Reminder to Self: there is no free will, but inputs influence the trajectory of decision making.

"There's no such thing as free will" ~ The case for a more compassionate world. https://t.co/B7kIhKxZDQ

— Marjuk (@marjukahm) June 3, 2016

Learnings from Marc Andresseen and the Future of Open-Source Game Engines -- What I am Reading Today

The amount of reading that I do each do sometimes astonishes me. I usually do not keep track of what I read. My reading list includes bunch of books from Kindle and iBooks and plenty of blog posts that I find mostly via twitter. I thought it'd be refreshing if I write small summaries of the reading that I do, so when I look back in a day I could use crystallize some of my learnings. Keeping that in mind, I am summarizing from the resources that I have read or listened to:

1. Marc Andreessen's interview on Tim Ferris's podcast:

These are my takeaways from the interview:

• Smart people should build things. 
• "Be so good that they can't ignore you" inspires me and I believe in this. 
• Hedge fund managers are not beholden to their ideas as when they are told where they are wrong, they get excited to hear how so.  
• Value investing versus technology investing are polar opposite in the type of investing that both do. Value investing bets on the future not changing (e.g. Coca-Cola, Ketchup) whereas venture investing invests in future trend and change (e.g. Google, Uber) 
• I should read Steve Martin's memoir  Born Standing Up.

2. Saku Panditharatne's blog post on the importance on open-sourcing in Gaming:

Here's what I have learned: In the gaming / graphics world, open-source is not as popular as it is in the tech world. Examples: 

• For low level graphics APIs, the proprietary library like DirectX is winning against open-source GL in the gaming world. 
• NVIDIA is acting like Microsoft in the early days when MS was against open-source. NVIDIA makes drivers that are required to be reverse engineered by the open source community to make it work. 

The argument is laid by Saku is two-fold:

• This practice of not code sharing has to change and the gaming/graphics community should come together to create open standards and protocols if they want to see VR or gaming DIY to flourish much like it happened for the web. 
• Without the open-source model, there is a high chance that game engines, which are the OS for the VR,  will be too buggy at the absence of the Linus's principle: "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" 

Why I Love Economics

I started out my undergrad journey studying economics. I still remember those joyous nights of reading Mankiw, learning Poker, dwelling in The Economist website, and day-dreaming about becoming next John Nash. I still remember that joy I felt when I learned the insight about human behavior that people respond to incentives. It makes so much sense. Such a great combination of beauty, truth, and elegance is wrapped within one principle.

More than anything else, I loved how economics taught me how to think about life. For example, we face trade-offs: we can't have everything we want. That if we want something, we have to think about the price we want to pay for it. And the price of something is what we are willing to give up to get it. It can be time (e.g. investing in relationship). It can be hours of work that we put to reach that magical score to obtain admissions into our dream colleges.

Perhaps, the most elegant among the economic principles to me is the one that says rational people think at margin. Margin means edge: that we always weigh in the benefit that we will get for one extra unit in exchange of the cost of that unit. For rational people, marginal cost-benefit analysis needs to make sense; otherwise, they shouldn't move forward with the decision.

Don't we ask al the time that "is it worth it?" Exactly, here we employ the thinking at margin principle. It's really powerful if you get to apply it in most of your decision making processes. I hope I apply it more actively and more often. I hope you do it as well.

Besides, sharing why I love economics, I want to make a small point. Much of what I write or am going to write occasionally is my attempt to produce more as I want to balance between my consumption diet and creation habit. I am hoping to write more, mostly summaries of readings that I do or my opinions of things that I read or think. I very much hope to receive feedback from you.