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The "life is a game" mental frame puts you in a fun frame of mind. You just can't wait to see what happens next. Maybe you'll lose, perhaps you'll win -- who cares! As long as it's interesting, keeps you amused, engaged, and learning.

Chances are the second proposition sounded more appealing to you. But look again, both these propositions are identical. The second version attracts more positive answers[1] because it's framed as cost whereas the first version is framed as a loss and who wants to lose?

"Life is a game" mental frame Once a motherfucker get an understandin' on the game, and what the levels and the rules of the game is, then the world ain't no trick no more, the world is a game to be played. -- 2Pac in "Starin' Through My Rear View"

The risk anxiety can paralyze you and unless you act you're just making your situation worse. One handy mental frame to adopt in this case is "life is a game, and I'm playing it." If life is a game, then you're there to play it.

In situations where it's painful, you have to remember that time will go by, nothing lasts forever, and that you'll eventually be on the other side. What's important now is to execute!

A excellent technique to couple with the worst-case scenario mental frame is what's called "negative visualization". An age-old technique invented by the Stoics in ancient Greece, you visualize or meditate on the worst. Like, actually imagine it happening. If it does happen, you're already at peace with it, and if good or neutral thing happens then it's ecstatic!

There is a lot more to this, and I'll try to keep this as a live document. But for now, I need to get back to playing the life game because time won't wait for me, and really, what's the worst that can happen? I want you to remember though, that I'm not only my job, it's true that I learn a lot from it, but I contain multitudes!

There is a way to bypass this and have software control how network links work, and for that we need to think about Unix conceptually for a second. In the hardcore Unix philosophical view: everything is a file. Hard drives and storage devices are files. Process information is viewable as files. Serial devices are files. This core philosophy is rooted at the heart of just about everything in Unix and Linux systems, which makes it a lot easier for applications to be programmed. The same API can be used for writing to files, tape drives, serial ports, and network sockets. This makes everything a lot conceptually simpler and reusing software for new purposes trivial.

discovered

Einstein reportedly once said that his own major scientific talent was his ability to look at an enormous number of experiments and journal articles, select the very few that were both correct and important, ignore the rest, and build a theory on the right ones.

There’s a line I love: People don’t remember books; they remember sentences. More specifically, they remember stories.

Pay close attention when someone you admire disagrees on a topic you’re passionate about.

When those two things align – a person you admire disagrees with you about something fundamental – pay close attention. There’s a good chance this is information you’ll want stored in your head.

An asset you don’t deserve can quickly become a liability. Maybe your portfolio surged during a bubble, your company hit a monster valuation, or you negotiated a salary that exceeds your ability. It feels great at the time. But reality eventually catches up, and demands repayment in equal proportion to your delusions – plus interest.

None of those are about settling or giving up. It’s about avoiding a certain kind of psychological debt that comes due when reality catches up. There’s a stoic saying: “Misfortune weighs most heavily on those who expect nothing but good fortune.”

Expecting nothing but good feels like such a good mindset – you’re optimistic, happy, and winning. But whether you know it or not you’re very likely piling up a hidden debt that must eventually be repaid.

There are a few reasons I can think of: It has never been easier to npm install (or yarn add) your problems away, whether it’s a library to format dates or some animation library. Third-party scripts like analytics, chat, or whatever your marketing team stuck inside GTM. First-party code.

But why is it steadily growing? I would say it’s due to product requirements and user expectations for rich interactive experiences. The more features we add, the more code we generate, the more JavaScript we ship.

Furthermore, there is somewhat of a correlation between DX (developer experience) and UX (user experience). To better understand this, we can look at this slide from a recent talk that Shai Reznik (international speaker and Founder of HiRez.io) gave:

The main reason for this is hydration, which is the process of attaching behavior to declarative content to make it interactive.

It’s like playing a video game — you progress on a level and collect loot, but then you accidentally die and have to restart the level from square one.

“Astro Islands represent a leading paradigm shift for frontend web architecture. Astro extracts your UI into smaller, isolated components on the page. Unused JavaScript is replaced with lightweight HTML, guaranteeing faster loads and time-to-interactive (TTI).” —Astro website This is pretty awesome, as it also allows you to write components in almost any frontend framework you like. You can make an island interactive on a case-by-case basis and with specific directives to control hydration, which they call partial hydration.

The problem is not that there is too much JavaScript; rather, the JavaScript must be eagerly downloaded and executed. (As I’ve mentioned, many existing systems have lazy loading, but only for components not currently in the render tree).

In a nutshell, with hydration we run our code on the server and then on the client. Resumability means running the app once, pausing execution, and then resuming where we left off, just on the client. It’s kind of like how VMs work. A virtual machine can run an app, say a text editor, on an operating system and then be stopped, moved to another machine, and then resumed.

Resumable frameworks are not new. For almost a decade, Google has been using Wiz (an internal framework at Google), which powers Google Search and Photos. Marko, a framework from eBay, is promising resumability in their next version.

Qwik is made by 3 performance nerds (they said it, not me 😉) that have 4 frontend frameworks under their belt.

Applying these three areas to my criteria idea: in science, you're successful if you create new knowledge; in invention, you're successful if you create something useful; in business, you're successful if you make money.

I personally would love to be both a successful inventor and a successful founder. But I'm gradually coming to grips with the realization that if I had to pick one or the other, I'd rather be the successful inventor.

But I don't think that makes me any less ambitious. In fact I think the software industry/society would benefit from having more people who funnel their ambition toward public goods!

I don't consider myself to be doing research on programming languages. I'm just designing one, in the same way that someone might design a building or a chair or a new typeface. I'm not trying to discover anything new. I just want to make a language that will be good to program in. In some ways, this assumption makes life a lot easier. The difference between design and research seems to be a question of new versus good. Design doesn't have to be new, but it has to be good. Research doesn't have to be good, but it has to be new. I think these two paths converge at the top: the best design surpasses its predecessors by using new ideas, and the best research solves problems that are not only new, but actually worth solving. So ultimately we're aiming for the same destination, just approaching it from different directions.

For many good ideas, the constraint to become a business can be just as damaging as the constraint to be research.

That seems obvious, yet I never thought about it much until recently. Perhaps that’s because the most commonly cited reason to not start a startup is roughly “it’s really hard and you probably won’t succeed.” If you’re ambitious, “it’s really hard” is a positive signal, in the same way that most people would judge a $80 pair of boots to be better than a $20 pair.

Framing your ideas as businesses can also dampen your morale. The euphoria of quitting my job and being free to work on my own projects lasted for about two months. After that, it was largely replaced by the soul-crushing burden of how-on-earth-will-I-ever-make-a-living-from-this. Psychologically, I sometimes wonder if it’d be easier to build a business if I wasn’t trying to build a business.

My ideas feel like business ideas because I can totally see how they would make lots of money—eventually. But the problem with these grand visions is that they don’t tell you how to get the idea started, and that’s what matters in a startup. I’ve been working on Findka for 10 months and I’m only now getting to something that’s worth using in the short-term (i.e. before we have lots of users and data to make the algorithm great). Anecdotally, it seems to me that most successful startups are not driven by grand visions at first; rather, the long-term vision comes into view after the company starts to grow.

I wouldn’t be surprised if grand visions are on average more of a liability than an asset for early-stage founders. If that’s the case, it’s ironic that startups, with their change-the-world potential, naturally appeal to grand-vision people like me. Perhaps we’d be better off working through things first in a low-pressure, non-startup phase, switching to startup mode when (and only when) an infant grand vision matures into a real business idea.

The networking would also reduce the risk: even if your exploration doesn’t result in anything significant, you’ll have a network of people who know you do good work. That’s incredibly valuable—if this whole system worked well enough, it could be a good alternative to college. Who needs a degree when you have referrals?