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The last couple of years I have been doing a better job of keeping notes on the books I read. So I figured I would make something out of it and post them periodically.

I chose to start with Peter Singer's The life you can save, because I am a supporter of his utilitarian views.

Singer is a philosopher whose life goal has been to get people to recognize that it is morally wrong not to help others when you have the chance to do so. Not with the objective of making you feel bad, but to make you see the huge positive impact you can have on the lives of others with an effort you will not even notice.

He has a famous thought experiment called "The drowning child", it goes like this:

On your way to work, you pass a small pond. On hot days, children sometimes play in the pond, which is only about knee-deep. The weather's cool today, though, and the hour is early, so you are surprised to see a child splashing about in the pond.

As you get closer, you see that it is a very young child, just a toddler, who is flailing about, unable to stay upright or walk out of the pond. You look for the parents or babysitter, but there is no one else around. The child is unable to keep her head above the water for more than a few seconds at a time. If you don't wade in and pull her out, she seems likely to drown.

Wading in is easy and safe, but you will ruin the new shoes you bought only a few days ago, and get your suit wet and muddy. By the time you hand the child over to someone responsible for her, and change your clothes, you'll be late for work. What should you do?

So given that you are not a psychopath, you will save the child. So what happens if the child is not in front of you, but you still know it is dying? is it morally ok to ignore it?

In this book Singer makes a point of how little of your income can make a huge impact in saving lives in places that have conditions that developed countries consider fiction: measles, malaria, hunger, etc. And he argues that the bigger your income, the bigger moral responsibility you will carry.

I usually hear two main critics to his arguments, one of them more right-leaning, the other more left-leaning:

Governments have the responsibility to help, not individuals. And by paying taxes we are already contributing what we must.

The root problem is systemic, and we must change the system to overcome it. Individuals must not be held responsible for systemic problems.

But they are really about the same thing, not making individuals responsible and expecting governments and corporations to solve this.

While this is true, it also gives you an easy way out. An individual cannot change a system, but they can do much better to help other individuals than to post an angry tweet and a black photo on Instagram.

Systemic problems must have systemic solutions, and we should always push for systemic changes. But I find it profoundly cowardly when people feign to be powerless and use the "system change" as an excuse not to acknowledge the level of agency they can have as individuals.

What I love about Singer's message is that it encourages you not to only acknowledge our current problems but to also take practical action. If you have a chance to save a life, why wouldn't you?

• This “identifiable victim effect” leads to “the rule of rescue”: we will spend far more to rescue an identifiable victim than we will to save a “statistical life.”

• Our focus should not be growth for its own sake, but the goals that lie behind our desire for growth: saving lives, reducing misery, and meeting people’s basic needs.

• I guess basically one wants to feel that one’s life has amounted to more than just consuming products and generating garbage. I think that one likes to look back and say that one’s done the best one can to make this a better place for others.

• Take the death of this small boy this morning, for example. The boy died of measles. We all know he could have been cured at the hospital. But the parents had no money and so the boy died a slow and painful death, not of measles but out of poverty.

• Most of us are absolutely certain that we wouldn’t hesitate to save a drowning child, and that we would do it at considerable cost to ourselves. Yet while thousands of children die each day, we spend money on things we take for granted and would hardly notice if they were not there. Is that wrong?

• There is an amount of money one needs to live a decent life—to pay for a reasonable amount of rent, clothes, food, and leisure. And if you have more than that amount, he posited, you should give it away—because you don’t need it, and someone else does.

• The world is not running out of food. The problem is that people in high-income countries have found a way to consume four or five times as much food as would be possible if they were to eat the crops we grow directly.

• If we want to bring about lasting cultural change, it is important that parents model effective poverty giving so their children see it as a normal part of what decent people do.

• First premise: suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care are bad.

  Second premise: if it is in your power to prevent something bad from happening, without sacrificing anything nearly as important, it is wrong not to do so.

  Third premise: by donating to effective charities, you can prevent suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care, without sacrificing anything nearly as important.

  Conclusion: therefore, if you do not donate to effective charities, you are doing something wrong.

• One reason why we should not cut off aid to countries with high population growth is that there is an abundance of evidence that reducing poverty also reduces fertility.

• If you are as skilled as Buffett in investing your money, I urge you to keep it until late in life, too, and then give away most of it, as he is doing. But people with less spectacular investment abilities might do more good by giving it away sooner and directing it to where it will go the furthest and do the most good.

• In 2015, the Kaiser Family Foundation asked Americans what portion of government spending (not national income) goes to foreign aid. The average response was that 26% of government spending went towards assisting other countries. The correct answer is less than 1%.

• If we look at the percentage of the population that gives to charity, the United States ranks only 12th, with 61% of the population giving, well below the top-ranked Myanmar where 88% give.

• Their results, which are borne out by other trials of cash transfers, have demonstrated that giving money to poor families:   Does not reduce the amount that adults work, but does reduce child labor; Raises school attendance; Increases economic autonomy; Increases women’s decision-making power; Leads to greater diversity in diet. Stimulates more use of health services.

I always wanted a big screen I could have turned on all the time with random stats I care about.

A couple of years ago I saw a post from an ex-Googler where he explained how he created one for himself and I got excited and scared at the same time. Excited because that’s exactly what I wanted, his version used an e-ink screen and the amazing dude did all the circuitry and wood-working himself. Scared because I imagined myself buying all the parts and leaving the project half-started like so many others.

I can hear the voices of all the unborn projects from all the notes, repositories and electronics that I have laying around.

So I just took notes of what I wanted and forced myself not to buy anything until I had a design document with everything figured out. If I didn’t solve everything, in paper, in advance, I was not going to do this project.

So it worked, I did not do that project.

However my interest started itching again when I learned about the Visionect e-ink screen that already had a computer integrated and wifi. You only had to point it to a webpage and everything else was already taken care of. It doesn’t even have to be plugged in, it came with a battery so you could just hang it up.

The screen is originally meant for businesses, for example, an airport with a bunch of screens that are all synchronized to display airplane statuses. Hence you can imagine that it already comes prepared for use cases that require entire fleets of screens.

One of the requirements for the screen to work is an-always on server that is pinging the screen in short intervals of time. This server is in charge of monitoring the status of the screens (battery, energy consumed, temperature, etc) and the content they display.

I wish I could just communicate with the screen directly instead of needing this server, but that was still convenient enough for me so I ordered the 32" screen.

I have the Visionect server running on a uConsole (with Raspberry CM4) 1 that I use as a home server. This is besides of the point of the post, but look at this beautiful computer:

As a first project I coded something to fetch a newspaper daily, the code splits in two parts:

1. A cron job that runs everyday to fetch the New York Times2, converts their cover into an image of the same 2560×1440 resolution of the screen, uploads it to AWS S3 and queries the Visionect server to command the screen to refresh.
2. A NextJS site serving the image I converted. This is the website the screen is instructed to have always open.

The flow looks like this:

Ultimately I want the screen for silly use cases: displaying our calendar, calendar of our favorite sports/events, weather, metadata about music playing, tracking habits, etc.

And some extra silly use cases, like displaying drawings that we make on the phone.

What I am most excited about is to track growth statistics for a couple of projects I have ongoing.

The screen itself is beautiful, very well built. I have had it in my living room for over a year and like how it looks. And I love the battery, with my use case it only needs to be charged every 3 months or so.

One con is that they have stopped updating the server for ARM. It's been 3 years since their last update, so there's a good chance they will stop supporting my raspberry server at some point. Now that there's several efficient x86 alternatives this is not a deal breaker, but certainly an annoyance.

What I hate is that Visionect now requires you to pay a yearly subscription to use the screen. This was not the case when I learned about the screen. And when I asked previous users, they were unaware. So it was probably a new requirement when I got the screen. This is absolutely horrendous. If I pay for hardware I expect to 100% own it and not for it to become a brick if I stop paying the subscription.

For this reason alone I would not recommend it. But I hope Visionect reconsiders and is friendlier to hobbyists.

1. The uConsole is gorgeous. It is more of a novelty but it also comes handy to have an integrated screen for quick debugging. And I'm amazed at how well built it is. The only downside is that they can take months to ship it. ↑

2. After I published this I changed it to a rotation of 10 newspapers. Every day one gets chosen automatically which makes for a nice surprise in the morning. The problem though is that not all of them have the same ratio as the screen, so they do not fit as nicely as the New York Times does. So far the novelty has been more exciting than the disgust of not having a perfect fit. But I can see myself going into a rotation of only newspapers that fit the screen perfectly. ↑

My first big competition itch in non-sports, was when PVP (Player vs Player) was introduced in World of Warcraft. I was instantly hooked, I left the biggest Guild in my server which focused on PVE content (Player vs Environment), to join a specialized PVP guild. I reached Lieutenant Commander, the 5th highest rank you could achieve in the game. But this took an enormous amount of grinding that I later had to quit because it was affecting school and work.‌

Years later I filled that competitive void with the release of StarCraft 2. I did not play the original a lot but I was instantly hooked with the new version. Friends joined the frenzy and I found myself following every big tournament and joining small ones. Eventually the community felt stale and it started decreasing rapidly with the release of MOBAs like League of Legends.

What I loved about StarCraft is that it was no longer the grinding what mattered. You had to improve your skills, yes by grinding practice, but not by the sheer amount of hours played like it happened with World of Warcraft.

Later on, I filled that competitive itch with Overwatch, but with Blizzard making all the wrong decisions in the past years, the game got stale and repetitive.

I left Overwatch telling myself that I would never put serious time into another competitive video game because you are left hanging after they go out of fashion and their communities start dwindling.

I couldn’t shake that competitive itch though, and that is how I ended up with Chess. Before the pandemic I followed Chess as a casual fan. Limited to following events results where Magnus Carlsen was participating. But with the pandemic I started doing puzzles regularly, following more tournaments and eventually liking it enough in order to get enough confidence to play online myself.

Chess filled every competitive itch while at the same time not suffering from the downsides:

• This is a hobby that will not die before me. People have been playing it for hundreds of years and will continue playing it after I am gone.
• It is accessible. You can find people who loves Chess everywhere. Play it on the phone, the computer, or find your local chess clubs.
• It is inclusive as they come, you will find all ages and backgrounds. There is no common “persona” like you will find in other events, for example engineering meetups.

I have heard people talk about how Chess is too much about memorizing nowadays. But this is not a problem at all unless you are a top Grand Master. Ignore whoever says that. The biggest danger is probably online cheating, but I haven’t found it to be a deal breaker at my level.

I strongly recommend it. I liked it so much that I have been taking classes for more than a year now. I still suck at it. But I love it.

The 90s were the pinnacle of brain-draining television. When you didn’t have anything to do outside it was normal to spend afternoons with aimless channel surfing waiting for your favorite tv program to come live.

When internet went mainstream I remember it bringing a lot of enthusiasm. You were suddenly not only able to consume unfiltered content from other normal people like you, you could also create content yourself!

Our generation was very smug about this transition at the beginning. It was common to hear “No, I don’t watch TV” or even “I don’t own a TV!”. But we merely switched to even more addictive screens.

The web today is a trap of dopamine-fueled scrolling. Algorithms are designed every day to keep us hooked, and they’re making our feeds ever more mindless, our thoughts ever shallower. We can’t even spend a five minute commute without taking a look at our phones.

Remember the good old days when our social feeds were chronologically ordered, when content was presented in the fairest way possible? They’re all a faint memory now. Instead we’re being force-fed a menu of whatever the algorithm deems to be the most engaging content for us.

The incentives of companies are all wrong. Instead of the platforms being in the service of humans, their incentive is to keep us scrolling as long as possible. Even to our detriment. Teams at all the top companies use our emotional weaknesses to keep us addicted.

Take Twitter, for instance. It used to be a place for meaningful conversations, a place to share ideas, a place to follow your heroes. Now it is mostly cesspool of division and hate, driven by algorithms that promote whatever gets the most views. And this environment only attracts more of the same hordes of wanna-be influencers who optimize for the algorithm instead of their readers.

Twitter used to have a vibrant ecosystem of third-party apps that focused on the content. But they killed it by restricting their API so much until it suffocated every popular client app. Nowadays this is happening with Reddit.

Companies that early on supported open protocols are now walled gardens. Expecting ever-growing numbers means that they cannot afford sending anyone to the competition. They’re not prioritizing quality products, they are prioritizing retention rates.

Perhaps it's time we woke up to the reality and took back control of our digital lives, communication tools must be open protocols not under the control of corporations.

We all love to think things thoroughly. Part of what pushed us into being engineers is the love for the puzzles. The thrill of finding the optimal solution. However the truth is that most of the time finding the optimal solution simply does not matter.

What you should strive to find is the best solution you can find within a limited budget of time.

The best solution you can find given your constraints is also usually good enough. It is far more important for you to move and test a concept, than to stall a decision because you are set on optimizing that last 5% out of whatever you are doing.

If you struggle deciding when to stop looking at alternatives, you can even leave that to math. A while ago I read about the 37% rule in the book “Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions” and it stuck with me.

The 37% rule is a strategy derived from optimal stopping theory. It suggests that when faced with a series of options you should spend 37% of the time exploring and gathering information, and then chose the next best option that comes along.

Let me illustrate this with an example:

Imagine you're hiring for a position and have 100 applicants. You can interview them one at a time, and after each interview, you must decide whether to hire that person or move on to the next candidate. Once you reject a candidate, you can't go back and hire them later.

Using the 37% rule:

1. You would interview the first 37 candidates (37% of 100) without hiring anyone. This allows you to establish a baseline for comparison.
2. Starting with the 38th candidate, you would hire the first person who is better than all the previous 37 candidates you've interviewed.
3. If you reach the last candidate without finding anyone better than those in the first 37%, you would hire the last person (since you must make a choice).

This strategy gives you the best mathematical chance (about 37%) of hiring the top candidate from the pool.

While this example is an exaggeration (in the real world you will choose from several candidates at a time), it demonstrates the core of the rule, going by statistics is very likely that you will not find anything better even if you exhaust all options available to you.

Good engineers people exemplify this principle. They know that sometimes you have to make a decision and move forward. They understand that time is a precious resource, and dilly-dallying can end up costing more than the potential difference between the options on the table.

So unless you are engaged in a project that requires the kind of precision reserved for launching rockets to Mars, prioritize making fast, effective decisions over slow and perfect ones. In a constantly evolving world, being able to make decisions quickly is a competitive edge.