Huy's Blog

Someone told me their meds made them jittery one day, and the people around them treated them with contempt.
It's the same person, same week, just in a different mental state.

It's clear to me: they were being kind to the version of you that costs them nothing.

Just don't.

You will never be as good as the people who are.

Stop trying. Learn to dance with time instead, push and pull, in sync.

Then the projects finish together, on time, the way your body finds its place against your partner's.

A great leader's weapon is their word.

The more weight a word carries, the more effective the order, the more powerful the leader.

Every word they say that fails to materialize makes the next one worth less.

You'll probably ask an AI to take out the trash.

You probably WON'T ask it to take your wife to dinner.
(unless, ugh...)

Some tasks are worth only their result.
Some are worth doing.

With advanced gene editing, there's no avoiding the next generation of superhumans, with better overall abilities than most people.

Many others and I are current-gen humans.

Our strongest claim is this: we show how far a person can develop inside their natural limits.

The superhumans will have it handed to them. We're still the ones who inspire.

In order to be special, first you need to be special against something.

The bigger that something is, the more room there is to be special against it.

A very large amount of that something is called a monoculture. Monoculture is the fertile ground for people who can offer special things.

I've made this mistake too many times: offering something special without framing it against a monoculture, and the thing feels mundane.

Every pixel should mean something.

A product that does this is as if its creator is saying: I respect your time.

As a designer, every element I cut causes me some agony, but I cut it anyway.

We are not cattle. Don't feed each other slop.

Gods used to be things we prayed to, in exchange for favorable weather, relationship, or politics.

Now we are actively building one, the final one.

I just refreshed this site's look:
The 2 new symbols

1. The number in the 3 windows is the percentage of my life I have left. Read them together like this: 55.9843687%.
   1. How did I calculate it? Based on the average Vietnamese male's lifespan (by The Global Economy, 2022). Perhaps humanity can figure out immortality this decade, but I may also very well die of some other stupid cause. Best stick to the average.
2. To the right: every post now contains the first window of % of my life left when I wrote each post (red arrow)
3. At nine o'clock is the Vegvísir, an Icelandic symbol for navigation, representing my wish for how to spend my life well.
4. But how do you spend a life well? I agree with Benjamin Franklin's prayer O Powerful Goodness: to continually discover where my "truest interest" is, and have the courage to do it.
5. The design is somewhat inspired by the beautiful A. Lange & Söhne Lange 1

Why?

This creates an incredible effect of seeing how my life just ticks away (especially in Grid View!), and what kind of thought I had at the time.

Which incentivizes me to write more.

Bonus

Earlier this month, when a whole number went down 🥹:

I've been obsessed with the topic of time since forever. Unsolved.
From my 2014 Photography portfolio