Archive for November, 2007

Only do things that you like

November 27th, 2007

and you will do them well. If you don’t like something, then you are doing it wrong, thinking about it wrong.
Paul Graham:
“If you think something’s supposed to hurt, you’re less likely to notice if you’re doing it wrong.”
[?]

Stuff

November 26th, 2007

Stuff sucks life out of you. Americans are brainwashed to consume more and more every day. Unfortunately, this consumerism is spreading around the world. It should stop. Although I’ve wanted to describe it here, I could not figure out a clear way to express the weightlessness I feel after having eliminated [...]

bored

November 24th, 2007

From Hofstadter’s Godel, Escher, Bach:

That is, it seems to me, a general principle: you get bored with something not when you have exhausted its repertoire of behavior, but when you have mapped out the limits of the space that contains its behavior.

I’ll call it Hofstadter’s Law. I think that Hofstadter wanted to call something [...]

ASUS Eee PC

November 23rd, 2007

ASUS recently released their Eee PC. It is a laptop that emphasizes computing for everyone. It is small (tiny), unbelievably light, energy efficient, cheap, and it runs Linux. Actually, it can be all of these things because it runs Linux. A Windows Vista computer would require more big and heavy energy-sucking [...]

Amazon Kindle Nearly Perfect

November 22nd, 2007

Amazon recently released their Kindle eBook reader, and it’s nearly perfect.
Imagine that you have a 6″ small, unusually light, paperback in your hand or backpack everywhere you go. Instead of that paperback just being a single copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, it’s truly magical. Flip the page, and you can [...]

Tiles

November 21st, 2007

When someone searches for your name on Google, you don’t know what they might find. They might find an article or two in which you were featured, or they might find a random post you made to an open source project. Or, they might find someone else and not know he is not [...]

Returns year 2

November 18th, 2007

I bought and held QID for a few weeks until the NASDAQ dropped. QID is a twice leveraged short of the NASDAQ. The NASDAQ was overpriced, I made an easy eleven percent.
But I want to ensure that I’m actually doing well, and that ostensible success is not due just to availability bias. [...]

Telecommunications

November 18th, 2007

Telecom companies (AT&T, Verizon, Telefonica, and so on) undermine capitalism. They always act either monopolistically or oligopolistically. If there were any real competition in this space, then our Internet capabilities would blaze at gigabit speeds, text messages would be free, our phones would have myriad more features, and calling anywhere in the world [...]

Zen

November 2nd, 2007

In Godel, Escher, Bach’s chapter on Zen:
Here is another koan which aims to break the mind of logic:

The student Doko came to a Zen master, and said: “I am seeking the truth. In what state of mind should I train myself, so as to find it?”

     Said the master, “There is no mind, so you [...]