M&Ms: The Computer Disease

To cure myself of The Computer Disease, I keep a lot of computers around.

Some people like fancy watches or cars; lucky for me, I never got into that. Those are expensive habits. But I did get into computers.

I have three MacBooks Pros. One MacBook Pro has 64 GB of RAM and one of the best Apple silicon chips. I also have two custom-built PCs. One PC sports 128 GB of RAM, the fastest SSD on the market, an AMD ThreadRipper, and an NVidia Graphics card that costs a grand, among other awesome parts. But this is old now. The other PC is good, too, but just a little newer. And I also have a Mac Mini in the house. The Mac Mini is mainly for the kids; I don't want you to think I've gone soft. But I'll fess up that I have typed up a newsletter edition or two on the thing.

One advantage of having more than one machine around is that suppose the weather is wonderful and I find myself outside, and I get the sudden urge to work, there is a machine right in the Garage. If I am in the office, there is one there, and so on.

But the real advantage is if I find myself wasting time on the computer I am on, I get up, walk over to another part of my house with another machine and fire up the code editor or the text editor to do some real work. It seems silly, but it works every time, and I promise this advantage is not just me rationalizing my expensive habit. The new physical environment I am in, and the new machine I fire up do not have any of the time wasters I had open in the previous machine.

See, the real problem with computers is that they're a lot of fun.

But Computers are fun for more than just playing games, watching hours of youtube, or doom-scrolling social media. You can also spend hours talking to ChatGPT. Or, if you're a developer like me, you can spend hours improving, refactoring, or beautifying code. Which can be good sometimes, but many times you can also fool yourself that you're doing important work. But it's not just devs. Designers can design, then re-design over & over. Writers can draft, then re-draft, and re-draft again.

Finding out what other cool things you can do and how far you can take the damn thing is known as "The Computer Disease."

And it's easy to get the computer disease"; even theoretical physicists got it.

When they invented the nuclear bomb in Los Alamos in April 1943, Richard Feynman wrote:

"We decided that the big problem—was to figure out exactly what happened during the bomb's implosion, so you can figure out exactly how much energy was released and so on—required much more calculating than we were capable of. A clever fellow by the name of Stanley Frankel realized that it could possibly be done on IBM machines."

But after they got the machines, Mr. Frankel began to suffer from computer disease.

Feynman then wrote:

"It's a very serious disease, and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is you play with them. They are so wonderful. You have these switches—if it's an even number, you do this; if it's an odd number, you do that—and pretty soon, you can do more and more elaborate things, if you are clever enough, on one machine.

But after a while, the whole system broke down. Frankel wasn't paying any attention to the work; he wasn't supervising anybody... he was sitting in a room figuring out how to make one [computer] automatically print arc-tangent X. Absolutely useless.

But if you've ever worked with computers, you understand the disease—the delight in being able to see how much you can do. But he got the disease for the first time, the poor fellow who invented the whole program.

And they had done only three problems in nine months..."

At the request of Oppenheimer, who was running The Manhattan Project, Feynman went over and managed to snap Frankl and the team out of the computer disease. After playing with the computer for a little, Feynman immediately recognized what had come over the team. And they found ways to snap out of it and get their important work done, ultimately ending the war in the Pacific.

As a self-proclaimed computer geek, I tell you this computer disease is very real. If smart people like Feynman and Frankl struggle with it, what chance do we have?

But if you can't cure yourself the way I cure myself, you might have to keep different profiles on the same computer for different purposes and switch between them. Move physically with your laptop. Or you might have to have special scripts that can block out all notifications and distractions.

Whatever your method is, I wish you Godspeed in curing your computer disease.

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Three Tweets: Jet’s Stock Referral Program, Dating through Google Docs, Just Don’t Be Stupid

My friend Sayid tagged me on this tweet because of my time at Jet.

Here is a fun fact, my first task at Jet was to create a system to manage that list of referrals and let all those people onto the Jet shopping platform slowly. The list was at around 450k emails in total from the contest. Some of those 450k emails were fake; we had to weed those out. But a good chunk were very real.

Eric Martin’s story is fascinating, and he did win and make a bunch of money. Patrick (who replied to that tweet) went down a rabbit hole and dug up a bunch of those old stories.

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The fact that people find a public Google Doc easier to manage and more custom than the dating apps of the world ought to be a wake-up call not to overthink and overcomplicate things.

What is happening here is a very interesting phenomenon, and it highlights the dangers of over-designing, productizing, and over-engineering things.

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This is a really simple idea by Charlie Munger, but it is one that is worth internalizing and remembering.

Charlie Munger likes to point out that he and Buffet are not geniuses.

For example, they pretty much missed the entire Internet Era of investing, and their firm is still worth hundreds of billions.

Their whole philosophy is you don’t need to jump over crazy hoops. You don’t need to be crazy smart. Just avoid mistakes that could ruin you and be as rational as you can be, and you’ll do fine in business, investing, and in life.

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Two Memes: European vs. American Economics, Rich Pretty Pointers

There are good points on both sides of this that get lost in the discourse.

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For my non-technical friends, C++ is a very powerful but difficult programming language to master. And pointers are one of many ways a software developer could easily shoot themselves in the foot with some nasty bugs. Pointers are a huge source of the power & complexity in C++ and the ability to shoot oneself in the foot.

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-Louie

P.S. You can reply to this email; it will get to me, and I will read it even if I can’t always reply in a timely manner.