Category: Writings

Over the past decade I’ve lived in 14-ish apartments, 7 cities and 3 countries. It’s a lot of movement. There’s all kinds of pros / cons with so much change.

But I think my favorite part has been the repeated opportunity to wander. I love to be aimless, love the feeling of discovery.

After our latest move to another city, I’d been trying to find fun things to do with my 1 and 2 year old kids: parks, playgrounds, libraries.

I find it harder to be freeform with such little kids – having a plan puts me (and I think them?) more at ease. So naturally, I turned to the Internet and found some great things. Walkable spots. Close-by drives.

After a month of being here, though, I finally took some time for myself to just go on a random walk. No particular purpose. I ended up passing through the little city center, kept going into the town gardens that then turned to walking paths among rows of beautiful trees.

I took a left on a whim. It was foggy and through some pines, I saw a low fence, then a slide and swings and realized there was this magical little forest playground just sitting there. I was delighted. Couldn’t wait to walk the 15 minutes back home, tell my kids and bring them over!

Later, I wondered how I’d missed this delightful spot, and it was simple. Just wasn’t on Google Maps for whatever reason.

And that’s the beauty of wandering. I could’ve easily settled into my planned routine, the places I’d already visited, and that would have sufficed.

I also could have done a more in-depth online search or looked at Google Maps satellite view, written a program to detect unknown playgrounds etc etc.

But the sheer serendipity of opening up to life can be so surprising and fulfilling. It brings me immense joy and peace to stumble upon some little marvel.

Sometimes, finding a clearing is as literal as happening upon a space set aside in a dense forest. Or finding the vast horizon at the top of a tree. Sometimes it’s taking a few deep breaths, emptying your mind for a millisecond of calm.

The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.

– Mary Oliver, wonder of a poet

That quote tumbles around my mind some nights. Makes me think about the last decade, the next decade. Who I can still be.

Makes me think about all the poems I’ve written.

Maybe 1 out of every 100 or 200 scrawls, I find it. The right word, the delightful phrase, something utterly true.

I don’t mind being a broken watch – it’s all about volume. Try. Create. Fill the minutes with life, discovery.

Makes me dream about all the poems I’ll write.

Next year’s words await another voice.

– T.S. Eliot

I have a couple of young kids (6-month old and 2 year old), so my days of burning time watching NBA games is long gone. I still try to keep up with the league, though. And during these 2025 playoffs, I follow along by intermittently refreshing the pages on Paul Martinez’s excellent website: plaintextsports.com

Since all I can focus on are the game stats periodically ticking, I started noticing patterns. Like how often the Pacers and Thunder, as entire teams, would hover above or around 50% field goal, 40% 3-pt and 90% free-throw percentages. Each team even finished a game hitting that 50-40-90 mark. Super efficient stuff.

We like to keep track of the 50-40-90 club for season averages of (mostly) legendary individual players: Bird, Reggie, Nash, Dirk, KD, Steph et. al. So I figured I’d take a deep dive into teamwide 50-40-90’s and write up what I find1.

Disclaimer: I’m aware there are many better ways to describe a team’s shooting performance nowadays, but I enjoy the heuristic. I added true shooting percentages to the tables to provide some extra context.

The Playoffs

Let’s start off by looking into the playoffs. The 3-point line has been around since 1979-80 in the NBA, and since then we’ve seen 64 instances of a teamwide playoff 50-40-90.

Teams hitting those marks went 59-5 (.922) – admittedly more losses than I anticipated, but still very, very good. Teams hitting the marks in the Finals went 3-2 (.600).

Turns out the Thunder and Pacers are the only teams to hit 50-40-90 in the playoffs over the past 2 years. Should lead to some impressive shot-making in this year’s Finals.

Interestingly, the Phoenix Suns lead all franchises with 10 playoff occurrences of the teamwide 50-40-90. All that offensive firepower leading to zero titles is perhaps an indictment against chasing these numbers…

The Regular Season

In the regular season, the teamwide 50-40-90 has happened 1041 times – around 1% of games in the time period – leading to a record of 909-132 (.873).

I don’t know why I thought it would be even more of a guaranteed win hitting those numbers – guess I was anchored on a somewhat undeserved awe of the thresholds. That win percentage would translate to a 71 or 72 win season though, which is pretty dominating.

Interestingly, the Indiana Pacers lead the league with 61 occurrences. Sadly, these offensive displays have also led them to exactly zero titles. Although maybe, just maybe, they can fix that this year.

An Artifact

With so many 50-40-90 occurrences, it turned out that 7 times, both teams hit those marks in the same game. They’ve mostly happened in the past decade, speaking to the increase in efficiency and league-wide shooting talent.

In this mini dataset, I still found it odd that the 2018 Warriors could have lost any game in which they went 50-40-90. I clicked into it and looked at the box score. Not only did Steph and Klay not play, but KD also got ejected less than 20 minutes into the game, after shooting poorly.

The weird part then became the fact that they still hit the 50-40-90. And it happened mostly because of a sharpshooting Quinn Cook who went 12/15. Digging further, it turns out Quinn is the sole and founding member of the G-League 50-40-90 club. So in a full-circle way, it made sense after all.

A More Exclusive Club

I originally thought the teamwide 50-40-90 was going to be rare. With 1000+ occurrences (~25 per season), I felt sort of underwhelmed. So I’ve upped the stakes here and filtered for a more exclusive 60-60-90 club.

It’s an order of magnitude more difficult to accomplish with just 14 instances so far, and none in the playoffs. As an avid Mavs fan, my favorite part of the list is that a Dirk + Kidd + the JET + Barea team qualified.

My second favorite part is that somehow the pre-LeBron Cavs joined this club, but were the only ones to lose the game. In 2016, the Chosen One really did break a nasty franchise curse.

The Platonic Ideal

A version of the perfect teamwide 50-40-90 game would be that every single player who attempts shots also hits those thresholds.

Crunching the numbers, I didn’t find any games that quite met this player-by-player elite shooting display. I found a few games that came fairly close, even exceeding the marks in some categories.

• 2000 New York Knicks: 40-50-100
• 1990 Charlotte Hornets: 40-40-100
• 2025 Miami Heat: 40-30-80

Maybe in a decade, I’ll check back on this and see whether the elusive club has any members.

References

1. Data from Kaggle NBA Dataset – Box Scores & Stats (1947 – now). I used gocsv + Python for data processing

Around 2020, I noticed beige website design popping up. And when I started my digital garden in 2023, I chose that direction. My favorite examples of the genre pair up classic / vintage serif fonts with illustrations. I think the idea is simply to evoke old books and human writing.

In the past couple years, led by Anthropic, a handful of LLM-related websites have co-opted the design style. Their branding in general aims to give the machine an implied humanity. Sometimes I wonder if that’s how they’ve tricked me into using Claude more than other models…

Anyhow I’ve collected some examples of the beige website here and I’ll keep adding them as I find them. Admittedly, a couple might lean more gray when I see them in context here.

Examples

Overgrowth

There are dim pockets in the woods, quiet places. Tree bark coursing with ants, crumbling branches, dark and humid. There’s an allure to their stillness, unmistakable smell. Organic residue and soft ground.

Forests tolerate them for years, decades – sites of latent resurrection. In the meantime they are mapped by those within.

Eerily calm as they writhe, toil. Decay is a series of cliffs, sudden breaks into canyons.

Undergrowth

I want to trace the line, electric. With another sense, myopic. There is a net, a flow, resilience, springy with the strength of life. Wily, clever little lines.

Can you build an essay this way, a poem? Should I dig up the supports? Less a maze, perhaps a village-turned-city-turned-upside-down. I don’t know if time is cyclic, but matter has many methods of rebirth.

Scale visits this dwelling, then turns away. Moonless, sunless, vestiges appear and fade. A striving, certain.

Canopy

Illusion of breath, spaces between spaces / species. Thin workhorse, leafvein transporting pristine light. Lithe bend of top branch, far-reaching spirals.

It seems we have conquered death into dainty blooms. Suffocating green film. Maximize capture, minimize competition.

It is, again, mathematics, or some theory of it.

Many find it hard to keep up with the pace of things. Since we live much of our lives in realms of computation, we’re prodded to match the machine.

Depending on your outlook, here’s some good or bad news: the future is irreducible. What I mean is that the future is, in an essential way, unknowable. It cannot be reduced to algorithmic understanding or predictive models.

You and I, will, on some level, always be guessing. We don’t have all the variables, we never will, and even if we did, the future will be irreconcilable from the present, and especially from the past.

Peering forward

Humanity has a long history of searching for an oracle. We are a collectively curious, but anxious species.

Religiously, we’ve looked for telltale signs, prophesies or omens. Scientifically, from the dizzying matrix of existence, we’ve strung out threads of knowledge. And some of these are even powerfully predictive (e.g. movement of celestial bodies).

Despite this progress, the vast future across all domains remains, in the truest sense, unknowable. Why? There is irreducible uncertainty in systems that can only be modeled probabilistically.

Physical systems

In the physical world we have to deal with a hazy cloud of possible outcomes all the time. Weather systems are a prominent example.

Despite knowing how these systems work on a physical level, their behavior is nonlinear and is very, very sensitive to initial conditions. We can work on the reducible uncertainty portion of this problem, i.e. add more sensors, collect more data points in the atmosphere, the oceans, etc.

This helps us better understand the initial conditions, and helps predict what will happen in the near future with a little more confidence. However, the uncertainty compounds exponentially the farther you move away from those initial conditions, quickly dissolving confidence in our predictions.

Computers

There are many systems that don’t behave nearly as chaotically as weather, yet remain subject to irreducible uncertainty. The computer is one of those systems. It is an unbelievably reliable invention.

We can almost always predict that the computer will do what we tell it to do. Yet, on its most essential level, at the bitwise operator, a computer can be affected by chaotic natural phenomena.

The typical way a computer stores bits is with a transistor gate, marking the presence or absence of voltage as a 1 or 0, respectively. If rogue electrons flow through this gate, they could unexpectedly flip the bit from a 0 to a 1 or vice versa. Too much heat or faulty hardware can cause such an error, known as a bit-flip.

But so can the magnetic field created as cosmic rays hit the transistor. Because outer space is awash in cosmic radiation (and other risk factors), spaceships minimize risk with redundancy in their physical computer systems, sometimes employing 5 computers.

If there’s a discrepancy in the expected output at any given time, the computers tally what their outputs are showing, and proceed with majority agreement.

While the frequency of these cosmic rays can be modeled probabilistically, the observer remains fogged in a gray area of uncertainty. We’ll never know exactly when one of these randomly occuring events will actually occur.

So even for our most robust input/output machine, operating on a millisecond-into-the-future time scale, we cannot be 100% certain it will provide us with the future outcome we predict / expect. Wild.

Moving forward

Sometimes, it can feel like we’re gaining immense amounts of knowledge, so much so that the future is in our grasp. While we’ve absolutely made progress peering a little ahead, it’s important to recognize that any prediction is wrapped in uncertainty.

It can be humbling to realize this, but ultimately it’s also the source of our freedom, our ability to stray from predetermined lines and squiggle our own paths into the future.

References

1. Stephen Wolfram’s interesting take on the phenomenon of free will and how it relates to computational irreducibility

2. Vinod Wadhawan’s blog discussing natural phenomena and Laplace’s demon

We’ve turned to the forests for centuries to explain ourselves. Sometimes a place of nostalgia (Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey), of estrangement (Dante’s selva oscura), of refuge (Robin Hood’s Sherwood), this natural metaphor repeatedly finds new life.1

Our present century brought the massive expansion of the internet, for better or worse. In order to grapple with its prominence, people have, unsurprisingly, looked to the trees for understanding.

The dark forest theory

Perhaps in the early years, the online world grew organically from individual gardens and seedlings into a forest with enough light, variety and space to enjoy a walk in the woods.

People tended to their plants and trees with care and sincerity. They placed personal interests and hobbies out there and people began to find unexpected community. Though there was always sketchy activity, these dangerous trails were easier to avoid.

Soon after the people, however, came the money. It was clever. It was voracious. And it has devoured us. Nowadays, to move through the open internet is to be monetized or scammed.

There’s a rot in this aging forest, parasitic growth choking the trees, threats lurking. The trails are overgrown, full of sticker weeds, thieves, traps and poisonous vines. We’ve entered the darkest age of Mirkwood.

This transformation is at the core of Yancey Strickler’s Dark Forest Theory of the internet.2 The invasion of ads, data collection, dark patterns, harassment, negativity-driven engagement and bad actors has become so overwhelming that we don’t even want to make a sound, lest we draw public, destructive attention to ourselves.

It’s no wonder we’ve retreated underground to more private spaces, to Venkatesh Rao’s cozy web (messaging apps, Discord, Slack, email, etc.).

Extending the metaphor

Maggie Appleton builds on this theory by describing how generative algorithmic content may send the digital world into utter chaos. We now have Rogue Johnny Appleseed and his many clones planting a practical infinity of LLM-driven, derivative trees.

The forest was already vast and darkening. Now it will likely become even more immense and treacherous. If a core purpose of going online is to connect with other humans, that’s about to become much more difficult.

In response, it’s tempting to fully disconnect or abandon the online world. I think this will / should happen to some degree and doing so will probably benefit many people (e.g. by eliminating doomscrolling, etc.).

If you want to trade metaphorical trees for natural trees, you’ll find no argument here. I cherish every visit to the forest and every climb into the canopy. I know how it heals and refreshes me.

What’s at stake

If you want to stay online in any capacity, I believe cultivating a human-centric online experience is essential. There are many possible solutions that Maggie provides to help us navigate this new reality and prove our humanity online (reverse Turing test).

I especially like her recommendations to be as original as possible and to play with unique language/expression. Though I know these aren’t strict safeguards, I find a lot of promise there.

It’ll be tricky, but if we unknowingly lose ourselves in a thicket of LLMs, I’d find that rather tragic.

I care about the triumphs, ramblings, learnings and misadventures of humanity, not the muddled, plagiarized, probabilistic output of algorithms.

Genuine human intelligence

The ongoing transformation is partly why I’ve started this website and why I’m writing a little. I’ve been a huge beneficiary of all types of human-produced content both online and offline. I’ve learned countless things from people and their blogs / courses / code, but I’ve mostly been a passive consumer.

Maybe now, disappointed by the coming changes, I want to actively contribute to a humanist vision of the internet. LLMs and other types of algorithms / statistics can and will play an enormous part in our future.

I just don’t want these tools to obscure our reality or distract us from original human thought and experience. I want to participate in a public exchange of ideas, and help maintain a network of genuine human intelligence.

Reviving the forest

People often say “you don’t want to miss the forest for the trees.” In other words, don’t get so caught up in the details that you lose track of the big picture. In this case, the big picture is a bit of a mess. But it can be cleaned up.

I believe this online moment requires immense focus on the trees, one-by-one, in order to salvage the forest. We can make a home again in the woods. It’ll take a sort of inversion, a fresh return to the nostalgic roots of the internet.

This is the start of my contribution to that endeavor, a hope to create lively new growth. And to connect with others trying to do the same.

References

1. Forests: The Shadow of Civilization by Robert Pogue Harrison – a review of the forest as metaphor in Western thought

2. I found out about these ideas through Maggie Appleton’s awesome website – she’s a big advocate of creating your own online garden, and I gotta say, it’s been fun starting one up