2023-08-18

Where to begin? I recently was browsing through YouTube and got to the bottom of all of the usual suspects and started into the random suggestions. Whereupon one of the first recommendations was something with an outrageously clickbaity title of something like “I’ve been journaling for 13,000 days - here’s what I’ve learnt”

Needless to say, I watched it all 13 minutes of the thing. There was nothing new there that I haven’t seen before. But it did remind me that it is a practice that I should restart again. During my formative years of high school and college I blogged semi-regularly as a form of carthacis on a since defunct platform, called Bebo. I somehow wish I had managed to capture a dump of all of those memories before they disappeared in the digital ether, but alas, c’est la vie.

Over the years, my online blog moved online to a Wordpress site with sporadic moments of activity. Notable towards the end of university, and again once I moved to Israel.

Then within Canada, I tried “Morning pages” for a while. But the time commitment of 2 sides per day removed the fun of the thing - plus writing by hand these days is frustrating slow. After some Tim Ferriss recommendations, I also tried the 5-minute journal for a month or so upon moving to Montreal. But that didn’t stick either, but I felt that was concentrated enough. Or rather not enough of a time commitment to really have much inertia.

So here I am, the week of my 36th birthday, making a pledge. For the next month, I will commit to writing for 10 minutes per day. No jumping off point. No prompts. No real editing. I want this to be as easy as possible. I want this to be a stream of consciousness.

With a little time, perhaps I shall start to include a weekly, monthly, quarterly review process so that I can notice some general trends in what is going on.

For the sake of confidentiality, I shall keep names vague, randomly assigned and mostly in the abstract. After all, I mostly want this to be a reflection of my inner thoughts and not externally focused. Similarly, to avoid a recency bias and having people jumping in with commentary or support, I think I shall introduce an artificial delay of a few weeks between writing and posts being published.

I don’t want this to turn into a self-indulgent therapy session, just musings on a virtual page. And with that, concludes by first 10 minutes. Were they spectacular? Not by any stretch. But maybe, one day, my boys will find these scrawls and they might understand me better.

Newer post

2023-08-20

What distinguishes you from other developers?

I've built data pipelines across 3 continents at petabyte scales, for over 15 years. But the data doesn't matter if we don't solve the human problems first - an AI solution that nobody uses is worthless.

Are the robots going to kill us all?

Not any time soon. At least not in the way that you've got imagined thanks to the Terminator movies. Sure somebody with a DARPA grant is always going to strap a knife/gun/flamethrower on the side of a robot - but just like in Dr.Who - right now, that robot will struggle to even get out of the room, let alone up some stairs.

But AI is going to steal my job, right?

A year ago, the whole world was convinced that AI was going to steal their job. Now, the reality is that most people are thinking 'I wish this POC at work would go a bit faster to scan these PDFs'.

When am I going to get my self-driving car?

Humans are complicated. If we invented driving today - there's NO WAY IN HELL we'd let humans do it. They get distracted. They text their friends. They drink. They make mistakes. But the reality is, all of our streets, cities (and even legal systems) have been built around these limitations. It would be surprisingly easy to build self-driving cars if there were no humans on the road. But today no one wants to take liability. If a self-driving company kills someone, who's responsible? The manufacturer? The insurance company? The software developer?