The doctor,
the entrepreneur,
the engineer,
and the ghost
sit in a rented red Fiat
endlessly driving
from Nice
to the winding bends
of the Alps. Cheap Thrills
from cheap speakers
echoes in the crisp mountain air,
but our ears register only
the sound of youthful invincibility
and infinite potential.
Every year
I find myself pulled back
into that tiny car in my memory
and I think,
It must have been a hot summer,
because the snow melted
and formed this tear in my eye.
I followed every coefficient
backpropagated every label
but for all the good
of ten million data points
and a thousand machines I taught
to learn how humans
“behave”
I myself
never learned
why she changed her mind
about her love for me
on the coldest sunny day
that summer in Portugal
on days
she sleeps
my muse
i light
a candle
and imagine
the wisps
that billow
in reverse!
coalescing into
the vein
in my
forehead;
it pulses
and carries
mango coconut
-scented ideas
to me.
After 6 years of consulting and startup adventures, I’ve been trying to get back into big tech. While browsing Reddit and Blind to get a pulse of FAANG nowadays, I’ve noticed something fascinating: Google, the company that defined “moonshots” in Silicon Valley, no longer commands the extreme prestige it once did.
Moonshots
Google’s still a great company, but once upon a time, Google was defining the future. They didn’t just build products - they invented the language we used to talk about innovation. In that period, “moonshots,” “10x thinking,” and even their slogan “don’t be evil” were legendary, at least in my eyes and those of my peers aspiring to go into computer science. I don’t think they were just marketing; I like to imagine they were genuine artifacts of a culture that believed in doing massive, world-changing things. I know that’s an idealized version of them, but it was easy to believe when you’d hear conversations about the tiers of their free food, silly hats, and even slides in their offices, all in contrast to the boring desk jobs we’d come to imagine for the typical white-collar worker.
The world is shrinking, and some people are upset. Today I read on article on Hacker News “What does a world without Airbnb look like?” which talks about the negative sentiment against long-term tourists in Barcelona, and it corroborated the discussion I saw on the Digital Nomad subreddit yesterday “Cancel Barcelona Trip?”.
Mobility
When I was a kid, my family moved from China to Canada. The ease of it all seemed normal to me. Make a life in a new country? No big deal. As I grew up, I realized this wasn’t far from the truth for most of the developed world. If you’re in a Western country and dead set on becoming a citizen of another, is it really that hard? Not really.
This is the world we created after World War II. We asked for peace and open borders. Now we’re surprised when people use them?
