Musings on Sam's Blog

Last day at AMXL

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Leaving AMXL after 5 years

What I learned from ~5 years at Amazon all of which were spent at an organization called AMXL. I’m moving to a new organization within Amazon, and I felt like it was a good time to reflect.

Reflecting on people

Being negative and short with people is almost always detrimental to both you and them. If this is occurring figure out why and fix it asap.

Most requests will be labeled as “urgent”, very few will actually be urgent.

One of the best things a manager can do is help allocate your time well. There will be meetings you never sit in that have an outsized impact on what is worked on and how things are measured, especially long term.

General Reflections

Good documentation is gold. Building in systems to keep it updated over time is gold x2.

Be cautious of your time… 5 years went very quickly, and I don’t see the train slowing down. You also have no idea where the end of the tracks are, enjoy it.

Clarifying questions are powerful & necessary, make sure as much context/information is made available before leaping into action.

It’s very important to understand inputs/outputs. People like to drop you into the middle of a complex problem/workflow which quickly becomes an unsolvable context trap if you don’t understand the start and the end. Also be careful of the XY problem.

Don’t allow my self worth to be entirely defined by work, I need other outlets.

A good metaphor is underrated. The ability to produce a good one quickly is even more underrated.

You should be failing 1-2x per year. This does not need to be out right crash and burn, but it should be something like “yeah we hit the limit of that system, looking back we should have done X, but now we NEED to do X”. This is how you learn, there is no book for this.

Data Reflections

Under the right stressors, people will treat a data orchestration framework as cron.

People prefer a wide table rather than creating a data model. It’s important to be careful about this, See post on wide tables

Always assume that people have no understanding of statistics. Always assume your chart/graphic/UI is too complicated. This is NOT a knock on people. You are inherently waist deep in a problem that most others are only weakly aware of, if you can’t boil it down to something graspable that they can care about, that is your own fault.

Scaling markets with non-human operators

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’m jotting this down quick so apologies for run-ons and shit that doesn’t read well.

Scaling markets with non-human operators

There’s this common adage that you should do things that scale beyond yourself.

Doing things that are limited by your capacity to complete them and garner little long term value moving forward don’t “scale”.

Uber, autonomous trucking, and scaling

If you drive for uber your earning potential depends on your willingness to take more rides and how you act during those rides. There’s probably some momentum/multiplicative factor where if you have close to a 5 star rating and a ton of rides you become more desirable in the market and you can derive outsize returns. However, this is probably limited by the fact that most people doing uber are also aiming for this status that typically just requires time and a decent personality to get.

So NO, Uber driving doesn’t scale. What might scale is if you have a fleet of autonomous vehicles that can constantly give rides for you.

You pay a large fixed cost for the vehicles and the software
You pay a variable cost for maintenance, software updates, etc…

This begins to feel like a vending machine type business. Something similar could be said for the trucking industry where you could direct your autonomous fleet by winning bids for loads in the market and then sending a truck to execute them. Which is kind of how it already works except people drive the trucks and they bring added complications. Although to be fair, autonomous systems also bring added complications but they are usually preferable to the ones people bring.

Today I learned that the FMCSA established that the legal BAC for a commercial motor vehicle operator is .04%… which is fucking insane. It should be 0.00000000%. Human beings, distracted humans beings, in anyway inebriated while they drive a ~20 Ton vehicle is INSANE.

I see a few major problems with this.

As autonomous vehicles become more pervasive what’s stopping anyone from giving up the excess capacity of their vehicle to a market of people willing to pay for it. You could say “I am not using this car from 8pm to 8am” and then allow users to bid for its use all night… this is literally Uber but without an individual sacrificing their time driving (still sacrificing the maintenance cost of the miles and the vomit in the back seat).
The other thing is that large companies like google will control fleets of these vehicles. It may become so cheap to rent an autonomous vehicle that vehicle ownership becomes irrational financially. Cars that don’t have to worry about humans driving them can be completely retrofitted for leisure, camping, etc… and you can leverage some pool of supply for a trip at such a low cost and such high liquidity (no latency in acquiring capacity) that it would be silly to buy a car that is only good at one particular thing. In this way, you could push the burden of insurance, maintenance, liability, etc… to some larger supplier (although they’d probably try and pass that cost back to you, I don’t know exactly how that works out). I hae no idea if it’s right to push transportation supply to be under control of a single entity… that also sounds… bad?

Humans in an LLM inference market

Ok that was a little nuts but let me reel this back in to the central thesis of “things that scale beyond yourself”. Something that struck me recently was the clawd bot buys a car thing. This is a rough example, but we are early days. What this shows as that traditional markets are going to break down under the pressure of non-human relations. As an individual, negotiating a car takes time or you can just have a system negotiate for you. We have companies that try to do scale this like Carvana or Cars.com, but they’ll need to pivot or risk being entirely exhumed by the ability for a single person to mass produce enquiries/negotiations and get the “best price”. Same ting goes for travel sites.

You could never compete against a high frequency trading firm by tapping away from Robinhood on your phone. In that instant that you bought $BBW is it possible that there may have been a slightly better price available… yes, but you paid some tiny tax to some firm that helps make the market for $BBW for the convenience of the liquidity and your sanity. I don’t know if I’m illustrating this well, but I wonder if humans attempting to participate in less liquid, higher friction markets online like ebay, facebook marketplace, car shopping, travel, etc… will struggle to compete for goods/services amongst bots. This markets were gate kept because you kind of needed to be a person to navigate them, they are built for people and used by people… but what if they aren’t or some fraction of the market becomes no longer human.

Scaling oneself against a larger organization/entity

On a slightly different note, think about this when it comes to battling insurance. You can literally attack this seemingly unassailable behemoth that relies on your inability to take the time, read the fine print, and fight to make money. Something as arcane as this will fold under the constant/immense pressure of the arguments/enquiries that can be automated against it.

HOWEVER, this may be prevented in the short term by these companies lobbying that automated communication for XYZ not be allowed, in which case there will be massive gray areas and a whole host of new problems/new inventions.

The other thing that could happen is that they build an automated defensive shield against these enquiries. In which case we have LLM on LLM inference to the bottom and the winner is whoever you are paying for inference. This is worrisome for MANY reasons, its probably bad for the climate to be doing all this inference for no fucking reason, and it will be nearly impossible to sift through it all and paralyze decision making (very bad).

I’m racking my brain for some middle ground. Maybe it’s higher cost for communication to make mass spam prohibitive? Maybe there’s human in the loop reality check points?

This is going to be so crazy to watch play out.

Value at the limit

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

An unbounded supply of Chess

I used to play chess only on lichess everyday. Lichess is great, it’s free, open source, and I’ve been donating to the site monthly for years.

I prefer Lichess to Chess.com in nearly everyway, but, recently, I’ve been playing/practicing on chess.com. Why? Because it offers a stopping point.

Chess offers me a slippery slope. On one hand it’s an outlet for deep thought and creativity and on the other its an aggravating time suck that leaves me infuriated with little improvement in my abilities to show for it. Often times, I’ll play blitz or bullet chess for hours. I play these time controls poorly and find myself sliding into the “just one more game mentality”.

Lichess offers me unlimited puzzles, variants, and studies. I can play and practice as much as I want without ever having an advertisement or banner to “subscribe” thrown in my face.

On Chess.com I only get to solve 4-5 puzzles a day before reaching a limit and being told I need to “upgrade to premium”. Unless I create a new account, I wont be able to solve another puzzle on the site for 24 hours… this is exactly what I need.

I need a stopping point. I need someone to tell me that I’ve done enough. Scarce supply incentivizes me to take my time and leverage each puzzle to the maximum.

Being restricted is a feature

Unbounded supply is dangerous… it feels valuable, but requires a high level of self discipline. The same self discipline that is chipped away at from the time you wake up to the time you go to bed.

Restriction is a feature. I’m enabled to gamble on nearly anything, eat/smoke/drink as much as I want, I can watch sports for hours a day on all of my devices, I can scroll short form videos until my brain is mush, play video games until my fingers are numb, and read information (both true and false) until I’ve developed myopia… in the kind of abundance we live in today, restriction is a feature. Being told to STOP is a feature.

Though not realizing it, Chess.com’s subscription model has offered me a small respite from the onslaught of abundance. The restriction of my actions keeps me coming back to solve my four puzzles everyday. For that, I’m grateful.

LLM Weaponized Spam Circle

Sat, 13 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Right now, circular financing and AI bubble takes are a dime a dozen. These may prove true, but be warned:

“Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”
― John Maynard Keynes

I think another kind of circle is forming: The Weaponized Spam Circle.

Thesis

LLMs are great at commoditized tasks because it lowers the cost to produce them. People love this so much they leverage them for non-commoditized tasks, in doing so, they shift the burden of actually thinking to the reader. A reader will be overwhelmed by the quantity of generated text and require LLM assistance to ingest/summarize it, resorting to LLM assistance to respond.

It’s Brandolini’s Law but instead of refuting the bullshit, the bullshit is shot back at the bullshitter and the cycle begins anew.

In adding another layer to how we communicate with one another, we shell out big $$$ to afford the matrix multiplication to do so.

But what is a commodity?

Let’s do the wikipedia cliche:

“In economics, a commodity is an economic good, usually a resource, that specifically has full or substantial fungibility: that is, the market treats instances of the good as equivalent or nearly so with no regard to who produced them.”

“With no regard for who produced them…” will be the thread I hold throughout the rest of this piece.

Computers (neural networks trained on millions of positions) are better than humans at Chess. Humans prefer to watch humans play chess and regard using a computer as cheating.

This means playing chess IS NOT a commodity, we CARE who plays the chess

Do people check where the gas is coming from… do they deep dive the exact source of the energy being used to charge their Tesla? Pretty much no… if you want to get pissed here and tell me how you’d never use Saudi oil and you check at every gas station be my guest.

This means filling up/charging our cars IS a commodity, we DON’T CARE how it happens… we want it as cheaply/quickly as possible.

But writing... is it a commodity?

When Characters are a Commodity

Not all writing is thoughtful. There’s tedious writing marked by “character limits”, extrinsically imposed deadlines, random boiler plate, documenting a new feature, emails to insurance companies, and the gut wrenching feeling of having to start putting words down for a book report.

In these moments, an LLM can shoot through character limits and fake decorum to produce words that felt far away. With a bit of editing, large writing burdens are reduced to a slight inconvenience.

But we’ve already made a big mistake… if you’re nodding your head at the two paragraphs above, read them again.

Expand when you've formed an opinion

I threw “book report” in there with the rest of those “examples”. A book report is not a commodity. If you’re writing a book report you’re most likely learning the basics of writing. You’re learning the fundamentals of how to take a position on something and defend it. If that is a commodity, then I don’t know what is. The thinking is the important piece and the author wielding their brain is what matters, the physical words are a by-product used for other humans to interpret your thoughts.

Also what about: “documentation” and “extrinsically imposed deadlines”. I can spot issues there as well.

Sometimes it’s not easy to determine what IS and what IS NOT a commodity when it comes to writing.

Sometimes it’s too easy to label some writing as a commodity and shovel it off to an LLM.

Sometimes it’s not easy to think, thinking is hard, new ideas are hard.

When Characters are NOT a commodity

“Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard." ― David McCullough

At Amazon, there is the notorious six pager.

“When you have to write your ideas out in complete sentences… in complete paragraphs it forces a deeper clarity of thinking.”
“The author who has put a tremendous amount of work into writing the memo gets to see everyone read the memo.”

A six pager is NOT a commodity. The moment it becomes a commodity is the moment it becomes no better than a powerpoint. The people who wrote the document should care about it, should have thought deeply about its contents, and those reading the document digest it out of that same thoughtfulness.

Yet LLMs have quickly crept into this space, because writing a six pager is hard, it requires thinking, and plopping that burden on something else is just a few key strokes away. The writing is on the wall:

Python 3.7 on Lambda (LLM Knowledge cut off)
“its not just a ___ its a ___”
cascades of bullet points
Hallucinated information that looks ok but is wrong after a bit of thought

Wait, are they treating this document like a commodity?

Did they take the time think through the key ideas?

Did this person even read what they wrote?

Do they even care about my time?

…I’ll respond in kind.

That “six pager” can be done so FAST because nobody is THINKING ABOUT IT. The LLM takes a unique piece of articulate thinking and turns it into a commodity. How do we respond to a commodity? Drive down the price! If they chose not to think why should I chose to think. And……… we have our circle.

Output as a result of input

I could care less about the output of the hallucinated + verbose document. Show me the input, show me the meat of what you are trying to convey. If there was no or sparse input to begin with… then there was no or sparse thought.

Is adding fluff to things holding us back? Is this why people reach to LLMs to puff up their ideas? If there is an important point to make then lets start there, but we don’t need to play telephone back and forth via LLM.

Why do we teach assembly

Many undergraduate curriculums teach assembly. Most undergraduate students will never earn a $ or spend a minute of their free time writing assembly. Why teach it? Because it helps provide insight into how computers work.

Why take the time to develop an idea and write it down? Because it forces you to think critically about the opinions and about the facts.

Doing this because we can’t help ourselves

There are many practical use cases for LLMs. It is 100% clear that they are beneficial, especially if you take the time to give them the tools, context, and guidelines they need to succeed. Just like a human, if you give an LLM limited context and tell it to do something it will probably suck at it. LLMs are NOT humans, it’s math, and if the necessary inputs aren’t provided the equation won’t be solvable.

Just like with any beneficial thing, humans are going to exploit it for their gain. It’s fundamental to how we operate. This massive boon in LLMs feels like a free lunch… it feels like something to be exploited, yet it remains a balancing act.

Sure you can generate a bunch of text and throw at someone, but they can do the same to you… we are back to square one.
Sure you can generate 100,000 lines of code, but now you need to maintain, refactor, and change one hundred thousand lines of code.
Sure you can automate that PMs flow where they aggregate a bunch of stuff from Asana, Excel and your ticketing system into a general summary, but why the fuck are we tracking things across 6 different application in the first place.
Sure you can automate your Linkedin post, but it’s just getting gobbled up by bots rolling around in the absolute slop trough of their own creation. If you want a peek behind the curtain and see what the dead internet will look like, scroll around there for 5 minutes.

Other Random Thoughts

Do we really want people growing up and learning how to read/write via LLM? The pattern’s they’ll learn will converge us towards the style of LLM writing that people find so obviously annoying today. Will the humans have the ability to recognize that and AVOID that style?

You have a brain, you can still think, brains are powerful… use it.

Writing without thought distills an entire method of thinking into something transactional, input output. Don’t ask how it works it just does.

For kids, writing is the new math.

In regard to math:

When will I actually use this when I grow up?
I have a calculator I don’t need to learn this.

Now, in regard to reading/writing:

I have an LLM I don’t need to write this.
What’s CliffsNotes? I just use an LLM

For adults, the same super powers you can use to generate a lot of text can be used against you. Most adults will be using their single LLM chat session to compete against an entire layer of corporate LLMs. Let the words be fired back and forth and to the datacenter owner’s, chip manufactures, and model trainers go the spoils.

Whenever I leverage an LLM to write I ask a flavor of these questions:

Would the reader or any of the reader(s) consuming this content care if it was produced by an LLM?
Would I personally care if the content under my name was authored by an LLM?
Have I provided the proper steering, guidelines, and context for the model to be successful?
Have I read what the model has produced?

A State of Inevitable Gambling

Mon, 06 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This is a collection of semi-coherent, random thoughts I have on “gambling”.

The inevitable gambling state

My brokerage wants me to gamble on sporting events
When I watch sporting events I’m bombarded with ads to gamble at {insert sportsbook}
My credit card wants me to gamble
McDonald’s wants me to play Monopoly and hope for a lottery like payoff if I buy their food
Go hang out at a gas station for a while and see how many people go in and buy scratch offs
Prediction markets want me to gamble
There’s someone out there looking to take the other side of my bets in the stock market
Crypto… do I even need to?
I’m getting ads on Venmo to join DraftKings and buy lottery tickets

There are so many people in the business of flipping a coin, heads they win 52 cents tails you win 48 cents. They’ll disguise this bet as a really fun thing, and they’re going to socially engineer you to make this bet as many times as possible. Because the MORE they can scale this bet the more money they win, they want you to put this bet on every second of every hour of every day to speed up the rate of wealth transfer.

The business model of a casino continues to march into consumer products.

Sign up to get emails and we’ll let you spin a wheel for a prize (some of which are great)
Buy our food and you could win a fucking car
You should pick who’s going to win the next presidential election!
You should buy this stock, it’s going to 10x in the next 3 months

To be fair, with enough hype and social lubrication people are willing to buy anything.

Random aside on NFTs

Side note, why the fuck would anyone rugpull NFTs? Like if you get a bunch of people to buy your NFTs isn’t the scam already complete? Just give them their stupid internet pictures, collect your money and allow them to trade on the marketplace. The valuation is now utterly useless to you, you’ve already perpetuated your scam? The hard part is already done, you’ve already convinced people that something useless is valuable and that you can generate the useless thing…

These people know that in aggregate they WILL make money off these promotions. Just like sportsbooks have all the little tools to keep you coming back, making it habit… the same tools surround us everywhere.

Is it possible to go a day without being bombarded by gambling?

The problem

Here’s the hard part… gambling is fun and, at the tail, people make money.

If you can refrain from all the garbage on Sportbooks you can take advantage of all the free money they offer
It’s clear that sharp bettors can make money from sportsbooks or, at least, perform arbitrage across books
Similarly, sharp people trading equities, commodities, etc… can make money over time (a lot of money) a.k.a Rentec
You can get really good at poker and… make money.
You can go to Kalshi with insider information, trade on it, and make a ton of $ while making markets more efficient

But now that you’ve gotten a taste you realize what you’ve become… you are now the one making 52 cents every time the coin flips.

THe problem? You exist on a PLATFORM. Just because you want to flip the coin… doesn’t mean you’re going to be able to anymore.

You will get banned/limited by Casinos/Sportsbooks
Is insider trading welcomed or lambasted in prediciton markets?
People don’t have to play poker with you or take the other side of your bets (I massive part of poker is playing at tables where you have an edge)
You may also fully exploit your advantage and not be able to continue to make money from it (Renaissance Technologies’ flagship Medallion fund does not accept outside money)

So you win 52 cents on borrowed time, or you continue to exploit people who don’t understand what kind of bets they are putting on.

I guess taking advantage of misinformed people/organizations is part of operating in a free market. In order to properly allocate capital there must be some winners and losers and in the long run we (hope to) lift wealth, life expectancy, and improve our existence.

If you’re a non-gambler you’re also kind of tied to the gambling ship. As much as you want to say, “Oh I’m VT and forget, I max out my retirement accounts, I never even look at my portfolio, etc…” Yet, if the a bubble pops your downturn will be large and hard to stomach just as those who are leveraged out of their minds in risky assets. You could make an argument that something like VT would be less destroyed than a concentrated bet in an devastated asset class and you’d be 100% correct (I hope), but you’re still on the same ship… you will feel the pain.

Personal thoughts

I like gambling. I know enough to understand when I’m making a terribly negative expected value decision and essentially just handing cash over to somebody… and I avoid that at all costs.

You can derive the sense of winning, the sense that I “knew” something that somebody else didn’t and while mindlessly, clicking, odds and offerings and spinning wheels certainly provides dopamine. There’s another level of dopamine from being right.

What are you going to compare this to?

Mon, 06 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A new project

You’re setting off on a journey to build a new {table, whole series of tables, dashboard, predictive model, pick your adventure book, etc…}. The initial request from THE BUSINESS lacks any semblance of detail required for immediate execution. You’ve done this before, people love quick calls to discuss the minutiae (a.k.a any level of detail) that was left out of the request. Lets hop on a quick call.

Things to remember when beginning “$project”:

Entitlement:

There will probably be no specific “entitlement”, “$ benefit”, etc… associated with the request, if you ask for this you will get:

“I don’t know”
“this will save x hours per week”
a round number in the $ millions
“let me circle back with you on that” (You will not hear about it again)

Context:

The person you are talking with may have less context then you. If this is true, you will most likely need to approach the most tenured member of their team to understand what is going on/why this is being requested. This is important if you can find the person who actually understands the broader picture, you will be able to sort out hours of hand waving in minutes.

Urgency:

Remember, everything is high priority and needed to be done yesterday. Wether the request “saves $100MM” or “saves me 15 minutes per week” it will be something urgent for the requestor. This is because:

In a race for constrained bandwidth, teams will continue to increase the unfounded urgency of requests to get things into a sprint, this causes the “urgency” to lose its meaning
People default to a general sense of what I’m working on is dire, important, and most be completed… this can be internally driven or imparted by point 1. above
Information is siloed causing large changes to remain unknown until just before/after implementation. This inflates a sense of urgency as things literally needed to be done yesterday

Create a graph:

A graph can be quite helpful in determining what you’ll actually need to do to complete this. I typically use Obsidian and jot down notes in markdown files and then link them as needed to create my graphs.

These notes are my scaffolding for how I’d go about executing the request. What information, alignment, data, sign off, etc… will I need to do this? if I had all of that right now, how would I execute this, what tools would I use, etc… What does the end result look like, how does it operate, whats the UX like?

This will NOT cover everything that comes up… it serves as a base to begin to cover edge cases and open questions that you’d like to establish an answer to now rather than weeks into this thing.

The Questions you ask:

What are you going to compare this to?

One of mt favorites gets to the heart of what you need to do.

If you’ve created a graph above there is a good chance you may have put more thought into the request than the requestor has, thus these questions may be just as important for them as it is for you.

Finger Under the Page

Sat, 16 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Reading

I tend to put my fingers under the right page of a book in a rush to get to the next page. As soon as I do it, I’m already thinking about the next page and struggle to focus. Other times I’m not even thinking about the book… just reading on auto pilot, paragraphs slipping by.

I’ve been catching myself doing this more. I can’t decide if it’s

a sign to move on from the book or
a sign that my mind can’t (doesn’t want to) focus on reading.

As a catch myself doing this I re-read the last few paragraphs. If it keeps happening, I then have to decide between 1 & 2. I don’t want to force myself to read a good book when I don’t feel like reading, and I don’t want to force myself to read a book cover to cover just because “I started it”.

Driving

I drive between Phoenix, AZ and Tucson, AZ a lot. 100 miles on the I-10, pretty much straight, set the cruise control and never touch the brake kind of drive.

My Aunt came over for her birthday, and we talked about driving the speed limit. I recalled my false sense of urgency on the I-10 in a rush to get from one city to another. Someday I’ll reminisce about the drive. Maybe I’ll wish I hadn’t allowed it to blend into a meaningless annoyance only prolonged by slow drivers taking up the left lane.

I’m going to try and drive the speed limit. I’m going to do the drive no podcasts or music. Time to mix it up.

School

The first week of school was always really slow. New classes, new teachers, new peers, etc… then everything normalizes and it’s like someone takes the speed slider and scrubs it to the max and you’re in the rinse cycle of the core of the semester.

Then you open your eyes and its done.

Months of tests, games, events, lectures, etc… can now be boiled down to a pin head in your brain, something that had previously fully occupied your schedule/life and contained nearly all forward looking events can be distilled down to “Fall Semester Sophomore year”… a time period you can only recall memorable events from, the mundane washed over.

Life

Then you hit this post-school period. There’s no arbitrary delineation of time periods like semesters. Sure a company will post quarterly earnings, but it doesn’t mark a time where you’re faced with entirely new course work with a new group of peers.

There’s not really anyone challenging you to try new things or join a club, your friends are further away and it’s a little more difficult to make new ones. It’s crazy how fast you can slide from Monday to Sunday if you pay attention (or don’t).

Result

Approach the mundane with a renewed sense of observation in the minutia or put your own spin in on it.

Try new things.

Don’t try and preemptively turn the page, enjoy the page. If you can’t enjoy the page, do something else you can focus on now.

Stop wasting time doing trivial bullshit that accelerates the coagulation of life into a blurry sense of “past”.

Advice to Beginner Cyclists

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Found myself giving a bit of advice to new cyclists, so I figured I’d store my thoughts here so I can share it. This is primarily for road cycling, but a lot of it could be applicable more broadly.

These are just semi-organized tips this is not an exhaustive list of everything you should or need to do.

I like riding bikes, I’m not a mechanic, I’m not a pro, and my opinions are subject to change. Anything you read is just my experience and nothing more.

Buying a Bike

I would NOT start off with an expensive bike
1. You may not know how much/how long you will enjoy riding
2. Your bike handling skills will be at their worst and you’ll be learning no skills (Clip-less pedals), expect to fall once or twice
3. You will probably make some maintenance mistakes
Here’s a few good threads on buying a used bike.
If you want to buy a new bike I’d recommend buying a bike with Shimano 105, I’d go around to a few bike shops to test ride some bikes, and I’d run tubed tires

Other Things You’ll Want

Get several good pairs of bibs/jerseys. This will make your rides way more comfortable. You’ll want bibs that have shoulder straps not bibs that are essentially padded shorts. Maybe go try some on before you buy…
Get a small red light to attach to the rear of your bike
Get a good hemet, check out the Virginia Tech Helmet Ratings to find a protective helmet at a good price
You will most likely want clipless pedals and the associated shoes
Get a nice pair of non polarized sun-glasses that offer a good field of vision
You should get a saddle bag to carry things like, an extra tube, a $20 bill, a multi tool, some tire levers, etc…
You will want bottle cages, the Trek Bat Cages are pretty damn good for the $$$. You should also get some bottles for your cages
Get a small hand pump to take with you while you ride, you can put this in one of the pockets of the jersey that you bought (Might as well get a decent floor pump too)

Before you ride

I like Strava or you can download an alternative tracking app. It’s really nice to have the data, it’s great for planning routes, and can be helpful with initial social interactions (Group rides, challenges, etc…). Its also very good for tracking the mileage on your components, how many miles are on my tires, do I need to bleed my breaks, should I check my chain wear… you can come to a much more accurate conclusion with an understanding of the overall mileage on these components and inspecting them.
Check your tire pressure, bring a spare tube, bring tire levers, have a multi-tool, bring food and water
Practice using clipless pedals on a soft surface (Grass) before you hit the pavement
You’ll want a bike fit, at the very least watch a couple videos and play around with your position on the bike a bit. Eventually you will want a bike fit

While Riding

If you are swerving trying to open up some food, find yourself in a lot of traffic, or are checking your phone for x,y,z reason… STOP, there are unavoidable accidents and there are avoidable accidents. Don’t hurt yourself/ your bike, just unclip put your foot down and re-orient yourself or leave the busy road in a safe manner.
Nobody gives a shit about your average speed, don’t take silly risks with some thought of setting your fastest time or keeping your speed high… not worth it
Try and ride as consistently as possible. Don’t spike your power out of every stop/turn, attempt to maintain the same power as much as possible
Let people know you’re going to pass them by telling them you are going to pass them and on which side you are going to pass them
If you find yourself about to hit a patch of sand/gravel on the side of the road do not attempt to turn or suddenly brake, apply a bit of power and ride through it. Do not intentionally take your road bike on a gravel ride it won’t perform well. When turning look out for sand/gravel as it can cause you to slide out
If you’re riding with others, give hand signs regarding road debris/pot holes, let them know when you are slowing, and point to where you want to go or let them know. Don’t half wheel people.
When taking a tight turn raise your inside knee and apply pressure through your outside foot and inside hand. Don’t break in the middle of a tight turn… break before.
Bring food! Eat while you ride especially for long rides > 90 minutes. Bonking is NOT fun and completely avoidable. If its a short ride, and I plan to do some intervals I’m bringing a lot of high carbohydrate snacks. If its a longer ride I’m bringing a mix of high carbohydrate, dried fruit, trail mix, etc…
Take in fluids and do so in a manner that’s conducive to rehydrating yourself. Don’t waste your money, mix sugar, salt and water. Uh oh… turns out sugar isn’t “bad for you” actually no food is necessarily “bad for you” its chronic over-indulgence and under-exercise that’s “bad” for you. I’m getting on my soap box here a little bit because some lady in Sprouts was telling everyone how bad sugar was for them.
Be respectful of vehicles, keep a keen eye on drive ways and entrances/exits. Watch out for newly parked vehicles and cars people are getting in/out of. If you are at an intersection operate under the assumption that you are invisible and you’re essentially playing a game of Frogger. Don’t ride against traffic. If you’re coming up on the right side of someone about to make a right they may not notice you.
Try and ride at times when there are less cars/people. This can depend on your location but early morning rides and weekends are typically better. You can use Strava heat maps to plan your routes and see where others are riding.

I want to get faster

You will want to get a power meter/heart rate monitor. This will make training much easier/reliable
Best weight/speed improvements per dollar: Get in a more aerodynamic position on your bike, better Tires/Rims, better Shoes/Pedals, better Saddle/Seat Post
Check out this channel and look up some of the basic videos on how to get faster. I think this channel probably has just about all the knowledge you need to train optimally baring hiring a good coach but that’s going to cost you $$$
Ride a lot

Basic maintenance

This stuff is pretty good at cleaning your drive train. This stuff is good at lubing your chain (it’s wax based, check out the difference between wax/oil based depending on where you live)
I thoroughly clean my drivetrain every 2 weeks and lube my chain 2x per week but this varies based on how much I’m riding. Thorough cleaning currently involves spraying the drive train with the SILCA Drivetrain cleaner and brushing the metal components to get at any dirt/grime, washing everything away with water. I use a microfiber cloth to dry things off and get in between the cassette and chain rings. Once dry I apply the Rock n Roll Gold and use a microfiber cloth, running my chain through the cloth and cleaning the pulley wheels as well.
I like to clean my bike after I ride with a microfiber cloth and/or with some baby wipes to wipe off dirt and mud.
Track the mileage on your components (I mentioned above that I use strava for this)
Put grease on your things… “Used with any type of ball bearings, threads, or press fit applications found on a bicycle, including headsets, bottom brackets, cranks, pedals, and hubs.”
I love picking up new maintenance things and learning hwo to do them, but when in doubt take it to a shop. If you’re friendly they will most likely let you watch if it’s a small ordeal like swapping out your chain

Other useful things you will eventually want

Heart Rate monitor
Bike computer
A power meter
Tubeless tires
Chain tool
Chain wear checker
A bike stand
Torque wrench
Quicklink Pliers
Valve stem remover
Sealant injector/measure

Other weird road cycling stuff

Put the arms of your sun glasses over your helmet straps
Remove your pie plate/reflectors, better yet if you bought your bike from a bike shop have them do it
Get socks that end just at the base of your calves, try and match the color of your shoes

My Dad's Good Qualities

Thu, 26 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

It was my dad’s birthday recently, which sparked a bit of reflection.

What are the past situations where I’m grateful for having learned appropriate behavior?
What positive qualities have I successfully incorporated into my own life?

Vanity purchases

Ever since I was born, I’ve known my dad to only be extremely reasonable when purchasing things. Never flaunty or flashy always purposeful and value oriented. He buys a Honda accord and drives it for 150K miles. You’re not turning heads but the insurance is cheaper, same with the registration, and the maintenance is low. He has no desire to impress others with money or impress upon others that he has money.

Maintenance

When my dad buys something of value, he maintains it. It doesn’t get destroyed, he doesn’t abuse it… he takes his time and understands what he needs to do to keep it in good working order and he does that. I think he takes a lot of pride in this.

He Values Experiences

Rather than flashy purchases of tangible goods my dad will buy experiences. Taking everyone out and going axe throwing, vacations, or even just going for a walk. Time with loved ones is important. I still spend ~half the year at home. I’ve been trying to hike/bike as much as I can with him because I know there’ll be a time in the future where we don’t live close enough to do that very often.

Hard work

My dad still works hard. He’s run business for half a century now… which is absolutely insane. I mean year after year, navigating a small business through five decades of changes, modernizing over time, and making it successful. After all that time, he’s still working hard. What an achievement, how many people can say they’ve successfully owned and operated a business for that long.

Integrity

One of his biggest ideals has to be integrity. He hammered that home to us as kids. Do things with integrity. We had a “family constitution” plastered on the fridge in high school to remind us, and I think integrity was point number one hahaha. I guess it worked… I won’t forget it.

My dad will do a fair bit of listening in social situations, especially in larger groups. Not dominating or being overly loud. He knows when to interject, sometimes he’ll tell a story. One thing I’ve picked up recently is he never talks bad about anybody. He doesn’t like the Cardinals current quarterback, but other than that you’d never hear him just say something mean about someone. Not much good ever happens from saying mean things about people.

Health

My dad’s had his fair share of injuries and health concerns since I’ve been alive. However, he’s always stayed active. Some of my fondest memories are out hiking, biking, rafting, camping, etc… with him.

Justice

Whenever my dad hears about an injustice being done, he can’t stand it. He will go way out of his way to help someone out of nothing more than fixing something that is total bullshit. This is probably why most of the people who work for my dad have been there for decades because he won’t put up with any mistreatment whatsoever. I think this goes hand in hand with integrity.

Other

He once showed me a list of things he wanted to accomplish in his life that he’d written down in his late twenties that I really enjoyed.

Buying a new bike as a kid, I really wanted a cruiser with flames on it. My dad said I’d be wanting a mountain bike after a few weeks on the cruiser. I ended up buying the cruiser, and I also ended up wanting a mountain bike after a few weeks. Ever since then, we agreed that if my dad says “bike” I know I need to deeply consider the decision I’m about to make.

There may be another side to that

Sat, 16 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Intelligent and deep-thinking people may hold opposite opinions of one another. If you hold an unshakeable opinion about anything that exists in some state of probability or confidence its almost certainly a mistake to be doing so.

One of Amazon’s leadership principles is Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit. I wish it would elaborate a bit further, Have Backbone; Disagree, Reevaluate and Commit. It shouldn’t be disagree, hunker down, and ram my opinion through… but rather an exploratory process where people that respect each other’s opinions get closer to the truth.

There are certain physical facts that aren’t worth disputing. Anybody arguing that I am NOT sitting here physically typing this at my computer would be wrong. Its undeniable and for better or worse I’m typing these words into some word document (Document2).

Now let’s pick at something with an air of doubt about it: Is the United States economy doing good or bad?

Some people may say “bad”, some may say “good”, and some may say:

“What a terrible question, how can a complex economy be broadly categorized as good or bad”.

While this example is heavy handed, it certainly demonstrates the need for clarifying questions.

“Oh… I said “good” because I assumed we were talking about the performance of a market-cap weighted index of U. S. equities.”

“Oh… I said “bad” because I was talking about real GDP growth slowing year over year”

If you look around, deep questions are reduced to simple statements and assumptions all around us.

Political candidate ‘X’ is the sole perpetuator of problem ‘Y’
The project failed/succeeded because of ‘Z’
The P value was < .05, so we should reject the Null Hypothesis…

How can one possibly attribute the entirety of a complex issue to a political candidate, the failure of a project to a single problem, or why even use .05 as a cut-off for rejecting the Null why not .04, why not .049?

“Man’s mind cannot grasp the causes of events in their completeness, but the desire to find those causes is implanted in man’s soul. And without considering the multiplicity and complexity of the conditions any one of which taken separately may seem to be the cause, he snatches at the first approximation to a cause that seems to him intelligible and says: This is the cause!"

– Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

Probabilistic thinking is such an important skill as we fight the urge to quickly categorize into binary values: buy or don’t buy, right and wrong, good and bad. This isn’t an argument for never making a decision or paralysis by analysis, but rather for careful consideration of beliefs, a willingness to update opinions, thinking in probabilities and asked clarifying questions in light of a vague inquiry.

I think we are all on some gradient descent toward truth. We wake up every day with a goal of minimizing loss (regret) through being correct, producing positive change in our environments and updating our beliefs. We inch toward this over time, but… our calculus is a bit rusty, sometimes we take a step in the wrong direction, sometimes we over shoot our destination, and sometimes we find ourselves stuck in a local minimum and only with great difficulty can we eject ourselves and find the global minimum.

This is an arduous but worthwhile process.

“The inactive investor who takes up an obstinate attitude about his holdings and refuses to change his opinion merely because facts and circumstances have changed is the one who in the long run comes to grievous loss.”

―- J. M. Keynes

Pizza & Orange Juice

Sun, 03 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Last Tuesday I went to The Parlor. I was back in Phoenix and wanted some pizza. I couldn’t find anyone willing to drop everything and go with me, so I went by myself. I rarely go to restaurants by myself, its somewhat uncomfortable because I feel limited in what I can stare at. I’ve been trying to fight the feeling that I always need to stare at something. Sometimes, I get pretty in my own head about what/who I’m staring at, how much eye contact to make, etc… Anyway, reading that back that sounds pretty weird, but I’m just going to leave it… this is off the cuff.

Ok so I go to the Parlor it’s ~8pm and not busy at all. I’m sitting at the bar, and I’m just staring at the guys making the pizzas. Now they seem to notice that I’m just staring and one of them looks at me and goes “Are you waiting to pick up?”… and I was like “Oh… no, I like watching.” He goes back to his thing and then after a few minutes tells me “This one is yours” and hands me the pizza directly. At this point I was a little worried that I pissed him off because I was staring or something idk.

I’ve chowed down about half the pizza and I notice the chef walking behind me. I tell him the pizza was great as always, and we ended up having a thirty-minute conversation. Turns out that was the executive chef at the parlor, Zeus Miranda-felix. He’s a super nice guy and makes some of the best pizza in the state. He’s been working since 8am chopping 50lbs of onions, preparing dough, and now its 8pm and he’s still happy to spend half an hour chatting with some random guy watching him make pizza. He’s in his late twenties and told me he’s dedicated his entire adult life to cooking… his art. He’s dedicated his entire adult life to meticulously getting the small things right every day.

When I was a kid my brother and I would go over to my Grandparents house, climb up into the orange trees, and pick bags of oranges. My mom had this little juicer and we’d run all the oranges through it until we had a good jugs worth. Just one ingredient… unfiltered orangey goodness. We’d finish playing outside and want a glass of OJ before water.

Could we have just gone to the store and bought a bunch of juice? Sure. Unfortunately, most orange juices from the store are kind of garbage. They taste like the container… there’s just something off about them. There are probably many difficulties with mass producing orange juice at scale, having it sit on a truck, on a shelf and comply to regulations that slowly erodes the flavor.

I think orange juice is a nice encapsulation of getting the small things right. If your orange juice is good, it means you took the time to get nice fresh oranges and dealt with the slight inconvenience of juicing them. It’s one ingredient, there’s no hiding behind gobs of fat and salt and your customer is probably not staring intently as you make it. It’s pretty common to find on menus. It’s also pretty easy to cut corners on.

I’m not going to right hook anybody with a shitty analogy now but the details matter and orange juice speaks volumes. The Parlor actually doesn’t have orange juice on their menu, but it’d probably be good if they did. I’d like to have an orange tree in my backyard. I wish I lived closer to The Parlor.

Thoughts on personal finance

Sun, 22 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

$$$

I wanted to quickly jot down my current positions on personal finance topics. This will be quite interesting to see if I maintain these views into the future or if I change my mind.

On Saving

Saving money now (Currently 25 years old as of writing) is incredibly important due to the nature of compounding a dollar saved now is extremely important given the long time horizon it has to compound.

I currently live below my means, and hold a high savings rate most months.

I avoid status seeking purchases. Sometimes I have urges to make these purchases, but I frame them as large drains of my limited time… this makes them extremely off-putting to me. For instance, I could buy a $10,000 outfit to show off my status and attempt to attract attention. The tradeoff of my time to do so simply isn’t worth it.

$10,000 compounding annually for 40 years at 5% interest turns into $70,399.89.

Purchasing power will be reduced due to inflation, the 5% return is an assumption (Could be +/-), and there are no additional contributions to this initial investment. Irrespective of any of that, the point stands that that initial investment would be worth much more than in an outfit that will most likely be worth far lass than the initial investment in 40 years.

The other side of Saving

While I closely monitor unnecessary purchases, I view travel as necessary and not something to wait until later to enjoy. I don’t go out of my way to spend as much money as possible when traveling, but I take most any opportunity to visit a new place. I enjoy maximizing my time and being comfortable while visiting and am willing to spend the $$$ to do so.

I’m also willing to spend money I wouldn’t normally while hanging out with friends or going out to dinner with family.

Investing

I may currently be too risk averse, but my current investing philosophy is as follows:

Buying individual equities/crypto is essentially gambling, doing this with a small amount of money is ~~fine~~ (Less then 2% of total net worth)
I split investment 40/60 between sure return products(CDs and a High Yield Savings account) and indexes(Small Cap Value and VT)… in current state I think this is probably over-weighting CDs and HYS, although it does allow me a lot of liquidity if the stock market goes down
In light of the last statement, I do NOT believe I can time the market, and I am currently acting not in the interest of maximizing returns by withholding so much cash from the stock market
I try to weight my Index holdings away from Large Cap US tech companies as that is currently my main source of income and I’d like to diversify away not increase my exposure

I think Rational Reminder is the basis for most of my opinions and current investment philosophy.

What do I think will change

I’ve never made a large purchase like a home, but it currently makes me nervous concentrating so much of one’s net worth in a single asset.

I think having a large expensive wedding is silly, but maybe I’ll see that as a once (Can only get married for the first time once) in a lifetime opportunity and change my opinions.

If I have kids, I think my financial outlook changes quite dramatically. This is not to view children as an expense, but simply to note that my current thoughts around personal finance don’t take dependents into account whatsoever. Maybe I will become even more risk averse at this point?

A reason for being

My end goal is to have the freedom to spend my limited time on the things I want to do with the people I want to do them with. My thoughts, everything I wrote and didn’t write above is with this single goal in mind. I think this is a broad statement but I don’t think I can make it any more granular.

Its all a weird balancing act of present satisfaction vs future enjoyment… a rubber band of fond memories and regret. I guess I’d like to have fond memories, and leave others with fond memories as well.

Ok so maybe its:

I want to have enough $$$ to do the things that bring me happiness currently
I want to make sure my future self has enough $$$ to do things that bring him happiness
I want the freedom to be able to choose how I spend my time
I want to help others and leave a net-positive reputation with both strangers and loved ones

If I can leverage my finances to do that, I think I’d be happy.

Blindness and a Chess Puzzle

Thu, 25 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A Chess Puzzle

I recently encountered a chess puzzle that revolved around capturing my opponents material due to a forced mate in one threat. While exploring various permutations of moves, I struggled to choose the right piece (between the bishop and the knight) to simultaneously block my opponent’s mate in one threat while allowing me to freely capture a few of his minor pieces. After a brief though I played Knight C3 -> D5, blocking my opponents mate threat on g2 and adding an additional attacker to the black knight on F6. I completely missed that by moving the knight I was unveiling my opponents Queen to be able to attack my queen. Just a single move, only 64 squares, and I was entirely blind to the undermining of my idea. After black captures on D5 with the pawn and I take the knight on F6 with my bishop, my opponent can simply capture my queen, negating my mate threat and forcing me to respond by taking back with my bishop.

To my surprise, the solution was quite simple: I moved the rook one square up instead of to the right. I had been fixated on the idea of the rook moving horizontally, a pattern I was familiar with in trapping queens. Faced with this new scenario, I failed to reevaluate the rook’s positioning and didn’t realize that a slight vertical shift would solve the puzzle.

I had been trapped in my accustomed patterns and couldn’t see the obvious queen attack that should have been my initial consideration.

Inattentional Blindness?

It’s interesting how we can become blind in opposite degrees of experience. When we’re beginners, we struggle to discern crucial elements in a sea of information, unable to recognize common patterns and solutions. Our thoughts are malleable, as we miss many things but discover new patterns. As we become more seasoned, the details start to fade into the background, and a sort of “flow state” takes over, making everything seem almost automatic and fast. Taking a familiar walk around the block can feel like teleportation, with the journey happening almost unnoticed. Conversely, exploring a new place can overload our senses, making it easy to miss small details in the midst of absorbing so much new information.

There’s some fine balance between routine and new. New is good, it seems to slow down time and deepens perspective. However, routine seems to be critical to making considerable progress on activities I’d like to be good at, it removes the newness and mental overhead. I can focus on getting better or ‘teleport’ my way through difficult moments I might otherwise struggle to make it through.

Redlining

Sat, 18 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

For some people, not red lining all the time is a skill in and of itself. Why wait until you have an injury or a mental health crisis to take a breath?

Reflection

I was brushing my teeth recently, paused, turned to my girlfriend and proclaimed that I wasted all four years of college on two degrees that were not challenging. I said that I should’ve majored in something “more difficult” like Engineering, Math or Computer Science because “I could have” and people wouldn’t “default to questioning my abilities”. The constant grappling with “I could have done more” or “I could have challenged myself” is probably good in some regard, but I believe the above scenario is unhealthy and bleeds into why I have found myself redlining ~~for no reason~~ at work over the last year or so.

Redlining: drive with (~~a car engine~~ the human brain) at or above its rated maximum rpm.

My girlfriend refuted the above points pretty quickly. Reflecting on the above, I realized I was being quite harsh on an 18 year old that had no idea what he wanted to do. I was being insecure about my background and over indexing on some irrational fear of my inability to learn and produce good work. I was discounting the fact that I have had and will have future opportunities to pursue furthering education in a variety of fields. I understand that there is some amount of life I can’t control, responding erratically and sprinting as fast as I can toward certain goals is suboptimal.

Consistency is efficiency, going 100 mph in most vehicles is not as fuel efficient as going 55 mph. You do not need to impress everyone at all time. Although I am not a car or a transformer, I think this applies.

At Work

At work, I would find myself trying to accommodate all types of requests as quickly as possible. There is a consistent sense of urgency about most things that people want done. I think the urgency is caused by people wanting to believe that what they are working on is urgent/important or being told that it’s urgent/important. In addition, others may also want to impress their peers/boss and the urgency surrounding that is subsequently passed on to the person they require something from. The presence of urgency in combination with the desire to help/impress coworkers, fuels a sense of wanting to get things done as quickly as possible redlining and stressing to deliver.

Most things are not important, if ten people come to you in a day telling you they have a hugely important task think twice
When evaluating a large project don’t assume that its value add, has been properly vetted, and the timelines make sense. Default to being skeptical
If extremely value add work could be done easily/quickly it would probably already be done, approach these types of request cautiously
Be flexible on implementation, the hot topic changes, do not take a change of direction to heart and pivot as necessary

Refrain from doing as much as possible: If you get a ton of cool stuff done but have no time to document it, iterate on it, and tell people about it… it will go unknown. If you work on a ton of stuff and get it all done fast most of that stuff is probably not useful, will require corrections, and be prone to going unnoticed

Spending more time investigating and figuring out why something is needed ~~is this actually valuable~~ is worth way more in the long run than solving useless problems. You can spin your wheels all day, redlining, while only having a small portion of your work be actually useful or… spend the extra time investigating to avoid useless work in the first place.

Investigating is not as mentally taxing. Working on a difficult problem, writing a bunch of code, figuring out why the code you wrote is wrong and doesn’t work is stressful and difficult. Asking people to provide you better inputs as to what they want, asking why they need what they asked for, asking how much benefit is to be derived, openly asking a plethora of questions to verify exactly what is needed all increases the quality of your work while reducing the mental bandwidth required in producing a useful artifact.

At the end of the day:

Most things will become out of date unless they are maintained, nobody will take the time to maintain them unless they are useful.
Nobody will have time to maintain many useful things if no-one uses them.

I also think this opens the door to more interesting job and role opportunities. Sure, you may not have produced as many artifacts as someone else but the depth and usefulness of the projects you did complete should outshine in comparison. Going deep on a few topics, creating something with tangible benefit, and then adequately documenting and sharing that thing scales exponentially while the ability to produce more and more “Stuff” scales linearly with the amount of time you want to sink into it.

On Stress

Tue, 27 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Stress

I’ve been meaning to jot down my thoughts on this for a while, but I keep running into things that tweak my mental model about stress.

Recently, I watched some old home videos. Twenty years ago, my parents moved us into the home we still live in today. Around this time, my dad filmed a video of my brother and I walking the quarter mile from our house to a canal that runs through metropolitan Phoenix. It’s about a ten-minute walk that probably took us thirty as we stopped for a snack on a small berm of grass, waddled around with empty backpacks that hit the backs of our knees and ran at my dad fists clenched screaming “Power!” for some reason.

Recently

Over the last few years, I’ve done this walk, probably, several thousand times. Walking, which I previously thought was only for old folks or people with nothing better to do, is something I now cherish and serves as my focal point for both learning and introspection. The walk to the canal hasn’t changed much over the last two decades, in fact, barring new people moving into the neighborhood the most drastic change would be me. Now an unrecognizable twenty-four year old strolling down the side-walk, sometimes still with my father.

I’ve become quite accustomed to this walk; it’s a routine for me, and for better or worse I like routines. Sometimes I switch it up, try a different path, walk to a different neighborhood; I like to pick out things that I’ve never noticed before each time to keep myself present. I’m comfortable; I find myself slipping into this state of comfortability, time passes by quickly. Walking in a new place alters time for me, my normal walk feels smooth I know where to go, I don’t even think, and before I know it I’m home again. A new place ‘slows’ down time.

Panic

Over the last year, I’ve suddenly begun to struggle with new places. I’ve done a fair bit of traveling in this period and, for the first time in my life, primarily by myself. Instead of taking on the whimsical nature of four-year-old me carelessly walking to the canal, I’ve become rigid. I have an underlying level of stress I can’t shake. Dealing with crowded places, meeting new people, taking in new sights; in my head I’m certain these are valuable moments. Yet I can’t shake the tension in the back of my neck, the nervous thoughts of what if I get sick, what if a lose my passport, what if I twist my ankle. These thoughts culminate in a panic that ebbs and flows coming to peaks in enclosed spaces where I have to sit for a while (restaurants, airplanes, etc…). Instead of enjoying these experiences, I usually just want to go home where I feel safe.

My initial reaction was that I had some kind of disease. The nervousness, loss of appetite and sweaty palms felt like I had a stomach flu. Yet the consistent pattern these symptoms lead me to believe I was just panicking. My concern for my health quickly turned to anger, why are you ruining this for yourself? Why can’t you just sit through a nice dinner with your family? Why are you shaking in the Uber to the airport? Just snap out of it. Shaming myself was not a successful strategy and did nothing to address the root cause of the problem.

Root Causing

Part of the reason I’ve struggled to write this is because I’m still working through it. I have a better understanding of what’s going on, and I’m much kinder to myself and can calm myself down. However, I’m still unnerved when I’m traveling and I’m still figuring out a root cause(s).

I’m doing a lot of new things fully on my own and assuming the risk and responsibility in doing so.
I think I’m social and outgoing, but I did spend 18 months between 2020 and 2021 almost completely isolated from social interaction outside of my parents.
During those 18 months, I would rarely leave home outside of going for my walks or bike rides, spending the rest of the time studying.
I put immense pressure on myself at work, currently, my work is one of the few avenues I have to get approval from other people I respect, and I value approval/recognition more than my monetary compensation.
A sense of urgency around staying up to date with new technologies and everything that’s going on in the world; I feel that taking time to relax is causing me to regress and will be detrimental to my long-term happiness (I know this is wrong but struggling to shake it).

I’m trying to find a middle ground between the happy, curious, unknowing toddler and the ridged, white knuckled, and loss-averse adult that I’ve found myself becoming.

Business Intelligence Engineer

Fri, 12 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Two months as a BIE

Promoted to BIE on the same team I have been on since September.

Worked hard during my first four months on the team, put together a doc with my boss and got approved starting about two months ago. Since Septmeber I’ve done a lot of stuff:

A little Background

- Redshift Cluster Maintenance and Query optimization of our longest running jobs
- Working toward establishing code reviews and a central code repository
- Created new production tables for partner teams
- Made adjustments/additions to some of our most critical tables that buoy all reports

How to improve

Looking back, I am very happy with my effort, but I want to do two things better.

ONE) I have not asked “WHY?” enough. I often get a request and my mind instantly goes into solve mode: how do I do this, how do I do this optimally, how quickly can I do this, etc… I need to clarify the ask and get a better understanding of if they EVEN need what they are asking for.

“Hey can you add this to the output of the model?”
“Why do you want that?”
“I’m not sure someone else just mentioned it”
“Ok let me know what the use case is, and I can see what I can do” _ Never hear about it again _

This helps to avoid useless work…

TWO) I’m struggling to detach from work. I just took two full weeks off; it was nice, I went to Europe, hung out with my girlfriend, saw family… but I also wanted to be working. I get way to attached to work, and I feel like my greatest source of satisfaction right now is recognition/ appeciation from people I work with.

I’ve recognized that my level of committment is 24/7 and my derivation of self-worth is much too entwined with my job. I am grateful to be passionate about what I do, and I am not saying that I want to de-commit, care less, and avoid work… I need an off button. I will work 7AM to 7PM no problem, when I’m done working I will go to the gym and think about how to solve work problems, and when I get home I will check my computer to see if any emails came in. I need to learn that throwing more effort, more concern, and more intent at a problem isn’t always the way… sometimes you need to close your copmuter at 5PM and leave it shut until the next day. I’m trying.

Forward Looking

One thing that might help with my above problem is I’m being forced into an office 3 days a week starting July 1. None of my team is in the same state is I am, but I will have to drive 30 minutes to plug my computer into a different monitor to take calls and write code.

On learning, I’ve been deep diving DBMS internals mostly through Andy Pavlo’s CMU lectures (so good). I have been tinkering around with different AWS resoruces, GIT, read a book on SPARK, learned about a python library called Polars, and continue to just consume a ton of information on data engineering tools/topics.

I love what I do everyday, I’m having a great time learning new technologies, and I’m grateful I get to help others with my learnings.

4 Months as an Analyst

Sat, 28 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Four Months as an Analyst at Amazon

My perspective switching to the Supply Chain BI team.

A little Background

The first four months have been interesting. Last week, Amazon laid off 18,000 people. Fortunately, nobody on my team or, I think, my whole org got the axe. This really hit home the fact that jobs come and go, and that I should be prioritizing employment that allows me to work on what I’m interested in and gain meaningful skills.

I’ve been working ~60-70 hours a week, mostly because I want to be good (I want to be the best) at my job, I’m learning a lot, and I’m about to transition to a BIE (given that 10 different people and our VP signs off that I am capable/deserve it). I have a deep desire to fulfill every request of me as quickly and accurately as possible which is both a good/bad trait. I’m learning how to prioritize my work and focus on one thing rather than bouncing around.

While I would be lying if promotions or wide-spread recognition isn’t nice, I’ve found that individuals reaching out to tell me they appreciate my work and my attentiveness to detail means the most to me. I also derive a lot of meaning from the 1:1 conversations I have with the people I view as mentors.

-Personally, I’ve been enjoying spending time with friends (Even reaching out and
getting together with people I haven’t seen in years). I’ve also been actively
organizing and spending time with my family; this is something I didn’t do in
high school/college outside of major holidays, now in my early 20’s,
I’ve attempted to rectify this before it becomes a major regret in my 30s/40s+.

-I’ve been studying poker, I played for the first time at a casino recently:
my hands were shaking the entire time, and I lost ~$300 over the course of
3 hours. I got an espresso machine, and I’ve enjoyed using it
(I am not a coffee snob!).

-One of my child-hood friends got married. It was surreal remembering
playing pool basketball and watching Iron Man at my 4th grade
birthday party/sleepover, now he has a wife.

-I’ve been continuing to run my book club at work, this month we are reading
Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell.

-I’m working on being the best son, brother, friend, peer, and partner I can be.

What has been not so appealing/difficult?

Creating reports, models, and queries for a new part of the supply chain that I’m less familiar with has been challenging. There are a variety of teams that create complex models that generate complex outputs to optimize different parts of our network. We consume these outputs into our Datawarehouse. I must interpret those results, figure out if they make sense, figure out if they make sense for our specific network, and then create visualizations that make those results easily accessible to PMs/Leadership.
Supply Chain Program Managers and their bosses each have a unique set of jargon and metrics for their silo/role in the supply chain. Understanding what everything means and what it means in the context of other jargon is quite complex!
We have close to 500 tables containing over a Petabyte of data on our Redshift Custer (Datawarehouse). Figuring out what tables are useful and accurate for my queries has taken months to develop. I now use a subset of 30-40 tables for almost all asks. 100/500 tables cover almost all asks from supply chain teams, the other 400 tables are used for the mist niche of requests and queried a handful of times per year. However, those tables still had to have long initial syncs and then subsequent data syncs (daily) that use up valuable/limited cluster resources.
I don’t like when other people’s reports break or when the numbers “aren’t quite right” for a dashboard. This usually entails digging through a ton of SQL (Sometimes poorly written) or trekking through all the steps in someone’s data pipeline, or worst of all digging into their scrappy solution where we are web-scraping into a an excel file and reformatting with VBA. At the end of the day, this is an important part of the job, but I feel like its thankless/non-value add work.
Dealing with issues that have been kicked down the road: Poor organization of our tableau dashboards, scrappy process’ that few people actually know about/can fix, POOR DOCUMENTATION (Please add comments in your queries, an info tab in your dashboards, and links to your ETL process), poor data validation/inadequate testing, and improper error handling/alert systems/code reviews.

What have I enjoyed?

I’m quite passionate about writing complex and performant SQL and helping to educate others do the same. I’ve written a couple documents about optimizing queries to scan less data and run faster, how to use the explain plan, and reached out to folks to help them write better queries. I’m going to be the mentor for one of our new interns starting next week, so I’ll be learning what the best way to get these concepts across quickly is. I’ve also written some stored procedures for database admin tasks, identified and fixed tables with improper sort/dist keys and retention policies, and adjusted poor performing ETL jobs.
I’ve gotten to work on some fascinating projects. How do we position/spread inventory as close to customer demand as possible? How do we improve our buying/forecasting systems and our responses to overbuying of inventory? Automating hundreds of hours of manual data gathering and reporting into a succinct/performant report. Why are we sending more inventory to warehouses that already have a significant % of our on hand quantity of that item? Building on Native AWS using CDK (Infrastructure as Code) and maintaining the with a CI/CD pipeline. Using AWS Sagemaker, can we predict how often a particular item will be within X miles of our customer at the time of order? What factors are driving our fulfillment optimization system to plan specific paths that will be used to fulfill customer demand for a particular fulfillment set?
I work with some incredibly intelligent folks who I’ve learned a lot from.
I have very few meetings each week, and the meetings I do have are generally quite interesting; I can actively contribute.
I’ve never been told not to pursue something I’m interested in. I am constantly presented the opportunity to learn new things; whenever we are looking into a new project that I’m interested in working on (Not time sensitive) or I have an idea, I don’t get the responses: “Let’s leave that to the data science team”, “Lets let the Sr. BIE handle this one”. It’s more along the lines of “Yeah go for it, reach out to _ for help, and don’t delete any of our AWS resources!”. At this point in my career, I’m very grateful for this.

Overall

-I’d like to start writing on here more. I’m going to maintain these longer career posts
at their current cadence 1-2x per year, but I think I’ll start writing some
shorter technical pieces, maybe some about supply chain optimization problems,
and some personal thoughts I can look back on and see what I was thinking
as a 23 year old.

Year 1

Thu, 25 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Year 1 at Amazon

My perspective working at Amazon as my first job out of college.

Background

After graduating college in May of 2021, I took a job at Amazon. I also had offers from PepsiCo and a small logistics company, but I felt I would learn the most, have the biggest impact, and gain the most opportunities from working at Amazon.

When people hear you work at Amazon, they think that you’re a part of everything. I’m not. Specifically, I work for AMAZON XL (AMXL). We are the heavy bulky/large parcel arm of our transportation network, delivering things like TVs, Treadmills, Mattresses, etc… (The big stuff).

My Job

My role involved helping launch new warehouses, new connections between warehouses, changing times trucks would depart warehouses, other supply chain related changes, automating tasks for partner teams (Python, VBA, SQL), writing queries for partner teams (ETL, SQL, VBA), etc…

Accomplishments

Automated the analysis of launching new lanes between warehouses based on distance and number of packages that would be added to those trucks.

Implementing a directed graph in Python, I evaluated every opportunity to connect an unconnected Origin-Destination pair given current network constraints.

Saved my team and partner teams thousands of hours of work annually through a variety of automation projects and queries.

I’ve done other cool things, but it’s difficult to describe some of them in a way that would make sense in the context of our supply chain in less than 400 words…

What I dislike about Amazon

My Value:

-I feel like some of the best data visualizations, automation projects, and queries I’ve built are underappreciated/underused

-Disheartens me from continuing to go above and beyond for any other reason
than my own learning

-Maybe this is my own doing: failure to distribute, educate, and advertise

There’s a lot of people:

-Many upstream/downstream stake holders must sign off on every change making things slow and difficult to approve (Not necessarily anyone’s fault, probably unavoidable with the size of the org)

-It's difficult to loop all relevant stakeholders in on a change that will affect them

Organizational Silos:

-People are good at what they do but often have no clue what most others due

-This leaves large gaps when people leave that may or may not have documentation to
clarify things with new hires

-This makes explaining things to other people cumbersome and time consuming

-It can be difficult to explain your wins/accomplishments to hiring managers/partner teams who aren’t deeply familiar with what you do

What I like about Amazon

There are lots of smart people to meet:

-Most people genuinely try to do a decent job. The distribution is skewed toward smart/hardworking employees

-The vast majority of people who have made it decently high up work hard, are smart, and
genuinely care about what they do.

Interesting projects/initiatives:

-There are always interesting/high impact projects that you learn about and get involved in if you poke around enough

-It's not very difficult or time consuming to develop a reputation as a hardworking
individual contributor

-Your large wins are broadcast to hundreds/thousands of people

Career:

-You have access to a variety of different jobs/orgs that you can switch to based on your interests/career trajectory

The Future

Overall, I’ve had a positive experience. After a little over a year, I’m being promoted to a business-analyst with the hopes of becoming a BIE or Data Scientist. I’ve opted for more of a tech path, but feel like I could transfer back into a supply chain management role should I want to… I don’t know if I could do the other way around, thus, I’ve chosen this path to keep my options open.

I’m starting to understand that I know little in a large pool of people, working on a variety of different goals, with different ambitions, and an underlying directive to meet pre-defined metrics.

Musings on Sam's Blog

Last day at AMXL

Leaving AMXL after 5 years

Reflecting on people

General Reflections

Data Reflections

Scaling markets with non-human operators

Scaling markets with non-human operators

Uber, autonomous trucking, and scaling

Humans in an LLM inference market

Scaling oneself against a larger organization/entity

Value at the limit

An unbounded supply of Chess

Being restricted is a feature

LLM Weaponized Spam Circle

Thesis

But what is a commodity?

When Characters are a Commodity

When Characters are NOT a commodity

Output as a result of input

Why do we teach assembly

Doing this because we can’t help ourselves

Other Random Thoughts

A State of Inevitable Gambling

The inevitable gambling state

The problem

Personal thoughts

What are you going to compare this to?

A new project

Things to remember when beginning “$project”:

Entitlement:

Context:

Urgency:

Create a graph:

The Questions you ask:

Finger Under the Page

Reading

Driving

School

Life

Result

Advice to Beginner Cyclists

Buying a Bike

Other Things You’ll Want

Before you ride

While Riding

I want to get faster

Basic maintenance

Other useful things you will eventually want

Other weird road cycling stuff

My Dad's Good Qualities

Vanity purchases

Maintenance

He Values Experiences

Hard work

Integrity

Social

Health

Justice

Other

There may be another side to that

Pizza & Orange Juice

Thoughts on personal finance

$$$

On Saving

The other side of Saving

Investing

What do I think will change

A reason for being

Blindness and a Chess Puzzle

A Chess Puzzle

Inattentional Blindness?

Redlining

Reflection

At Work

On Stress

Stress

Recently

Panic

Root Causing