What is an interview?

Networking, interviewing blog post
-being yourself
-understand the root of things... If something seems difficult, you're likely looking at it the wrong way (ex. Talking to people just comes down to seeing them as people and not as interfaces, seeing conversation as something more than just means to an end, but rather just allowing yourself to discover things, explore others minds )
-win-win article. Honesty works for everyone except for sociopaths.
-joshua -- him and his friends see it as a game. Doing things to build up their resumes. I was the same way... But what changed? Where do I now stand? I see the bigger picture, the mechanisms. As a society we attempt to obfuscate all of our institutions. But we are not nearly to the point where we can sustainably do that. To be part of a society, we need to understand the complications, the reasons why we do things, or else we'll just be going around faking things, using these flawed APIs that only mimic the right behavior.
-try building society from the ground up. What is an interview but just a test, a communication and exchange of information to test whether you two are a good match?
-stop looking at it like a selfish thing but see the big picture of how society works. Those who see this picture and want to participate in society recognize each other. If you play games they can see right through you.
-look at it this way. In an interview, what is your goal? To get a job? That's a scarcity mindset right there. The point is not to get a job, that's an ad hoc solution that you have devised, or been told is the only solution, and decided on, without understanding the general perspective. And the general perspective is this: we're all just trying to survive. And to survive and maybe even fluorish, we need to provide services, create goods, build things, improve things. But to do those things we often need to work together, we need to trade -- what a job is is simply a function to enable you to apply your skills in the best way so that you can trade your time for other things of value.
So speaking of your skills, when you are interviewing or negotiating, what should you do? Should you overrepresent what you offer? No, because this is dishonesty! Not only that, the dishonesty will always catch up to you. But that should not be the reason you dont lie... You need to think one level deeper, go beyond the simplified scarcity mindset of "I need money and I need to find someone to trade with". Rather, you need to think about it holistically, from everyone's perspective. Rather even further, take it to the limit, and just look at the truth. Is this partnership -- yes, I mean partnership -- going to be mutually beneficial, and optimal? Is it "win-win"? Otherwise, there's deception going on.
The reason I stress honesty so much is because that's how you really should look at everything. No games, just honesty. If you're just honest, you should only have to present yourself as you are. All of these interview prep things are now cast in a different, less toxic light... Instead of you memorizing stuff to try to game them, you're learning more effective ways to communicate your honest, true self and what you can do from them. And that's the best form of marketing.
Of course on the other side there's ways you can undersell. That's why you need to practice communiction.
-communication is information transfer. If it's based on truth, then it's easier to communicate. If it's based on lies, that's deception. Deception is a lot harder to get good at since it's more natural to just be yourself and have other people believe it than to project a false image of yourself and have them believe that it's genuine. Unless of course you're a sociopath that's really good at lying. But usually people are really good at recognizing genuine-ness and non-genuine-ness. Real recognize real, I think.
-The best way to act in a certain way is to BE a certain way. That's why the best actors literally put themselves in the character's shoes. There's just so much entropy and ways you can give away your hand if you try to control everything. The subconscious mind is better at crafting a story, maybe.
-and that's the thing. If something seems difficult but not difficult for others, like you have to consciously control and force your way into it, you're probably doing it wrong and there's a different way -- you need to adopt a certain mindset. Because clearly in their mindset, it's easy. How do you get to that mindset? That's the question. The first, and most important, requirement is that you "keep an eye out". Stop fixating on those "obvious" linear solutions. Stop staying in a toxic mindset and just think about other possibilities. Explore. Talk to people. Admit ignorance and avoid assumptions. Love yourself and don't fear "mistakes", which are really just data gathering exercises. They're only mistakes to you because you put your whole self-esteem at stake on these "successes" you're chasing.
-dont play games.

Gas station, 12:30 AM

Slow numbers go up

Really just need to fill up

What the fuck ? ? 

raining trees

Trees don't weep in rain
Afterwards a gentle breeze
Sheds their tears away

birthdays

There's nothing special about being born.
Well... That's not quite true, we (humans) are pretty amazing, if only as information processors, neural networks.
But a neural network is really not all that interesting in a vacuum, is it? What does it do? What is it supposed to do? How is it useful?
In the same way, none of us come into this world with a sense of meaning or purpose (at least I didn't). The way I see it, we come into this world as painters with blank canvases. But we color each others' canvases, not our own. Every greeting, every interaction amounts to a sharing of paint on these canvases. Over the years, the empty canvas fills and transforms into a work of art.

For those who have known me, seen me, interacted with me in some way, the 11th day of April marks the day of beginning of this life, one of many that would touch and color their lives.
For me, it was the day I joined this weird drunk-painting class.

Like a violin being lifted into a dissonant, but beautiful harmony, the singular me is granted meaning through the collection of singular others.

I want to take this day to really notice this fact, really appreciate others for their contribution in creating, for lack of better words, this work of art. And, as  art, whether it's good or bad seems irrelevant. Comparing it to "other pieces" becomes meaningless to me, since there are no other works I can truly, fully see in full detail as my own.

So why not take time on your birthday to meditate on your (but not really your) painting? To open up to yourself, and then open up to others by recognizing that you are part of this beautiful collage?



I often say half-jokingly that mothers are essentially the best machine learning experts. Every child birthed is the result of future-state engineering -- hardware, firmware, software, model implementation. On top of that, mothers need to train their children using supervised learning, reinforcement learning, and sometimes unsupervised learning.
I love nature (modulo humans) as much as anybody. But humans are on a different level... in part because I am one. The complexity you can perceive even through the most basic communications channels: words, speaking, actions... it's mindblowing. And that, in my opinion, is what makes appreciating this collective of humans so worthwhile. You'll never run out of richness, depth and beauty to explore. It's the combination of complexity and the ability to comprehend that complexity. 

Aphorisms

It's really funny how useless aphorisms are. There's always a true lesson behind each and every aphorism, but no aphorism is enough to actually teach that lesson.

It's basically a cryptographic hash function, if you think about it.* The profound lesson maps to some trite saying via this mapping we call an "aphorism". Yet the inverse function is ridiculously difficult to compute, unless you... learn the lesson through some other means. That is, the only way to figure out what an aphorism means is to actually learn the lesson behind the aphorism. Thanks, aphorism.

So what, exactly, has the aphorism taught you? What have you gained from the aphorism, besides a common way to express what you had to figure out yourself (with no help from the aphorism), and a sense of pride in finally having that a-ha moment?

Maybe it has some use in serving as a reminder for those who have already experienced it -- meaningless to anyone else, but poignant and deep to those who "get it". Kind of like a souvenir.

*I just realized that my reference to a "cryptographic hash function" is itself an example of this kind of phenomena for those who don't know what it is... 

Souvenir

Do you ever do that thing where you keep a tab open thinking you'll come back to it later, but eventually because of that 50-tab limit you just overwrite it with something else, and something else, and then something else... and before you know it you've completely forgotten what you wanted to remember under a chain of internet history?

Well today, I wanted to remember. So I kept pressing back, back, back in the browser -- and found that I was scrolling through the memories of a couple nights ago, and some other night before that, but backwards.
Then I realized... these were events and experiences with people I love, that I want to remember -- much more so than the title of that book I'd been wanting to buy. By accidentally overwriting something I thought was important, I had kept for myself a souvenir of something truly important. 

People know what they want. Anyone reading this will agree that cherished memories are a good thing -- this is little more than  a reminder. So what's the problem?

It's more like we forget what we want. You might be so busy optimizing for all the things you think you want that before you know it, you forget to work for things that you should want (scratching an itch doesn't make you any happier after it's gone, but it sure feels good while you're doing it). Or maybe like me, you were never made aware that you wanted it or had to work for it, maybe you never even thought about it. One might call these types of wants "schematically inaccessible".

I wonder if this is the kind of thing people regret on their deathbed. How many people right now are regretting that they forgot to not forget? What other things are we forgetting to want?

Come to think of it, buying souvenirs and taking pictures have never been a priority for me. "Be present", "enjoy the moment", "people will think I'm a tourist".
I feel a bit differently now, but I'm still not going to purchase some generic model Eiffel Tower on a visit to Paris (the picture is obligatory though). But I just might take an escargot shell from that overpriced restaurant to memorialize the funny conversation we were having about snails over lunch, or something to that effect.

A relevant song

The 9/11 Memorial means something special and poignant to a small subset of us. I could empathize with the sadness while I was there... but it's nothing close to how it feels to those who were closer to the event and suffered real loss. My memories are secondhand -- my parents talking about it, videos of the event, stories... the rest I've filled in to the best of my imaginative ability.

As humans we have a tendency to build permanent things to remember other, impermanent things by. It makes sense for those who have the corresponding memory, but can that object really hold the same meaning for their children, much less their grandchildren? 

Of course, when those of us who remember die, other memories take their place -- you may have had an exceptionally memorable date on the Broome Bridge, once remembered by the late Sir Hamilton as the place he wrote down the now famous "i² = j² = k² = ijk = −1". But as for those memorials who claim to represent some piece of history... those "true" memories vanish. To call it a "memorial" is to lie, if only a little. 

It's an interesting perspective though -- to understand that someone, at some point, prescribed some very specific memories and emotions of an event to the structure claims to memorialize it... but no longer truly does. 

Words

Words are themselves "images". The sound of the word, or perhaps its shape on paper reminding you of its sound, is only an image -- that is, a sense experience.

Sense experience is all we know. To make "sense" of it all, we impose structure. Certain images seem similar; we group them. Sets of associated images... classes, or ideas if you will. We seem to be born with this innate sense of "association". Or at least for me. I can only think about how others think via some kind of projection and by assuming some complicated array of associations built upon frameworks upon frameworks of ideas. 

A "word" is just another class: the way I said it once, the way your mother said it that one time, the visual image reaction in my mind when I hear it. The utterance of that word is but one image that reminds us of these other things: "representing the broader idea", if you will. 

So a word is part of an idea, at least within this framework. But words are special for most in that they are somehow "canonical" -- most people think of language as something separate -- the medium for which to transfer ideas. 

That's fine. We still have the fact that words associate to ideas.

But of course, words are also noisy and ambiguous. Describing an experience using words -- we often fool ourselves. 

The purest form of the idea is simply the idea itself. But the human memory is... well, it works the way it works. And the mind likes to make associations, build structure.

By verbalizing an idea, you run the risk of associating the event, the experience, with those words. Those words, in turn, may be associated to a much larger set of experiences and ideas.

And thus, by metaphor, the particular experience may become associated to this larger set. Perhaps things become what they aren't. Or perhaps not. 

Correctness can only be judged within another framework. But it happens to be that using words can lead us to "incorrectness" -- we see things that aren't there, we judge when we shouldn't. It gets worse when others are involved, and you give them those words. But that's a whole separate problem.

It's probably best to be mindful. What is there is all that is there. Labeling actions, people, events... sometimes makes it seem worse than it actually is.