Spilled Milk

Try not to cry over it.

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  • The Leviathan Loses its Privacy

    “The life of man, solitary, nasty, brutish, and short.”

    It’s interesting to think about what a man like Thomas Hobbes would say when asked about a world without privacy. Hobbes often likes to imagine a “state of nature” when analyzing humans, and what he is referring to is essentially a lawless and government-less land where humans are in constant states of fear and survival.

    Hobbes believed that deep down, humans are evil. In turn he actually advocates for big government – saying that humans cannot be left to their own devices. His preference is an absolute monarch with unlimited power. The only task of the monarch is to ensure that humans don’t find themselves in a “state of nature”.

    In my head it doesn’t make sense for a human to control the rest of the humans because humans at their basic level are evil and brutish. I think in order to really understand him I’ll need to read Leviathan, but at face value this concept seems a bit hypocritical.

    History has told us that absolute monarchs will pick and choose which types of citizens will find themselves in a “state of nature”, but even the state they find themselves in is a one-sided version. Humans are plunged into a state of fear and survival, but expected to obey the government and its law.

    The good old fashioned: Eat, and risk being jailed. Or starve, and preserve my “freedom”.

    To be frank, I’m not exactly sure where Hobbes’ ideals fit into this puzzle, or what he would even think of this world. Here are some quotes that I think he might say:

    • Ah, yes. Now their true nature will show!
    • Someone better take complete and full control over this!

    While it’s fun to think of Hobbes as an old curmudgeon upset with the world, maybe he would appreciate this. Maybe, this alone, this lack of privacy forever, would be what keeps humans away from their natural state. Maybe he wouldn’t need an absolute sovereign to keep order amongst chaos.

  • A world without privacy

    I sometimes like to imagine a world in which privacy doesn’t exist.

    Let’s say, that at any point in time, you could open up your laptop, and see a livestream of anyone in the world. Anyone in the world. At any time.

    At the same time, anyone in the world can open their laptop, and see a livestream version of you. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing – sleeping, eating, masturbating, speaking on the phone – it’s all available to watch.

    Let’s also say that this website has unlimited storage of video and you can go back to any time of a persons life. For example, I could re-watch my little league home run, or verify whether or not my interviewee took magic mushrooms before speaking with me.

    And for our hypothetical world, lets also imagine that all the video is high quality, and there’s multiple angles. As much as possible, I want to eliminate any ability to “hide” or any blindspots. In our hypothetical world, there are no blindspots.

    Okay, so we have our world established – let’s see where it takes us.

  • How many times do you wet your toothbrush

    All my life, I had wet my toothbrush twice. Once before I applied any toothpaste, and once afterwards. I’d continue this for a while, until sometime in college. I had a roommate from California who only wet his toothbrush one time.

    He’d wet his toothbrush, apply the paste, and brush away. I never really asked him about it, but quietly I started to understand. California has droughts and wildfires. It’s likely that most households in the area have some form of a water limit. So naturally, my roommate would be inclined to use less water.

    Ultimately, wetting the toothbrush one time is plenty to get the bristles softened. And most people’s mouths are already pretty wet to begin with. So now I wet my toothbrush once. I can say that the experience is no different.

    Did you know that each time you brush your teeth, if you leave the water running, you waste 4 gallons on average per session?

  • William Ernest Henley

    My head is bloody, but unbowed.   

    Beyond this place of wrath and tears   

      Looms but the Horror of the shade, 

    And yet the menace of the years   

      Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.   

    It matters not how strait the gate,   

      How charged with punishments the scroll,   

    I am the master of my fate:

      I am the captain of my soul.






    The night is dark and full of terrors. The morning is bright and full of pleasures.

  • The art major

    In my last post, I mentioned how our education system is ultimately a microcosm of our economic systems, and that capitalism has plagued our education with a sharp focus on grade point averages and the horrid question of what’s next?

    In this, I think of the art major.

    “Stop doodling“, the art major is told when sitting in sophomore year geometry class at the local public high school. He is told that SOHCAHTOA is more important than the doodle in his notebook.

    “What’s your plan for after college?”, the art major is asked at the Thanksgiving dinner table, before the stuffing has made its way around to him.

    “I hope you can handle the smell of a grease trap”, the art major is told jokingly at the bar by his peers.

    “You can always come work for me”, the art major is promised by his neighbor who works at an “asset management” firm.

    What about the art major? Who is no less intelligent than his peers. No less kind, no less moral and no less human. Why are they treated as a joke? Apprenticeship seems like a thing of the past, so what’s wrong with trying to grow as an artist and learn from others? In short, it’s because college is expensive, and as a society we hold money in very high regard. Once again, a symptom of our socioeconomic system.

    One day, the arts will become important once again. I don’t know when it will be, maybe not in my lifetime. It might even take until the near-end, where we’ve brutalized the planet to an unfixable degree and building generational wealth is a silly idea given the impending future.

    Until then, my heart feels for the art major.

  • If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying

    I’ve often heard the quote: “if you’re not cheating, you’re not trying”.

    When I was in college, the AI wave had taken over. Barriers for entry were nonexistent, while limits and controls were not yet in place. My first ever college coding exam took place online, without any type of Honorlock or screen monitoring technology. Questions like: “What is the output of the following code?” became rather easy. Copy the code, paste it into my interpreter, view the output, select the matching multiple choice option. Easy as pie.

    Exam one had an average score of around 88%. Higher than it had ever tested before in person. Potentially an outlier, but worth noting.

    Exam two had an average score of just about 94%. Higher than any exam I had ever taken in my high school and college career. Definitely not an outlier. It seems that word had spread like wildfire. “Hey, you know you can just copy and paste the code into Jupyter”.

    Exam three, the last exam before finals, is where things get a bit more interesting. It was clear to everyone that students were using interpreters on these exams. Including the professors and TAs. So what did they do? They inserted a plethora of invisible, code-breaking characters into the code snippets, causing a syntax error for anyone who tried a quick copy and paste. Of course, the immediate reaction was panic. Naturally, someone who was unprepared for exams one and two and still scored well would also come unprepared for exam three.

    Surprisingly, exam three still had an average score of about 86%. Still relatively high for a coding exam. Especially this far into the semester when the content has built upon itself and becomes more challenging, you might expect a larger drop. The problem, was that the attempts made to limit interpreter use were nearly futile. It seems that a few were scared away by the new invisible characters, but those that stuck with the interpreter route were once again rewarded.

    If you used what I’d call “the interpreter method” for exams one and two, it would take you about 30 seconds per question. On exam three, you can still use the method, but in this case you have to parse each code snippet and remove the code-breaking characters. This took about 90 seconds per question. If you weren’t scared away by your initial syntax errors, kept plugging along, and cleaned each snippet, you were rewarded. If you got scared, relied on your own knowledge, and took the exam without aids, you were punished.

    Now, it’s not like I was a bad student. I completed all the assignments and did well on them, and I attended lecture and understood it well. Without any aids, my guesstimate for my these exams would have been a score of about 90%. Not the 98-100 range which I found myself in. Sometimes even sacking a question or two to keep my radar level low. How insane, purposefully missing questions in order to veil what was really happening. But 90% still would have been good.

    90%, how wonderful! Now let’s look back at the other 10% and see where I can learn from my mistakes. Maybe in another day, this would have been true. I’d take my 90%, see what I missed and see where I’ve made a silly mistake or have gaps in my knowledge. But the temptation is just too much. I have the right answer sitting right in front of me. I cannot physically stop myself from ignoring a potentially incorrect answer. Or checking my work on a question I’m not certain I understood.

    I’m certain that I would have felt better about my exam if I had just taken it straight up and gotten my 90%. But the way I see it, I didn’t have a choice. You’ll need a good high school GPA to get into a good college. A good college and good GPA at said college is will help get you a job post-grad. So we do what we can to increase this GPA. Each time increasing our odds of finding a career after college. If we can cut corners, we can. We don’t do it because it helps us learn, we do it because the end result is so important to us.

    “What’s the point of college if I don’t use it to get a high paying job?”. I was lucky enough to not require student loans for my college degree, but that isn’t the case for everyone. Even still, my family’s investment into my future would be seemingly wasted had I flunked out of school, or never pursued the corporate world post graduation.

    Capitalism is an invasive species that spreads its seeds in what should be our most scared institutions.

  • Weekends are tough

    This weekend, I spent three days playing golf with some friends in Scottsdale, Arizona. We got to play some exciting and really great courses out there. My team came up short, and in the end I let my partner down, but it was an incredible time. I couldn’t have been happier this weekend.

    Meanwhile, I forgot to post any blogs during my time out west. So I’m in the hole here – I owe myself a few. I’m going to give myself a pass. If I didn’t, what would the outcome be? I can’t exactly penalize myself, just let myself down. And I owe a debt to myself, so I shall pay it.

    There will probably be multiple weekends where I miss out, and that’s okay. I’ll just need to double up some days. That’s okay.

    Of all the debts I owe, the most important is owed to myself.

  • Mindless crap for mindless crap

    This year has been such an odd year for me. Usually, I’m obsessed with the NFL and fantasy football. For some reason this year I just haven’t been as interested in it. I find myself watching other TV or movies on Sunday instead of football.

    Not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. It’s not like I’m watching something new and inspiring either. On Sundays especially, I find myself watching shows I’ve seen multiple times before, like How I Met Your Mother, Shameless, and Entourage. Which I love, but sometimes it just feels lazy to re-run the same show, barely paying attention.

    Mindless crap for mindless crap.

  • Forever World

    Every year, my friends and I create a Minecraft world. Typically around Christmas time, we’ll spend two weeks playing, and ultimately leave the world for dead in less than a month. This always frustrated me, as all of my hard “work” went out the window after a month. Only to repeat the same work every year.

    This year, we’ve decided to create our “Forever World”, which likely won’t last until the end of time, but will at least last until we stop playing video games. This time around, we won’t be resetting. After all, it seems a bit silly to constantly restart a game that I’ve never truly finished. (Sure, technically beating the game is once the ender dragon dies, but true players know that A LOT more can be done after that).

    I don’t really have many plans for this world, but I’m excited for it. It seems silly, but there’s something interesting about a world like this. You can’t just restart if you don’t like your house, you’ll have to tear it down. You can’t re-choose your seed, you’ll just have to explore deeper. I hope that it provides a nice twist to a game I love very much.

    Here are some parts of Minecraft I think are fun: redstone war machines, new copper golems, creating banners with looms and dyes, villager trading, enterprise, industry, end busting

    Here are some parts of Minecraft I think are scary: the Nether, fighting the Ender Dragon, Fighting the Wither, mining, caving in general, searching for the Nether fortress, lava

    I can guarantee that I will encounter all of these things in this new world. After all, forever is a long time.

  • This isn’t for you

    This isn’t for you. This is for me.

    Inspired by Mark Manson, I’ve challenged myself recently to try caring less about what people think. I won’t pretend that this is some new idea or that I’ve hit some Eureka! moment here. In my long and excruciating twenty four years of life I’ve found that the Eureka! moment just doesn’t exist. Well, maybe for science or industry, but not for life. I guess maybe it was silly of me to think that one day it would all just hit. One day, I thought. Still think, probably.

    In fact, a good way to describe my current life is: waiting around for life to kick me in the teeth. Waiting, waiting, waiting. Stuck in the waiting place. The wanting place. “I want X but I’m waiting until I solve Y”. Such a damned sentence that has slowly become one of my most used. I tend to satisfy my needs, and don’t seem to care much about my wants. So here I sit, waiting for life to kick me in the teeth. Increase my list of needs, please!

    I’m certainly aware that there is a lot of privilege seeded in this mindset. In truth, very little of my life has been a struggle. I’ve been “getting by” in all facets of life, thanks to privilege. So many hours of hard work and devotion skipped over – like hitting the Gumdrop Pass in a game of CandyLand and someone slipped a loaded die in my pocket. Of course, not everything is sunshine and rainbows or CandyLand. But it doesn’t rain often, and when it rains, it certainly hasn’t poured.

    So why sit here, arms outstretched, waiting for the skies to close and the world to flood? There isn’t much of a reason aside from the simple truth that it’s easy. Really, really fucking easy. But I can do hard things. With all of this in mind and my miniature existential crisis seemingly hashed out, I’ve decided to put myself up to the following challenge: Write a blog every day. Doesn’t matter how long. Or about what. Just do it every day. For thirty days. If after thirty days, it isn’t right, then move on. But stay for thirty days. At least thirty days.

    And if you think that this challenge isn’t hard enough, please remember: This isn’t for you. This is for me.