Letter One

· January 4, 2021

I won’t call a spade a spade.

Why?

So this is my first weekly letter. I intend to write a letter a week, every week. I am doing this for these main reasons:

  1. I want to reinforce what I learn, on a weekly basis. This letter will be a form of reinforcement.
  2. It creates some motivation to be consistent in learning new things. I found that I avoided longer books, since it would prevent me from doing my one book post/week schedule. Here, I can write about longer books, and thus be motivated to pick up longer texts (Like Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid )
  3. I want to improve my writing, and I feel somewhere along the way, I may just become better at it.
  4. I like creating stuff. Stuff can be anything - food, code, art. This letter is going to be my weekly stuff. The stuff I can count on myself to do in a predictable manner. The stuff that can’t hide behind guise of needing inspiration.

What?

The what is a pretty clear extension of the whys. The letter will be my weekly chronicle, and I will split it into these broad categories:

  1. Read: I am going to write about what I am either reading or have read the week before. Going from my history, this will broadly fall into the category I like to call VC Chic. So, what, you may ask, is VC Chic? Since I coined the term, I get to define it. Its a very vague category of things that usually resonate with the VC kind. Things like startups, new technology, the sciences, big ideas. Paint a picture with these words as a seed: Sapiens, Blockchain, Series A Deep- tech startup, Leveraging compounding. Your are visualing VC-chic.
  2. Learnt: This will be stuff I learnt over the past week. For the most part, it will be relatively computer scienc-y, and am hoping it will have the occasional maths or music.
  3. Thoughts: This will be my optional - if I have a thought that I have, it will go here.

When?

Every Monday.

Call a spade a spade, this is a newsletter.

Well, yeah. But here is the thing, I hate newsletters. I think the concept of a newsletter is fundamentally broken - it gives content creators unwarranted access to a consumer inbox. The power is not with the consumer, but with the publisher. I can impose whatever crap I want onto you. Its time to revive the original newsletter - RSS/Atom feeds. They shift the power from the creators, to the users. I can’t impose my nonsense onto you without your permission, you get to pull it. I don’t store your email ids, and details, you store mine. This is what the internet was about.

So yeah, right now, I am acting against my ideology. I am considering making this a newsletter, since that’s in vogue. But that’s if I am able to develop a reasonable system on a static website that is not intrusive in any other way.

Anyways, thanks for reading the first edition of The Letter. Let’s hope I keep this up, and tangentially end up creating value for someone else too.

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