muizz
@ayokanme
We come and go, like ripples in a stream
muizz
@ayokanme
We come and go, like ripples in a stream

To go with the flow is to seek equilibrium.
Excerpt from a remarkable final shareholder letter:
“Staving off death is a thing that you have to work at. Left to itself – and that is what it is when it dies – the body tends to revert to a state of equilibrium with its environment. If you measure some quantity such as the temperature, the acidity, the water content or the electrical potential in a living body, you will typically find that it is markedly different from the corresponding measure in the surroundings. Our bodies, for instance, are usually hotter than our surroundings, and in cold climates they have to work hard to maintain the differential. When we die the work stops, the temperature differential starts to disappear, and we end up the same temperature as our surroundings.”
You get ~350k waking hours every year to do things.
You get 8 shots to do big/meaningful things in your life.
Wonderful.

Mathematics is a an abstraction and it is best broadcast using mathematical notation (a form of writing).
The permanence of sand drawings seem to be the limiting factor here.
Excerpt: “To appreciate how revolutionary Ascher’s perspective was, consider that before her work and that of her contemporaries, scholars generally assumed that only societies with writing could truly practice mathematics. They constrained their investigations of mathematical knowledge to textual sources and ignored many other practices seen in societies with oral traditions that did not use a written language.“
“It shouldn’t be like this [illegible/complex/chaotic]”
But not only is illegibility an acceptable trait of optimal systems. It is a trait that all systems optimized against complex realities will tend towards. The real world is complex and extremely high-dimensional. When we see a successful company that’s chaotic, we shouldn’t think: “wow, it succeeded despite chaos!”, we should think: “Of course! This is what a complex, optimized system looks like: an illegible forest.”