I’ve been working through the Haskell Road to Logic, Maths and Programming for about 2.5 months. It’s a great book for anyone interested in any of the three subjects and has been the most digestible math texts I have ever read.

When I was first exposed to college math there was an air of mysticism. The concept of proof was abstract, overly rigorous, and something only those who were destined to understand it ever rid. I was wrong, and I know understand the phrase “there is no royal road to geometry”.

I was trying to prove that a relation on a set was an equivalence relation if and only if it was a subset of the identity relation and equal to itself compose it’s inverse. I was stuck for half a day until I had the simple notion of writing out the facts I knew. I enumerated them, saw them, and wrote two more lines and the proof was done.

The proof was shockingly uninteresting. Nothing complex, nothing special. The point I’m trying to make is that it’s important to change the way we look at things that we have never done before. Most the time, whether it’s a proof, startup, relationship, etcetera, “there is no royal road”.

When I was in High School and the final bell rang at 2:15pm the song “Eye of the Tiger” would play. It’s been almost 4 years since I last heard that song in such a context and this Friday I’m feeling particularly nostalgic.

It’s not nostalgia for parties, football games, tests or even friends. I think it’s nostalgia for hope and maybe a twinge of disappointment.

In college, values aren’t very different from high school. There’s a tone, an air of constant competition and jockeying for social position that is similar to high school but far more subversive.

In high school I was hopeful and there was a belief that all that would be over. College was an equalizer where the just and brilliant excelled. Now though, between greek life, consulting recruitment and dispassionate STEM degrees my naive impression seems misguided.

Rather than just complaining though, all hope is not lost. The greatest skill I learned in high school was focus. True, unadulterated, Eye of the Tiger, no push notification focus. I think that skill has benefited me in college and I think it’s the antidote to a lot of the garbage I see.

I’ve been reading a lot about mentoring. Everyone wants a mentor/mentee and everyone has an opinion on how to get one and be one. There’s so many opinions out there that it’s exhausting and hard to determine what content is valuable.

Personally, I subscribe to a simple approach. For my mentees I offer to help when I can, continue doing so, and it becomes a habit to meet or “mentor” all the better. For my own personal mentors, when I need help, I ask for it. If that help becomes a habit, I consider that person a mentor and if we’ve been in the habit of “meeting” and it gets too long (you’ll know whens it been too long) I ask them if they want to hang out.

I think there’s more nuanced things this two paragraph blurp on mentoring is missing. However, I do think this captures a large percentage of what mentoring should be.

I recently found out and started using Anki.

Anki is the successor of the application SuperMemo, which is an application that through spaced repetition allows you to memorize the things you want to memorize. It makes you know more stuff.

The reason I’m excited to start is because of two, semi-related concepts.

In classical AI, there’s the concept of the Knowledge Base, of KB. The bigger the KB, the more facts your agent can learn, and the smarter the agent becomes.

In chess, masters of the game tend to “chunk” segments of games together and recognize patterns. They can build up smaller sets of information into bigger “chunks” and use those when they play.

I don’t think either of those are a direct analogy, but I’m hoping to use Anki to make me a better programmer/mathematician/entrepreneur and help with my pattern recognition.

Great Movie. Anyway, that’s an homage to Fred Wilson of USV who, every time he sends out a blog post, reminds me of that clip.

Although Balls of Fury isn’t relevant right now, I want to reflect on the scope of what this blog is supposed to be and why I’m doing it. The what is straightforward – I want this to be as consistent as Fred (daily), as concise as Paul Graham (concise), and original enough to include technical content, patterns, or media (above) that I find fun. The why is also simple – I get a lot of value from the things I subscribe to and I hope someone will eventually find this valuable.

1/15/19

I spent yesterday reading Paul Graham essays. The strangest thing I read was that Paul Graham made up a person named Tara Ploughman (an anagram of Paul Graham) to get around the stigma of quoting himself while posting on his own website.

Quoting yourself is a weird thing, but what struck me as peculiar is that Paul Graham felt the need to do invent Tara Ploughman. Paul Graham is an eminent thought leader in startups, PL, Angel Investing, VC, hacking, education etc. and he even can’t quote himself.

I’m nervous about starting a blog, but I suppose this is a good base case for never taking yourself too seriously.

1/14/19

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton