Elisa Gabbert makes us doubt whether a memory failure is really a failure of the multiverse matrix, a loophole into an alternate reality that somehow you had access to, and now you access it random

The Big Short is a great lesson of first principles thinking. Never assume anything just because it’s commonly understood to be that way. Ask why and how sufficient times do that your 10 year old kid can understand it. If you cannot explain to a 10 year old, you haven’t reached the first principles. Even then, if you haven’t seen it with your eyes, you might not understand it still. Always look at the source code.

I bought Pedro Paramo in Mexico, as one does. I started reading it with a Mexican voice. Slowly faded in a Spanish one when I came back home. What a pity that I couldn’t hold it for longer. Maybe I should read it again when I’m back in Mexico.

They are all dead, or maybe not, maybe it’s all a dream, maybe it’s just my imagination. I don’t know what I’m reading anymore. So blurry, so entangled. But I stay for the images. The images are powerful. Remind me of my childhood, in father’s village. The water drops, the long rainy days, the light of the sun in el patio. My mind wandered back to those days of my past. Or is it my future? Or is it where I’ll go when I’m dead?

Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness by Kristen Radtke. It’s a comic but it’s a documentary or a visual essay or… I don’t know what it is. But it’s good. It looks at loneliness from all angles, the emotional, the biological, the cultural, the personal. It’s an inspiration in form and in approach. An example to follow. Austin Kleon books are books with pictures. This is a comic that reads like an essay. Remarkable.

A question and a blank space can trigger you or can block you.

A question and a sample answer can inspire you or can limit you.

To act compulsively is to be driven by impulse.
To act rationally is to weigh each step.
To act consciously is to align with what the moment demands.

Just watched the documentary The Greatest Night in Pop about the making of the song We are the World.

I noticed how some of the most talented singers during that night didn’t make it to supernova stardom while others, without such musical or vocal gifts, did.

People shine because of their inner energy, they project a vibe that you connect with. Then you cannot get enough of it. Some talent is necessary, but it’s the energy projected that you want.

The only way to radiate that energy is to remove all layers of expectations, fears and self-awareness, and expose yourself fully.

I don’t think everybody carries that energy, but if you do, then only full abandon will work.

And now I should start singing ‘Let it go, let it gooo 🎵’

It’s a meh for me. Loved the first act. Stylistically remarkable. The message doesn’t hit. A bit childish.

Sometimes you have an idea. You explore some ramifications. You go on a detour. Some paths lead you nowhere. Some others open new ideas. After those explorations, you might end up in the same place, together with your original idea. You might think it was all a waste of time. But in reality you are a different person even if you returned to the same place. You gained depth. Depth is hard to define but we all recognize it.

After years, I’ve been unable to type Dvorak unconsciously. I still need to think about the keypresses. After even more years, I’ve been unable to type Querty consciously, I mean, not look at the keyboard and know exactly where the keys are. But because I can type Querty unconsciously, I actually type faster in Querty.

So that’s my dichotomy: Dvorak is more satisfying but taxing; Querty is faster but more frustrating.

The algorithm has offered me this. I think I’m in the next level now. Will keep you posted.

You can design the best canvas for the content, or you can design the best canvas for the receiver. We naturally do the former, but we should actually do the latter.

When you build a presentation, you naturally follow the content, so the presentation gets shaped according to it. What I argue is that the presentation should be shaped according to the receiver, so that, given a receiver, all presentations should have the same canvas, and then you cram the content within it.

Finding this use case of ChatGPT very useful: choosing music to pair with what I’m reading.

Last ones:

• The White Book by Han Kang with Spiegel im Spiegel by Arvo Pärt.
• Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo with Async by Ryuichi Sakamoto

Oh, wow. I was done with the printing on my DZines and the I saw this

I’m certainly back to trying a printed media.

It is that neat office that gets into my head. Everything in it’s right place. Not a single item out of place. 4 hangers for 4 employees. Zero waste as a design principle. And yet… all that space. So much empty space. Whitespace. Is it peaceful or is it eerie?

Your blog post is a fascinating blend of personal creativity and tech innovation, how do you see this approach scaling within a banking environment?

Self-expression happens in specific conditions between slack and tension. Just like a guitar string—too tight, it’s out of tune and might snap. Too loose, it won’t make a sound. Get it just right, and it will sing.

A banking environment (or any other public company of a certain size, for that matter), is a difficult environment to cultivate this condition for a couple of reasons.

First, it’s subject to the pressure of having to compete against others to become the preferred option of our clients, while delivering the expected returns to shareholders. These tensions tighten the string.

Second, the string is built of many different individuals with very different breaking points and resonance frequencies. Getting all of them to sing under the same string tension is very difficult.

Besides, the adaptive nature of these conditions makes it impossible to articulate recipes that one can apply and expect the same results. Fostering innovation and personal creativity becomes, for all we know right now, the art of surfing waves that are not fully in our control but we can aim to perceive, interpret and respond to.

Perhaps one day our understanding of the human condition will allow us to read the patterns of the water and apply well known formulas.

I dread that day.

1. When managing IT, this LTS frame is always helpful:
   1. People
   2. Service
   3. Risk/Audit
   4. Finances
   5. Projects
2. You transform by “including and transcending”, not by “replacing the existing”.
3. When you accept your limitations, you start appreciating team work, you seek collaborators that complement you, you truly appreciate diversity.

Tools, methods and artifacts should be limited to the span of the human attention, to the cognitive bandwidth of our minds.

There’s no point in having 400 different components eligible to assemble a new application. A human will not be able to hold them in her mind.

But interestingly, AI can assist curating and sifting through the complexity.

When you start a wave, you ride it till the end, then you paddle up to catch a new one.

You don’t stop in the middle of a wave just because you saw a better one coming.

Driving on ice. Try. Try again. You can think of the physics, but it’s the body who learns, not the mind. Try again. I see it now. Yes, I’m starting to get it. Try again. Yes. I got this.

At that point, you are on to the next level. Basic moves are internalized and new concerns become visible, available. Everything works through this type of composition. Notes, melodies, chords, chord progressions. You level up to higher levels of abstraction, integrating the lower ones as you internalize them as second nature.

There’s an arrow of development, and it’s that of assembling components into higher and higher levels, for which you need to integrate the lower ones, and only repetition does it, not thought.

A human being has a lifespan of 80 years ≈ 1.000 months.
It takes 9 months to build one.
Build time is % of lifespan.

Through a patchwork of images of the past and the present we assemble the picture of grief and confusion and discovery and connection.

The book is very brief but reads slowly. So much whitespace give the words a mythical aura of poetry, of private journals, of intimacy.

As you let yourself get drawn into the images and the thoughts and memories evoked, it feels like a prayer.

I loved the heartfelt portrayal of Warsaw.

I read it listening to Arvo Pärt, specially Spiegel im spiegel.

Two tools can help internalize an idea:

• Images
• Stories

When communicating an idea, always use at least one of the two.

“One of the techniques they teach to get rid of a resentment toward somebody is to pray for him or her to get everything that you want for yourself in life—to be loved, to be successful, to be healthy, to be rich, to be wonderful, to be happy, to be alive with the light and the love of the universe. It’s a paradox, but it works.”

— Anthony Kiedis, Scar Tissue

43 reading tips from Naval Ravikant

1) Read what you love until you love to read.
6) The smarter you get, the slower you read.
14) Most books should just be summaries so I leave most books unfinished and only make it all the way through a few. The best ones can’t be easily summarized.
8) If they wrote it to make money, don’t read it.
9) Read books, avoid news.

It the beginning was the personal page. Think Geocities for those that were online back then.

Then was the blog, a simpler form of publishing, restricting the user to a chronological sequence of entries.

Then was the social network, where the social graph allowed the Feed to exist: a chronological sequence of entries of everyone you followed.

Then came the social media, where platforms started introducing algorithmically curated content in your feed, trying to hook you in the screen for longer.

Today, there’s just digital media an algorithmic feed of content with unclear chronology and unrelated to your social network.

Austin Kleon regularly uses 4 notebooks:

• Pocket notebook for random annotations on the go.
• Logbook for recording everything he does in a day.
• Commonplace book for capturing quotes.
• Diary where he writes daily at least 3 pages, in a more creative fashion (collages, new designs, etc).

This technique of interviewing yourself as a way to structure ideas and get them out of your head.

You need to really step out of yourself to ask the relevant question. What would an audience be more interested in knowing?

You really need to step out of yourself to feel that someone else is asking you the question. Imagine yourself in a stage.

Train your body as you want your mind to be.

Want to be more flexible? Train flexibility.
Want to be more mentally strong? Train strength.
Want to be more resilient? Train resistance.
Want to have a faster mind? Train speed.

If someone would have arrived at my wedding, someone vaguely known, a face that is barely recognizable, an old friend of my father, perhaps, he would have come and said: you see the suspenders you are wearing now, the ones you bought for the wedding because you had none? Those very same suspenders will hold your son’s overpants when he does his motorcycle test, when he is 15 years old. If someone would have said that, it would have blown my mind away.

What happens when she decides to regress into a plant?

One responds with shame. The shame that comes from the fear of not fitting, of not following the established course.

One responds with lust. The lust that comes from craving the new, the different, the unique. Something that will brought us from anonimity.

The last responds with love and compassion. The compassion that comes from not understanding and not caring about it anymore. From understanding that some things are beyond reason and probably within those there are truths that are deeper than the ones we’re fed with.

I read this book listening to Metamorphosis, by Philip Glass.

Excluding others is (perceived as) the most accessible way to belong to a group one is desperate to fit into.

Those who fear exclusion are often the ones who exercise it most aggressively.

Vicious cycle fueled by basic survival instincts, rooted in fear.

How to break this?

Philosopher and writer Friedrich Nietzsche on enjoying the process: 

“The end of a melody is not its goal.”