Philosophy

I crawled through the 2 by 2 feet hole. I checked the map again. If the map is right then in about 30 ft, this passage should open into a big enough chamber for me to walk out of this aptly named Labyrinth cave. My elbows were bruised. So were my knees. And then a small stalactite scratched my forehead. That’s when time stopped for me. I decided to lie down. 100s of small thorny stones were pinching me. I was calm. I looked around. A video feed of this would have been claustrophobic for the viewers but I felt nothing. At least not till my forehead got scratched.

Statistical outcomes matter only if you are playing a statistical game

Let’s say you are building a git analytics product. Your product supports GitHub and GitLab for now. It might support more products in the future. 90% of the codebase that supports GitHub and GitLab is identical. 10% is specific to GitHub and GitLab. There are two ways to build software abstractions here. The easy path to fall for is to have unified objects that take care of both GitHub and GitLab data. These objects would, however, behave 10% differently depending on whether it is GitHub or GitLab. Your codebase will be ridden with conditionals that trigger only for one or the other. ...

An American’s experience in Luxor made me write this. The story is long and vivid, but the core theme is how she and many other foreigners were duped into buying and then selling properties losing money in the process.

Some notable quotes from " How to Live" by Derek Sivers. It consists of 27 stories independent of each other. Some contradict ideas from others. And that’s what makes this short read even more provocative.

The Tijuana border (between the US and Mexico) is one of the busiest land crossings in the world.

Sum: Forty Tales From The Afterlives is a collection of 40 short stories, describing what could happen in our afterlives. Here are my key takeaways from the book.

The Bed of Procrustes is a short book consisting of quotes by Taleb. Unlike his other books, this book is mostly a collection of quotes. Procrustes used to stretch/amputate his guests who wouldn’t fit on his bed. Similarly, when our minds need to reduce information, we are more likely to try to squeeze a phenomenon into the Procrustean bed of a crisp and known category (amputating the unknown), rather than suspend categorization, and make it tangible. That’s the central theme of this book.

Another great read in the Incerto series by Taleb. The core idea is that certain systems benefit from uncertainty. And our goal should be to make all systems antifragile, so that, they can benefit from uncertainty.

The book posits a unique viewpoint to understand randomness and unpredictability in the world around us. Rather than trying to predict the improbable black swans, it focuses more on how not to be adversely impacted by them.