Dear Jiana,

I heard from your mother you are enrolling as a Computer Science major in undergraduate.

First of all, I want to congratulate you on successfully getting to college. Though it might seem “everyone goes to college these days”, that does not diminish your achievement in the least. Comparisons matter, but by definition only relatively. The work you put in through 12 years of schooling and then college application and everything else were tasks given to you as a child explicitly or implicitly. Maybe you did or did not like them, but what matters is you saw things through to completion. So again, congratulations.

Second, I want to welcome you to the field of computers. It’s a friendly field; the hacker ethos means there is always someone willing to reach out and help – as long as you put in the work first ;). It’s also, very surprisingly, very accessible. Programmers like nothing else than to extoll and trumpet their works; fortunately for programmers, they also invented the internet. You will soon hear and see and meet many many bright, talented and industrious persons in this space that you can learn from. Have fun making new friends!

Third, it’s alright to take a while to being “good”. Maybe you won’t even want to be a good programmer. But if you do, it takes time. There’s no instant cheat code. The only cheat codes I know are to study a lot, do side projects a lot, meet and follow interesting people and see what they’re doing alot (find “Hacker News” and make it your daily ritual to skim through the headlines). Admittedly, I’m not very good or was very late at doing any of those, but maybe you can make use of it. There’s no cheat code to being “good”, work hard!

Fourth, I think the aspect that makes programmers fall in love with programming is the freedom. With software, you have freedom to do almost anything. If you can think of it, it can be done. I’ve been doing this for 5 years now (including time in college), I don’t think I got it until this year, so don’t fret if you don’t get it right away. The freedom to do what I want is honestly intoxicating. I am only limited by my thoughts and transferring them to my fingers. I hope you will find that freedom as well.

Finally, it’s ok to switch direction. I was in chemical engineering for 2 years in college before I landed on computers. At first, I thought CS would be my minor. That intro class got me hooked and I went all in. Maybe for you it would be the other way, you don’t like computers at all, you hate looking at screens all day, your posture has gone bad and your eyes hurt, you just don’t enjoy it the way others seem to. That’s fine. Don’t make decisions you feel you will regret later. Do things because they make sense to you and your priorities. Be careful of sunk-cost fallacy. People’s advice are just that, advice. Remember that it’s your life and your future. At 18, you became an adult legally, that comes freedom and responsibility to yourself. Lookout for yourself!

Finally, the only concrete advice I’ll give you is going to be in this paragraph. get a Mac computer or install Linux on your machine and know that Windows sucks. Use the command line. Put all your homework and notes and diaries and projects on GitHub or something similar, even if they’re only private to you. Use the command line. Self-marketing doesn’t have to be icky, think of it as “increasing the surface area for luck to land on”; or, in other words, start writing a blog and share. Use the command line. Protect your eyes, I suggest doing something physical once every two days at least. Use the command line. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast, and we must be as fast as possible because it’s always better to be fast; so learn how to type faster, learn how to read faster, learn how to learn faster. Use the command line. Read Hacker News. Use the command line.

Good luck and hack on!

from your mother’s colleague,

Viet Than

Books are my obsession. The finishing of a story is a grinding pressure on me when I start on every journey. It doesn’t take long to know if you’ll enjoy a story or not, just a few chapters. Before you know it, a vortex has pulled you into the depths. Sometimes I think it’s an incredibly toxic and unproductive thing. I probably am squandering away a lot of potential. But whenever I cast my gaze into the past, I can’t help but think fondly of those nights. Those were the most sublime of personal freedom, moments when I really can let go of anything else in the world.

This is probably my most interesting story so far at this job. No lie, I really did discover a database in production that no one else knew existed.

It starts when Kobi, AppCard’s Operations Director, approached me one day and say, “Hey Viet, can you look into why one of our jbrains wasn’t backed up?”.

Read more

Many developers will have done this, some probably do this as a daily routine, but a recent work of mine on a data recovery job felt like a latest expression of my career’s progress so far.

Read more

I had nowhere to go by Douglas Gordon is an audio experience where I wince as a man continually hack a beet dangerously close to his fingers and have a staring contest with a chimpanzee. Also, entirely carried by the tales of Jonas Mekas’s escape from war-torn Europe and his early years in New York City.

About 4-5 weeks ago, it started with Legend of the Northern Blade, well really it starts with /r/manga. Now, of course that little few chapters won’t get me anywhere, so next came Red Storm cause it’s martial arts, and ki, and that was oh so so exciting! But the ending was a little weird, and the mentor character was interesting but not explained, thankfully there is Peerless Dad which is set in the same universe. That was Korean, and martial arts excitement hasn’t ended, of course we’ve got to at least check out Gosu S2 a little bit. At this point, I am a little bored with manga/pictures, so we have to swtich to webnovels of course. The first one was Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint, but that was dark and depressing by the end. Not like horrifying, more like gut-wrenching in how people would sacrifice themselves for others. I clearly needed something way lighter to cleanse my palate. That’s when I stumbled on A Stay-at-home Dad’s Restaurant In An Alternate World, that was a light, easy read. But very frustratingly, it didn’t have an ending. Can you understand that? like reaching for the “NEXT” button but nothing’s there. It was close to finishing the thirst. I took the plunge and browsed Completed on b o x n o v e l. Finally, I landed on Rebirth to a Military Marriage: Good Morning Chief. I felt complete, I felt really complete then. It was an amazing novel. An amazing amazing story.

PS: Wed Jun 1 2022, lol, let’s also add The Legendary Mechanic

PPS: Sun Jun 26 2022, ok, let’s really really end this binge-ing with Tales of Herding Gods. Which is so good I would re-read and do a YouTube channel on it if I could.

Crypto and its problems

“Line Goes Up – The Problem With NFTs” - Folding Ideas

and

[M]arkets are distributed systems.

Even though there are, in fact, very strict regulators and regulations, I can still enter into a contract with you without ever telling anyone. I can buy something from you, in cash, and nobody needs to know. (Tax authorities merely want to know, and anyway, notifying them is asynchronous and lossy.) Prices are set through peer-to-peer negotiation and supply and demand, almost automatically, through what some call an “invisible hand.” It’s really neat.

As long as we’re in the continuous control region.

As long as the regulators are doing their job.

Here’s what everyone peddling the new trendy systems is so desperately trying to forget, that makes all of them absurdly expensive and destined to fail, even if the things we want from them are beautiful and desirable and well worth working on. Here is the very bad news:

Regulation is a centralized function.

The job of regulation is to stop distributed systems from going awry.

Because distributed systems always go awry

…

I find myself linking to this article way too much lately, but here it is again: The Tyranny of Structurelessness by Jo Freeman. You should read it. The summary is that in any system, if you don’t have an explicit hierarchy, then you have an implicit one.

Despite my ongoing best efforts, I have never seen any exception to this rule.

Even the fanciest pantsed distributed databases, with all the Rafts and Paxoses and red/greens and active/passives and Byzantine generals and dining philosophers and CAP theorems, are subject to this. You can do a bunch of math to absolutely prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that your database is completely distributed and has no single points of failure. There are papers that do this. You can do it too. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

<several PhDs later>

Okay, great. Now skip paying your AWS bill for a few months.

Whoops, there’s a hierarchy after all!

• apenwarr

Tô Minh Sơn’s comment on apenwarr:

“Men prefer to will nothingness than to not will”

and also pointed me to chainalysis’s ranking of crypto adoption with Vietnam being on top

People who vie for power are locked in the most obvious zero sum game in existence, and so they’re necessarily conflict theorists. People who have no lust for power themselves and try to explain the world in terms of mistake theory are basically forced to speculate that Power does not exist at all except as epiphenomenon of some poor coordination or whatever, or does not matter. It exists and matters a great deal, however, and shapes the way they live and think, and seeks to triumph over them ever harder. They just don’t know yet.

/u/Ilforte