There is no tyranny in categorization.

We reason through analogy, but leaning too much on the structure and foundation can lead to you building a palace devoid of love and connection and intimacy.

Also, when someone boxes you into a lower-dimensional category than who you are, prepare to profit. Your NAND is my upside.

<narrator>it was really tempting to start this in the abstract with "have an idea" but that would ruin it, I have to talk about an actual idea for this to be real.</narrator>

I had a dream last night and this morning I wanted to write about it. The way to write is to start writing, but there was just one thing I needed to figure out first.

Obviously yes I should start writing, but where? My paper journal, obsidian daily notes, obsidian other notes, on my website, in a google doc, notion, elsewhere? If I publish it on github will people see it? If I publish it on files.omarish.com, wait is files.omarish.com still online or did I finish the redirect migration?

Is this a thing that I prompt to an LLM, is it something that I will keep to myself? Am I worried what an LLM will think of me in the future? What tone do I use? Do I plan on sharing this with others? Just with people I know, or publicly? What if someone important reads it and then they think differently of me?

Is this a BlogPost or a Project or a Note?

Oh also I had a Remarkable tablet for a few weeks but I returned it. Great device but it added decision fatigue.

I know these roads well, so well that I made a keyboard shortcut for the <narrator> speaking. After all, giving something a name is helpful. Subject to object. "This is not me being indecisive, this is my narrator speaking and let's give him a chance to speak and listen to him." We won't let him speak the whole play, imagine going to the theatre and it's 2h of the narrator speaking. Maybe introspection is narcissism. But back to the theatre.

It's my choice where this goes, but it's such a hard choice to make. It's tempting to be nihilistic and say "it doesn't matter, not like anybody is going to read this anyways" but The Lulz are Sexless and I'm not going to pretend it doesn't matter when I want it to matter. So it's my job to decide where this goes and where it gets captured. My job. I'm the DRI which means I should also have the autonomy to make the choice.

So far we've named the Narrator, now let's name the job: to categorize the thing that's about to be written. Great, a few minutes ago it was a bunch of thoughts, now we have at least three parties: myself, the narrator (also myself), and the audience.

Here's the thing. We thought our job was to categorize, but we're thinking about how to categorize something that's not even real yet. An idea is words. Right now those words are keystrokes. Also notice: I didn't make formats.xls or something, I just started writing. Just start.

The words aren't even getting left on the floor in the editing room, because there's no film (yet). Hopefully (yet), but rigidity can kill an idea before it exists.

Reductio ad absurdum, so I don't know if this example resonates, but imagine if you hear a melody in your dream and before you strum it on the guitar in your room, you fixate on "what genre is this?" Maybe I'm trying to categorize, but also, what if I'm just afraid what the notes will sound like? There is no resonance in the melody of the song you haven't written yet.

Even if it's just EDM: https://music.ishkur.com/.

Schemas, or Peter Pan Syndrome

Postgres is great, MongoDB is built to be schema-less. Defining the schema is important. Schema migrations can be painful to do in production. But "I never want to have to define the table schema" is like the dating epidemic in San Francisco, Peter Pan going on a lot of first dates, turning 50, and still figuring out his type. He knows his type, he's just afraid to jump.

Peter Pan Syndrome is the fear of committing, because when you commit to something, you categorize who you are and what life you might want to lead.

It's not that Personal CRMs are evil. "Personal CRM" is like "incredibly perfect" in that it's an over-statement of something.

Did you know that the original Web3 was not blockchain but schema.org metadata? It might end up being useful, but imagine if you were Sun Tzu sitting in your tent after a long day of battle, wanting to capture your hard-earned wisdom, and then getting nerd-sniped on "which schema.org metadata attribute should I put before I write this, also no I don't want to make an account on Medium."

ref="https://schema.org/book/romance"

I don't know if Romeo and Juliet would have been such a banger if Shakespeare instead opened with that.

But at the same time, allbirds can rebrand as an AI company. Arizona Ice Tea can rebrand as a blockchain company. (Hold that thought.)

Fear masquerading as metadata

Often times, the need to categorize something comes from a place of fear. I think we sometimes feel the need to categorize something, to place it into a bucket, because we don't understand it, or we're afraid of it. We don't know what the thing is, but we'll never find out what the thing might be if we don't start writing. So, let's write and trust that we'll figure it out.

So, this isn't a "notion metadata" problem. It's fear masquerading as metadata. Be bold. Like the Monty Hall problem, maybe you could guess the right door out of 100, but you're more likely to win if you can close 98 of the wrong doors first. Close them if you can.

What if there's another solution. What if there's energy and what if there's malleability. What if energy is more real than time.

Apres Moi, Le Petit Mort

There's energy and then there is waiting for your CI to run the test suite.

Capturing ideas versus "I just need to update the draft in wordpress." Now you have a fork of reality. Actually, you never started with one. There were two once you put pen to paper.

1. imagination
2. writing
3. "the version of the writing that's in my content management system"

The worst kinds of bugs are the ones that take many minutes and weird conditions to reproduce. A few days ago I lost way too much time to one of these in my k8s cluster, but that story is going to live on another page: Le Petit Mort and Waiting for CI to Finish. LLMs don't really understand time (yet).

Deploying code, changing data. Yet Presentation of Self in Everyday Life and the example of the restaurant - restraint and editorial taste are a real thing. Not every idea in your head should be published. That's being too real.

This being said, I don't think that human ingenuity <narrator>wow that sounds like an advertisement in the area between the terminals and arrivals hall at IAD <narrator>to those who don't know, that is Washington Dulles International Airport</narrator></narrator> is actually this myopic.

We know beauty when we see it. Recognizing beauty and creating beauty - it does not take so much energy to recognize beauty (standing beneath and looking up at the Sistine Chapel) but it might take a lot of energy to create beauty (even Michelangelo had to tap out and take a 30 minute lunch break).

But what gets in the way often isn't running out of ideas; it's "fatigue" from having to manage three versions of an idea. Or, the truth, a pointer to the truth (what you wrote), and I think we get unwillingly-drafted into project manager mode when N>2.

Your NAND is my upside

Once we have the thing, we get to choose the category. Now that we've covered so much area, let's talk about why.

A few years ago I got some feedback about going too deep in rabbit holes. I decided to censor myself, and started thinking rabbit holes as bad things. After all, "I want to be a successful entrepreneur" and "I can go balls deep into sysctl and cilium iptables on a tuesday morning" seemed like an XOR kind of relationship.

But it's not XOR, it's NAND.

XOR would imply that all people do exactly one of the two, either:

1. Run MetalLB in BGP mode
2. capitalist

But it's not XOR, because there are probably people out there who do neither, and I'm not talking about them. I'm talking about the universe of people who do (1) OR (2). And if you're sure I can't be both, you've mispriced me, and a mispriced category is just alpha.

Maybe you think it's NAND. Arizona Ice Tea is a blockchain company now? Sure thing, I'll make you a market and trade with you all day.

I could Pirsig this and go deeper and ask "is it good or bad to be someone who runs BGP" but I think that Pirsig took it too far. You could sell all your belongings and go into the forest and spend 10 years of your life writing a novel. Ask Ted. But I'd rather have my $12 latte with oat milk, it just tastes better than an elk I just hunted.

I don't know if this is true, but I remember hearing that the first version of the New York Times website was just a PDF of the newspaper. Skeuomorphism is.. I can't think of an exact definition quite yet, but it's kind of like how when you open the Apple Notes app and it has a yellow background. Over-categorizing is a little skeuomorphic like that: pouring the new thing into the shape of the old container.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

I saw this movie a few years ago called The Reluctant Fundamentalist and I liked it and it was a great movie but it felt so limiting.

Pakistani kid -> goes to Princeton -> joins a top-tier consulting/private equity firm -> (scene) -> now he has to decide who he is.

He goes back to Islamabad, shuns fundamentalism. But the part that I felt most was the scene where he had a PE assignment to go evaluate a publishing house in Turkey. The publisher had printed some classic Urdu work, including literature his father had made. His firm told him to shutter the publishing house, his identity told him not to destroy himself.

This stuck with me for a while and then I realized that it was really a movie about a false dichotomy, about answering a question that doesn't need to be answered.

Just because we can put two ideas in the same sentences, it doesn't imply that they are related or that they are of the same category.

A place where ideas resonate

I've expressed more surface area about myself than I have in a long long time. It's as if I found a voice that I've been looking for. I think the voice has been there all along, he was just burdened with the "reluctant project manager" job title. Without structure, we're chasing the Gendo pipe dream, pursuit of human instrumentality where there is no boundary between you and me.

Without an AT field there is no resonance because everything is one. And with too much categorization, this never gets written because we're busy stress-level-9000-ing whether this is a BlogPost or a Note.

With structure, there can be resonance.

A place where ideas resonate.

Have a wonderful day.