I noted once that the most interesting potential for virtual/mixed reality wasn’t to put yourself in a virtual office or the ocean floor; it was that you could experience entirely different worlds with different physics, where time flows differently, where acoustics mutate as sound waves fly through the air. In VR, you could move through scales of experience, from nanometers to miles, as easily as you move a few feet through space in the real world. I feel a similar sense of loss of underex...| linus.coffee
Someone asked me via email about my thoughts on the software engineering field, and what I would tell someone new to the industry. (Relatively speaking, I’m also pretty new to the industry! But it’s 5AM, and I ended up going on a long semi-rant. I thought the rant might be interesting to some other people too, so here’s the rant.) --- Interpretations of reality If you look one way, mathematics is just a box of tools. Abstractions you can pull out to solve specific problems when we are f...| linus.coffee
In the year 1972, a pair of spacecraft departs the Earth atmosphere, headed towards the outer gas planets of the solar system. These spacecraft, bearing the name Pioneer 10 and 11, become the first artificial objects to fly beyond Pluto and escape the gravitational grasp of the sun. They each carry a gold-plated plaque bearing etchings of the human form, our place in the solar system, and its place within our stellar neighborhood. Thus begins humanity’s effort to leave a trace of its intell...| linus.coffee
tools iPad Pro (2018, 11-inch) & Apple Pencil Paper by WeTransfer process| linus.coffee
This is an excerpt from today’s issue of my weekly newsletter. --- Essays, photographs, videogames, podcasts – these are what we create. They live on mediums, like word documents, film, canvas, software, and audio. On the other side of the canvas or the lens or the microphone are the humans casting their ideas into form. And in between, at the point of contact between the creator and the creation, the human and the medium, is the interface. The constraints laid out by our creative media a...| linus.coffee
This is an excerpt from today’s issue of my weekly newsletter. --- I’ve been working through Jon Gertner’s The Idea Factory this month. The book covers the early history of the storied industrial research lab Bell Labs. Though I’m not finished yet, the book, combined with a week-long vacation in Paris, has triggered some thoughts in me I wanted to share. Bell Labs’ prolific history of innovation and discovery in computing includes the vacuum tube, the transistor, C, and UNIX. Given ...| linus.coffee
American cities seem like a product of industrial processes where older European cities seem like a product of human processes. This is because most American cities were built after and alongside the car and the industrial revolution – the design of cities took into account what was easily possible, and that guided the shape and scale of everything. Software has similar analogues. There are software codebases that feel much more industrially generated than hand written, and they’re usuall...| linus.coffee
A while ago, I wrote on my main blog about more intentionally disambiguating “impossible” things from things that are merely very difficult. The idea has since grown with me, and recently I gave a talk for the Startmate Fellowship about a related idea, which is that you should approach new ideas with a “possible by default” mindset. I think as we grow up and go through school and work, we’re conditioned into an “impossible by default” mindset, where the assumption about any part...| linus.coffee
우리의 얘기를 쓰겠소 (Writing Our Stories) by SG Wannabe, from the drama 시카고 타자기 (Chicago Typewriter).| linus.coffee
Something reaches escape velocity when it moves fast enough to “keep falling forever” – when it moves quickly enough that even the gravity that pulls it back to the ground can’t bring it back to the ground. Once you reach escape velocity in space flight, for example, you are guaranteed escape from Earth’s gravitational grips. I think the metaphor of escape velocity applies neatly to other areas of life. Financial escape velocity If you are smart about investing, you can reach a poin...| linus.coffee
I was walking through the Oculus structure in the World Trade Center train station in New York, and began thinking about signages and signage design in such a busy transportation hub. The battle between form and function is nowhere more fierce than in a busy transit hub, where utility and accessibility are top priority, but you don’t want to sacrifice the aesthetics of architecture. I personally find New York City’s metro transit signage system surprisingly functional (given the complexit...| linus.coffee
This is an excerpt from today’s issue of my weekly newsletter. --- New York is a place that seems to demand that I justify why I’m living here. It’s expensive. It’s noisy. What am I getting in exchange? So I’ve been trying to go out more and see what’s in the neighborhood recently. Last week, I made a couple of visits to Strand Bookstore, a large and apparently quite historic bookstore downtown. I went a couple of times, once just to browse and once to pick up a couple of books in...| linus.coffee
I visited the Guggenheim Museum in New York earlier this week. The museum was more bare than usual due to social distancing policies and a smaller exhibit going on due to the pandemic. There were a few audiovisual works of art displayed in the rotunda, and smaller galleries around the corners of the museum. Every time I visit a place like this, I’m just as taken by the architecture and interior as by the works of art themselves. What kind of an environment and ambiance is being intentionall...| linus.coffee
I consider writing (words) and writing (software) to be my two most proficient creative skills. There are many parallels between the two – in most situations, both take the form of writing letters down onto some document that gets interpreted by someone or something else. Both take time, require extensive pre-writing preparation, editing, and rewriting to be great, and both are skills with such creative and technical depth that it takes a lifetime to master, if at all. Software gives you in...| linus.coffee
I spent an afternoon this weekend at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and it got me thinking about artists and writers as vehicles for ideas. The most conventional view of creative work has the artist (or writer, author, videographer, whatever you want to call them) as the main character. An artist conjures ideas out of their experience and beliefs, and renders it into reality. But I think there’s a more insightful perspective, which is to look at the cultural phenomenon of creative wo...| linus.coffee
Most of the time, I don’t know how to make anything. I don’t know how to make anything because I don’t know what to make. I don’t know what to write about, or build, or talk about. I survive in a nearly constant state of writer’s block, punctuated by acute moments of clarity when the voice inside me speaks at three hundred words a minute, and I grab the nearest writing utensil or perhaps a suitable alternative and start scribbling madly to write down what it’s saying. I scribble q...| linus.coffee
The first observed Anomaly was a small flicker. A singular quantum fluctuation. A “five-sigma event” – research-speak for about one in four million chance of happening. The spin of an electron neutrino flipping in silence. Physicists didn’t know what to do with the data, so they published it under a question mark. The press murmured echos of instrumentation errors and measurement mistakes that caused the faster-than-light neutrino kerfuffle in 2012. It was mostly brushed under the met...| linus.coffee
Hold, fast, to the things that hold you in this world. Hold on. Hug back. Run towards.| linus.coffee
One really alluring way for me to think about music (or art, more generally) is that it’s a holographic projection of everything that isn’t music that fills up life. Music isn’t a medium — life is a medium through which we learn to be better musicians and artists and filmmakers, and what we learn in life, all the emotion and the harmonies and the pain, we take that and condense it into this tight little piece of delicate soundcraft that is music. To be a better musician, it’s not si...| linus.coffee
You were navy when we met, the color of musky rain and warm evening skies and shadows flowing through New York City streets. Lost in a sea of pastel blazers and neon dresses I fell free into your blue, reaching out for something deeper, mesmerized by the stars I could only see in the dark. And then blue turned to purple, of scented candles and magic tricks and chandelier-lit velvet carpets. And on that carpet we danced, purple mist filling the atmosphere. Then purple turned to red. The color ...| linus.coffee
There are different kinds of silence. The loud ones that press against your eardrums, where you don’t want to move because everyone else is going to stare at whoever makes the first move. The cold ones where you’re on the phone, but you know the other person isn’t listening. The dead ones, because you know there isn’t a response coming but you don’t want to give up. And the warm moments of silence, when there’s no sound going over the wire, but you know the other person’s listen...| linus.coffee
This is an excerpt from today’s issue of my weekly newsletter. --- Sometimes when I look at the window, I can almost imagine that there is still a sky behind it. Even in the nicer rooms in this side of the hospital, the windows don’t quite get the sky brightness right all the time, and most of the time, the screen is a little too dim, and the clouds are a little too bright. But a few times a day, if I look up at the right angle and let my eyes pull focus out into the distance, I can let m...| linus.coffee
In technology (defined broadly), there are questions that are evergreen and related to the nature of science itself, and questions that are temporary and specific to the technological capabilities of a given era. A simple example of a temporary question is when Moore’s law for scaling semiconductor performance no longer holds. It’s an interesting question, and one that has huge economic, industrial, and scientific consequences, but it’s a question whose answer is time-limited in its uti...| linus.coffee
This is an excerpt from today’s issue of my weekly newsletter. --- I’ve been thinking about Romanticism recently. Ironically, not the Valentine’s Day kind, the capital-R Romanticism. I wanted to share a couple of pieces of writing related to it that have found a way into my notes this week. First, from the French poet Charles Baudelaire: You have to be always drunk. That’s all there is to it—it’s the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and...| linus.coffee
Don’t Hold Me by Dean Lewis, covered acoustically on the guitar.| linus.coffee
Can’t Help Falling In Love by Elvis Presley, a cappella arrangement (if you can call it that) by me.| linus.coffee
I Won’t Give Up, by Jason Mraz, plus some improvisations and ad-libs as I felt so compelled. A vocal + piano cover, me on both.| linus.coffee
This is an excerpt from today’s issue of my weekly newsletter. --- By a studio, I mean a space for creative work that has grown and accreted the right tools in the right places over time. It’s a larger version of the “desktop” analogy. Looking at someone’s studio can tell you a lot about the work they do, their sources of inspiration, the kinds of mistakes they make and the thinking process they go through. Studio spaces aren’t limited to artists and craftspeople. As a person who ...| linus.coffee
This is an excerpt from today’s issue of my weekly newsletter. --- There is an Afterlife, but it’s not what you expect… In this Afterlife, you enjoy the rest of eternity without worrying about scarcity of any sort. You have as much money, time, and energy as you need to do whatever you please—provided that what you want to do is something you’ve done already. In the Afterlife, you can only do things you’ve done in your previous life, with the people you knew in your previous life,...| linus.coffee
Some time ago you asked me if I would come to church with you every week, and I said, “of course.” You didn’t ask, but in that moment, I imagined you asking, “Would you believe for me?” And I imagined myself pausing a little to consider the implications of me pulling the very basis of my reality of life out from under me. “Of course,” I repeated in my imagination. Living with you was better than living the truth. You were my truth.| linus.coffee
There are higher levels of thinking to any skill. Practicing a skill is really the process of teaching your brain to think at higher levels of abstraction. A beginner chess player only thinks in terms of individual moves and positions. Move the king here, the rook there, the knight over there. But when you watch a grand master play the game, the individual moves barely register. Instead, the grand master thinks in terms of higher-level patterns – the English opening, the Sicilian, a castlin...| linus.coffee
This is an excerpt from today’s issue of my weekly newsletter. --- The universe began as an enormous breath being held. Who knows why, but whatever the reason, I’m glad it did, because I owe my existence to that fact. All my desires and ruminations are no more and no less than eddy currents generated by the gradual exhalation of our universe. And until this great exhalation is finished, my thoughts live on. In the short story Exhalation, Ted Chiang tells the tale of a scientist in a civi...| linus.coffee
I came across this quote recently, by Mark Kennedy: I don’t know what people expect to see what they look in a sketchbook, but they always seem mighty disappointed. I think people expect to see what they would see in a Hollywood version of a sketchbook. Whenever someone is sketching from life in a movie, it’s always supposed to look tossed off and effortless, but it’s really some totally finished and labored-over drawing that some artist spent hours rendering. Any real sketchbook is ful...| linus.coffee
This is an excerpt from today’s issue of my weekly newsletter. --- What makes a great conversation? Certainly there’s some degree of give and take, listening to the voice of your interlocutor and responding in kind. You want to move fluidly between topics, avoid jumping from idea to random idea without transition. In the best of times, it feels like exploring a mental landscape that you share with your partner-in-conversation, mapping out unknown territory shared by the two of you and no ...| linus.coffee
I didn’t think “a year in recap” or anything like that was worth taking up real estate on my main blog, but was curious what I wrote and what people read most of my writing in 2020, so here we are. What I wrote I write in three places today: thesephist.com, which is my main blog dotink.co, which started out as a website for my programming language Ink, but is now where I dump all my technical writing linus.coffee, which is this site. It’s new this year, and I made it to put writing th...| linus.coffee
There are a class of occupations where the job of the worker is to know and anticipate the unknown unknowns of a situation or domain. Aircraft safety engineers and investigators, for example, are tasked with anticipating emergency situations or failure modes of complex machines (aircrafts) that we might not have discovered to even be possible yet. Because commercial airliners are engineered to such rigorous standards of safety (exceptions like the 737 MAX notwithstanding), most aviation accid...| linus.coffee
Science improves our ability to control and predict the future. Music stirs emotion. Cooking produces food. What does art do? I think one reason this is an interesting question is that art usually produces an artifact, so when we think of “what is art” we think of the artifact, like Jackson Pollock’s art being the paintings or Toni Morrison’s writing being the “art” of her writing. But in science, we don’t take the conclusion of a research paper like “X gene has a Y% correlati...| linus.coffee
Timeglass is my second original album of compositions and improvisations on the piano. It was recorded in Berkeley, California in December 2020. The album is available on Spotify, Apple Music, and most other streaming services. You can also listen to it on YouTube. --- Track list Future Elegy Love, Please Remember Me Ataraxia Reunion Morning Song Precipice Unraveling Neverending| linus.coffee
This is an excerpt from today’s issue of my weekly newsletter. --- If all evidence of civilization on Earth was destroyed, and humans had to re-build society from the ground up, what would be different? Feynman reckons that pivotal scientific moments, like the discovery of the atom, will still happen in the same way. Perhaps mathematics will be similarly rediscovered. Someone told me once in response to this question, no artwork would ever be recreated. The art we create – music, stories,...| linus.coffee
Pushing Daisies, by Loote. A vocal cover, with me also on the guitar.| linus.coffee
I’ve been getting a lot of questions lately about how I manage to get so much done – side projects, essays and blog posts, music production, so on, so forth. I think people expect me to have some rigorous and productivity-boosting tactic they can employ to be more prolific, but that’s not really true. I don’t really have great tactical advice to stay productive more of the time. What I have are some ideas on how you can maximize your creative output, despite not being productive most ...| linus.coffee
I used to think that the classical computer, the universal Turing machine in our pockets and backpacks, was a one-of-a-kind invention. There is the human history before computers, and the human history after software; before, we are mortal, and after we are divine. I don’t think so anymore. Computers are powerful because they are universal machines, mechanical solutions to some generalizable large abstract class of problems. In the case of classical computers / Turing machines, this is gene...| linus.coffee
This is an excerpt from today’s issue of my weekly newsletter. --- I don’t remember much about how I got there or where I was going, but I found myself on the back of a bus last night, squeezed in between seats that just barely fit my legs and my bag. Even on the comfortable ride, I could tell the road was barely paved by the way the kicked-up gravel clackered against the sides of the bus. The bus growled on, riding the line on the two-lane road that seemed to stretch forever out into the...| linus.coffee
LAUV never gets old~ A vocal cover, with me also on the guitar. There’s some other tracks mixed in there from me playing around with GarageBand.| linus.coffee
People ask me how I get so many ideas for interesting side projects and blog posts.| linus.coffee
I’ve talked to a few different people in the last week about growing as a writer, and the process of going from “I don’t think I have anything to write about, and it takes so long” to “I’m regularly writing about interesting topics.”| linus.coffee
A vocal cover, with me also on the acoustic guitar. There’s some other tracks mixed in there from me playing around with GarageBand.| linus.coffee
On two assumptions:| linus.coffee
We can understand ideas horizontally, by studying the breadth of ideas available in a particular field. We can also study ideas vertically, by looking at the lineage of current ideas extending into the past. I think deep understanding of an idea requires both, but especially the latter. A horizontal survey of ideas gives you awareness of the status quo, the cutting edge, the current consensus. But real understanding requires knowing how ideas are connected, and how flaws and advances in past ...| linus.coffee
This is the third note I’ve written about my ideas around gap years. I think that’s probably three too many, but I also seem to keep getting questions about it. The previous notes were more about the decision to take a gap year. This one is more about what to do with it – given the immense whitespace for opportunity and choice in a gap year, how do you make the most of it? --- Some general heuristics I think are useful for navigating a time with a lot of whitespace, like a gap year. Lea...| linus.coffee
This is an excerpt from today’s issue of my weekly newsletter. --- There’s a particular flavor of silence that greets the early-morning travelers of an airport terminal. A kind of silence that whispers and echoes, waking you up from your nap on the train as you shuffle your way to a 7AM flight. The terminals are still mostly empty this early. The occasional cleaning crew sweeps by, only a few of the stores have even opened up yet. The only thing that disturbs the peace of orange sunrise p...| linus.coffee
In the six years since I’ve started blogging regularly on the Web, my philosophy on titles have barely changed. I use opaque titles, at least on my main blog where I do the bulk of my longform writing. My titles often tend to be 2-3 words long, and symbolic, where you wouldn’t really know what the title meant until you read the post itself. Compared to the more popular writing style of self-explanatory titles that are complete thoughts or questions, I think this is worth explaining. If yo...| linus.coffee
How remarkable that scars heal, that wounds close, that broken bones mend, so that we may be so bold to stand up at all. At every cut, bruise, and fracture, the army of molecules at work rushing to begin the process of re-building, re-learning, re-covering. But scars don’t un-scar, wounds don’t un-wound, bones once broken don’t un-break. Scars scar only forwards, never backwards. How beautiful that scars heal, so that we may attempt to do anything at all, to stand over a cliff, curious ...| linus.coffee
Best I’ll Ever Sing is one of my favorites from Maisie Peters, a British singer-songwriter. This is a vocal cover, with me also on guitar.| linus.coffee
My Dorm Room Fund friend John Forbes asked me an interesting question today: What’s requisite to knowing enough to go understand/(some cases) work with (close to) anything, well, at a white paper level? In other words, what are the foundational kinds of knowledge that, if we have it, can accelerate the way we learn everything else? Our conversation went many places, but I thought I’d extract an idea I landed on that seemed particularly elegant. --- I think domain-specific knowledge falls ...| linus.coffee
Formatting your writing so key info can be scanned easily and read quickly is an extremely underrated skill. Often, but not always, whether a text is formatted for scannability determines whether 10% or 100% of readers understand your main points. The information formatting rule of thumb In general, people visually scan text in the order: Top of document > Start of sections > Bolded words > Start of lines This implies that, for best scannability, we should place an overview at the top so the ...| linus.coffee
To talk about what no-code is good for, we need to first take a digression on what makes no-code fundamentally different from “yes-code” software. The grain of abstractions Software – yes-code software – has been around for a while. One of the things we’ve learned as an industry is how to write software that gracefully evolves. We’re not perfect – sad, legacy systems still proliferate – but we as a technical industry have learned how to build and evolve software systems agains...| linus.coffee
I think Twitter has a way of studying an identity in isolation, apart from the person. In other apps, you usually see someone’s life unfold, following them in their many different aspects. But Twitter, for one reason or another, seems to have an invisible hand that guides everyone’s account and profile to be about exactly one thing, whether it’s coding or startups or something else. I think this happens because, when you start talking about something and it “sticks” with people, Twi...| linus.coffee
OOP :: data : FP :: functions In object-oriented programs, we compose abstractions by composing data structures – this is composition in the space dimension a program, if you will. In functional programs, we compose abstractions by composing functions (subroutines, processes, whatver you call them) – this is composition in the time dimension of a program. I think this dual is conceptually interesting and can be useful for thinking about the structure of large programs that are macro-OOP v...| linus.coffee
Paraphrasing from my tweet from last November: It seems to me like investing [money] with compounding interest rather than spending it on travel / learning isn’t smart if the experience you’re investing in compounds in value over lifetime faster than market interest rate. I bet it’s more than just travel or education where this is the case. A university education costs a fortune in the United States. But most people who have the chance to invest in it do without a hesitation, because th...| linus.coffee
I first wrote I Hope You Find It for guitar and piano, with vocals added later. It’s me on all three tracks. The production quality isn’t quite where I’d like it to be, but I had left all my recording equipment back home when I was stranded during a pandemic, so I had to make do with a Macbook. The piece is available as a single on Spotify, Apple Music, and most other streaming services. You can also listen to it on YouTube.| linus.coffee
Here, I mean “hacker” in the sense of “hackerspace” or “hacking on a new idea,” not in the sense of an offensive corporate or military espionage. Hacker (sub)culture as it emerged in the 80’s and blossomed in the 90’s in places like Silicon Valley and MIT and Bell Labs. Hacker culture is inherently American. Hackers generally care about open source software and open platforms. Hackers are ruthlessly entrepreneurial – if they have a problem, the build a solution, and then sha...| linus.coffee
I’ve noticed in the last few months of complete schedule-freedom that I achieve highest average productivity over time, when I work in what I’m calling long bursts. A long burst is a long, focused, mostly-continuous session of work where my brain is thinking about a single problem and nothing else. Sometimes I’ll go eat or sleep, but my brain is still focused on the one problem during those times. I’m able to focus on that single problem because during those times, I defer responding ...| linus.coffee
tools iPad Pro (2018, 11-inch) & Apple Pencil Paper by WeTransfer| linus.coffee
tools iPad Pro (2018, 11-inch) & Apple Pencil Paper by WeTransfer process| linus.coffee
tools iPad Pro (2018, 11-inch) & Apple Pencil Paper by WeTransfer process| linus.coffee
I think in order for bookstores and public libraries to survive, they have to change and reframe their service to their communities. Many of the functions of a library – book rental, discovery, copying, studying – have been replaced by online equivalents. So what becomes of them? I think they’re too valuable, both practically and symbolically, to just do away with. Instead, I think we should evolve bookstores and public libraries to become galleries and communal spaces that function as ...| linus.coffee
This is a longer-form response to a tweet from my friend Steve: Are there things (concepts, feelings, thoughts, materials) that actually cannot be described in words? Or are some things just hard to describe but could be described with enough patience & vocabulary? In other words, indescribability: — steveflanagan.eth (@flevestanagan) June 16, 2020 I think in a strictly formal, theory-sense: Let’s define a “description” as a finite sequence of morphemes. Any human language necessarily...| linus.coffee
To convince the world, you must first convince a single individual. Convincing the world of something – the action – is comprised of many small instances of convincing individual people of something. That is the atom of the act of convincing: to convince the world, first, start with a single individual. Many such acts are atomic. To inspire the world is to inspire many individual people. You can’t inspire the world without having inspired a single person. To entertain the world is to en...| linus.coffee
More and more Software-as-a-Service companies are selling their business model transparency as a feature: Unlike [competitors], the way we make money is straightforward. We give you X, and you give us Y dollars in return. No shady third parties, no advertisers. You aren’t the product, and we’ll keep to this promise indefinitely. This feels like a part of the tide of backlash against the tech giants that have built their wealth and markets precisely on obscuring exactly where value is bein...| linus.coffee
Here’s a thing most Americans don’t think about. When American companies export their product or build a global digital product, they design American cultural norms into it. And in that act of exporting it globally, the culture is being exported alongside the product or user expereince. To use it, the customer must subscribe at some level to that culture baked into the product design. I think this is a little-understood part of every export/import relationship. Cultural norms are designed...| linus.coffee
tools iPad Pro (2018, 11-inch) & Apple Pencil Paper by WeTransfer process| linus.coffee
tools iPad Pro (2018, 11-inch) & Apple Pencil Paper by WeTransfer process| linus.coffee
Instagram stories and Tiktoks are to films and longform videos, what tweets are to essays and books. Shortform media like stories-style video/photo sequences and tweets are easier to consume in the context of day-to-day life, easier to share, and easier to remix. I think a confluence of these factors are making shortform media the kind of popular, collective creative format that longform media could never be. Instagram stories, in particular, strikes at a critical intersection between creativ...| linus.coffee
I’ve been getting more and more questions recently of the form: I heard that you’ve taken a few breaks from school during college. Given that [my school] is going to be mostly or entirely online this fall semester, should I consider taking this semester off? I don’t want to pay full price for an online-university experience, but I also don’t know how to navigate a gap year. For the record, I’m going back to school this fall, and I think most people considering it should probably do ...| linus.coffee
tools iPad Pro (2018, 11-inch) & Apple Pencil Paper by WeTransfer process| linus.coffee
Staying together, apart. tools iPad Pro (2018, 11-inch) & Apple Pencil Paper by WeTransfer| linus.coffee
There are two pivotal moments in the lifecycle of a new idea: Inspiration -> Question This is a step often ignored, and critical if done right and consciously. Ideas usually don’t start out as correct solutions to a problem, or even an accurate and helpful expression of a question. Often, it’s just an inspiration. Maybe it’s the identification of a trend or an itch or pain point in your life you want to scratch. Regardless of the cause, we should take more time and intent when transform...| linus.coffee
Writing and programming are two of the most abstract activities humans engage in. We take abstract ideas – more mathematical and precise in programming, more organic and metaphorical in writing – and compose them together, group and categorize them, place them against each other. We stack abstract concepts on top of other abstract concepts to produce some effect in the real world. But until that effect reaches a computer output device or a human mind, writing and software both exist in th...| linus.coffee
Back when I was getting really into linguistics, I was taken by the idea of “untranslatable words” – words that represent an idea in a particular culture that just doesn’t exist in another, so it’s impossible to translate into a single other word. The Korean phrase “지켜줄게” is one such untranslatable phrase. It means something in between “I’ll protect you” and “I got your back” and “I’ll be here for you”, but not quite any one of those. It promises trust an...| linus.coffee
Illustration for gratitude. tools iPad Pro (2018, 11-inch) & Apple Pencil Paper by WeTransfer process| linus.coffee
At time of writing, social media technology of today is about the medium – how we create content digitally, how we distribute it, to whom we make it accessible – and how we fund free-to-access social media sites with virality and network effects. The medium and funding model have been the focus of innovation in the first two decades of the 2000s. Facebook, for example, puts the content at the center. Each post is substantial, often media-rich, usually at least a few sentences. Users decid...| linus.coffee
It’s a trend I’ve noticed recently, but I’m not particularly interested in going down this product-market rabbit hole myself. People like to curate what they’re reading, watching, and listening to, and they like to find out what their friends are reading, writing, and watching. Services like Pocket, Substack, Pointer.io, and even Twitter are conduits for this kind of curation and discovery, but none seem to have cracked it yet. Curation of stories, news, ideas, people, and opinions. W...| linus.coffee
Better than to simply know the world is to understand it. Better than to simply understand the world is to feel it. Better than to feel the world is to fall in love with it.| linus.coffee
Good communities are three things. Good communities are effective empathy distribution networks, as opposed to efficient value transaction networks. I think the working world and startup sphere have hijacked the word “community” to mean any group of people who exchange some value or information on a regular basis, but that’s the most basic, flimsy kind of community. Members of a good, strong community are bound by their shared belief in and care for each other as humans. Communities lik...| linus.coffee
We perceive time in at least three different ways. First is chronological. We measure time in scientifically regulated intervals, and demarcate events in our lives and on the calendar with counted numbers that label moments according to a clock. This is the most objective marker of time we have. Second is with respect to other lifetimes. We talk about how people who came before us “live in the past” and how the younger generations are “living in the future.” We improve society “for ...| linus.coffee
Life after midnight, in quarantine, physically apart, virtually connected. tools iPad Pro (2018, 11-inch) & Apple Pencil Paper by WeTransfer process| linus.coffee
tools iPad Pro (2018, 11-inch) & Apple Pencil Paper by WeTransfer process| linus.coffee
tools iPad Pro (2018, 11-inch) & Apple Pencil Paper by WeTransfer process| linus.coffee
tools iPad Pro (2018, 11-inch) & Apple Pencil Paper by WeTransfer process| linus.coffee
tools iPad Pro (2018, 11-inch) & Apple Pencil Paper by WeTransfer process| linus.coffee
Memory Palace is my first original album of compositions and improvisations on the piano. It was recorded in Berkeley, California in late 2019. The album is available on Spotify, Apple Music, and most other streaming services. You can also listen to it on YouTube. --- Track list Intro The Seer Ray Casting Expedition Select One Most Significant Bit Strange Attractors Berkeley Two’s Complement Help Me Remember Skye It’s a Promise| linus.coffee
tools iPad Pro (2018, 11-inch) & Apple Pencil Paper by WeTransfer process| linus.coffee
