Latest Posts

• The Math Behind Complete Destruction in King of Tokyo

  I made a child cry after I unintentionally crushed them in King of Tokyo. I asked my friend Claude if I was a bad person — specifically, whether the 9-point Complete Destruction card I used to win from nowhere was as strong as it felt. This is their response.

• Book of the Week: The Art of Spending Money

  I read The Art of Spending Money written by Morgan Housel, who wrote The Psychology of Money.

• Engineering Archetypes

  I’ve been thinking about myself as an engineer: past, present, and future. In the past, I talked to a machine learning expert about engineer archetypes: Iron Man, Captain America, and Yoda — see 4 types of software developers. Been a while since we spoke, but I have my friend Claude. Video games and collectible cards sometimes represent the characters with power levels and spider charts. I thought it would cool to draw these software engineering archetypes to see what dimensions show up and how they are different.

• Ranking Job Opportunities

  I was asked, how I was going to evalaute job opportunities. I didn’t think that far yet, I spent some effort a few days ago to determine what my values were since that was important based on my previous experience. I remember that Marissa Mayer, did some comparisons before she decided on joining Google. With help from my friend Claude, we ended up with this rubric.

• Values

  So I made a web app to figure out my values. I took a list from some website and ranked it.

• Value Ranking

  I decided to push the personal ranking things I use to git. This is ranking for personal items, not web scale data.

• Lettuce

  I planted some little gem lettuce seeds, but I’ve been having trouble with germination. Either lack of light exposure or too low soil temperatures. I planted 3 seeds per soil block. Starting 4 soil blocks a week to get some succession planting going.

• Single Fund Portfolio

  I asked Gemini to help me choose between mutual funds.

• Book of the Week: The Speed of Sound

  Thomas Dolby has no affiliation of Dolby Laboratories. I got this book, because I thought it was an origin story of Dolby Labs. Instead I got …

• Book of the Week: The Little Book of Common Sense Investing

  This week I read The Little Book of Common Sense Investing by John C. Bogle after finding out he has Enough. First thought is that do I still need to read this book if I’m already an index investor. Does he need to speak to the choir? I’ve been a long time convert after reading Unconventional Success. Beating the stock market is a zero-sum game.

• The Little Book Of Common Sense Investing

  This week I read The Little Book of Common Sense Investing by John C. Bogle after finding out he has Enough. First thought is that do I still need to read this book if I’m already an index investor. Does he need to speak to the choir? I’ve been a long time convert after reading Unconventional Success. Beating the stock market is a zero-sum game.

  Time makes more converts than reason —Tom Paine

  People are irrational, but math wins in the end. You just have to survive long enough to see it win.

  It's amazing how difficult it is for a man to understand something if he's paid a small fortune not to understand it.

  People are finance are stupid and they are paid to stay that way.

• Book of the Week: Enough

  This week I read Enough: True Measures of Money, Business and Life by John C. Bogle, the founder of Vanguard Mutual Fund Group. He had his first heart attack in 1960, but is still alive today. We focus too much on things that can be counted. You get what you measure. I’m tired of the rat race and wonder when I will have enough? What happens when you don’t have enough? Will I ever have enough? Jack can talk about enough since he clearly has enough already. When you’re rich and retired, you need to occupy your time, writing a book is one of those things. I will keep working until the day I have enough. I hope that day was yesterday