Ben Mann Monthly Oct 2021

Blindsight, Darknet Diaries, CPAP, cookies, great movies

Purpose

• An index for my memory

• A menu of topics for my next conversation with you

• A faster way to share what I’m excited about without the barrier of writing a complete blog entry on it

• A skimmable way to spread content I found valuable

Photos

Experiments and experiences

• CPAP

  • This machine looks like an alarm clock with a hose coming out of it. It pumps air into your nose through a strapped-on tube, constantly adjusting the pressure to make sure you're always breathing. It humidifies and warms the air so your nose doesn't dry out. Most people have trouble falling asleep due to discomfort. If you try to talk with it on, air rushes through your nose and out your mouth, distorting your speech. When I look at my sleep stats, the difference is obvious and impressive. My sleep efficiency goes through the roof; the next day I feel far more rested, even when I sleep less. I don't wear it every day because it is uncomfortable and sometimes I think I can get by without it. Maybe I'll eventually get used to having a hose attached to my face.

• Doggie paint night

  • Diana's dog-mom friends organized a painting night on Halloween. The ringleader, an artist in the true sense of the word and career tattooist, dressed as Bob Ross, provided all the materials, and showed a template everyone could interpret to their fancy. She flitted here and there giving tips, encouragement, and sometimes sass.

• Birthday cookie competition

  • Harking back to my chocolate ice cream and dark chocolate tasting parties, this year I wanted to conduct a no-holds-barred search for the most superior cookie. And, given our temporal proximity to Halloween, I asked the crowd to dress in onesies. We had a good turnout of both cookies and onesies. I made this chewy ginger molasses recipe, but I doubled all the spices and salt, and skipped the cinnamon in the coating. They were very good! In the top tier with them were a cardamom shortbread with persimmon jam, a mochi-stuffed salted chocolate chip cookie, and a classic Dandelion chocolate ultra-dark chip cookie. Next tier down in the "very good but standard" were peanut butter cookies with a hershey kiss, snickerdoodles, puff pastry with lemon frosting, cinnamon buns (not a cookie?), chocolate topped macadamia cookies, and the disqualified-because-store-bought Hot Cookie yonic/phallic chocolate covered coconut macaroon. And lastly in the thanks for trying category, cornmeal peppermint crispy rice kitchen sink crunchy, almond-flour chocolate chip, unmodified chocolate chip cookie mix?, chocolate chip banana oat bread cookies. Then of course there were the heroes who brought cookie enhancers: milks of all kinds, whipped cream, ice cream, and hot cider. It was perhaps the most wholesome party I've attended in SF.

• Emotion rating {-3, 3}: mean 2, std .5

  • Highs: 10k PR, decreasing number of hats at work, CPAP works, reading more during bike commute, first V5 since COVID started

  • Lows: still too many hats at work, rainy season started, late on newsletter 😛

Life updates

• 📚 Started reading The Will to Battle

• 🚀 Private alpha launch

• ⚡️ Finished lasers

• 🐕 Nori visit

• 💇‍♂️ New hairstyle: frohawk

• 🎸 Learning ukulele?

Content

• 5 point Likert ratings for “I would recommend this content to a friend”, sorted

• Blindsight 4/5

  • Where do we draw the line between consciousness, intelligence, and self-awareness? When are they synonymous, and when not? What does it mean to be human? Watts explores these themes in a future alien reconnaissance mission. His characters are a diverse mix of self-modified humans and a vampire??

  • A little more of the story than I would've liked was distracted by dungeon crawls and action sequences, but they were popcorn-worthy. This would make great source material for a thoughtful horror movie!

  • The main character gives Notes from Underground vibes, with slowly revealed past failures and bad relationships piling on top of each other to motivate his foibles and tics.

• Closer 4/5

  • A love quadrangle spanning years and borders exploring the styles of attraction, love, and fidelity.

  • I loved all four main characters. Each one, while archetypal, was also complicated and conflicted on many levels, brilliantly executed.

  • Clive Owen's Larry was the confident cave man juxtaposed with Jude Law's Dan as the suffering artist.

  • What does it mean to really know your romantic partner? Or even yourself?

• Police Story (1985) 4/5

  • A Jackie Chan classic, touching all his usual themes of insane stuntwork, playful choreography, awkward social encounters, and in this special case stifling bureaucracy and its conflicts with justice.

  • I'm struck by the complexity of the characters in what seems on the surface like a slapstick action comedy. There are no hero cops, and the bad guys often get away. Everyone's a little crooked here and there, and nothing works perfectly. That doesn't stop people from trying. Jackie rises to fame, then notoriety, then outlaw, and finally comes through in the end.

• Darknet Diaries: NSO 4/5

  • This Israeli hacking group made a zero-click (no user interaction required) remote takeover for iOS called Pegasus. They claimed to sell it only to governments to help catch terrorists, but of course it fell into the wrong hands over and over, as shown by research group Citizen Lab.

  • Given hit after hit listening to these episodes, I can easily declare this my new favorite podcast!

• Darknet Diaries: The Spy 4/5

  • How do you tail someone in real life? This spy in NYC tells how he was assigned to tail a reporter involved in the Harvey Weinstein investigations. Once he realized who it was, he switched sides and helped his mark instead. Lots of little spycraft gems in here.

• Darknet Diaries: Zero Day Brokers

  • How do people buy and sell zero days? And who's on each side?

  • Argentina is full of 15 year old hacker prodigies trying to make a buck and escape their gravity wells.

• Dune 3/5

  • Visually stunning, well acted, but otherwise very little plot or character development; part 1 only, clearly setting up for franchise.

  • I read the first half of the book a few years ago and got bored before I finished. I expect the film series to be similarly fluffy, but perhaps more entertaining.

• Why React Hooks? 3/5

  • A nice explanation of the history of React API design, explaining the move to hooks and the specific problems that solves

  • Specifically, separating presentation and business logic was hard to do with classes and HOCs. With custom hooks, this stuff is more obvious to encapsulate and requires pretty much no boilerplate (eg mountains of bind statements).