My friends call me Jack, and you can too!

If you are looking for a formal homepage, you may find my website or academic site more useful to you in that pursuit. Instead, I will instead keep this page updated with some stuff (hence the title). Everybody and their cat seem to have a convictions page, so I figured I do the same here.

• You can just do things, remember that Stardew was made by one guy
• Being optimistic and upbeat has the following surprising properties
  • Its infectious
  • Its self-propagating
• “always the stairs, never the escalator”
• Your most high value action is to be a cheerleader and steelman of your friends
  • this frequently means that contextualized harsh feedback is often the best thing you can tell someone
• Relentlessly question assumptions, and understand things from first principles
• Guard your time fiercely, partition it consciously, otherwise it’ll disappear on you
• It’s really fun to be fast!

Having now spewn forth very Bay-Area classic takes, I now have some Bay Area revisionism for you: I think the Bay has its own very groupthink mentality which is conducive to high velocity, but perhaps have lost some of the high-impact (read: “hippy”) stuff it did in the 80s and 90s. And so…

• Fun fact: you need 2 bowls of ricenoodles a day to survive; a sudden glut of 10 bowls will just result in wasted ricenoodles
  • …and so work to win the long race, not just to have fun now
• The trend to be “tech native” enshittifies your shit, knock it off. You know what’s an enduring brand for the last 100 years, and will for the next 100? a nice bottle of Coke.
• No, its not cool to sleep at the office. We stay because we have to and the work is important (perhaps the most important we can do as a species), not because we want to.

Work to maximize living good life, and sadly, a pre-scarcity world means you have to actually try. So let’s fucking ball 🏀

Friends?

Contrary to popular belief I actually spend a decent amount of time going outside and having friends. You should meet them, they are very cool.

• Sanity (David, Hux, Alb, and Zach) is a friend group formed over COVID that I still consider my best friends
• I feel very lucky to have met many legendary friends during my time at Stanford, including Joseph, Mason, Danny and John; some are so legendary they won’t let me list them here, you know who you are
• I’m privileged to have enjoyed a long and productive friendship with two close collaborators, Amelia and Robert, and similarly I’m very grateful to friends and colleges at SISL and Stanford NLP

Picture?

If you want photographic evidence of my face, here you go. I also spend a decent amount of time these days frolicking in the outdoors, which tends to generate pictoors which you can view here.