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October 10, 2024
By Venkatesh Rao
After several years of keeping it going in semi-retired, keep-the-lights-on (KTLO) mode, I’ve decided to officially fully retire this blog. The ribbonfarm.com domain and all links will remain active, but there will be no new content after November 13th, 2024, which happens to be my 50th birthday. There will be one final roundup post before then, and perhaps a shortish epitaph post. And the main page will switch to a static landing page. But after that date, this will effectively be a museum site.
I’m not personally retiring of course (I neither want to, nor can I afford to), but this WordPress blog is. Sometime in the next few months, I’ll figure out how to move it to a lower-cost archival hosting model, probably as a static non-WordPress site, simplify the design as befits a retiree, and put up some sort of museum-like landing page with self-guided tour maps, a little museum shop selling books, directions to the service entrance for AI scraper-bots, and so on. If you get your updates via the Mailchimp newsletter, that will be shutting down sometime in the next few weeks. So if you’d like to continue hearing from me, sign up for mysubstack (fair warning: It’s not a blog, and both the contents and style are distinctly different from what you’ve been used to here).
But in the meantime, in what is going to be the last significant post on here, let’s look back on what has been a 17-year journey. [Read more…]
August 17, 2024
By Venkatesh Rao
Been on a Venn diagram kick lately, since being primed to think in Venns by Harris campaign. This one summarizes an idea I’ve long been noodling on: The healthiest way to relate to a truth-seeking impulse is as an infinite game, where the goal is to continue playing, not arrive at a dispositive “winning” right answer. Trivial truths might have such win conditions, but no interesting truth can be “won.” It can only be healthily related to, because it will produce an inexhaustible supply of salient novelty.
A “healthy relationship” to a suspected truth is, I think, a dynamic equilibrium at the intersection of the three forces illustrated above. And every unbalanced configuration is unhealthy. This is the second such dynamic equilibrium Venn I’ve made recently. Yesterday I had one in my newsletter about cozytech. There I characterized it as “individually delusional, collectively rational.” I think that’s true here as well. The ring of six 1/3 and 2/3 subsets is a buffet of delusion traps. But the center is healthy.
There is something deeper going on here and I think the n=3 case is just the simplest stable dynamic equilibrium emergence of a less deluded disposition from a bunch of more deluded ones. It’s building a reliable gestalt subjectivity out of unreliable component subjectivities. The self as complex engineered artifact. [Read more…]
August 15, 2024
By Venkatesh Rao
I ran across the alarming phrase intellectual menopause a few months ago in John Gall’s Systemantics, and it naturally stuck in my brain given I’m pushing 50 and getting predictably angsty about it. The phrase conjures up visions of a phenomenon much more profound and unfunny than the more familiar one we know as midlife crises. It sounds much worse than merely buying a sports car and chasing younger women. And if you chase down the idea, it turns out it is worse. And sadder. And unfunnier.
Anyway I got curious, and started digging. Turns out this was rather hard to do since this rather obvious turn of phrase surprisingly has no usable footprint in either Google Trends or ngrams. Some tedious wading through the shitty Google search results turned up the earliest usage I could find in H. L. Mencken’s 1917 book A Book of Prefaces. The phrase occurs within a merciless evisceration of a semi-autobiographical novel called The “Genius” by a writer I’ve never heard of, Theodore Dreiser (emphasis mine):
“The ‘Genius,'” which interrupted the “trilogy of desire,” marks the nadir of Dreiser’s accomplishment, as “The Titan” marks its apogee. The plan of it, of course, is simple enough, and it is one that Dreiser, at his best, might have carried out with undoubted success. What he is trying to show, in brief, is the battle that goes on in the soul of every man of active mind between the desire for self-expression and the desire for safety, for public respect, for emotional equanimity…“The Titan” is the history of a strong man. “The ‘Genius'” is the history of a man essentially weak. [Read more…]
July 14, 2024
By Venkatesh Rao
I like to make a distinction between imagination and creativity that you may or may not agree with. Imagination is the ability to see known possibilities as being reachable from a situation. Creativity is the ability to manufacture new possibilities out of a situation. The two form a continuous spectrum of regimes in simple cases, but are disconnected in complex cases.
I’ve been playing with Legos in open-play mode lately to try and develop better intuitions about both. I’m limiting myself to a set of rectangular blocks on a base plate for now. I’m afraid so far the results are terrible. I can follow fairly complex instructions to build models from a kit pretty easily, but faced with a pile of bricks and no plans or goals, I come up with dull designs to build, exhibiting very little imagination and near-zero creativity. Nothing in this collage gets even a passing grade on creativity. The most imaginative thing in the collage below is the model of a FinFET — a nano-scale feature of semiconductor chips — at the bottom left. I give it a D+ on imagination because it took a minor leap of imagination to recognize that Legos can be used to model things at scales besides the familiar range of scales covered by Lego models (typically coffee-cup scale to cityscape scale). I had to let go the “habit” of only seeing normal-scale-range design possibilities. But even that minor, barely passing-grade leap felt exciting. I plan to pull out my copy of Open Circuits and model more tiny electronics parts and features. [Read more…]
June 14, 2024
By Venkatesh Rao
Ever since I got a bout of Covid a couple of years ago (late 2022), I’ve noticed memory problems of a very specific sort: Difficulty remembering names. Especially people names, but also other sorts of proper nouns. This is especially marked when it comes to remembering names of actors or authors, or not-too-close friends and family. Interestingly, there has been little to no effect on my ability to remember the names of characters in TV shows, but I frequently forget actor names, even famous ones I should remember. For example, I’ve blanked several times on Steve Carrell, which is odd given that my whole career is based on writing about The Office.
I wasn’t sure this was just some personal aging thing, or something to do with the tumultuous times we’ve been living through, versus a Covid effect, but now I’m fairly certain it’s a Covid after-effect. I asked on Bluesky and Farcaster, and several people reported similar symptoms. It’s very specific. Other kinds of memory don’t seem to be affected. I don’t think it’s aging because 49 is not that old, and this is rather specific and sharply defined. And tumultuous times have been going on since a few years before Covid, and I didn’t notice any such effect before 2021. [Read more…]
June 5, 2024
By Venkatesh Rao
Did a ribbonfarm meetup in Bangalore last night, the first ever in India. Thanks to Abhishek Agarwal for organizing. I think this is the first meetup I’ve done since the last Refactor Camp in 2019. It was kinda last minute, which is why I only posted on Substack rather than here (some sort of signal there 🤔). We had a nice mix of people show up: local startup people, corporate tech people (including a transplant from the US and another visiting), and a couple of older people. And rather refreshingly, we spent the entire evening talking about everything except the election. It was the sort of cosmopolitan conversation that might have happened anywhere else in the world, which kinda surprised me, since the India I left in 1997 was a sort of insular world unto itself. [Read more…]
May 24, 2024
By Venkatesh Rao
One of the biggest changes in my personality with middle age is that I no longer really enjoy travel beyond local weekend getaways. Almost no destination has a pain/novelty ratio that makes it worth it. On the one hand, I’ve traveled enough that few places hold the promise of real novelty and stimulation. On the other hand, even though travel has gotten way more convenient overall (smartphones, eSIM cards, cashless payments, Uber, Google Translate — though at the expense of phone-loss anxiety), my tolerance for discomfort has plummeted. I don’t like shitty hotels/hostels, awkward couchsurfing, wrangling luggage, driving unfamiliar cars, figuring out transit systems, or spending the night in an airport as I did once in Paris in 1998. I especially don’t like wading through lots of options figuring out food options. The net effect is that I’ve gradually gone sessile. I avoid travel when I can except when one of two conditions holds — either the destination offers some genuine novelty (Antarctica maybe?) or someone, preferably not me, is paying for a business class, high-touch managed experience. If younger friends don’t make arrangements I can parasitically hook into, I tend not to wander far from hotels in new places. I made a graph illustrating my evolving preferences: [Read more…]
May 14, 2024
By Venkatesh Rao
I’ve long held that civilization is the process of turning the incomprehensible into the arbitrary. The incomprehensible can be scary but the arbitrary tends to be merely exhausting. Unless the stakes are high, such as in paperwork around taxes or passports and visas. Then the exhaustion becomes tinged with anxiety. Either way the steady increase in arbitrariness creates, in the name of progress, a growing ocean of mind-numbing details you just have to know. Or figure out the hard way by reading instructions. Or by brute force trial-and-error. For example: [Read more…]
May 12, 2024
By Venkatesh Rao
In thinking about decision-making under stress, most people focus on fight-or-flight responses. Both fighting and fleeing are obvious courses of action that inherit a clear sense of direction from the characteristics of the threat itself, and are energized by the automatic mobilization of emergency reserves by an acute hormonal response. It’s barely even a decision, since you’re likely to pick one or the other very quickly and intuitively. But the most difficult modern decisions are marked by the lack of a legible threat (the opposite of a “clear and present danger”), and a slow build-up of a maladaptive chronic stress response. As Robert Sapolsky argued, this is why zebras don’t get ulcers but humans do. Our default impulse is neither to fight or flee — there is no clear adversary to fight or flee from — but the under-theorized third F: freeze. [Read more…]
May 12, 2024
By Venkatesh Rao
I did not expect to see auroras in the Seattle area. Or ever in my life without a special bucket-list effort I had no particular intention of making. Though now I might. It feels a bit like I’ve just seen giraffes in the wild without going to Africa. You’ve probably seen some of the thousands of photos being posted online. My wife’s contribution to the global photo collection is below. This is probably the most widely photographed geomagnetic storm in history, and it’s amazing how much better the latest phone cameras are than the naked eye. The photo is far more dramatic than it looked naked-eyed. It was still pretty great live though. [Read more…]
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