucking on mangoes, and then handing the seeds over to her to throw, while she laughed and howled at me ‘Paara pathlyaan dhaanv’ (Run after that seed)).
I wish I had seen her more, as I began working, as we both grew older.
And yet …

Maybe we did not need language.
She is the reason, I got over my fear of dogs (and other animals).
She is the reason, I still crazily love the outdoors and communing with nature.
She is the reason, I took to stoicism to help me through the storms of life. She was stoicism in action, my modern day Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus all rolled into one.
She is the reason, along with daddy, that I love practicing irrational generosity.

Maybe that is her legacy to me.
I carry her with me.
In my bones, in my marrow.
In my words and deeds.
And just like Shelley never let Keats die, I know, I carry my ancestors with me.
As long I remember them and celebrate their words and deeds, they live.
My father is here.
My nana is here.
Mai is here!

Because her touch and her actions spoke more than language ever could.
To me, Mai means mother or godmother or big mother and grandmother.
Or maybe Mai could just mean a big old heart, full of love.

I am to blame too, for never having learnt it after. ↩︎
Yes, she was my godmother too. ↩︎

Book Notes, Ultralearning

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 25 Jan 2021 05:45:00 +0530

This post was first sent to my newsletter on December 7th, 2020.
[You really ought to subscribe][1] :)

The beginning is always today.
— Mary Shelley

The biggest obstacle to ultralearning is simply that most people don’t care enough about their own self-education to get started

Finding Time for Ultra learning
#

What matters is the intensity, initiative, and commitment to effective learning, not the particulars of your timetable

There are nine universal principles that underlie ultralearning projects. They are:

Metalearning: First Draw a Map
Start by learning how to learn the subject or skill you want to tackle. Discover how to do good research and how to draw on your past competencies to learn new skills more easily.
Focus: Sharpen Your Knife
Cultivate the ability to concentrate. Carve out chunks of time when you can focus on learning, and make it easy to just do it.
Directness: Go Straight Ahead
Learn by doing the thing you want to become good at. Don’t trade it off for other tasks, just because those are more convenient or comfortable.
Drill: Attack Your Weakest Point
Be ruthless in improving your weakest points. Break down complex skills into small parts; then master those parts and build them back together again.
Retrieval: Test to Learn
Testing isn’t simply a way of assessing knowledge but a way of creating it. Test yourself before you feel confident, and push yourself to actively recall information “rather than passively review it.
Feedback: Don’t Dodge the Punches
Feedback is harsh and uncomfortable. Know how to use it without letting your ego get in the way. Extract the signal from the noise, so you know what to pay attention to and what to ignore.
Retention: Don’t Fill a Leaky Bucket
Understand what you forget and why. Learn to remember things not just for now but forever.
Intuition: Dig Deep Before Building Up
Develop your intuition through play and exploration of concepts and skills. Understand how understanding works, and don’t recourse to cheap tricks of memorization to avoid deeply knowing things.
Experimentation: Explore Outside Your Comfort Zone
All of these principles are only starting points. True mastery comes not just from following the path trodden by others but from exploring possibilities they haven’t yet imagined.

Principle 1 - Metalearning, First Draw a Map
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If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
— Isaac Newton

How to Draw Your Map
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How can you apply this to get an edge in your own learning efforts? There are two main ways: over the short term and over the long term.”

Over the short term, you can do research to focus on improving your metalearning before and during a learning project. Ultralearning, owing to its intensity and self-directed nature, has the opportunity for a lot higher variance than normal schooling efforts do. A good ultralearning project, with excellent materials and an awareness of what needs to be learned, has the potential to be completed faster than formal schooling.
Over the long term, the more ultralearning projects you do, the larger your set of general metalearning skills will be. You’ll know what your capacity is for learning, how you can best schedule your time and manage your motivation, and you’ll have well-tested strategies for dealing with common problems. As you learn more things, you’ll acquire more and more confidence, which will allow you to enjoy the process of learning more with less frustration”

Break down metalearning research that you do for a specific project into three questions: “Why?,” “What?,” and “How?”

“Why?” refers to understanding your motivation to learn. If you know exactly why you want to learn a skill or subject, you can save a lot of time by focusing your project on exactly what matters most to you.

“What?” refers to the knowledge and abilities you’ll need to acquire in order to be successful. Breaking things down into concepts, facts, and procedures can enable you to map out what obstacles you’ll face and how best to overcome them.

“How?” refers to the resources, environment, and methods you’ll use when learning. Making careful choices here can make a big difference in your overall effectiveness.”

How Much Planning Should You Do?
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The 10 Percent Rule
A good rule of thumb is that you should invest approximately 10 percent of your total expected learning time into research prior to starting. If you expect to spend six months learning, roughly four hours per week, that would be equal to roughly one hundred hours, which suggests that you should spend about ten hours, or two weeks, doing your research. This percentage will decrease a little bit as your project scales up, so if you plan to do five hundred or a thousand hours of learning, I don’t think it necessarily demands fifty or a hundred hours of research, but maybe closer to 5 percent of your time. The goal here isn’t to exhaust every learning possibility but simply to make sure you haven’t latched onto the first possible resource or method without thinking through alternatives.

A good idea is to be aware of the common methods of learning, popular resources, and tools along with their strengths and weaknesses before starting. Long projects provide more opportunities for getting derailed and delayed, so doing proper research in the beginning can easily save a much larger amount of time later on.”

Metalearning research isn’t a onetime activity you do only before starting your project. You should continue to do research as you learn more. Often obstacles and opportunities aren’t clear before you start, so reassessing is a necessary step of the learning process

Principle 2 - Focus
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Sharpen Your Knife
Now I will have less distraction.
— Leonhard Euler, mathematician, upon losing the sight in his right eye

The struggles with focus that people have generally come in three broad varieties: starting, sustaining, and optimizing the quality of one’s focus.

Problem 1: Failing to Start Focusing (aka Procrastinating)
#

I had no problem sitting and watching the videos of MIT classes, but I always tackled the first problem sets with considerable trepidation. Had it not been for the intense schedule I was on, I might have found excuses to avoid doing so for much longer.

Why do we procrastinate? The simple answer is that at some level there’s a craving that drives you to do something else, there’s an aversion to doing the task itself, or both

Most motives to procrastinate are silly when you verbalize them, yet that doesn’t stop them from ruling your life. Which brings me to the first step to overcoming procrastination: recognize when you are procrastinating.

Most of what is unpleasant in a task (if you are averse to it) or what is pleasant about an alternative task (if you’re drawn to distraction) is an impulse that doesn’t actually last that long. If you actually start working or ignore a potent distractor, it usually only takes a couple minutes until the worry starts to dissolve, even for fairly unpleasant tasks. Therefore, a good first crutch is to convince yourself to get over just the few minutes of maximal unpleasantness before you take a break

Don’t ever feel bad if you have to back up a stage, either; you cannot control your aversions or tendency to distraction, but with practice you can lessen their impact.

Problem 2: Failing to Sustain Focus (aka Getting Distracted)
#

Researchers generally find that people retain more of what they learn when practice is broken into different studying periods than when it is crammed together.

What’s needed is a proper balance. To achieve it, fifty minutes to an hour is a good length of time for many learning tasks. If your schedule permits only more concentrated chunks of time, say once per week for several hours, you may want to take several minutes as a break at the end of each hour and split your time over different aspects of the subject you want to learn

There are three different sources that cause focus to break down and distraction to occur. If you’re struggling to concentrate, look at each of these three in turn:

Distraction Source 1: Your Environment
Distraction Source 2: Your Task
Distraction Source 3: Your Mind

If it ever feels as though continuing working is pointless because you’re so distracted by a negative emotion that you can’t possibly work, remember that the long-term strengthening of your ability to persist on this task will be useful, so the time is not wasted even if you don’t accomplish much in this particular learning session.

Problem 3: Failing to Create the Right Kind of Focus
#

Improving Your Ability to Focus

There is a procedure you can follow to get better at focusing.

My advice is this: recognize where you are, and start small. If you’re the kind of person who can’t sit still for a minute, try sitting still for half a minute. Half a minute soon becomes one minute, then two. Over time, the frustrations you feel learning a particular subject may become transmuted into genuine interest. The impulse to engage in distractions will weaken each time you resist it. With patience and persistence, your few minutes may become large enough to accomplish great things.

Principle 3 - Directness
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Go Straight Ahead
He who can go to the fountain does not go to the water jar.
— Leonardo da Vinci

The Importance of Being Direct
#

Directness is the idea of learning being tied closely to the situation or context you want to use it in

We want to speak a language but try to learn mostly by playing on fun apps, rather than conversing with actual people. We want to work on collaborative, professional programs but mostly code scripts in isolation. We want to become great speakers, so we buy a book on communication, rather than practice presenting. In all these cases the problem is the same: directly learning the thing we want feels too uncomfortable, boring, or frustrating, so we settle for some book, lecture, or app, hoping it will eventually make us better at the real thing.

Learning activities are always done with a connection to the context in which the skills learned will eventually be used.

The easiest way to learn directly is to simply spend a lot of time doing the thing you want to become good at. If you want to learn a language, speak it, as Benny Lewis does. If you want to master making video games, then make them, as Eric Barone does. If you want to pass a test, practice solving the kinds of problems that are likely to appear on it, as I did in my own MIT Challenge. This style of learning by doing won’t work for all projects. The “real” situation may be infrequent, difficult, or even impossible to create, and thus learning in a different environment is unavoidable. Roger Craig couldn’t practice Jeopardy! by being on the show hundreds of times. He knew he had to learn in a different environment and prepare to transfer that knowledge to the show when it came time to do so. In such situations, directness isn’t an all-or-nothing feature but something you can gradually increase to improve your performance.

The simplest way to be direct is to learn by doing.
Whenever possible, if you can spend a good portion of your learning time just doing the thing you want to get better at, the problem of directness will likely go away. If this isn’t possible, you may need to create an artificial project or environment to test your skills. What matters most here is that the cognitive features of the skill you’re trying to master and the way you practice it be substantially similar.

Principle 4 - Drill
#

Attack Your Weakest Point
Take care of the bars and the piece will take care of itself.
—Philip Johnston, composer

Certain aspects of the learning problem form a bottleneck that control the speed at which you can become more proficient overall.

Consider learning mathematics. This is a complex skill that has many different parts: you need to be able to understand the fundamental concepts, you need to be able to remember the algorithm for solving a certain type of problem, and you need to know in what context it applies. Underlying this ability, however, is the ability to do arithmetic and algebra so as to be able to solve the problems in question. If your arithmetic is weak or your algebra sloppy, you’ll get the wrong answers even if you’ve mastered the other concepts.

This is the strategy behind doing drills. By identifying a rate-determining step in your learning reaction, you can isolate it and work on it specifically. Since it governs the overall competence you have with that skill, by improving at it you will improve faster than if you try to practice every aspect of the skill at once. That was Franklin’s insight that allowed him to rapidly improve his writing: by identifying components of the overall skill of writing, figuring out which mattered in his situation, and then coming up with clever ways to emphasize them in his practice, he could get better more quickly than if he had just spent a lot of time writing.

Tactics for Designing Drills
#

Drill 1: Time Slicing

The easiest way to create a drill is to isolate a slice in time of a longer sequence of actions. Musicians often do this kind of training when they identify the hardest parts of a piece of music and practice each one until it’s perfect before integrating it back into the context of the entire song or symphony.

Drill 2: Cognitive Components

You’ll want to practice a particular cognitive component.

The tactic here is to find a way to drill only one component when, in practice, others would be applied at the same time. When learning Mandarin Chinese, I would do tone drills that involved pronouncing pairs of words with different tones and recording myself speaking. That allowed me to practice producing different tones quickly, without the distraction of needing to remember what the words meant or how to form grammatically correct sentences.

Drill 3: The Copycat

It is often impossible to practice one aspect without also doing the work of the others.

By copying the parts of the skill you don’t want to drill (either from someone else or your past work), you can focus exclusively on the component you want to practice. Not only does this save a lot of time, because you need to repeat only the part you’re drilling, it also reduces your cognitive burden, meaning you can apply more focus to getting better at that one aspect.

Drill 4: The Magnifying Glass Method

Suppose you need to create something new and can’t edit or separate out the part you want to practice. How can you create a drill? The Magnifying Glass Method is to spend more time on one component of the skill than you would otherwise. This may reduce your overall performance or increase your input time, but it will allow you to spend a much higher proportion of your time and cognitive resources on the subskill you want to master. I applied this method when trying to improve my ability to do research when writing articles, by spending about ten times as long on research as I had previously.

Drill 5: Prerequisite Chaining

One strategy I’ve seen repeatedly from ultralearners is to start with a skill that they don’t have all the prerequisites for. Then, when they inevitably do poorly, they go back a step, learn one of the foundational topics, and repeat the exercise. This practice of starting too hard and learning prerequisites as they are needed can be frustrating, but it saves a lot of time learning subskills that don’t actually drive performance much.

Mindful Drilling
#

Drilling problems without context is mind-numbing. However, once you’ve identified that it’s the bottleneck preventing you from going further, they become instilled with new purpose. In ultralearning, which is directed by the student, not an external source, drills take on a new light. Instead of being forced to do them for unknown purposes, it is now up to you to find a way to enhance the learning process by accelerating learning on the specific things that you find most difficult

Principle 5 - Retrieval, Test to Learn
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It pays better to wait and recollect by an effort from within, than to look at the book again.
— William James

The act of trying to summon up knowledge from memory is a powerful learning tool on its own, beyond its connection to direct practice or feedback.

The idea, therefore, is to find the right midpoint: far enough away to make whatever is retrieved remembered deeply, not so far away that you’ve forgotten everything.

The act of taking a test not only is a source of learning but results in more learning than a similar amount of time spent in review.

What Should Be Retrieved?
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The research is clear: if you need to recall something later, you’re best off practicing retrieving it.
What kinds of things should you invest the time in to remember in the first place?

There will always be some things you choose to master and others you satisfy yourself with knowing you can look up if you need to.

How to Practice Retrieval
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Tactic 1: Flash Cards

They work really well for a specific type of retrieval—when there’s a pairing between a specific cue and a particular response.

Tactic 2: Free Recall

A simple tactic for applying retrieval is, after reading a section from a book or sitting through a lecture, to try to write down everything you can remember on a blank piece of paper.

Tactic 3: The Question-Book Method

Another strategy for taking notes is to rephrase what you’ve recorded as questions to be answered later. Instead of writing that the Magna Carta was signed in 1215, you could instead write the question “When was the Magna Carta signed?” with a reference to where to find the answer in case you forget. By taking notes as questions instead of answers, you generate the material to practice retrieval on later.

Tactic 4: Self-Generated Challenges

Creating a list of such challenges can serve as a prompt for mastering that information later in practice and can expand your library of tools that you are able to actually apply.

Tactic 5: Closed-Book Learning

Any practice, whether direct or a drill, can be cut off from the ability to look things up. By preventing yourself from consulting the source, the information becomes knowledge stored inside your head instead of inside a reference manual.

Principle 6 - Feedback, Don’t Dodge the Punches
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Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.
— Mike Tyson

The ability to gain immediate feedback on one’s performance is an essential ingredient in reaching expert levels of performance. No feedback, and the result is often stagnation—long periods of time when you continue to use a skill but don’t get any better at it.

More isn’t always better. Crucially what matters is the type of feedback being given.

Feedback works well when it provides useful information that can guide future learning. If feedback tells you what you’re doing wrong or how to fix it, it can be a potent tool.

Feedback that includes useful information needs to be correctly processed as a motivator and tool for learning.

Who is giving the feedback can matter, as feedback coming from a peer or teacher has important social dynamics beyond mere information on how to improve one’s abilities.

Be sensitive to what feedback is actually useful and tune out the rest.

Feedback-seeking efforts are often underused and thus remain a potent source of comparative advantage for ultralearners.

It is not so much negative feedback on its own that can impede progress but the fear of hearing criticism that causes us to shut down. Sometimes the best action is just to dive straight into the hardest environment, since even if the feedback is very negative initially, it can reduce your fears of getting started on a project and allow you to adjust later if it proves too harsh to be helpful.

These acts require self-confidence, resolve, and persistence

What Kind of Feedback Do You Need?
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The opportunities for seeking better feedback will vary depending on what you’re trying to learn

Outcome Feedback: Are You Doing It Wrong?

This tells you something about how well you’re doing overall but offers no ideas as to what you’re doing better or worse.

Informational Feedback: What Are You Doing Wrong?

This feedback tells you what you’re doing wrong, but it doesn’t necessarily tell you how to fix it.

Corrective Feedback: How Can You Fix What You’re Doing Wrong?

This kind of feedback is often available only through a coach, mentor, or teacher. However, sometimes it can be provided automatically if you are using the right study materials.

The best feedback is informative and usable by the student(s) who receive it. Optimal feedback indicates the difference between the current state and the desired learning state and helps students to take a step to improve their learning.

Informational feedback can be worth the effort needed to find such people.

How Quick Should Feedback Be?
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Faster feedback. This enables a quicker recognition of mistakes. However, there’s a possible risk that this recommendation might backslide into getting feedback before you’ve tried your best to answer the question or solve the problem at hand.

Feedback too soon may turn your retrieval practice effectively into passive review, which we already know is less effective for learning. For hard problems, I suggest setting yourself a timer to encourage you to think hard on difficult problems before giving up to look at the correct answer.

How to Improve Your Feedback
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Tactic 1: Noise Cancellation

Noise is a real problem when trying to improve your craft because you need to do far more work to get the same information about how to write well. By modifying and selecting the streams of feedback you pay attention to, you can reduce the noise and get more of the signal.

Tactic 2: Hitting the Difficulty Sweet Spot

Ultralearners carefully adjust their environment so that they’re not able to predict whether they’ll succeed or fail. If they fail too often, they simplify the problem so they can start noticing when they’re doing things right. If they fail too little, they’ll make the task harder or their standards stricter so that they can distinguish the success of different approaches. Basically, you should try to avoid situations that always make you feel good (or bad) about your performance.

Tactic 3: Metafeedback

This kind of feedback isn’t about your performance but about evaluating the overall success of the strategy you’re using to learn.

One important type of metafeedback is your learning rate.

There are two ways you can use this tool. One is to decide when you should focus on the strategy you’re already using and when you should experiment with other methods. If your learning rate is slowing to a trickle, that might mean you’re hitting diminishing returns with your current approach and could benefit from different kinds of drills, difficulties, or environments. A second way you can apply metafeedback is by comparing two different study methods to see which works better.

Tactic 4: High-Intensity, Rapid Feedback

The easiest way to improve feedback is simply to get a lot more of it a lot more often.

High-intensity, rapid feedback offers informational advantages, but more often the advantage is emotional, too. Fear of receiving feedback can often hold you back more than anything. By throwing yourself into a high-intensity, rapid feedback situation, you may initially feel uncomfortable, but you’ll get over that initial aversion much faster than if you wait months or years before getting feedback.
Being in such a situation also provokes you to engage in learning more aggressively than you might otherwise. Knowing that your work will be evaluated is an incredible motivator to do your best. This motivational angle for committing to high-intensity feedback may end up outweighing the informational advantage it provides.

It’s better to get in and take the punches early so that they don’t put you down for the count. Though short-term feedback can be stressful, once you get into the habit of receiving it, it becomes easier to process without overreacting emotionally. Ultralearners use this to their advantage, exposing themselves to massive amounts of feedback so that the noise can be stripped away from the signal.

Principle 7 - Retention, Don’t Fill a Leaky Bucket
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Memory is the residue of thought.
— Daniel Willingham

Memory is essential, even when it is wrapped up in bigger ideas such as understanding, intuition, or practical skill. Being able to understand how something works or how to perform a particular technique is useless if you cannot recall it. Retention depends on employing strategies so the things you learn don’t leak out of your mind.

How Can You Prevent Forgetting?
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Forgetting is the default, not the exception.

How can you retain the things you learned the first week, so that you don’t need to relearn them by the last week?

You need to pick a mnemonic system, which will both accomplish your goals and be simple enough to stick to. Mostly they seem to work according to one of four mechanisms: spacing, proceduralization, overlearning, or mnemonics.

Memory Mechanism 1—Spacing: Repeat to Remember

If you care about long-term retention, don’t cram. Spreading learning sessions over more intervals over longer periods of time tends to cause somewhat lower performance in the short run (because there is a chance for forgetting between intervals) but much better performance in the long run.

If you have ten hours to learn something, therefore, it makes more sense to spend ten days studying one hour each than to spend ten hours studying in one burst.

Finding the exact trade-off point between too long and too short has been a minor obsession for some ultralearners. Space your study sessions too closely, and you lose efficiency; space them too far apart, and you forget what you’ve already learned.

When it comes to retention, don’t let perfect become the enemy of good enough.

Another strategy for applying spacing, which can work better for more elaborate skills that are harder to integrate into your daily habits, is to semiregularly do refresher projects.

Scheduling this kind of maintenance in advance can also be helpful, as it will remind you that learning isn’t something done once and then ignored but a process that continues for your entire life.

Memory Mechanism 2—Proceduralization: Automatic Will Endure

Why do people say it’s “like riding a bicycle” and not “like remembering trigonometry?”

There’s evidence that procedural skills, such as riding a bicycle, are stored in a different way from declarative knowledge, such as knowing the Pythagorean Theorem or the Sine Rule for triangles.

This difference between knowing how and knowing that may also have different implications for long-term memory. Procedural skills, such as the ever-remembered bicycling, are much less susceptible to being forgotten than knowledge that requires explicit recall to retrieve.
This finding can actually be used to our advantage. One dominant theory of learning suggests that most skills proceed through stages—starting declarative but ending up procedural as you practice more

Procedural knowledge is quite robust and tends to be retained much longer than declarative knowledge.

This may suggest a useful heuristic. Instead of learning a large volume of knowledge or skills evenly, you may emphasize a core set of information much more frequently, so that it becomes procedural and is stored far longer

One strategy for applying this concept might be to ensure that a certain amount of knowledge is completely proceduralized before practice concludes. Another approach might be to spend extra effort to proceduralize some skills, which will serve as cues or access points for other knowledge. You may aim to completely proceduralize the process you use to start working on a new programming project, for example, so that you can get over that hump in the process of writing a new program

Memory Mechanism 3—Overlearning: Practice Beyond Perfect

Additional practice, beyond what is required to perform adequately, can increase the length of time that memories are stored.

The first is core practice, continually practicing and refining the core elements of a skill. This approach often works well paired with some kind of immersion or working on extensive (as opposed to intensive) projects, after the initial ultralearning phase has been completed. The shift from learning to doing here may actually involve a deeper, subtler form of learning, which shouldn’t be discounted as simply applying previously learned knowledge.
The second strategy is advanced practice, going one level above a certain set of skills so that core parts of the lower-level skills are overlearned as one applies them in a more difficult domain.

Memory Mechanism 4—Mnemonics: A Picture Retains a Thousand Words

They usually involve translating abstract or arbitrary information into vivid pictures or spatial maps. When mnemonics work, the results can be almost difficult to believe.

One common, and useful, mnemonic is known as the keyword method. The method works by first taking a foreign-language word and converting it into something it sounds like in your native language.

Mnemonics can act as a bridge for difficult-to-remember information, but it’s usually not the final step in creating memories that will endure forever.

Paired with SRS, they can form an effective bridge from feeling as though there’s no way you can possibly remember everything to remembering it so deeply that you can’t possibly forget. Indeed, in a world before paper, computers, and other externalized memories, mnemonics were the main game in town.

Principle 8 - Intuition, Dig Deep Before Building Up
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Do not ask whether a statement is true until you know what it means.
— Errett Bishop

Only by developing enough experience with problem solving can you build up a deep mental model of how other problems work. Intuition sounds magical, but the reality may be more banal—the product of a large volume of organized experience dealing with the problem.

How to Build Your Intuition
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Rule 1: Don’t Give Up on Hard Problems Easily

One way you can introduce this into your own efforts is to give yourself a “struggle timer” as you work on problems. When you feel like giving up and that you can’t possibly figure out the solution to a difficult problem, try setting a timer for another ten minutes to push yourself a bit further. The first advantage of this struggle period is that very often you can solve the problem you are faced with if you simply apply enough thinking to it. The second advantage is that even if you fail, you’ll be much more likely to remember the way to arrive at the solution when you encounter it.

Rule 2: Prove Things to Understand Them

Feynman decided to read through the papers meticulously, finding that they weren’t actually so difficult but that he had simply been afraid to go through them.

Feynman didn’t master things by following along with other people’s results. Instead, it was by the process of mentally trying to re-create those results that he became so good at physics. His drive to understand things by virtue of working through the results himself assisted in building his capacity for deep intuition.

Rule 3: Always Start with a Concrete Example

Human beings don’t learn things very well in the abstract. As the research on transfer demonstrates, most people learn abstract, general rules only after being exposed to many concrete examples. It’s not possible to simply present a general principle and expect that you can apply it to concrete situations.

Rule 4: Don’t Fool Yourself

One way to avoid this problem of fooling yourself is simply to ask lots of questions

The Feynman Technique
#

The method is quite simple:

Write down the concept or problem you want to understand at the top of a piece of paper.
In the space below, explain the idea as if you had to teach it to someone else.
- If it’s a concept, ask yourself how you would convey the idea to someone who has never heard of it before.
- If it’s a problem, explain how to solve it and—crucially—why that solution procedure makes sense to you.
When you get stuck, meaning your understanding fails to provide a clear answer, go back to your book, notes, teacher, or reference material to find the answer

The crux of this method is that it tries to dispel the illusion of explanatory depth. Since many of our understandings are never articulated, it’s easy to think you understand something you don’t. The Feynman Technique bypasses this problem by forcing you to articulate the idea you want to understand in detail.

Application 1: For Things You Don’t Understand at All

The first way to use this approach is when you don’t understand something at all. In this case, the easiest way is to do it with the book in hand and go back and forth between your explanation and the one in the book. This lacks the benefits of retrieval practice, but it can often be essential when the explanation you’ve been given baffles you

Application 2: For Problems You Can’t Seem to Solve

A second way to apply this is for solving a difficult problem or mastering a technique. In this instance, it’s very important to go through the problem step by step alongside the explanation you generate, rather than simply summarizing it. Summarizing may end up skipping over the core difficulties of the problem. Going deeper may take time, but it can help you get a strong grasp over a new method in one go, rather than needing numerous repetitions to memorize the steps.

Application 3: For Expanding Your Intuition

Instead of focusing on explaining every detail or going along with the source material, you should try to focus on generating illustrative examples, analogies, or visualizations that would make the idea comprehensible to someone who has learned far less than you have. Imagine that instead of trying to teach the idea, you are being paid to write a magazine article explaining the idea. What visual intuitions would you use to pin down the abstractions? Which examples would flesh out a general principle? How could you make something confusing feel obvious?

Principle 9 - Experimentation, Explore Outside Your Comfort Zone
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Results? Why, I have gotten lots of results! I know several thousand things that won’t work.
— Thomas Edison

Experimentation Is the Key to Mastery
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As your skill develops, it’s often no longer enough to simply follow the examples of others; you need to experiment and find your own path.

Part of the reason for this is that the early part of learning a skill tends to be the best trodden and supported, as everyone begins at the same place. As your skills develop, however, not only are there fewer people who can teach you and fewer students you could have as peers (thus lowering the total market for books, classes, and instructors), but you also start to diverge from those you’re learning from. Whereas two complete novices have quite similar knowledge and skills, two experts might have quite different sets of skills that they’ve already acquired, thus making improving those skills an increasingly personalized and idiosyncratic adventure.

A second reason for the value of experimentation as you approach mastery is that abilities are more likely to stagnate after you’ve mastered the basics. Learning in the early phases of a skill is an act of accumulation. You acquire new facts, knowledge, and skills to handle problems you didn’t know how to solve before. Getting better, however, increasingly becomes an act of unlearning; not only must you learn to solve problems you couldn’t before, you must unlearn stale and ineffective approaches for solving those problems. The difference between a novice programmer and a master isn’t usually that the novice cannot solve certain problems. Rather, it’s that the master knows the best way to solve a problem, which will be the most efficient and clean and cause the fewest headaches later on. As mastery becomes a process of unlearning over accumulation, experimentation becomes synonymous with learning as you force yourself to go outside your comfort zone and try new things.

A final reason for the increasing importance of experimentation as you approach mastery is that many skills reward not only proficiency but originality. A great mathematician is one who can solve problems others cannot, not merely a person who can solve previously solved problems easily. Successful business leaders are those who can spot opportunities others cannot, not merely those who can copy the style and strategy of those before them. In art, it was not only van Gogh’s skill but his originality that made him one of the most celebrated painters to have ever lived. As creativity becomes valuable, experimentation becomes essential.

The Mindset of Experimentation
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The experimental mindset as an extension of the growth mindset: whereas the growth mindset encourages you to see opportunities and potential for improvement, experimentation enacts a plan to reach those improvements. The experimental mindset doesn’t just assume that growth is possible but creates an active strategy for exploring all the possible ways to reach it.

To get into the right mental space for experimenting, you need not only to see your abilities as something you can improve but understand that there is a huge number of potential avenues to do this. Exploration, not dogmatism, is the key to realizing that potential.

How to Experiment
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A flurry of random activity doesn’t usually translate into mastery.

Tactic 1: Copy, Then Create

This strategy has an advantage, beyond simplifying the choices available to you. In attempting to emulate or copy an example you appreciate, you must deconstruct it to understand why it works. This can often highlight things that the other person does exceptionally well that weren’t obvious from the beginning. It may also dispel illusions you may have had about an aspect of the work you thought was important but upon emulating the other person’s work you realize was not.

Tactic 2: Compare Methods Side-by-Side

The scientific method works by carefully controlling conditions so that the difference between two situations is limited to the variable being studied. By applying two different approaches side by side, you can often quickly get information not only about what works best but about which methods are better suited to your personal style.

Tactic 3: Introduce New Constraints

The challenge of learning in the beginning is that you don’t know what to do. The challenge of learning in the end is that you think you already know what to do.

A powerful technique for pushing out of those grooves of routine is by introducing new constraints that make the old methods impossible to use.

Tactic 4: Find Your Superpower in the Hybrid of Unrelated Skills

For many areas of creative or professional skills, another, more accessible, path is to combine two skills that don’t necessarily overlap to bring about a distinct advantage that those who specialize in only one of those skills do not have.

Tactic 5: Explore the Extremes

Pushing out to an extreme in some aspect of the skill you’re cultivating, even if you eventually decide to pull it back to something more moderate, is often a good exploration strategy. This allows you to search the space of possibilities more effectively, while also giving you a broader range of experience.

Experimentation and Uncertainty
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Learning is a process of experimenting in two ways. First, the act of learning itself is a kind of trial and error. Practicing directly, getting feedback, and trying to summon up the right answers to problems are all ways of adjusting the knowledge and skills you have in your head to the real world. Second, the act of experimenting also lies in the process of trying out your learning methods. Try out different approaches, and use the ones that work best for you.

Having a mindset of experimentation will also encourage you to explore beyond what you feel most comfortable doing. Many people stick to the same routines, the same narrow set of methods, they apply to learning everything. As a result, there are a lot of things they struggle to learn because they don’t know the best way to do so.

What I Learnt from Antifragile (V)

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 18 Jan 2021 05:45:00 +0530

This post was first sent to my newsletter on November 16th, 2020.
[You really ought to subscribe][1] :)

Teaching Birds How to Fly, & Skin in the Game!
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via pixabay

This probably is the last post, I have on Antifragile, for now.

These lessons over the past few weeks are those, that have sunk in for me, and something that I use on a daily basis. I’ll write more as I learn and internalise some new piece of wisdom (knowing the book, I’m sure I will).

Skin in the Game, is the most important thing, I have learnt from the book.
(It was important enough, to Taleb too, that he went wrote a whole book on it, after Antifragile.

The only folks I should ever listen to, follow, are the folks who have done it, who are doing the work, the folks who have skin in the game.
The world rests of the shoulders of doers.

It is not enough for me to just read a blog to learn Python or programming.
There are a whole lot of folks, spouting opinions, and telling me how to do things. But a guy, who has walked the path I want to walk, who uses his skills the way I aim to, who uses it to better the world he lives in?
Him, I will listen to and do what he tells me to, because he talks to me with his scars.

When I wanted to get out of debt, I read a whole lot of books, but the only person whose advice I followed, was Dave Ramsey

I was a rebellious teen and would have my disagreements with my parents, but growing up, I realise I still live the values they taught me. Because they lived it themselves. Hard work and faith.

The teaching birds how to fly is the flip side of the coin.
It speaks to folks who tell stories and explanations about things and events, after the fact.
Everything, I see, most near everything was built by tinkerers and doers.
Not by folks who theorised and saw the whole picture in their mind and then brought forth perfection.
There might be a few who do that, but that’s not how the rest of the world works.
And I had to learn this the hard way.
There are tons of people who explain things, who tell me how things work, or how things should be done.
But without skin in the game, this is like what Taleb calls, teaching birds how to fly.
Imagine some stuffy manager, with his charts and his plans and his MBA going upto a sparrow and lecturing the poor thing on how exactly it should flap its wings and how it should pose its body for maximum aerodynamic efficiency.
I imagine the sparrow would just ruffle its feathers and go look for the next bird feeder.
The manager, though will still labour under the illusion, that he taught the sparrow to fly!
And then go on to give talks and publish posts on social media as the world’s leading avian technologist.
In the meanwhile it does not matter one whit to the sparrow as it flits about and dives for its grain and berries and whatnot, using its innate knowledge.
So now I always pay attention to whether it is Max Planck himself, who teaches me … or his driver.

This I now know. That when it comes to my relationships or advice or anything that relates to other people, they ought to have skin in the game if they want me to take them seriously.

The same thing helps me look at the big things that I have no control over. Do the decision makers of things that affect me, have skin in the game? Are they affected if things go south? If not, I realise that all this is just a charade, and I am an unwilling victim, and I have to route my life around such events and decisions.

Also applies to the advice I give to my mentees or my friends.
I keep my opinions to myself.
Unless I am asked.
And then, I will only ever talk about the things I have done, the stuff I have experience with, the experiences that life has given me the scars for.
I will happily talk to you about how to lose weight, or computers and networks, or getting out of debt, or writing.
But if you ask me about politics in India or what needs to be done to save the strays of Mumbai, or how to double your money in 10 days, I sadly have no answer for you.
Because I know nothing :)

Look at what the other side is telling you.
Heads, you lose? Tails, they win?
Is someone taking advantage of the fact that you cannot see what they are doing?

It’s simple in the end.
Are they willing to put their money where their mouth is?
Look at whether they have skin in the game.

Consolidating Websites

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 15 Jan 2021 09:00:00 +0530

*Update: 15/01/2021. It’s done. I moved everything and it all seems to be working. If something is broken, let me know, on [the fediverse][cbj], or mailing me at jason at this domain. To my tech posse, no there is no forwarding of old links happening. The site is too small and I have no time. Nobody is going to miss this. And to that one little friend, who noticed that the site was dead and actually cried, I love you.*

Happy New Year and welcome to the first newsletter of the year :)

I’m starting the year with a bit of spring cleaning.
I decided to stop publishing to mjbraganza.com
Yes, the book review and the photo website is now gone.
I had started it to give my family and friends the option where they did not have to see me work rants and struggles.

A few years of doing this have taught me that they don’t mind it anyway. They don’t check it on their own anyway. The newsletter is where the magic happens for family & friends.

Which left me the unwanted, detested task of having to run two websites, maintain two sets of data and run two newsletter like things.
I also have goals (my health, my family, my professional life) that I need to focus on, which leave me very little time to do these (even though I enjoy it immensely).
So, I’ve decided to stop doing it.
Like Cal Newport says,

Do less
Do Better
Know why

janusworx.com is where home is, for the forseeable future.
If you are looking for the old stuff, I will be bringing it over here, slowly as time and energy allow.

And once again, I wish you and yours a very Happy New Year!

What I Learnt from Antifragile (IV)

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 28 Dec 2020 05:45:00 +0530

This post was first sent to my newsletter on November 7th, 2020.
[You really ought to subscribe][1] :)

What I Learnt from Antifragile (IV)
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In a world with too much choice … Lindy is the cure
#

via Screenrant

So here’s a little distinction I learnt.
We, ~~who are about to die~~, mortals need to become antifragile.
We know, we are going to die someday, and are always being buffeted by the storms of life, so we seek to get stronger.

But what about the non mortal, the non living?
Are there antifragile, erm things?
Taleb posits, that things have the opposite quality. They don’t have to get antifragile.
They just have to have really long lives, for you to know what is good (or at least common sense and dependable) and what isn’t.
This helps you choose from the daily craziness of what do I do? What do I choose?

It’s simple really.
What things have lasted forever?
What piece of advice, has been handed down from generation to generation?
What book has been passed down through the years?
What kind of architecture has lasted through the ages?

Stick to them, stick to age, stick to ancient wisdom and life becomes so much simpler.
That’s not to say that they can’t be wrong, or that old things cannot fall apart, or that you cannot improve or think new things.
Just that, when you don’t want to do the thinking, or you are not quite up to speed on something, or you are paralysed with choice, choosing something Lindy is the safest (and also mostly, the best) thing that you can do.

The term, Lindy comes from a deli at Broadway in New York city.
Quoting Albert Goldman describing a shared folk belief on the longevity of a comedian’s show/series on TV,

… the life expectancy of a television comedian is proportional to the total amount of his exposure on the medium.

If, pathetically deluded by hubris, he undertakes a regular weekly or even monthly program, his chances of survival beyond the first season are slight; but if he adopts the conservation of resources policy favored by these senescent philosophers of “the Business”, and confines himself to “specials” and “guest shots”, he may last to the age of Ed Wynn.

Benoit Mandelbrot modified this, and expressed it mathematically to state that regardless of material, the more appearances comedians make, the more future appearances they are predicted to make. (depending on various other factors, of course)

Taleb, then took this concept and ran with it. From Antifragile …

For the perishable, every additional day in its life translates into a shorter additional life expectancy.

For the nonperishable, every additional day may imply a longer life expectancy.

…

In general, the older the technology, not only the longer it is expected to last, but the more certainty I can attach to such a statement.

He goes on to exemplify this, using my favouritest things, books …

If a book has been in print for forty years, I can expect it to be in print for another forty years. But, and that is the main difference, if it survives another decade, then it will be expected to be in print another fifty years. This, simply, as a rule, tells you why things that have been around for a long time are not “aging” like persons, but “aging” in reverse. Every year that passes without extinction doubles the additional life expectancy. This is an indicator of some robustness. The robustness of an item is proportional to its life!

And plays on Broadway and ancient buildings,

Gott made a list of Broadway shows on a given day, May 17, 1993, and predicted that the longest-running ones would last longest, and vice versa. He was proven right with 95 percent accuracy.

…

He had, as a child, visited both the Great Pyramid (fifty-seven hundred years old), and the Berlin Wall (twelve years old), and correctly guessed that the former would outlive the latter.

And all this because of time.
Like Warren Buffett says,

It’s only when the tide goes out, that you learn who’s been swimming naked.

Time shows things for what they are.
Time filters the chaff.
Time erodes and polishes things to their essence.
So whatever survives time, needs to be given more weight in my opinion.

How do I use this myself?
#

While I am not necessarily concerned with building something that is Lindy ¹, whenever I want to use something, I make sure I choose the Lindy option.
I use this with the books, I choose to read. As do other smart people, I follow.
I learnt more from the Bible and the Upanishads and the Stoics, than I do from any modern non fiction book.

I use this with the tools, I used to write. I used to earlier write using Word, and then a program called Textmate, followed by a program called Scrivener, followed by a program called Sublime Text, followed by a program called, Visual Studio Code.
It was frustrating, trying to keep up with the changes and incompatibilites and the do this and do that and can work here and not there, nature of these programs. I can tolerate this craziness in other areas of my life, not with my writing.
So I learnt Vi and then Emacs and settled on using Emacs. Why?
Despite their steep-ish learning curve, they run almost everywhere and have been in existence since 1976.
These programs are older than me!
So I’m sure, they will be around and will continue to work for a long time to come.

Dad crafted furniture.
And he was obsessed with all his creations being beautiful, functional and lasting forever.
I have a stool at home, that he made when I was two. Forty years later, I still use it daily.
Mom uses a sickle to break coconuts. She’s been using the same one that he crafted when they got married and she needed cooking implements. That too, is older than me.

I’d bet on Yamaha surviving the vicissitudes of fate and time, more than Uber or Twitter.
Japan has many, many more, by the way.

Same thing with old architecture.
I lay bets on the Taj Mahal surviving longer than all the modern buildings in Lutyen’s Delhi.

So, if you ever need a quick way to decide something, look at what past you did.
Then look at what folks in the older generation did.
Then look at what your grandparents generation did.
And onwards and upwards.

If there is a shining, silver thread that extends through time, then that is what you can safely choose and do.
Listening to grandma’s advice, is always a good thing :)

actually the trick is you don’t have to think about posterity until the posterity ↩︎

No letters for a while, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 21 Dec 2020 09:30:00 +0530

My email program, was somehow hacked into last week, and close to 3000 spam mails were sent out in the course of a few minutes.

While I was able to serendipitously catch it as soon as it happened, I apologise if you were the recepient of unsavoury stuff from my email address.
I am now in the process of rebuilding everything.

letter at janusworx dot com is the new home from where these letters will be sent from.
Please add this address to your contacts, so that I do not end up in your spam :)

I am still picking up the pieces.
I hope to slowly do over everything. And I hope to resume in the New Year.

Before I put my pen down and bid you adieu, let me wish you all a Very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
And as ever, I wish you warmth!

Sometimes it only takes a stranger, in a dark place,
to hold out a badly knitted scarf, to offer a kind word, to say
we have the right to be here, to make us warm in the coldest season.

You have the right to be here!

— Neil Gaiman

Love and warmth,
Jason

P.S. The poem in beautifully illustrated link above, is a Neil Gaiman creation, which old letter folk will know, was how I wished you last year too.

Books I Read, November 2020

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 14 Dec 2020 05:45:00 +0530

This post was first sent to my newsletter on November 30th, 2020.
[You really ought to subscribe][1] :)

Now that life is picking back up, I have slowed down on the reading.
I stuck to fiction this month. Only this month was at my normal pace 😄
The speed demon of September and October is no more 😂

Actually I stuck with Jack Reacher this month.
I thought I would be done with him, but he does not seem to be done with me.
There was another new Reacher published last month, to be tacked on to the end of the queue.

Not that I am complaining. 😄
Jack Reacher is no Sandman, but as as stoic vigilante, he rocks!

Speaking of stoicism, the one book I did read other than Child’s series was my evergreen favourite; Colleen McCullough’s epic about the early settlers of Australia and Norfolk Island, Morgan’s Run.

Following the disappearance of his only son and the death of his beloved wife, Richard Morgan is falsely imprisoned and exiled to the penal colonies of eighteenth-century Australia. His life is shattered but Morgan refuses to surrender, overcoming all obstacles to find unexpected contentment and happiness in the harsh early days of Australia’s settlement.

From England’s shores to Botany Bay and the rugged frontier of a hostile new world, Morgan’s Run is the epic tale of love lost and found, and the man whose strength and character helped settle a country and define its future.

It isn’t masterful writing.
But it is a masterful potrayal of a man who is buffetted by the storms of life and yet, holds on to his core.
And it has another important (to me) characteristic. It is looong at close to 900 pages.
So oftentimes, I just open to one phase of Richard Morgan’s life and get lost in it.
His false imprisonment, or his early halcyon life, or how he makes the most of his imprisonment in Australia or his easy ability to inspire loyalty.
Like I write under its title, it is one of my Lindy Books.
It has been my soul food and constant companion for the last twenty years.
It taught me stoic principles, before I even knew what Stoicism even was.
I cannot imagine, how I would have gotten through my tough times, if it wasn’t for Morgan’s Run.

And that was my run for November.
I’ll be back with more of what I read, next month 😄

If you want to see the titles, click here.

Shower Thoughts, The Speed of Learning With Various Media

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 07 Dec 2020 05:45:00 +0530

This post was first sent to my newsletter on November 23rd, 2020.
[You really ought to subscribe][1] :)

A quickie for all you fellow epistemophiliacs.
I may have written something about this somewhere, but this still rankles my brain enough, that I want to put it down in a note.

Learning across various subjects, as I have been for the past two years (12th, college, programming, and the rest), for a short while, I was obsessed about the best way, the fastest way, the most efficient way to learn something.

And as usual, I have realised, a little too late in the process that there is no such thing.
One learns at the speed one learns.

That is not to say however, that all forms of instructional material are created the same.
The media you engage with, has to be intentionally chosen, based on what you want to learn, get out of something that you are consuming.

Here’s how I see it.

Reading Mathematics is the most efficient at expressing huge amounts of knowledge, efficiently and concisely. (which is why it is a budding hobby of mine. so that I can read more, lots more, before I die 😃)
Reading Books (both fiction and nonfiction) come next. I can skim, absorb, skip sections, delve deeply, reread, meditate over, quite rapidly.
Audio, Video and Interactive Multimedia are the next steps in growing levels of commitment of effort, time and space. You learn better, but spend more time doing it.
Doing it is the final step. The most involved, takes the most effort and the most time.

This is not a good, better, best list. This is a how much time and attention, do I want to devote to learning this-thing-i-am-learning list.

This is more like: this is how I go about learning list.
If I want to quickly read large quantities of knowledge, I start at the top, and the more I want to dive deeper / learn more intently / understand better because I don’t get it; the further down the ~~rabbit hole~~ list, I go.

For hard, vast, yet distillable topics, Maths is the best way to go.

It isn’t available for the rest of squishy unpredictable life, so books are the next best option. As I realise I want to learn more or as I realise, the books are not cutting it, I don’t understand this, that’s when I go down a level (only if I think, this is worth learning).

A/V and multimedia are the next stop. For e.g. I did not understand Python Comprehensions by reading, so I took a video course to understand them better.

Doing is of course the big daddy of them all. I want to change careers to programming, which is why I now devote hours a day, to … you know … actually programming. While Josh Kaufman’s maxim certainly applies, it is still a significant investment you make. So do this intentionally.

That’s all for this week
If you like this one, I might pen more shower thoughts 😂
Or they can just go down the drain 😛
Let me know what you think.

Books I Read, October 2020

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 30 Nov 2020 05:45:00 +0530

This post was first sent to my newsletter on November 2nd, 2020.
[You really ought to subscribe][1] :)

Nothing really exciting this month.
I had lots of work and could not quite focus on reading hard books or non fiction.
I needed to escape from the humdrum of life

So, I read a lot of Jack Reacher.
I decided to read all of the Lee Child novels featuring the character.

And all of that, started because I read a book, that followed Lee Child around for a year, describing his writing process and the work that goes into a Reacher novel.
It’s been fun, reading. Like meeting an old friend.
Considering that he writes about one a year, I find it slightly alarming that I have now read seventeen years of Child’s work in a month.

I wonder what I’ll do when I get done with all the books.
Well I don’t really have to wonder. I’ll just go read another one.

I have more books, I want to read than I have life left :)
So here’s to reading! See you next month!

If you want to see the titles, click here.

What I Learnt from Antifragile (III)

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 15 Nov 2020 13:24:23 +0530

This post was sent to my newsletter on October 25th, 2020.
[You really ought to subscribe][1] :)

What I Learnt from Antifragile (III)
#

What Does Not Kill Me … Antifragility for the Collective
#

What does not kill me makes me stronger.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Maxims and Arrows

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.
But those that will not break it kills.
It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially.
If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.
— Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

That, in a nutshell, explains my learning today.
To become Antifragile, we need to ~~understand~~ be aware of what we do, our actions and then see who it ultimately benefits.

via Greek Myth Fandom

Antifragility, like I imagined in my head, was me getting stronger with every blow that life dealt me, Hydra like.
If you cut off one head, I would just grow another one.
But I realised that everything comes at the expense of something.
If I am growing Antifragile, something else has to give.
If there’s just nature on the otherside, we’re fine. But if there are people, then we better be careful about how we get Antifragile.

There’s also the notion of scale. Something small, dying to make the bigger collective stronger.
So there’s always a balancing act and a constant need to be observant.

This is how I imagine it, in a few scenarios in my life.

My cells need to die, my muscles need to tear in order that I build up my strength.
Here the individual is nature (my cells), dying in order to make me (my body, the collective) much stronger.
Imagine if that did not happen, if each cell decided, why should I die?
Actually, you don’t have to imagine.
That’s what cancer is.

If I die this year, I am insured. My folks get a hefty payout. (Antifragility for my family’s finances)
But the insurance company can only afford to do this, because they have money from a ton of folks placing the same bet as I did. That we would croak this year.
This is again the individual (me) benefiting the collective (the vast pool of people, who do not have enough saved, yet want to provide for their loved ones).

A nasty one is when someone uses this for their own benefit.
They win, but the collective loses.
Scams of various sorts come to mind here, where an unscrupulous person, takes advantage and become antifragile at the benefit of other people.

The flip side is the hero, where the individual takes risks and sacrifices to benefit the collective
Soldiers, Teachers, Firefighters, Tinkerers, Entrepreneurs are all examples of folks who sacrifice individually so that society as a whole benefits.

So this is what I learnt. To see how actions towards antifragility (mine or others) have ramifications on my life.
To always see if I or society benefit. Not someone else taking undue advantage.

My Experience Learning the Dvorak Keyboard Layout

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 02 Nov 2020 05:45:58 +0530

This post was sent to my newsletter on October 16th, 2020.
[You really ought to subscribe][1] :)

I was wondering about what kind of technical posts, I could write, since I am still learning programming and I did not want to bother you folk, with this is how I learnt to do lists in Python and this is what dictionaries do :)

I then realised that it’s been slightly more than a year, I have been touch typing using the Dvorak layout.

So I thought, why not tell you that story? :)

Why did I switch to Dvorak?
#

I never learnt to touch type. It was always a some day, maybe cool skill to learn.
Ever since my computer support days in the late 90s, I have always hunted and pecked at my keyboard, using 2-3 fingers.
Or 4.
Or 5.
You get the gist.

And I was pretty comfortable with it, until I broke my back in 2017.

I now have three slipped discs at various point along my back, and one of them was compressing the nerves that go down both my arms a bit.

So the old way of typing, was now causing tremendous pain.

I asked my doctor what I could do and his answer was basically, change professions. (Silly sod)

But my physio sessions where I was strengthening my back muscles to take the load of my vertebrae, lit the bulb of what if I learnt to finally touch type using Dvorak? It was designed to reduce strain on the fingers.

Would that help?

Some Thoughts
#

I realise that I am in a lucky position, painful fingers notwithstanding.

My native language is English, most of the world types in English, programming is largely done in English and Dvorak was designed for English.

It would not have gone well for me, if I had to type in another language, because most of them adapt off the QWERTY layout.

While I have had no real issues adapting my fingers to shortcuts from my operating system and the various programs I use, I do realise that other folks might have muscle memory, that’s ingrained too deep.

How did I do it?
#

By switching to it cold turkey.
It was not like I had any other option.
The alternatives were to either endure shooting pains, up my fingers to my arms or give up typing altogether.

I switched my keyboard layout in Linux Mint on the desktop and MacOS on the laptop to Dvorak.
iOS does not natively have support for the Dvorak layout, so I installed Google’s Gboard and then switched that to Dvorak.

I practiced for about 10 minutes daily, using Gtypist on Linux, just to get a feel for where the keys were. I could see them on the phone and the tablet too, so that helped.

It took me a month to get the hang of it.
And the first two weeks, were absolutely miserable.
Emails, messages, writing, practically everything suffered.
I know.
I measured.
I averaged 2 to 5 words per minute.
I got yelled at.
And a few work balls got dropped too.
But that was a small price to pay, for what I hoped would be finger salvation.

But at the end of that month, I could touch type.
At 5 to 10 words a minute.

But I could do it.

A Year Later …
#

So, did it help?
Absolutely!
I now can type at close to 265 words a minute, with just my right hand.

Just kidding :)

It never was about the speed for me, though that has improved as well.
My good old patent pending hand claw typing, averaged 35 words a minute.
With Dvorak, I was at that speed in two months.
And then I just gave up on getting faster, because at around that speed, my fingers keep up with my thoughts.

The magic though, lies in the fact, that my speed has been on a gradual upward curve over the past year.
Four months ago, I was averaging 45 words a minute.
Today, I do about 55 words a minute.
And yet, like I said, it’s never been about the speed.

The best thing about Dvorak, lay in the fact that my fingers stopped paining.
I still have twinges once in a while, but those are few and far between and definitely a far cry from the daily agony of last year.

The other thing I’ve noticed is my fingers have become semi-autonomous typing appendages, if that makes any sense.
My thoughts flow out my fingers, on to the page. I don’t have to think about typing anymore.
Like I don’t have to think about walking. I want to go someplace and my feet just do it.

Finally, if someone had just told me just how comfortable Dvorak’d be, I would have made the attempt years ago.
It feels almost as good as scribbling notes on a pad to me. My fingers just roll over the keys, forming words.

You might not have crazy, flingin’ flangin’ fingers, but ought you learn to type with Dvorak?
My answer would be an emphatic, Yes!
(Two, no longer painful, thumbs up)

What I Learnt from Antifragile (II)

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 01 Nov 2020 05:45:00 +0530

This post was sent to my newsletter on October 18th, 2020
[You really ought to subscribe][1] :)

What I Learnt from Antifragile (II)
#

I fell sick and missed writing last week.
I have to live up the name of the news letter, anyhoo.
It would not be erratic without me whiffing once in a while, non?
Apologies all around, anyway!

The Barbell Heuristic to Taking Risks
#

Basically a shortcut to figuring out whether you ought to do something or not, based on the risks it entails.
How do we take a decision, when we don’t know all the pros and cons?
How do we decide in an uncertain world?
Simply put,

What kind / amount of loss am I willing to accept, to gain some reward?

Life basically consists of three outcomes:

The safe outcome, with little to no success, but you don’t lose anything
The normal outcome, with some middling success, but you stand to lose some.
- But here’s the kicker. You might stand to lose everything, if you don’t understand the risks you take, or if the risk is unknowable. (Blow ups due to these unknown risks are what are now popularly called, thanks to Taleb’s earlier book, Black Swans)
High Risk, high reward! You know you will lose, but if you win, you win Big! It helps if you take risks with a domain that you have deep expertise in.

Taleb suggests that the best and safest way, to make decisions that propel your forward with minimal risk, is to ignore point 2 altogether.
Most of your daily life decisions ought to be with point 1.
Some of your decisions you, go to point 3.

Your strategy is to be as hyper-conservative and hyper-aggressive as you can be, instead of being mildly aggressive or conservative.
— Taleb, The Black Swan

And that is the barbell strategy.
It looks like an unbalanced barbell actually, like the one on the cover of his next book, Skin in the Game.

This is what will give you maximum peace of mind.

Risk taking also becomes easier, if you have options like I pointed out last week.
The best worst case scenario, is one that you have the option to reverse. (like buying something you need, but uncertain about how it’ll be? Easy to buy it, if the thing comes with an option to return it if you don’t like it.)

Three personal life cases,

Money
#

I don’t understand investing.
I do know, that I need a nest egg for when Abby & I are old :)
Ergo, barbell strategy.
Most of our money is parked in safe investments like the Provident Fund and fixed deposits.
And some of it, in risky stuff like stocks and equity mutual funds. (since this is not my domain of expertise, I pay someone trustworthy to help me out.)
So if the market crashes like it did earlier this year, I was not as worried as other folk.
I did not lose my shirt.
I could follow, what the given advice at the time was (Stay Invested) with a clear, calm mind.
And I am confident, compounding will work its magic over time over both sets of investments.

Work
#

Let’s put the barbell, to work here too.
Your safe, boring job is one end of the spectrum.
Your risky side projects, hustles, are the other.
You need both.

You could either do both together, or serially.
Work a safe job for a few years, then take up a risky moonshot, and if it doesn’t pan out, go back to another safe job.

While right now, I am in between jobs, due to health reasons, in my earlier lives, I had pretty boring jobs.
But, I write a lot. I teach a lot.
And that brought me a lot of opportunities that helped me through really trying times in the past two decades.

Health
#

This is relevant to me, because it helped me get fit over the past year.
I have three slipped discs.
Do I have surgery?
The docs are undecided. Or rather they are, but are unwilling to guarantee, how long the surgery would help me.
And I had bloated to 98 odd kgs at my worst.
What do I do?

So, the safe thing to do was to lose weight.
And the hard thing to do was to get strong.
Both of which, are progressing along nicely.
I lost 30 kgs and am doing aggressive physio to build up my back muscles, so that my poor vertebrae don’t have to do all the heavy lifting by themselves.
I feel much better today, better than I did in my twenties!

And that about does it for using barbells to help make decisions.
That’s all we have for you this week :)
I really do hope, this little heuristic, changes your life as much as it did mine :)

Newsletter on Janusworx

Books I Read in June, 2026

Empire Podcast: Spice Wars, The Battle of the East India Companies, Episodes 358-360 #

The Rest is History, The Fall of the Incas, Episodes 644-649 #

The Secret Pilgrim, John le Carré #

Platform Decay, Martha Wells #

Control, Andy Diggle, Angela Cruickshank, Andrea Mutti & Vladimir Popov #

Chung Ju-yung & Hyundai, Farnam Street Podcast #

Steve Jobs in Exile, Geoffrey Cain #

Apple: The First 50 Years, David Pogue #

Learning Object-Oriented Programming, Design and TDD with Pharo, Stéphane Ducasse & Damien Pollet #

Data Structures the Fun Way, Jeremy Kubica #

The Art of Reading, Timothy Spurgin (The Great Courses) #

Books I Read in May, 2026

Vanguard, Spring 2026, Episode 3, Acquired Podcast #

Smiley’s People, John le Carré #

Empire Podcast: Simon Bolivar: the Liberator, Episodes 354-357 #

Matthias Endler Built His Own Newsletter Setup

Books I Read in April, 2026

Deep Questions, Cal Newport, Episodes 391-400 #

Lincoln the Unknown, Dale Carnegie #

The Beryl Coronet, The Stockbroker’s Clerk, The Six Napoleons, Sherlock & Co. Podcast, Season 40, 41 & 42 #

Literature Ideas, You Really Need to Know, John Sutherland #

Songteller: My Life in Lyrics, Dolly Parton #

Books I Read in March, 2026

The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, Stieg Larsson #

The Looking Glass War, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and The Honourable Schoolboy, John le Carré #

The Bear and the Nightingale, The Girl in the Tower and The Winter of the Witch (Winternight trilogy), Katherine Arden #

Books I Read in February, 2026

Deep Questions, Cal Newport, Episodes 381-390 #

Beyond the Rift, Peter Watts #

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, John le Carré #

Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality #

Falco, The Official Companion, Lindsey Davis #

The Novice’s Tale, The Servant’s Tale, and The Outlaw’s Tale, Margaret Frazer #

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson #

Books I Read in January, 2026

The Thin Man, Dashiell Hammett #

The Rest is History, The Nazis at War, Hitler Strikes West, Parts I-IV #

The Rest is History, Jack the Ripper, Parts I-IV #

The Second Stain, The Man with The Twisted Lip, and The Muskgrave Ritual, Sherlock & Co. Podcast, Seasons 37, 38 & 39 #

Mania for Subjugation III, Hardcore History, Episode 73 #

Sister, Maiden, Monster, Lucy A. Snyder #

The Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel #

Shattered Lands, Sam Dalrymple #

History of the Alphabet, Kevin Stroud #

A Play of Isaac, Margaret Frazer #

Focus on How Long You Read, Not How Much, aka The Best Advice I Could Give You About Reading Lots of Books

Books I Read in the First Quarter of 2025

Books Saved My Life

Reading Page a Day Books

Maria Popova’s Favourite Books of 2022

Moving Tasks Between Org Files in Emacs

Notes to Self on Renewing Wildcard Certbot Certs

Splitting an Unwieldy Emacs `init.el`

Writing as Gardening

Zettelkasten

All the Stuff I Wanted to Share in 2022

Ryan Holiday #

Susan (Fowler) Rigetti #

The Art of Manliness #

Ben Orlin #

Austin Kleon #

Vanessa Grall at Messy Nessy #

Tim Ferriss #

Farnam Street #

Maria Popova #

Old Tech/Work Links of Interest 2022

Two exhaustive articles on the historical significance of the Arpanet and how the protocol worked #

Crazy obsessions like this, are why even I got into writing software. TT2020 is an advanced, open source, hyperrealistic, multilingual typewriter font for a new decade! #

Len Kleinrock: The First Two Packets on the Internet #

Old Links of Interest 2022

The beauty of Seth Godin¸ is that every post on his is darn here quotable. This is him, on the weight of repetitive tasks … #

You’ve read the classic works of stoicism. What now? The Daily Stoic helps with, Assembling A “Bible” of Stoicism: What To Read After The Romans, https://dailystoic.com/bible-of-stoicism #

Annual Letters, from folks I listen to and learn from … #

Maya Angelou’s Paris Review Interview, on writing and language and life and growing up. Watching this could probably the best hour of your life. #

On Reading

Books I Read Last Month #

On Woman Computers, Long Tails & Reasons to Write

On Reading News, Remembering, and Why We Write

Empire Podcast: Spice Wars, The Battle of the East India Companies, Episodes 358-360
#

The Rest is History, The Fall of the Incas, Episodes 644-649
#

The Secret Pilgrim, John le Carré
#

Platform Decay, Martha Wells
#

Control, Andy Diggle, Angela Cruickshank, Andrea Mutti & Vladimir Popov
#

Chung Ju-yung & Hyundai, Farnam Street Podcast
#

Steve Jobs in Exile, Geoffrey Cain
#

Apple: The First 50 Years, David Pogue
#

Learning Object-Oriented Programming, Design and TDD with Pharo, Stéphane Ducasse & Damien Pollet
#

Data Structures the Fun Way, Jeremy Kubica
#

The Art of Reading, Timothy Spurgin (The Great Courses)
#

Vanguard, Spring 2026, Episode 3, Acquired Podcast
#

Smiley’s People, John le Carré
#

Empire Podcast: Simon Bolivar: the Liberator, Episodes 354-357
#

Deep Questions, Cal Newport, Episodes 391-400
#

Lincoln the Unknown, Dale Carnegie
#

The Beryl Coronet, The Stockbroker’s Clerk, The Six Napoleons, Sherlock & Co. Podcast, Season 40, 41 & 42
#

Literature Ideas, You Really Need to Know, John Sutherland
#

Songteller: My Life in Lyrics, Dolly Parton
#

The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, Stieg Larsson
#

The Looking Glass War, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and The Honourable Schoolboy, John le Carré
#

The Bear and the Nightingale, The Girl in the Tower and The Winter of the Witch (Winternight trilogy), Katherine Arden
#

Deep Questions, Cal Newport, Episodes 381-390
#

Beyond the Rift, Peter Watts
#

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, John le Carré
#

Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality
#

Falco, The Official Companion, Lindsey Davis
#

The Novice’s Tale, The Servant’s Tale, and The Outlaw’s Tale, Margaret Frazer
#

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson
#

The Thin Man, Dashiell Hammett
#

The Rest is History, The Nazis at War, Hitler Strikes West, Parts I-IV
#

The Rest is History, Jack the Ripper, Parts I-IV
#

The Second Stain, The Man with The Twisted Lip, and The Muskgrave Ritual, Sherlock & Co. Podcast, Seasons 37, 38 & 39
#

Mania for Subjugation III, Hardcore History, Episode 73
#

Sister, Maiden, Monster, Lucy A. Snyder
#

The Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel
#

Shattered Lands, Sam Dalrymple
#

History of the Alphabet, Kevin Stroud
#

A Play of Isaac, Margaret Frazer
#

Ryan Holiday
#

Susan (Fowler) Rigetti
#

The Art of Manliness
#

Ben Orlin
#

Austin Kleon
#

Vanessa Grall at Messy Nessy
#

Tim Ferriss
#

Farnam Street
#

Maria Popova
#

Two exhaustive articles on the historical significance of the Arpanet and how the protocol worked
#

Crazy obsessions like this, are why even I got into writing software. TT2020 is an advanced, open source, hyperrealistic, multilingual typewriter font for a new decade!
#

Len Kleinrock: The First Two Packets on the Internet
#

The beauty of Seth Godin¸ is that every post on his is darn here quotable. This is him, on the weight of repetitive tasks …
#

You’ve read the classic works of stoicism. What now? The Daily Stoic helps with, Assembling A “Bible” of Stoicism: What To Read After The Romans, https://dailystoic.com/bible-of-stoicism
#

Annual Letters, from folks I listen to and learn from …
#

Maya Angelou’s Paris Review Interview, on writing and language and life and growing up. Watching this could probably the best hour of your life.
#

Books I Read Last Month
#

“[W]e’re surrounded by so much information that is of immediate interest to us, that we feel overwhelmed by the never-ending pressure of trying to keep up with it all.”
#

— Nicolas Carr
#

Over at Ars Technica, Researchers think a planet lost its original atmosphere, and built a new one
#

A Bear? Where? Over There — Strapping a giant teddy bear to a car in the name of highway safety
#