Category: Life Design

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Life Design

At some level, the details are not transmissible

We ask Warren Buffet why he invested in a company and he can try and create a mental construct as to how he thinks and how he invests in a company. But there are just as many details to Buffett’s activities, when he decides what to invest in and how he lives his life and how he thinks, as there are to Roger Federer’s body running around a tennis court, hitting a ball. At some level, the details are not transmissible. They’re not copyable.

[co-interviewer/ee] The things that you do greatest are the things that you know not how you do.

– Conquering the Mind, podcast with NavalR and KapilG

Engineers like myself value first-principles thinking. Following the path from observations back to first principles is useful. When it comes to building something back up from those principles, you’re best on your own.

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Audience as Capital Life Design Wellness when Always-On Writing

Mental health Whatsapp group

A couple of days ago I started a Whatsapp group about mental health, something that’s rather important to me.

Here is the link to the Whatsapp channel.

And here is how I describe the channel:

Links to articles and short commentary on living a less rushed, less stressful, less distracted life. A shared journey from surviving to thriving. From someone who’s been through the lows of burnout, depression and chronic pain.

On this site, we explore mental health in the context of technology under the tag Wellness When Always-on.

My first message on the channel referenced a quote I had linked to in a blog post from almost exactly a year ago:

Burnout as a workplace injury

This is the second Whatsapp group I have recently begun publishing on, the first one being one on bitcoin, cryptocurrency and decentralised finance, which now has subscribers from ~13 countries.

Cryptocurrency Whatsapp group

(Featured Image Photo Credit: Laura Ockel/Unsplash)

Categories
Life Design The Next Computer Wellness when Always-On

iPhone home screen, March 2021

(Previously:August, September, October, November, December, January, February home screens)

I’m very nearly at a home screen setup that doesn’t change at all month on month.

The only change from February has been changing the Shortcuts widgets on the home screen from two 1×1 widgets to a single 2×2 widget. That means instead of two Shortcuts, I have four.

The two new Shortcuts are water consumption and meditation logs.

As temperatures rise in the tropics here, I’m prone to headaches from even slight dehydration – these are different from my migraines. We have discussed water tracking via the Fitbit app earlier, but I’m taking a break from wearing a device constantly on my wrist, and I want an alternative way to track my water habits – so this shortcut simply brings up a pre-set list of water levels for me to tap, and then logs it to a comma-separated file in iCloud Drive along with the timestamp. So I can track not just my daily water consumption levels but also the number of drinks and their time.

The other is my meditation log. Years ago, I had a pretty solid meditation routine. It helped me during some very challenging years dealing with mental health issues. While I’m much healthier now I’d like to get back to a daily twenty-to-thirty minute meditation practice. This Shortcut, which I have had a long time but rarely used, is to be invoked after I have completed the meditation session. It presents a prompt for how long I meditated, and then a pre-set list from 0 to 3 to log (subjective) quality, zero being no meditative state at all. So far I’m usually at a one. This is logged to another comma-separated value file with the timestamp. Much like water, I can not just plot my meditation streak, but also its quality, number per day and the time of day I typically meditate. The infrastructure exists, now to execute.

(ends)

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Life Design Making Money Online Products and Design Wellness when Always-On

The Precariat and today’s tech age

The precariat is a neologism for a social class formed by people suffering from precarity, which means existing without predictability or security, affecting material or psychological welfare. The term is a portmanteau merging precarious with proletariat.

Unlike the proletariat class of industrial workers in the 20th century who lacked their own means of production and hence sold their labour to live, members of the precariat are only partially involved in labour and must undertake extensive unremunerated activities that are essential if they are to retain access to jobs and to decent earnings. Classic examples of such unpaid activities include continually having to search for work (including preparing for and attending job interviews), as well as being expected to be perpetually responsive to calls for “gig” work (yet without being paid an actual wage for being “on call”).

The hallmark of the precariat class is the condition of lack of job security, including intermittent employment or underemployment and the resultant precarious existence.

– Precariat, Wikipedia.

We usually ascribe the ability of technology-first companies to disrupt existing industries to the fact that tech brings the marginal costs to service customers down to nearly zero. Tech-first companies can ‘scale’, get things done more efficiently: cheaper, faster, with fewer errors and people.

Another, darker side of many types of technology companies is that they externalise costs that were usually absorbed by more traditional companies.

These costs are often borne by employees themselves. This is more obvious in the ‘gig’ economy, where companies have fought hard to have their drivers, delivery persons and other roles classified as contractors so they wouldn’t be required by law to receive all the benefits employees were due. But this is also evident at several other tech companies, especially those that have moved to remote work (or were remote-first to begin with). Many companies have employees pay for their own computers, phone and equipment, internet, power, and their own home office while saving on rent, IT and utilities.

The precariat isn’t a consequence of the Tech age or tech companies. Its emergence and persistence are more than anything the symptoms of an inadequate welfare system which itself, as Wikipedia article suggests, is a result of “neoliberal capitalism”.

But it is also true that the very things that make some types of technology companies efficient and innovative are those that create precarious employment.

(Featured Image Photo Credit: Carl Campbell/Unsplash)

Categories
Life Design Products and Design The Next Computer

This ten year old Macbook Air

A short comment on the incredible durability of my mid-2011 Macbook Air. I bought it shortly after its release, so it’s nearly ten years old and still going strong.

It’s on its second battery, the logic board has had to be replaced [1], and some key combos work either with only the left or only the right shift keys. It’s also the last machine with the Magsafe 1 charging port, so I guard my two chargers with my life. But it runs just fine as an everyday machine. I’ve had more go wrong with me this past decade.

Replacing the logic board led to the unfortunate loss of the serial number and therefore the capability for Mac OS to list the vintage)
The detailed hardware report correctly identifies the machine as a Macbook Air 4,2 – which is the mid-2011 model

This was my first Mac machine and a return to machines with good build quality after a three year gap. My main machine used to be an IBM Thinkpad R51 – pre-Lenovo – until it was stolen in 2008. It had excellent driver support for Linux even back then. In the interregnum I used, unhappily, a series of Dell laptops. The Mac, and Mac OS, was such an improvement that I have stuck to it since.

Speaking of Mac OS, this machine shipped with OS X Lion. It’s since run Mountain Lion, Mavericks, Yosemite, El Capitan, Sierra and High Sierra, which is the last supported OS. That is seven operating system releases over seven years. Mac OS is backwards-compatible enough that the most recent versions of almost all my everyday software runs on High Sierra (it also helps that my software needs are modest and include many open source tools).

Nearly a year ago, I wrote about Apple’s laptops:

These machines appeal to me because they’re such a terrific example of sustainability. Apple may release new laptops and revisions every year but you don’t have to buy them that often. In fact you can go five years, even ten depending on what you use your computer for. The relatively high price you pay up-front translates to many years of trouble-free use. The ‘cost per wear‘ equivalent of Apple’s laptops is extremely low.

– Oldie but goodie, April 2020

My everyday machine is a mid-2012 unibody Macbook Pro I got for free as a hand-me-down, which will itself be ten years old next year. That machine is a lot more powerful than this Air, and I’ve upgraded its hardware more than once. It’s clear to me I’d have spent a lot more on Dell laptops over this last decade than I did on these two Macs, even including repairs and upgrades.

To close, no one described better than Terry Pratchett why I love my old, wonky Macbooks:

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”

― Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms: The Play

Categories
Data Custody Decentralisation and Neutrality Life Design Privacy and Anonymity Wellness when Always-On

The Custodial Internet

This New York Times article talks to people who own bitcoin but cannot access them because they’ve forgotten the keys to their bitcoin wallets. Some of these people have all but lost thousands of bitcoin, which are worth hundreds of millions of dollars today. I personally know someone who was gifted a hundred or so bitcoin when they were worth a dollar each, and has since been unable to recall how to access them.

The genius of bitcoin – and therefore the problem – is that has no issuer, like a central bank. Inherently, there is no equivalent of a bank account that holds bitcoin, and no bank that you can visit or call to have your password restored. It is as decentralised as the Internet is, and people have over and over extolled bitcoin as being able to be your own bank.

But one man’s freedom is another man’s overhead. As more people hold bitcoin and other cryptocurrency, they will turn to entities to manage it for them. Specialised cryptocurrency custodial services have existed for years now, and mainstream financial institutions like Fidelity already offers it. J P Morgan is seriously evaluating it; a solution from the 130 year old Northern Trust is pending approval. It’s likely that between new and old world financial entities, most cryptocurrency will be held in custody like more traditional securitised assets.

Digitally-native things are alike in this regard. You can own them if you like, but it’s a lot easier to have a third party hold them in custody for you.

Twenty years ago it was highly uncommon for the entity that gave you your email address to give you any sort of storage service for your email. You’d download your email to your computer through POP3 and it’d be wiped off the email provider’s servers . You truly owned your email – and were responsible for it. Today most people don’t even have a email client on their laptops or desktops, preferring to use web-based email with data stored entirely online. Even the email app on your phone doesn’t store all email offline, only the most recent. Your email provider is also your email custodian.

IRC messaging was similar. Many private/hobbyist IRC servers simply didn’t have the capacity to store chats. It was your IRC client stored chat logs offline, limited only by your computer’s hard drive size. But today, chat apps like Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp store chat logs entirely online, even if they claim they are end to end encrypted.

In the early days of digital cameras – the 1990s and 2000s, your photo library would exist solely on your hard drive. You had total control over the import and organisation of your photos – and consequently had total responsibility. My desktop machine crashed in 2008, leaving me with no photos from before that time – a terrible loss. Now, chances are you use either iCloud Photos or Google Photos for the massive amounts of photos your phone takes, and leave organisation to their AI while paying for online storage. They are your photo and memory custodians.

Finally, your documents, contacts, calendars all have online custodians, usually but not always Apple or Google. This is even though you could store them on your hard drive or self-host your sync server, it’s just too much work for most people.

Whether we realise it or not, whether we like it or not, we live in the Custodial Internet. We pay our custodians in cash or in data, often both.

Like people will doubtless do with bitcoin, we should evaluate custodians for our other data carefully. That data holds our relationships, our memories, our creative output, our wealth, our plans – in sum, our life.

Categories
Life Design Personal Finance

Five steps to building a positive investing habit – the video

Back in August 2020 I described “five steps to building a positive investing habit” that described how to efficiently set up and automate monthly investments for yourself. Recently, in December 2020, I spoke about it in a thirty minute talk.

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Audience as Capital Discovery and Curation Life Design Making Money Online

Unlived lives and wormholes

This four thousand-plus word article in the New Yorker – about considering the alternate lives we could have lived if we’d made different choices – is a good longread as this year comes to a close.

This bit interested me:

The nature of work deepens the problem. “Unlike the agricultural and industrial societies that preceded it,” Miller writes, our “professional society” is “made up of specialized careers, ladders of achievement.” You make your choice, forgoing others: year by year, you “clamber up into your future,” thinking back on the ladders unclimbed.

This is by and large true. I had held for a while that I’d have a career in computer architecture and operating systems, either designing chips or OSes that ran on them. Instead I’ve ended up working with early stage startups across a bunch of fields including in finance. And while I’ve stayed in tech, it’s no longer practical to switch to my earlier, specialised tech career.

At the same time, the growth of no-code tools that bring fixed costs down, the proliferation of distribution channels to build your own audience, and several alternate means of financing (one, two) means that know-how and technical skills as barriers to entry are falling every day.

Five years ago the quote from the article would mostly hold; your career would be a journey down an eternally narrowing funnel. But today there are an increasing number of wormholes out of that funnel. Curiosity and passion are now at least as valuable as tech kn0w-how and access to capital.

Categories
Life Design Wellness when Always-On

The confidence of no

I’m becoming more conscious about my attention on a day-to-day basis. Several times during the day I myself evaluating whether what I am engaged in at that moment is worth my attention.

It’s often most relevant to when I find myself skimming through quote-unquote content, or watching TV on the iPad, but also when I’m having phone or chat conversations at or outside of work: have we reached diminishing returns on this conversation? Is this important enough to hold my attention? There’s an awareness of the temptation of multi-tasking.

Contrastingly, when I find myself thinking through or dwelling on an idea, I ask whether I should continue to indulge it or make a note and get on with my day.

Today I came across this article titled “How to find focus“. The writer says that they have found focus by saying “no to obligations or opportunities that I would have easily accepted before”, but it’s what follows that’s more interesting:

The most significant change in my thinking has been that I have a lot of conviction now that the few things I’m spending my time on – university, writing, side projects – are right for me.

Bingo. It’s hard to answer the questions above if you don’t have some level of confidence in what’s important to you and what isn’t. In the absence of conviction, you’ll yo-yo between giving in to stimulus temptation – of which there’s no shortage in our information-suffused lives – or forcing yourself to focus on stuff that someone else wants you to: a friend, your manager.

But if you have a good enough awareness of what is worth your attention, then combined with awareness, you’ll have a much easier time deciding what to say yes or no to – that calendar invite, that new personal project, that new Twitter subscription or Netflix recommendation, that conversation segue.

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Life Design

Removing negatives

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[the question I ask myself before a purchase is] Is this removing a negative in my life? Because it’s pretty well studied that happiness is not very much affected by adding positives to your life, it’s mostly… especially in a rich world/environment like we live… mostly accomplished by removing things that are a strong negative to everyday.

– Peter Adeney aka Mr. Money Mustache on the Tim Ferriss blog, in 2017