Emrah’s Notes

Riffs & Ponders (2024)

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  • Thoughts, ideas and dreams are not easily lost. Even if you can’t recall them to your conscious mind, they are still deep within the subconscious. They will resurface when triggered. It’s harder to forget or change than most people realize
  • Taxes are like nature in reverse. While each seed turns into a new plant that generates many more seeds exponentially, each $ gets decimated when spent as government captures more and more of it
  • Mastery is not perfection but a series of adjustments to achieve asymptote
  • Age is not just a number. It’s a proxy for life experiences, biases, perspectives and expectations
  • Some events are more likely to happen as time passes, like an earthquake on a fault line. Others are the opposite: if you applied for an audition and you haven’t heard yet, it’s less likely you’ll get the call tomorrow. It’s important to figure out which kind of event is at hand
  • It’s hard to know what one would do until in the middle of the situation for real. Whatever you think you might do before it actually happens to you is a mental simulation and it is more than likely inaccurate
  • If you hold back questions because you worry about looking stupid, what you don’t know will show in your work, people will figure you out anyway. Might as well ask and have a chance at getting your work done well
  • Majority rules != democracy, at least it shouldn’t be. Democracy means every voice matters and counts. So instead of a single majority winning over everyone else, majority of every voice/party should have to work together and agree together to resolve issues at hand
  • So if there are three parties A, B and C, majority of each party has to agree and approve to pass a major, i.e. 50%+1 vote per party! “But that’s very hard!”. Yes, probably, and that’s true democracy. “Every group is represented” is democracy!
  • How come old style analog clocks and watches did not have an arm for “day of year”? It would move slowly most of the time but you’d be able to tell how much of the year is gone by at a glance
  • Airlines need to ask weight and height, and allow single seat purchase based on BMI. No need to get offended, it’s a simple matter of volume
  • People enjoy movies, shows, books where there is at least one character they can see as being themselves or wanting to be them or recognize being in their shoes. It’s even better if that character is the protagonist
  • Many people recommend gratitude exercises. But how do you know if it’s really working? For me, it’s the distinct feeling of appreciation I get, feeling truly lucky for having something in my life
  • If what you do can be scripted, it can be automated and you will be replaced, with a robot, app, LLM, or someone cheaper
  • Creativity is productive hallucinations and hallucinations are unproductive creativity
  • When in doubt, be like Data; curious, inquisitive, kind, calm, unassuming, unbiased, helpful. Despite being an android and trying to become more human, ironically he’s a great role model for humanity
  • TFS #702 has an amazing tidbit at the start about social debt. It made me realize it is not lots of money that is evil. It’s perfectly fine to live in a $100M house as living in a $300K one. What is evil is separating people as those who can and who can’t. Another way to put it is separating people as those who are “worthy” and those who are not is the problem!
  • Investing is a terrible way to try to make money for most people because it is a lot of work to find companies that can generate good results and it takes them years or decades to get there whereas bad things can happen very quickly
  • If you think starting a company is too much, you have no business investing in individual stocks
  • If you want to be able to spend $10,000 the way it feels to spend $100 right now, you need to be making 100X more
  • Plastic decorations remain the same, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, forever.. Don’t be a plastic decoration!
  • When being “first” is not a competitive advantage
  • There is no such thing as passive income. One always has to work on the product, at least to maintain it. What there is though is async income which refers to the fact that money rolls into one’s bank account independent of the hours worked to generate the product and may keep rolling in long after the work is done
  • “Most everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Most everything we see is a perspective, not the truth” — Marcus Aurelius
  • It’s amazing how much you think you know until you try to write about it, or try to teach it to someone else
  • Happiness is “happenstance“, that is, a discrete event that triggers positive mood and dissipates over time. “Joy” on the other hand is a less pronounced but continuous state of peaceful mind and far more preferable to happiness
  • Nothing happens like in the movies. That’s why they make them and we watch them eagerly
  • If you are not happy where you are now, you are not going to be happy somewhere else. The unhappy travels with you. It’ll be a different kind of unhappy though
  • Idea: a jigsaw puzzle with high quality low power screens attached to each piece, and one can upload different scenes to it so different puzzles can be played with the same puzzle set
  • The Necessity of Grinding Through Concrete Examples Before Jumping Up a Level of Abstraction
  • If you travel a lot, especially by plane, you remain ever so slightly younger than those who don’t
  • Companies say they need to generate profit to invest in growth. That used to make sense to me until it didn’t. Any growth they would invest in, they would have already done by spending the money they made, and it would be recorded as expense.

    Any money that goes towards profits is money they couldn’t figure out how to spend and stayed in their wallet. Obviously this is good to weather any future challenges that come up but saying that it is for future expansion is misleading.

    Just say what it is: we don’t know what to do with this money we call “profit”, we’ll think of something.. maybe..
  • The purpose of an interview isn’t to try to fail the candidate, any more than the purpose of a date is to see if you can find something wrong with your partner. The goal is to learn about them and their skills. Whether they succeed in solving your puzzle or not is secondary to learning as much about them as possible