For a long time I thought I didn’t like carbonara because the few I tried were too creamy and eggy. Recently I gave it another try because the picture in the menu looked delicious. It was excellent, and I decided I wanted to learn how to make it myself. I needed some practice before I felt comfortable with the timings, but overall it’s a pretty simple recipe that wasn’t hard to learn.

Ingredients

• Spaghetti for 2
• 2 eggs
• 1 block of parmesan cheese
• 1 block of bacon, cut into chunks
• 1 clove of garlic
• Pepper
• Olive oil

Notes

• There are no weights and volumes because I can’t be bothered to measure things.
• You can use 3 egg yolks if you want the sauce to be thicker.
• Pecorino cheese might be more authentic, but parmesan is totally fine.
• Pancetta might be more authentic, but I personally prefer normal bacon (gasp!).
• The cheese and pepper tastes better if it’s freshly grated/ground.

Method

1. Start cooking the pasta in boiling salted water until al dente.
2. Beat the eggs in a bowl, and grate in the cheese.
   • Keep adding cheese until the sauce becomes thick and creamy.
   • Add pepper to taste.
3. Heat the garlic with olive oil in a frying pan over medium heat, and cook the bacon.
   • Cook the bacon until it starts to crisp on the outside.
   • Take out the garlic once the bacon is done cooking.
4. Once the pasta is ready, add it to the frying pan and mix well with the bacon.
   • Add the pasta directly to the pan with tongs (instead of using a strainer) to get a nice amount of pasta water as well.
   • Remove the pan from the heat here and take your time, so that the pan is not too hot when you add the sauce.
5. Add the sauce and mix well.
   • The heat from the pasta will be enough to gently cook the egg.
   • If the pan is too hot here, you will get pasta with scrambled eggs (gross).
   • If the sauce seems too thick, add some more pasta water.
6. Serve with some extra cheese and pepper on top.

I was consistently able to have lucid dreams when I was in high school. Partway through a dream, I would realize that I was dreaming and could then control the rest of the dream to a small extent. As I’ve grown older though, this has become less and less common. Maybe age has changed something about my brain.

Naturally, I’ve been interested in lucid dreaming and have read a lot about it. Tim Ferriss has a fascinating beginner’s guide on his blog. Different people seem to have different approaches and theories, so I thought I would write about my own experiences.

Entering a lucid dream

The breakthrough for me was trying to wake up from nightmares. I would pull my eyes open to try to force them to open in real life. Sometimes it worked, but other times the nightmare would already be over because I was focused so much on trying to open my eyes. At some point, I realized that if it’s all in my head, there’s no reason why I shouldn’t be able to change it to be less scary.

The next time I had a nightmare, instead of trying to wake up I tried to change the dream. I tried to imagine myself on a calm beach. It didn’t work very well. The whole dream just became hazy, and I woke up right away. Still, progress!

Signals to realize you are dreaming

In Inception, the characters have totems that they use to determine if they are in a dream. If the totem is slightly different from the way they remember, they know that it is an imperfect version of the totem that exists within a dream.

It sounds like science fiction, but some people have similar methods of invoking lucid dreams before they even fall asleep. One of my friends in high school would hold an image of a French horn in his mind as he was falling asleep. He would then see the French horn in the dream, and it would be a sign for him to realize he is dreaming.

One thing that I have read (and noticed personally) is that it’s common to not be able to read clocks in dreams. It’s hard to describe, but the clock face is hazy and it’s as if your mind can’t register what time is showing. Or if I ever am using a smartphone in a dream, I always struggle to get it to do what I want. I consistently mistype the same words over and over. These are all signals that can help me to realize that I am dreaming.

Controlling a lucid dream

I read about people with tremendous control over their lucid dreams. People who fly through the air freely and visit beautiful places around the world. Athletes who perform their sport in their dreams to develop muscle memory without fear of injury. Mathematicians who use the dream-space to visualize multiple dimensions and work out complicated formulas.

Even after becoming lucid within a dream, I had a hard time controlling them. I was never able to fly, for example. The closest I got was jumping far by falling slowly. Changing my location was generally impossible, too. Like my attempted visit to the beach, changing too much about the dream around me would just wake me up. Instead, I could look for a door that leads into a room with a pool, for example, but it would often take me some time and effort to find that door.

It felt like my dreams had rules, and if I pushed too hard the dream would collapse and I would wake up. I had to be very careful to only make changes that fell within the dream’s rules to make sure that I could stay inside the dream.

Once I realize that the dream is fading, I try to stop pushing against it and surrender myself to the dream’s natural flow. This usually lets the dream get back on track, but sometimes I get caught up in it and forget to become lucid again. Supposedly, spinning around or rubbing your hands together is a good way to make a dream more “solid” again if you’ve weakened it too much (who discovers these things?), but I’ve never been able to remember to test this technique. I’m sure there are other tricks that people have developed, but they probably all require a lot of practice.

I wonder sometimes about what a better society than ours would be. What should our goals be as we try to improve?

As our society improves and we get more efficient, I like to imagine a future where we don’t have to work as much. That seems like a nice thing to aim for. Universal basic income (UBI) seems like one possible solution. If we could afford to give everybody a fixed minimal income, people could work less and still have a basic amount of wealth needed to survive. But I’m not yet convinced whether UBI is the correct answer to describe an ideal future.

Robots and machines can do a lot of work for us. This is progress that could be applauded, but it’s feared instead. The main reason why we’re afraid of offloading work to machines is that we can’t live without money, and we can’t get money unless we are productive members of society. Capitalism is set up to make us want to stay busy. We seem to be stuck in a rut where we never stop building more things and make up fake jobs to stay busy.

If we let robots and machines do a lot of work for us, the downside is that many people will lose their jobs. This is where UBI comes in. If robots and machines and other general improvements allow us to create value more efficiently, the government could then redistribute the extra value to everyone in the form of a basic income. Unemployment will be feared less if you don’t have to worry about how you’ll feed your family. UBI in some form seems necessary if we want to make life easier for everyone while still using money to pay for things. But I’m not yet convinced whether it’s the correct answer to describe an ideal future.

Making sure everyone has a basic ability to live a decent life sounds like a great goal for a government that exists to serve its citizens. On the other hand, capitalism promises rewards for great work, and that’s what motivated a lot of people to do great things. People spend millions of dollars researching medicine because a breakthrough drug could be worth billions. Redistribution of wealth will take away from those rewards, and a loss in motivation might lead to a decline in innovation.

One interesting example of UBI is The Alaska Permanent Fund. This program was set up as the Trans-Alaska Pipeline was being finished in 1977 and has been giving $1000-2000 to every citizen since 1982. This isn’t exactly UBI because it is tied to a new form of income that Alaska had access to, so it isn’t just redistribution of wealth. But in general, it has been working very well, and hasn’t increased unemployment or made people lazier.

I had been playing World of Warcraft on and off for about 10 years, but I decided to stop playing again about a year ago. I quit because of a series of changes that were made to the game, and it motivated me to think about why I reacted that way as a paying customer.

A series of recent changes made to WoW were designed to motivate players to play by ensuring they always gain something and grow a little every time they play. Unfortunately, a side effect of these changes was an increased pressure to spend many hours playing. This made me feel like my limited time spent in the game was less valuable, and is what ultimately led to me quitting the game.

What makes a subscription-based game worth its price?

All games need to convince people that what they are buying (whether it’s a complete game, an item, or another month of game time) is worth the price. I wrote previously about what mobile games do to make people want to buy extra items. Online games where players pay a fixed amount every month have a very different strategy.

Unlike games that sell items, games with a subscription model don’t need to maximize revenue per user because everybody pays the same price. Instead, the most important metric is how many people will keep playing the following month. The total revenue per user is determined by how many months they spend playing the game.

Traditional console games need to convince people to pay money just once. “$60 will get you more than 100 hours of fun gameplay!” On the other hand, subscription-based games need to convince people to pay money every month. One thing that helps people make a decision is whether they felt like the previous month was worth the price. So online games do their best to make sure that people are always satisfied with the time they have spent playing the game so far.

How to design a subscription-based game

Most online RPGs follow a basic progression system that can give players a fun game experience over a long period of time. You enter a dungeon, beat a few bosses, and get a few strong items. The dungeons reset each week, and since those new items make you a little bit stronger you can get a little further in the dungeon. After a few months you are strong enough to defeat the final boss, and by that time the game will (hopefully) soon release a new dungeon.

You always have a challenge, and you are always making progress towards completing the challenge. It’s almost like you’re buying and playing a new small game every few months, but it’s much more meaningful because you keep the same character who is constantly growing stronger.

So then, what can go wrong and make people want to stop playing?

People pay for their time. Don’t make them waste it.

The most competitive players will defeat all of the game’s bosses very quickly, and have little to do inside the game until the next dungeon is released. If there is nothing meaningful to do inside the game, then there’s no reason to spend money to keep playing. Making social elements important or having players battle each other are possible solutions, but online games constantly struggle to make sure that high-ranked players will always have a reason to keep playing.

In other cases, a player might have plenty left to do but still feel like their time in the game was not spent well. You could play for many hours fighting bosses, but never manage to get any new strong items just because you were unlucky. All of the time spent fighting bosses would feel lost because you gained nothing for your effort.

At the end of the month, players will ask themselves, “Did I get my money’s worth last month?” If you spent $15 to play a game but didn’t make any progress, you might feel like that was a waste of money.

So WoW started to reward people for the time they spend playing the game. Now you constantly get special experience points when you play, and this will make your items stronger. Because you are always gaining these experience points it is guaranteed that none of your time will be a total waste. People can spend more time playing the game and be satisfied that it was time well-spent. Problem solved, right?

Not quite.

People pay for their time. Don’t devalue it.

The issue is that if every hour you spend in the game makes you stronger, you are now required to spend many hours playing the game if you want to be strong. Before, I could play for a few hours on the weekend fighting bosses and if I was lucky I would get some great items and be a strong player. I was happy with that. But now having the good items isn’t enough. I’m required to make my items stronger by spending many more hours gaining extra experience points to improve them.

In that sense, the time I spend fighting bosses is only meaningful if I also spend more time making the items stronger. Without the extra time put in, I can only get weak items from bosses. And what if I can’t because I’m too busy during the rest of the week? My time spent in the game, which hasn’t changed, is now worth less because I get less benefit from it. I now feel like I’m no longer getting my money’s worth from the game. And ironically, the cause was a new system designed to make every hour spent in the game feel more valuable.

What was wrong with these changes?

Making all time spent in the game directly make you stronger doesn’t work well in MMOs. In mobile games, it’s fine to reward time spent playing because it works as an alternative to paying money. Competitive players can choose to spend either time or money to become stronger, and non-competitive players aren’t affected because they lose nothing by playing the game for free. But if you are paying a monthly subscription, then having a disadvantage because you don’t have extra time or money is a terrible experience. MMOs generally don’t allow people to pay money to become stronger, and allowing people to spend time to become stronger can lead to similar issues.

Giving an advantage to hard-core players is not a great business decision, especially if it makes the game less fun for more casual players. This is because no matter how dedicated a player is, they will only spend the same amount of money as a casual player. If a game gets the majority of its revenue from a small group of hard-core players, it’s fine to focus on them. But in an online game where everybody spends the same amount of money, the majority of revenue will come from more casual players and they are the ones for whom the main gameplay should be designed.

I’m not sure what circumstances motivated the changes to WoW, but I think there had to be better solutions. If hard-core players were running out of things to do, maybe add more cosmetic rewards, or create one insanely difficult version of the current dungeon that most people can not complete. Or if casual players were having a hard time progressing within a limited time, then you can add safety mechanics that guarantee a good item after a certain number of unlucky attempts with no rewards.

The latest version of WoW added changes that affected the core gameplay for all users and unfortunately did it in a way that gave a disadvantage to many casual players. I would guess that these people made up a large portion of the game’s players, and worsening their game experience may prove to do more harm than good.

The best way to cook popcorn in a pan. The secret is to heat up the kernels evenly in hot oil first, before heating them over a flame to pop them quickly all at once.

1. Coat the bottom of a pan with a small amount of oil and place over medium heat.
2. Put three popcorn kernels in the pan and wait for all three to pop.
3. Put the rest of the kernels in the pan, cover with a lid, and remove from the heat for 30 seconds.
   • This heats the kernels evenly, getting them all ready to pop together.
4. Return the pan to the heat, where the popcorn should start popping right away.
   • It helps to keep the lid ajar and shake the pan occasionally to keep the popcorn dry.
5. Once the popping slows to a few seconds between pops, pour the popcorn into a bowl.
6. Add salt to taste.

Picular is a site that lets you search for words like “water” or “summer” and see a list of related colors. It seems to work by running a Google image search and extracting the primary color of that image.

This is the kind of project I love. It’s simple and easy to understand, but fun to play with.

Concept

Play Pac-Man online against other players. 1 player plays as Pac-Man and 4 other players play as the ghosts. Pac-Man’s goal is to collect as many dots as possible, and the ghosts’ goal is to work together to catch Pac-Man. Players receive points at the end of the round based on performance, and roles are rotated for the next round.

Gameplay

In terms of strategy, the ghosts will need to work together in order to win. Pac-Man will move faster than the ghosts, so the ghosts’ main strategy will be to trap Pac-Man in a corner. To encourage teamwork, all ghosts will receive the same amount of points at the end of round regardless of who actually caught Pac-Man.

The fact that the ghosts can share information makes the game much harder for Pac-Man than the original, so he needs a new advantage too. We allow Pac-Man to see the entire map, but the ghosts can only see a small radius around them. The ghosts’ vision is shared with each other, so together they can see a large portion of the map.

The game then becomes a hide-and-seek game, where the ghosts spread out strategically to try to find Pac-Man. Pac-Man hides from them for as long as possible while collecting dots along the way. If the ghosts find an area with no dots, they will know that Pac-Man has already been there. Once Pac-Man is spotted, the ghosts converge on his position and Pac-Man must try to escape before becoming trapped.

With the gameplay changes, the characters should be changed as well. Some other ideas are:

• A squirrel collecting nuts vs. 4 wolves
• A thief collecting coins vs. 4 policemen with flashlights
• A human looking for supplies vs 4 zombies

Mockups

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what benefits there are to building a new product on a blockchain. Blockchains allow an app to be decentralized, and the biggest value they bring is a solid way to handle trust and consensus in an environment with no central authority. I was having a hard time thinking of products that would really benefit from being decentralized, but I came across an idea about decentralized platforms that makes a very strong case for using blockchains.

The idea, introduced to me by this post by Alex Tabarrok, is that a blockchain-based platform is uniquely able to align its needs with the needs of the users. If a traditional platform wants to create economic value for itself, it often needs to do things at the expense of its users. It can’t maximize value for both the users and the platform at the same time. But a blockchain-based platform can, through its tokens, increase its value directly by increasing value for its users.

Facebook creates value for its users by making it easy for them to communicate and keep in touch with their friends. But if Facebook and its stockholders want to create value (= money) for themselves, they need to start selling data and adding advertisements. This doesn’t add any value to its users and actually creates negative value. There is a conflict of interest because the needs of the users and the needs of the platform are not aligned, and the company needs to find a balance so that everybody involved is just happy enough.

For a decentralized platform with tokens powering its blockchain, the value of the platform lives in the value of the token. Users of the platform give value to the token by using it and interacting with it, so a popular platform will have more valuable tokens. The best way to make a token more valuable is to increase the value that the platform provides to its users. There is no conflict of interest because there is no way to increase the value of the blockchain itself at the expense of the value it provides its users.

Diaspora* is a decentralized version of Facebook, and Mastadon is a decentralized version of Twitter. These platforms don’t have anything like tokens, and there is no revenue involved in either of the projects. While this is refreshing, having no monetary incentive for the people involved makes it less likely for the project to grow. Blockchain might be the missing ingredient that allows a decentralized platform to really gain momentum and start a new era of user-centric services.

When I started using Facebook in 2005, it was exclusive to college students and was by far the best way to communicate with my classmates. It was the first time I could learn what my friends were up to without asking each one individually. Everything I wanted to know about my friends was in one easily accessible place.

All recent updates were shown as one long list, but Facebook eventually introduced the News Feed. This was an effort to filter everyone’s updates to show just the most important ones. Facebook made educated guesses about whose updates were most important to you and hid the ones you wouldn’t care about. I think they also kept an option to see all updates in chronological order if you didn’t want to miss out on anything.

News Feed seemed fine at first, but unfortunately it’s no longer useful as a way to keep in touch with people. Instead of showing you the updates that should be most important to you, Facebook now shows you the things that you are most likely to click on. Often, this means you only see pictures or videos on the home page.

When people posted YouTube videos or links to articles, they got more clicks than regular status updates. Facebook liked that and started showing more and more videos and links in the News Feed, and this made them get even more clicks. At some point, people started noticing that posts about themselves got almost no attention, while links to content would get lots of reactions. People stopped posting about themselves and started posting links instead.

Facebook prioritizes this kind of content so much that my News Feed doesn’t have any information about my friends anymore. It’s filled with posts by strangers that my friends have liked or commented on at some point. Because Facebook’s criteria for a good post is now so different from what we should expect, we have tragic situations like people never noticing that their friends were dying.

Facebook no longer has any use to me as a communication platform. It has just turned into a click-generating machine.

I grew up in the 90s, and back then video games were made for kids. Toys were for kids, and video games were just the newest, most exciting toys around.

But as my generation grew up, we never really stopped playing games. As we became adults, the game companies kept making games for us, and games shifted to targeting an older audience. It makes sense that these would be successful since adults have more money to spend on games than kids do. Video games became a form of entertainment just like movies, and they started using serious storylines and graphic violence in the same ways.

While this is great for the adults, I can’t help but feel that the kids are being left behind. The young adults making exciting new things are mostly making them for people like themselves, and very few companies are still focusing on entertainment for children. So now kids play Call of Duty, sign up for Facebook, watch YouTube, and are bombarded with content that really isn’t appropriate for their age.

Nintendo is a shining exception. The Switch is designed to be family-friendly and has many games suitable for young children. I was recently in a shopping mall that was holding an event for kids to try out the new Mario game, and they had a Mario there to greet them and take pictures.

Nintendo’s first steps in the mobile app industry - which is notorious for promoting competition and bad spending habits - includes games like Animal Crossing that have minimal payment mechanics and have only positive interactions between players.

Even Nintendo’s eSports efforts include a focus on kids. Splatoon has held national tournaments exclusive to Elementary School students, to find the best Splatoon-playing kids in the country.

Cynics will say that Nintendo’s strategy is to start making life-long customers from a young age, but I just think it’s nice to see a giant game company that hasn’t forgotten about the children.