Jekyll2024-01-06T17:23:34+00:00https://rolandas.blog/feed.xmlRolandas BarysasI mostly write software, splitting my time between freelancing and personal projects. Also avid original scores listener. Enjoying life in the slow lane.Rolandas Barysasrolandas@barysas.ltSaying stupid things is a basic human right2023-02-03T09:00:00+00:002023-02-03T09:00:00+00:00https://rolandas.blog/posts/saying-stupid-things-is-a-basic-human-right<p><a href="https://freakonomics.com/podcast/yuval-noah-harari-thinks-life-is-meaningless-and-amazing-2/">Yuval Noah Harari</a> on saying stupid things in private:</p>
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<p>[…] Again, one of the frightening things I see now, especially in democracies, is the way that the people at the top, especially politicians, are denied a private life. That anything they say at any moment can and will be used against them. And, as a public speaker, I know that when I speak in public, I have to make a very big effort to concentrate and to be very aware of what I’m saying. But then when I’m off record, I can let my mind rest. And part of resting is saying stupid things. Saying things you don’t think about carefully. The mind of every person is full of garbage. And I think this is a basic human right. You have a right to say stupid things in private. As a gay man, if a politician, tells a homophobic joke in private to some friends, and somebody records it, and it’s now on YouTube and Twitter and whatever, I don’t care.<br /><br />I care what this leader says in public. If in public, he or she tell a homophobic joke, this is very bad because this is inciting hatred among millions. I care about their policies. But what they say in private, it’s not my business. Some people think the opposite. That, finally, we get to hear what they really think. This is their authentic self. What they say on stage, this is something that some spin doctor told them to say. What they really think, this comes out in private. And that’s a very dangerous direction because I don’t want authentic leaders. I want responsible leaders. Politics is not psychoanalysis. I don’t want somebody who stands there and just gives me his stream of consciousness. Anything that comes up in the mind immediately comes out of the mouth. That’s authentic, and that’s bad. We need people who have a barrier, a wall, between the mind and the mouth and think very carefully about what they say, because it’s a big responsibility. And then they should have the privacy to go somewhere and just say stupid and terrible things. That’s, you know, just being human.</p>
</blockquote>Rolandas Barysasrolandas@barysas.ltYuval Noah Harari on saying stupid things in private: […] Again, one of the frightening things I see now, especially in democracies, is the way that the people at the top, especially politicians, are denied a private life.How many people know about you?2020-10-03T09:00:00+00:002020-10-03T09:00:00+00:00https://rolandas.blog/posts/how-many-people-know-about-you<p>Every creator knows what it means to second guess themselves. When we put out our ideas but do not get enough traction than we hoped, we think that we did something wrong, this will never work and we’re wasting our time.</p>
<p>What we’re hoping for is to get viral. We hope that our idea is so good that it will spread on it’s own, without having us to do anything to get the word out.</p>
<p>That almost never happens. When we start to second guess ourselves, it’s a good exercise to ask yourself: If you were to take 1,000 people from the street, how many of them could say that they heard about you or your product?</p>
<p>Don’t rush to conclude that you’re idea is worthless. The world is massive. Let enough people to know about it first.</p>Rolandas Barysasrolandas@barysas.ltEvery creator knows what it means to second guess themselves. When we put out our ideas but do not get enough traction than we hoped, we think that we did something wrong, this will never work and we’re wasting our time.Self-sustainable2020-05-17T09:00:00+00:002020-05-17T09:00:00+00:00https://rolandas.blog/posts/self-sustainable<p>When first news about potential new virus reached people outside China, it was hard to imagine it spread so widely. We’ve seen in many events throughout our history that people are reluctant to entertain a tiny possibility of things going wrong. Last big one was financial crisis in 2008, when many traders, investment bankers, regulators and credit rating agencies turned blind eye to the possibility of people not paying their mortgages which lead to a calamity of all world economies.</p>
<p>When disasters like these hit, it feels sensible to trust the government to take care of their people. Trust is a deciding factor here. Untrustworthy government will make people feel that they are on their own, which will encourage them to make themselves less dependent on a functioning society.</p>
<p>In software, the term dependency is used when one piece of code depends on some other piece of code. In many cases, those dependencies are managed by other people. Trust, again, is how that dependency found it’s way into your software—only because you trust that dependency to work as intended at all times, you decided to use that and save yourself some work.</p>
<p>But with every dependency, you add a potential point of failure: cases when that software is abandoned or worse, hijacked by bad actors, can have dire effects on your business. Replacing those dependencies with your own code is nothing but a risk mitigation.</p>
<p>We all depend on institutions at some level, especially in the time of world-wide crisis. Most of them, realistically, we can’t replace with anything else. Universal health coverage is one of them if you live in a modern country.</p>
<p>But dependencies shaped by our own behavior can be replaced. We could decide not to go to the gym and exercise in a park nearby. We could grow tomatoes in our garden or a balcony instead of going to the grocery store. We could learn how to fix faucet by ourselves rather than waiting for the plumber.</p>
<p>The idea of reducing dependencies could be put to the extreme, and some people do. That’s not what I promote—ability to work collectively is what brought us so far as a species. Only that recent events gives us an opportunity to think how could we depend less on someone else, which makes us less susceptible to crises and ultimately, brings us more tranquillity in our lives.</p>Rolandas Barysasrolandas@barysas.ltWhen first news about potential new virus reached people outside China, it was hard to imagine it spread so widely. We’ve seen in many events throughout our history that people are reluctant to entertain a tiny possibility of things going wrong. Last big one was financial crisis in 2008, when many traders, investment bankers, regulators and credit rating agencies turned blind eye to the possibility of people not paying their mortgages which lead to a calamity of all world economies.The wealth-happiness mirage2020-03-07T09:00:00+00:002020-03-07T09:00:00+00:00https://rolandas.blog/posts/the-wealth-happiness-mirage<p>The apocryphal narrative that success is measured by income-based productivity pulls in nearly everyone. The distorted image of “perfect life” is reinforced by social media where people share their best moments, which, maybe unintentionally, hides the truth that life is not perfect for anyone, no matter how large their wallet is.</p>
<p>To earn a lot and spend a lot is stressful because of the possibility of losing our job due to the events that we cannot control. As history shows, recessions and shifting economy are always brewing, which can lead to series of obligations that we wouldn’t be able to fulfill.</p>
<p>Earning just enough to live in a relative comfort is easier than to shoot for the stars. It’s easier than to give up our sleep, relationships and leisure for a chance to become extremely rich. It’s easier to know that if something happens to our income, we wouldn’t need much to recover.</p>
<p>Earning less also creates conditions for passive income to cover our lifestyle in full. There’s no better position to be in than to have enough financial security so we can focus on the things that we want to do in life.</p>
<p>People have an incredible ability to adapt. As we can adapt to extravagant living, we can adapt to living with enough.</p>Rolandas Barysasrolandas@barysas.ltThe apocryphal narrative that success is measured by income-based productivity pulls in nearly everyone. The distorted image of “perfect life” is reinforced by social media where people share their best moments, which, maybe unintentionally, hides the truth that life is not perfect for anyone, no matter how large their wallet is.Everything eventually becomes obvious2020-02-17T09:00:00+00:002020-02-17T09:00:00+00:00https://rolandas.blog/posts/everything-eventually-becomes-obvious<p>When building software, we all strive for simplicity. We spend days, even weeks ruminating on how to reduce friction and make it easy for people achieve their goals without needing for us to tell them how.</p>
<p>Because we work on our software every day, we will have a fundamentally different understanding of how our application works than people who will try it for the first time. All decisions that we make are derived from our own experience, which, unfortunately, does not so easily transfer to others.</p>
<p>When you work on something long enough, everything starts to look obvious. Every form and every button seem to be a straightforward path to achieve what your application is designed for. The more time we spend thinking how things could work, the more our perception gets detached from average consumer’s point of view.</p>
<p>Sometimes taking a break is a good strategy. It lets your brain to reset and allows you to look at your solution from a different pair of eyes, even for a second. The answer eventually will reveal itself.</p>Rolandas Barysasrolandas@barysas.ltWhen building software, we all strive for simplicity. We spend days, even weeks ruminating on how to reduce friction and make it easy for people achieve their goals without needing for us to tell them how.Back to reading paper2020-02-01T09:00:00+00:002020-02-01T09:00:00+00:00https://rolandas.blog/posts/back-to-reading-paper<p>It’s hard to escape news these days. They are everywhere—on your computer, in your car, in your pocket, maybe even in your refrigerator. Every smart device is ready to tell you what is happening in the world at any time.</p>
<p>Newspaper was the only way to get news before television or the internet was invented. It took days—sometimes even weeks—for news to reach us, until advancement of technology caused not only proliferation of news sources, but also dramatically increased how fast those news spread around the world. Now when something happens in Australia, we know about it in Europe—other side of the planet—in a matter of minutes.</p>
<p>While the amount of news has increased, our bandwidth to consume them did not. We used to read today’s newspaper and go on with our day, but that illusive limit of consumption is gone. Now we decide when to read and when to stop, which, unfortunately, makes too easy to reach for our smartphone each time we feel bored.</p>
<p>Reading news online has more costs than most imagine. The obvious one is productivity cost. People are not good at multitasking; filling every spare minute with a quick scroll through the news breaks our concentration. Spontaneously switching between work and entertainment makes it hard to deeply focus on the next task. This is why one-minute pause quickly becomes a half-hour distraction.</p>
<p>Ironically, reading news online somehow became harder as well. Websites are trying really hard to shift your attention while reading: pop-ups, auto-playing videos, advertisements and jumping mailing list forms are thrown to your face after reading first paragraph. It’s difficult to focus on text when websites are constantly bugging you to click on something.</p>
<p>Because speed became such an important part of breaking news, the quality of articles have deteriorated. Everyone wants to be the first to break a story. You can’t blame them: being too slow will leave them behind other news publications and it’ll have a direct impact on their revenue.</p>
<p>But the worst effect of reading news online is imposed by us. Reading news on the screen <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/25/skim-reading-new-normal-maryanne-wolf">encourages skimming</a>—a type of reading where we skim through the text without internalizing it. We’re not robots—we can’t understand ideas and provoke our own thoughts when we spend a split second on every sentence.</p>
<p>What’s even worse is that skimming has a detrimental effect on our attention span. The more we spend time jumping between the lines just to get the point of the article before moving to the next one, the harder it gets for us to immerse ourselves in a long-form writing.</p>
<p>I don’t believe in new year resolutions (any day is a good day to make a change), but it’s a good opportunity for course correction nonetheless. This year I decided to stop following daily news on the internet and go back to reading old-fashioned newspaper.</p>
<p>It’s been a month since I read any news online and the feeling is incredible. Not only because of increased productivity, but also in general calmness of life. There are very little news that’s worth knowing immediately as they happen—everything else can be postponed or even ignored. Crises around the world are happening all the time—there’s no point to follow them all.</p>
<p>Getting news weekly is a good compromise. All most important events are combined into a single paper publication that can be read in a few hours. Also there tend to be less reactive stories and more analytical articles that explain events in a historical context.</p>
<p>I don’t think I ever go back reading news online. It’s like ear ringing—you eventually get used to it, but you can’t believe how you could’ve lived with it when it’s finally gone.</p>Rolandas Barysasrolandas@barysas.ltIt’s hard to escape news these days. They are everywhere—on your computer, in your car, in your pocket, maybe even in your refrigerator. Every smart device is ready to tell you what is happening in the world at any time.Take a stance2020-01-25T09:00:00+00:002020-01-25T09:00:00+00:00https://rolandas.blog/posts/take-a-stance<p>No one likes to be proven wrong. This is why publishing something is so hard—we’re afraid that someone will poke holes in our arguments, which leads us endlessly scrutinize our own ideas and prevents us attaching our name to them.</p>
<p>However, every statement can be falsified under right circumstances.</p>
<p>This is why trying to be right in everyone’s eyes is futile. With every edge case covered your message gets more brittle, thus making it harder to penetrate people’s existing beliefs.</p>
<p>Pick your position and stand by it. Frame your ideas in your own narrative to support them. And most important—accept that you’ll always be misunderstood by someone, because that’s a mandatory step in changing someone’s mind.</p>Rolandas Barysasrolandas@barysas.ltNo one likes to be proven wrong. This is why publishing something is so hard—we’re afraid that someone will poke holes in our arguments, which leads us endlessly scrutinize our own ideas and prevents us attaching our name to them.A programmer’s reminder2020-01-19T09:00:00+00:002020-01-19T09:00:00+00:00https://rolandas.blog/posts/a-programmers-reminder<p>If you’re a programmer, don’t forget how lucky you are.</p>
<p>You can build things that many can’t. Not many people are willing to spend years learning to write code so they could make what they want. You are, and now you have a capability that many do not have.</p>
<p>You can work from anywhere. With modern technology you are not bound by physical space to get the work done. Work from home, from an office, on the road—doesn’t matter.</p>
<p>You can improve yourself every day. There are many people that do not work by their specialization. Being a programmer means that you get paid by getting better at what you like to do.</p>
<p>You can contribute to the society. Software runs the world, and with open source, it’s never been easier to contribute to the software that millions rely on every day.</p>
<p>And don’t forget—choices that you make have an impact on people. Reject work that contradicts your beliefs, because it depends on you how the world will look tomorrow.</p>Rolandas Barysasrolandas@barysas.ltIf you’re a programmer, don’t forget how lucky you are.Avoid distinction bias2020-01-11T09:00:00+00:002020-01-11T09:00:00+00:00https://rolandas.blog/posts/avoid-distinction-bias<p>You about to buy a new music player for your living room. In the store you examine different models from different brands, until you narrow your selection to two: first one sounds better than the second one, but the second one would look better in your living room. As a rational human being you decide that the better sound is more important, so you buy the first one.</p>
<p>After using that music player for a few weeks, it keeps bothering you that it doesn’t match your interior. Was buying this speaker was the right choice?</p>
<p>The concept of distinction bias states that we value things differently when we evaluate them in direct comparison rather than on a single basis. The juxtaposition between two music players creates a false notion that we would be happier with the better sounding one, but because we are not comparing sound at home with other music players, the sound quality starts to lose its importance. And because we see our new music player frequently in our home, we continue to subconsciously evaluate its design.</p>
<p>Another example that most of us experience is when we buy a new smartphone. When we make a switch, the new phone is faster, have more features and look much better. We think, “How could I use that old smartphone for so long?”. Distinction bias is in effect: only in direct comparison we see the difference, but if we stayed on our old smartphone, we wouldn’t feel that way. After some time the effect of distinction bias fades and our new smartphone becomes a new regularity.</p>
<p>How could we avoid situations like this and be happy about our choices in the long run? We should not only predict our future experiences, but also simulate single evaluation when making predictions. In speaker example, we should evaluate those two speakers by having a sensible amount of time between them, so the disposition effect would fade as much as possible: listen to the first one and only after a couple of days listen to the other. If you do not notice a big difference between them, there’s a good chance that you’ll be happier with the better looking one.</p>Rolandas Barysasrolandas@barysas.ltYou about to buy a new music player for your living room. In the store you examine different models from different brands, until you narrow your selection to two: first one sounds better than the second one, but the second one would look better in your living room. As a rational human being you decide that the better sound is more important, so you buy the first one.Luck is us2020-01-05T09:00:00+00:002020-01-05T09:00:00+00:00https://rolandas.blog/posts/luck-is-us<p>How do you define luck? We tend to visualise luck as some formless, soulless entity. A benevolent ghost that you can’t see or hear or feel, which we all worship and pray it present itself and shower us with good fortune.</p>
<p>In most cases, luck is actually… us. We, the people, are the reason why some of us get lucky and some of us don’t. The fact that your bus arrived even if you were late to the bus stop is because of the actions of other people. It could because bus driver decided to wait an extra minute at the bus stop. It could because of a traffic accident that caused a traffic jam, making bus late. It could because a mechanic done a poor job servicing the bus, which caused bus to be late due to mechanical issue.</p>
<p>When things don’t go as planned, it’s easy to think that we ran out of luck—that whatever we did, we had no choice but to absorb the misfortune that was inevitably about to happen. When our business is failing, it’s easy to throw all blame on luck, because then we don’t need to admit that it’s our fault, which while makes us feel better, it doesn’t bring any solution to the problem.</p>
<p>There’s always an explanation why things went wrong. Finding it is the only thing that is going to prevent it from happening again.</p>Rolandas Barysasrolandas@barysas.ltHow do you define luck? We tend to visualise luck as some formless, soulless entity. A benevolent ghost that you can’t see or hear or feel, which we all worship and pray it present itself and shower us with good fortune.