If you’re wondering why you received this email, it’s because you subscribed to my TinyLetter at some point. I created it in 2022 and managed to send out just one newsletter (hahaha) which also turned out to be the last one because Mailchimp shut down TinyLetter in February.
I initially chose TinyLetter because, although Substack can be used as a “newsletter,” it’s also home to actual publications—many of which I read and pay for, mostly using my alt account until now—and thus I didn’t want to give the impression that this was anything more than an occasional blog where I’ll sometimes subject readers to a messy outpouring of unprocessed thoughts. Certainly not something I’d ever charge money for.
Grindsome 2024
2024 so far… has been suffocatingly busy. In both good and bad ways.
Aside from the pieces that I’ll talk about below, there were also a couple of long-term writing projects that started last year (which have been keeping me busy in the best of ways). But there was one particularly grindsome non-writing task that I needed to get out of the way, something to do with transitioning from 1099-NEC to W-2, if you know what I mean. So I’ve been in hermit mode for the better part of the year.
Not in a state of depression but annoyance at how I was being robbed of hours of my working day that could’ve been spent on writing.
(Less like this ↓)
(More like this ↓)
But life’s a sine curve. Things can be good for a while, but the curve will inescapably go down at some point, just as it finds itself up somehow. As of this week, I think I’m liberated from that one big ugly burden. The slope has finally turned positive.
Since sending that one and only TinyLetter, I’ve been spending the bulk of my time on longer-term projects, so I haven’t published much, but here below are a few of the writings I’ve managed to put out.
Profile of Manuel Blum: What makes a great PhD advisor?
It’s time we retire Richard Feynman from the pantheon of iconic, role-model-worthy physicists. By many accounts, he was an unpleasant co-worker, an irresponsible teacher, and a womanizer. We should instead promote his PhD advisor, John Archibald Wheeler.
I once came across Wheeler’s legacy as a teacher, known for advising physicists like Feynman, Kip Thorne, Jacob Bekenstein, and Hugh Everett (“the Many-Worlds Interpretation”) along with a record number of undergraduate theses. Someone even wrote a dissertation about his mentorship.
Some fields have their Wheelers: John McPhee in journalism or Bob Paine in ecology. (I’m unsure about philosophy — Wilfrid Sellars? Gilbert Ryle? Quine? Please shoot me an email if you have candidates in mind.) In theoretical computer science, it’s Manuel Blum, winner of the 1995 Turing Award.
When writing about zero-knowledge proofs, I came across upon Blum’s paper “Coin Flipping by Telephone,” which was not just counterintuitive but, dare I say, “playful”—few mathematical/scientific concepts exhibit this attribute, but when they do, it’s a real mindblower. On top of his research on computational complexity theory and cryptography, Blum also created CAPTCHA with his student Luis von Ahn who later went on to found Duolingo. (Yes, that CAPTCHA — the fact that it stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” is, I think, another example of his playfulness.)
Improbably, three of Blum’s students have also won Turing Awards. (An analogy for the bookishly inclined: it’s as if three students taught by Toni Morrison also went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature during Morrison’s lifetime.)
I wish I’d had 5000 more words for this profile because there were so many anecdotes and Blumian legends his students shared that I could have created a small booklet out of them. (I think he deserves a documentary.)
I happened to have interviewed some of his students like Shafi Goldwasser and Michael Sipser for other assignments, months before I pitched this particular idea to MIT Technology Review. During those interviews, I asked them, just in passing, what it was like to have Blum as their advisor. When Sipser shared anecdotes that sounded like something straight out of cinema, I knew right then that I had to profile Blum.
I was also personally interested in this topic because I'm pretty sure I am a product of a few teachers who, through almost divine goodwill, decided to take me seriously: Mr. Joseph Foster, who basically re-taught us how to read (and was more hip than my high school self could appreciate at the time); my wonderful thesis advisor, Christiane Fellbaum, with whom I chatted weekly about linguistics, philosophical fiction, and magazine writings (often more than the actual thesis topic); Jim Dwyer who was my moral/spiritual guide and to countless others; and, of course, Rebecca Mead, without whom I'd never have thought I'd become an actual writer.
When I reached out to his students—now distinguished computer science profs, many of whom are old enough to be retired—they were eager to speak to me about their advisor. One said, “I could talk about Manuel all day.” Another said, “Manuel is my favorite topic of conversation.” Others said some version of that. He has become one of my favorite topics of conversation, too.
At the end of the reporting, I think I understood what made his students so successful, but I don’t think his style is replicable. His “secret” is not some kind of algorithm where we can enumerate rules and steps, but it has a lot to do with the type of person Manuel is — his special kind of charisma.
To describe that quality, what Tobias Wolff said about George Saunders in an excellent 2013 profile comes to mind: “[Saunders]’s such a generous spirit, you’d be embarrassed to behave in a small way around him.” If you’re lucky, you might’ve met people like Saunders who made you feel that way. (I count myself incredibly lucky for knowing three such friends/people.) These people aren’t just good people; they make you want to be a good person. They convince you that being a “generous spirit” is possibly the best, tear-inducingly great thing a person can aim to be.
Turns out that Manuel had a Manuel-like teacher, Warren McCulloch—one of the founders of cybernetics—who was his spiritual advisor from sophomore year at MIT through graduate school. (His official doctoral advisor was Marvin Minsky.)
Remember what Tobias Wolff said about Saunders? Saunders too had a Saunders-like teacher: Tobias Wolff himself, who was his teacher at Syracuse. After Wolff left for Stanford, Saunders moved into Wolff’s house, and one day he hears this:
One night I’m sitting on the darkened front porch of our new house. A couple walks by. They don’t see me sitting there in the shadows.
“Oh, Toby,” the woman says. “Such a wonderful man.”
Note to self, I think: Live in such a way that, when neighbors walk by your house months after you’re gone, they can’t help but blurt out something affectionate.
Recently, my partner Yeseul and I visited Manuel and Lenore at their home in Berkeley. (Lenore, a legend herself, was recently profiled by my friend Ben in this wonderful Q&A). Now in their 80s, they are doing research together on consciousness, and their lifelong co-intellectual partnership is something we aspire to. After dinner, as we were about to leave the restaurant, Manuel and Lenore said something unthinkably generous that left us in awe, hoping that we could extend the same gesture someday.
One last thing I’ll say is — for his 77th birthday (77 is a semiprime called the Blum integer), he had a “birthday conference” where his students came and presented interesting research ideas. What an idea for a party, surrounded by his students who love him. If that isn’t one definition of a life well-lived, I don’t know what is. What a great man. What a great life.
What We Lost When Twitter Became X
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/what-we-lost-when-twitter-became-x
Back in 2021, I was moving to the Bay Area for Yeseul’s grad program and needed a new job on the West Coast. I was a Twitter user (mostly a lurker) and thought it would be interesting to see the internals of the company that writers have developed a form of cathexis with. Maybe there would be a fun story or two to tell later, I thought. Little did I know that the genre of the story would be eschatological.
Whether Twitter was a net positive or negative—I have my opinions but it is not my hill to die on—is not the point in the article. What is sad is that I did find communities and friends on Twitter—a few of whom became friends IRL—which was invaluable as someone living in the literary wasteland that is the South Bay.
But now that Twitter has gone down, I’m not going to start all over again with other social media like Bluesky, Thread, or Mastodon. I’ve never really used Facebook, TikTok, etc., so I’m pretty much left with my Instagram, which has been… surprisingly good? It seems like there are communities and people there that make me feel similarly to how I felt using Twitter.
By the way, I also learned that
wrote a post about this piece. It’s not flattering, but to be honest, there’s not much I disagree with him there because his gripe was more about what I didn’t say (tldr pre-Elon Twitter was no paradise — duh) than what I did say.I think there are two kinds of criticism, perhaps parallel in spirit to the sins of commission vs. omission dichotomy. The first type goes, what-you-wrote-is-bad and your-argument-makes-no-sense. In the second, as in Freddie’s case, the claims are made by way of negation, zeroing on what was left out and implied.
This is not to say that he was reading the piece in bad faith, but it was very on-brand — a brand that’s contractually obligated with his readers to provide counterpoints to arguments made in mainstream media. I enjoy reading Freddie’s posts but I’ll claim that this one wasn’t his best :p (But I may be biased.) And my one retort will be that, unlike you Freddie, I had a word count to attend to :)
Spike Jonze's “Her” holds up a decade later (AI in cinema)
https://www.theverge.com/24066233/her-ai-film-spike-jonze-joaquin-phoenix-scarlett-johansson
I resisted writing about AI, but when Sarah sent out a pitch call, I couldn’t resist, having enjoyed working with her on a piece I wrote about blind programmers. But I think I cheated because this piece became more about film criticism than AI.
I ended up working with Kevin who is an actual cinephile. When writing about films, you know you’re in good hands when your editor is a hardcore cinephile.
JavaScript Runs the World
https://www.wired.com/story/javascript-runs-the-world-maybe-literally/
If you’re not a coder but want to get a sense of what the big deal about JavaScript is, I hope you’ll give this one a read. WIRED started a new column called Machine Readable, and I had the privilege of contributing the first piece. (Shoutout to my wonderful editors, Angela and Jason, for making writing of this form possible.) I think I’ll be writing more essays of this nature going forward. (Just filed a piece about a purely functional language—not hard to guess which).
I’d like to think that this is a continuation of software criticism. Because a programming language is, essentially, a piece of software. And I think software is a worthy object of criticism. But more on that later maybe in a future post because holy shit did this one take long to write. (How do people send out weekly newsletters?) It took eight months to write the second one, so let’s see if I manage to get another one out this year…
Running
By the way, Yeseul and I are running the SF Half Marathon (“The City Half”), so let me know if you’re planning to do so as well. (When registering, you’re all are welcome to join team “Bodhisati” named after our two cats, Bodhi and Sati.) If you need a referral code that gives you 15% off, shoot me an email. (Comments are disabled but emails are not.)
Hope all’s well with you—and thanks for subscribing.
