Notes

The more you know!

Son: "Let's watch McLintock!"

I stay up entirely too late some nights.

This is handy.

FSD on a Tesla is the greatest vehicle upgrade I've made to date. When you can drive without providing supervision, it will radically change travel. When you can set a destination and sleep in one, it will end significant regional air travel.

Son: "I want to try watching Happy Days."

I was 18yo, a freshman studying engineering. I woke up later than usual for my morning class and rushed to get there before being late.

As I hustled across the large open parking lot between my dorm and the building my classroom was in, I saw a classmate walking back to the dorm. He started yelling. As I approached, I heard him say, “They just blew it up!” I had no idea what he was talking about. “Blew up what?” I asked. “The twin towers! They just f*&$ing blew it up!”

I kept walking to class and walked in to see a mostly empty room with a few students huddled around a TV watching the news. That’s when I learned what my classmate had been going on about. The first plane had just hit the first tower in New York. I would continue to watch the news that day and watch the carnage unfold.

I emailed my uncle, who was in the military at the time, to ask him what he knew. He was in intelligence. I remember him writing back and telling me that war was coming and to pray.

I went to the Christian student center at the church I was attending. I spent the day with friends talking about how this would change things. In a lot of ways, this was the end of my childhood. It was the end of the time between the Cold War and the wars against terror. The US was a hegemon in peace alone but for a short time.

The smartest people I know are unafraid to ask questions and appear ignorant. Sort-of-smart people stop too quickly when they hit roadblocks.

I see this often in my line of work. Someone will do a trial of our product and, instead of asking questions, will white-knuckle reading the documentation, and when they get stuck, assume it can't be done and quit. It drives me insane.

I should say there are tiers to practical intelligence, and this band drives me nuts the most. These are usually people that are just smart enough to do something kind of technical. They also are just smart enough that they start to think of everyone around them as not particularly smart and behave condescendingly. They're not quite smart enough, though, to know how to work around these roadblocks.

I was on a call recently where we were getting feedback on how we did compared to other players in the market, and they dinged us for something we did. It required a small configuration change that wasn't obvious to them as people unfamiliar with the product. So they simply said we couldn't do it. I immediately turned it up, shared my screen, and said, "We can absolutely do it! It's right here!" Crickets. Problem solved, but this kind of interaction was constant.

Be smart. Ask more questions. Definitely ask questions when you've hit a roadblock on a problem.

Going back to work after a long weekend is always an entertaining exercise in watching people realize they aren't going to jam two days of work into one and moving early Tuesday meetings further out to catch up.

The hardest part of any great books program is simply reading the great books. That sounds obvious, maybe, but it's extraordinarily challenging to read these works if you're not used to their styles.

I have made some progress on the classics and have been encouraging my son to do them using graphic novels as a soft introduction to them.

Discussion and lecture are important here, but I honestly think a good dialog with a frontier LLM would give you 85% of what's useful from those engagements.

It's that important time in a young boy's life when he first watches Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

I buy items off my son's teachers' wishlist each year to hopefully bribe them into treating my son well throughout the year.

Don't get me wrong, I want to help them out, make sure the class has all the goodies they need, and ensure they aren't lacking for educational materials, but I also drop a few hundred bucks each year, hoping that it will earn a little grace each year.

I don't know how much it helps, and bribes are fleeting, but there seems to be enough evidence that if you do something nice for folks, they will return the favor. It doesn't always work, and we've had our usual share of good and challenging teacher interactions. It's also not something I can easily A/B test, but it's my hope that, in the same way a utility just tends to work, in the background the investment is paying dividends.

I was wrong about not wanting children at 23.

I was freshly married and talking to coworkers at the university. A couple of student workers were talking to me, and I was pontificating on how I thought there were enough children in the world and I didn't need to add to the number.

I was wrong.

Having kids isn't in the cards for everyone, but if it is for you and you've thought it's not for you and you're young, my advice is to simply give it a little time and you'll feel differently. Having my son and raising him with his cousins has been the best part of my life.

We're in a fertility crisis across the globe, but I'm afraid the seed of it was sown a generation or more ago, and we're now reaping what we sowed, and it will take another generation of messaging to fix.

You should go to every parent-teacher conference meeting you can as a general rule.

I’m constantly amazed at how few parents take advantage of this opportunity to meet their child’s teacher and have an open dialogue about their education and progression.

Our son’s school sent out a list of signups, and of the nearly 60 kids in his grade, only one-third or less took up the opportunity.

You should translate your own version of the Bible now that AI is so good. I’ve started mine. I’m working through the Gospel of Mark at the moment. I already have James 2, all of 1 Timothy, Matthew 5–7, and John. Next up will be Luke/Acts.

It’s not a matter of speed but rather using different texts to test and evaluate how I want the translation to flow.

For example, in John 21, the words for love get switched up when Jesus is restoring Peter. Jesus changes from agape to philia, and Jesus starts with agape and, on the last ask, switches. In English, this usually always comes out as just love. So how do you deal with this? It’s a fun exercise.

The guy at Moe’s taking our order ignored my son ordering to tell me they were out of chicken. Adults like to ignore kids. We have encouraged our son to be independent from an early age, including ordering his own food. We regularly have to tell people to stop ignoring our son and that he is capable of ordering on his own.

We lament how antisocial young people can be, but we do ourselves no favors ignoring them. No doubt, this is a vicious cycle, and I hold no great disdain for this employee. He is just a sign of the times.

Tyler Cowen has an old TEDx talk about the dangerous power of stories. I think this could be one such example.



https://youtu.be/RoEEDKwzNBw?si=5KWNyoBGyY8ETqrW