Sugg.Notes.1 (April 7, 2024)

The unexamined life is not worth living

What is this?

Each week, I round up all the cool thoughts and memorable quotes that have been buzzing in my head. It’s like a little time capsule of what’s on my mind, but also for my friends too (see below).

What should I do after reading this?
Drop your two cents — it doesn’t need to be deep. Comment directly on substack or text me your thoughts. It could just be “2nd point hit” or “4th point is way off base".

• Advice from Former President of Peru, Francisco Sagasti, at a Perry World House Panel

  • Re-engage with those which have the same ultimate objective but who have different approaches 

  • Radical moderation. ‘Moderation’ because you need to listen to everybody. ‘Radical’ because you need to resist dictatorship and corruption

• Thoughts on the most exciting advances in hardware, systems infrastructure, and creative solutions to sustainability— AMA with Bojan Vokunevic, Chief Cloud Architect at NVIDIA

  • Power management (it was easy to scale from 5-10 kw to 30 kw, but going to to 100 kw is very hard)

  • Network and data access (Ultrafast GPUs having to wait for data to arrive are losing out on power and productivity. Network speed is the bottleneck)

  • Sustainability as a creative solution: Schools in Germany are getting heating based on output from NVIDIA data centers. 

    

• Deep maniacal focus by Marcus Aurelius (@Isaac)

  • “Concentrate every minute like a Roman—like a man—on doing what’s in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly, with justice. And on freeing yourself from all other distractions. Yes, you can—if you do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life, and stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions override what your mind tells you, stop being hypocritical, self-centered, irritable. You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life? If you can manage this, that’s all even the gods can ask of you.”

• First sentence in Anna Karenina by Tolstoy. The lesson extends to businesses too (@Prof Gad Allon)

  • “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

• Perceptions of fairness 

  • "Fairness" and "unfairness" are essentially concepts of the emotions rather than fixed and measurable standards. We now know that the safety of our position in any country depends not alone on compliance with laws and contracts, or on the rate or amount of our payments to the government, but on whether our whole relationship is accepted at any given moment by the government and public opinion of the country--and by our own government and public opinion--as "fair." If it is not so accepted, it will be changed. (Excerpt from The Prize by Daniel Yergin)

  • Oil companies were fighting tooth and nail to prevent changes to their pricing standards towards a 50/50 split. They felt like they took considerable risk (economic, political, social) to fund exploration and development, and as they made these producing countries more powerful, the countries were fleecing and pressuring them for commodities which was technically granted to them under legal charter. As the market became more competitive, the balance of power changed — thus fairness became more important than agreed upon legal standards.

• Penn Fight Night

  • Sports and criminal activities are some of the ways to fulfill our cravings for authenticity (Daniel Boorstin). They both share a level of pre-meditated violence and hunger for victory.

  • On the other hand, Fight Night was exhilarating (Wharton victory pictured below). I always thought humans were so crude for having gladiators kill each other, but our inner nature is still alive and well.

    

• Thank you SEPTA for finally doing what every major city did a long time ago: enabling Apple/Google Pay. I’m now a paying customer. You did this, and you should be proud.