Another year has gone by
And in response, I simply sigh
Another year has taken place
I guess I’ll handle it with grace?
Another year, the same old grind…
And yet I feel I’ve fallen behind

As you might know if you’ve read my equivalent post from last year, I am now 35 years old (and 3 days). If we consider “working years” to range from 20 to 65 – which seems a decent definition – then I am 1/3 of the way through them, 1/3 of the way through my career. So, theoretically, we should see my résumé at least triple in impressiveness by the time I retire!

Here’s a story; stop me if you’ve heard it before.

There’s a child, an energetic, enthusiastic child, perhaps hard to deal with in some ways, but all around just beautiful. And then they go to a parochial school – or perhaps they just have a rather strict public school teacher. In either case, the authority figure makes it their wicked mission to suppress all the beautiful children’s personalities into identical, well-behaved zombies in the interest of the idol of order. Only our heroic child remains with their own personality, constantly getting in trouble for it but remaining themselves.

Tolkien was trying to make a new mythology, a new set of deeply resonant stories, for modern (especially English) culture, and he succeeded. He transformed fantasy, and founded the concept of high fantasy. His detailed legendarium (as his mythology is called) is a masterpiece of world-building, with deep symbolism and emotional complexity, a mythology with arguably more depth and room to explore than many ancient ones. Tolkien scholars work full-time to study it, and many more people draw from it explicitly and implicitly for their own art, in D&D and other more modern fantasy settings. Especially with his near-human species, his concepts of hobbits (off-brand as halflings) and elves (distinct from previous iterations) have deeply resonated with many people.

The NSA recently published a Cybersecurity Information Sheet about the importance of memory safety, where they recommended moving from memory-unsafe programming languages (like C and C++) to memory-safe ones (like Rust). Dr. Bjarne Stroustrup, the original creator of C++, has made some waves with his response.

To be honest, I was disappointed. As a current die-hard Rustacean and former die-hard C++ programmer, I have thought (and blogged) quite a bit about the topic of Rust vs C++. Unfortunately, I feel that in spite of the exhortation in his title to “think seriously about safety,” Dr. Stroustrup was not in fact thinking seriously himself. Instead of engaging conceptually with the article, he seems to have reflexively thrown together some talking points – some of them very stale – not realizing that they mostly are not even relevant to the NSA’s Cybersecurity Information Sheet, let alone a thoughtful rebuttal of it.

ADHD is a controversial topic, and it’s never been more relevant. Diagnoses are soaring right now, driven up by a variety of interacting forces. Open discussion about ADHD – and the related general concept of “neurodiversity” – has been exploding on the Internet. And recently, there’s been a very unfortunate Adderall shortage.

So I wanted to take an opportunity to share some thoughts about it. I would say that I was taking this opportunity to clear things up, but unfortunately, that might not be possible. The reality is a really muddy situation, and many people’s mental models – including many professionals’ – are oversimplifications.

Happy December! Happy Winter Holidays! We’re almost done with 2022!

I just had my birthday yesterday, on December 20. I am now 34 years old, which is more than a third of a century! I generally take the opportunity on my birthday to do some reflection on the previous year, and to set a theme for the next year. I wanted to share both with you, my audience.

The past year has been intense for me personally. It’s just been a laundry list of life changes and achievements:

As promised in my previous posts about organization, I will now go into some detail about my own organizational system. But before I start talking about it, and how I came to develop it, I’d like to emphasize a few points, or more specifically, three caveats, lest Zeus strike me down with a thunderbolt for my hubris:

• Caveat the First: My system is a work in progress. Even though it is overall very helpful, it’s always falling apart a little bit. Some parts of it work better than others, and it’s constantly evolving as I try to shore up the parts that fall apart more easily. Sometimes, it’s in a better state than others.
• Caveat the Second: What works for me might well not work for you, dear reader. I reckon you and I have very different brains. Even if a psychiatrist would categorize me and you with all the same formally recognized traits, we still have literally different brains, and literally different histories, cultural backgrounds, and personal struggles.
• Caveat the Third: Nothing in this system is particularly novel. It is however very tweaked to my own personality. I present this not to claim that I’ve developed anything new, but as a worked example of applying existing practices to my own life, in hopes that it will be useful to you.

And it is indeed a very personal system and a continuously evolving system. I am sensitive to minor issues. If a TODO list system is insufficiently ergonomic for me, I’ll get overwhelmed by it, or intimidated by it, disheartened, blocked out by my personal “Wall of Awful”, and I will default to not using any organizational system at all, and simply relying on my natural faculties – my naturally poor prospective memory – to make sure I do the things I need to do.

In my previous post on organization, I concluded with this statement:

As everyone’s brain works differently (whether ADHD or not), people differ tremendously in what their ideal organizational systems are. For me, I am much less productive if I have a less than ideal system – the stakes are very high. But even for people who can be productive on any system, I think that tailoring their system to their brain, their lifestyle, their job and schedule and hobbies, can have amazing results.

Memory Leak

I have an excellent memory. I have a terrible memory.

Well, which one is it?

This is a confusing state to be in. It can be frustrating to people around me. How is it – my father used to ask me when I was in high school – that I could remember all the lessons and readings for my tests in school, and get all the good grades, but couldn’t ever remember to do the simplest task or household chore, or to bring with me the simplest item? And of course the fact that I remember these conversations from so long ago is a bit of a case in point.

I am an Ivy League-educated professional who regularly has to write for my job, who was always in the top English classes in school. And sometimes, I mix up “your” and “you’re.”

I know how grammar works. I always, if I stop to think about it, can figure out which one to use. I know all the tricks. Most of the time, I don’t have to think about it, and the right one comes out. But sometimes, I’m just thinking in terms of what sounds I would make if I were speaking, and I’m in a rush or just distracted or just glitching, and the wrong one comes out.

Netflix should become a tech company.

I hear the obvious response already: Jimmy, Netflix is already a tech company!

Counterpoint: Is it though?

Somehow, after two dot-com booms, the markets still have an aesthetic-based definition of what constitutes a “tech company”: If a company – any company – has an expensive enough app, and if its founders talk enough about “disrupting” industries, then it is a “tech company” and is therefore entitled to a valuation completely disconnected from its actual industry. Think WeWork – and think what happened to it as people gradually realized it wasn’t an exciting tech start-up but rather a quite boring real estate company. Turns out, you don’t need an expensive app to run a coworking space.