I am a software engineer by trade, available for freelance and consulting. These are my writings; mostly non-professional. You can also find me on Bluesky and Github.
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On "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"
June 10, 2025
I really liked the beginning of this book, but got lost in the weeds towards the end. I expected this book to be an exploration of Buddhism for an American audience, but it turned out that the author had his own philosophical system to promote. It's funny. Read this passage from early in the book (page 7):
In this Chautauqua I would like not to cut any new channels of consciousness but simply dig deeper into old ones that have become silted in with the debris of thoughts grown stale and platitudes too often repeated. ‘What’s new?’ is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question ‘What is best?’, a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream.
Maybe Pirsig really believed he was embarking on an exploration of “what is best” with this book because it is ostensibly an exploration of the concept of quality. However, there is a bit of rhetorical sleight-of-hand at work here; the book actually contains a proposal for a new metaphysical framework centered around an undefinable thing called “Quality”, which could just as easily have been called “God”, “Arete” or anything else. I get the impression that the author (and his self-insert protagonist, Phaedrus) believe this metaphysics of quality represents a new contribution to philosophy, and a significant one. I wasn’t compelled by Phaedrus’ battle against academia to exalt his theory of Quality. In my view, the protagonist’s self-seriousness and ego were the cause of his mental health struggles throughout the book, but the narrative wants to convince the reader it’s because he suffers under the weight of this perfect revelation that nobody else seems to understand. For a book that uses zen in its title, this is ironic.
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Reviving this blog
June 9, 2025
I haven't written on this blog in a while. This is partly because I haven't felt like doing long-form writing. It's also because of the way this blog was built and deployed in the past, which made publishing a new piece more work than necessary.
For a while I’ve wanted a place to leave thoughts, no matter how short or inconsequential. I used to use Twitter for this, but I don’t anymore for obvious reasons. I now use Bluesky sometimes, but I wanted a place of my own to write content of any length or complexity. I have had this website for a few years, but it wasn’t really set up for “microblogging”. Over the past few weeks, I’ve migrated this blog to Jekyll & Github pages in order to make it easy to contribute to. I also changed the homepage layout to a format that will make it easy to consume small posts and previews of larger posts without clicking into the article. My old homepage only showed the article title and date, whereas now it should be easy to read an entire short post without clicking on it.
Jekyll + Github pages makes publishing content really easy. I just write my thoughts into a markdown file in my blog git repo, push it to Github, and it’s published! For my own interest, I am documenting below the old way my blog was written and published. It will be obvious why this setup created a higher barrier to posting.
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Book Review: David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity
February 5, 2023
When I began reading The Beginning of Infinity I was a little miffed to see how seldom the percent completed marker on my kindle changed when I flipped a page. Only an additional percent every fifteen page turns? How long is this book?? This admission betrays my laziness, but I’ve been burned before by dense tomes with more anecdotes than original ideas. As Shakespeare said, brevity is good. Besides, I’m a product of my time, baby.
As I drew near to the end of this book, around 90% completion, I began to have the opposite feeling. My pace of reading slowed down. I began to highlight more and more passages, as if trying to take them with me to go. I never know how much of a book’s end contents are going to be references and marginalia, so I feared with every page turn I’d be at the closing remarks.
Such was my experience of The Beginning of Infinity. A central idea so good that any number of words spent elaborating on it I would have consumed hungrily.
I can’t say definitively all of the ways that my thinking has been changed by this book. That self-knowledge will need time to percolate. But I can try to list some of them.
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Alone on the Playground
January 27, 2023
I grew up in what you might call a "streetcar suburb", though the streetcar was ripped out a long time before I was born. The neighbourhood I grew up in is a bit over 100 years old; grid streets, with brick houses spaced apart by gaps just wide enough to walk between. I walked to school. These kinds of neighbourhoods are fashionable now, and mine has lots of young families these days; when I visit my parents I see kids playing on the sidewalks. But when I was growing up I was lonely on weekends. I had friends at school who lived in newer suburbs. They would tell me stories about their Saturdays, waking up to streets and inter-connected backyards full of other kids their age, going out after breakfast and not coming in until dinner. They had their school friends and their neighbourhood friends. I had school friends and my computer. As I got older, I was able to roam further, and my social life benefited.
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Music is Dead; Long Live Music
November 28, 2022
It’s all folk music now.
The importance of musical movements and the innovation of new genres has been declining for some time now. I know that people have been saying this forever. I also realize that, at 26, I’m the prime age to join the “music is dead” camp; the bands I loved as a teenager are old now. But, in my mind at least, it’s not that I’m disappointed by the new styles of music coming out; I’m not even claiming that new music is particularly bad. I’m really asking: where is the new music? Not that there aren’t a billion songs being made every second, but where are the new styles? Where are the sounds that will define the early 2020s in popular culture? Listen to the first 30 seconds of this song:
Someone who is familiar with popular music of the last 50 years or so will probably be able to place this song in a timeline of musical movements with a decent amount of accuracy – i.e. they would be able to guess that the song was released in the 1980s. Will we be able to identify 2020s music the same way?
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