August 2023
teeth, fake flowers, management -> ic
Teeth. The UK’s NHS pays for all medically necessary dental work, but nothing cosmetic. Also I grew up in a place where having straight, white teeth just wasn’t a thing anyone thought about. End result was healthy teeth, but a big gap in my upper front teeth and overlapping bottom teeth.
And now I live in the US, and I move in social circles where orthodontics are a coming-of-age ritual. So I signed up for four months of Invisalign and… it’s fixed it all! I’m impressed, especially because Ella and I had tried Smile Direct (cheap, at-home Invisalign) a few years ago and had been disappointed.
All-in cost was $4k, of which insurance covered $1.5k. It doesn’t have the same ridiculous value-to-cost ratio as laser eye surgery did, but I’ve still come away thinking it was worth it.
Fake flowers. We live in a sterile high-rise with a thousand yards of off-white walls, and so color is badly needed. Unfortunately, we also have a history of killing plants. Turns out: fake flowers these days are pretty good!
Amazon links: lilies, tulips, succulents.
They don’t register as fake unless I focus on them. A regular gardener’d probably disagree! But for us they offer maybe 90% of the value we’d get out of real flowers, except with 0% of the maintenance.
One thing I’ve found that helps is to trim the stems and the leaves. I think I have - and I presume other folk have - much stronger priors on what a leaf or stem should look like than what a flower should look like, so the fewer leaves/stems visible the better.
Management. I’ve been managing a team at Anthropic for a year now, and while it was going reasonably well, I think I was maybe a 70th percentile manager whereas I’d been a top-few-percentile IC.
(For folks who aren’t in tech, an IC - individual contributor - is someone who does research and writes code directly, with only loose supervision)
So I’ve returned to IC’ing, and it’s done wonders for my mood. Strangely, and in contrast to a lot of other people who don’t suit management, I had easy reports, didn’t mind the people management, and the project I was leading was one that I think is going to be immensely impactful inside of 12 months. But something about the setup just didn’t suit.
I think it’ll take me a while to figure out why IC work feels so good to me in a way that management doesn’t. The proximate reason is obviously that the Skinner box embedded in IC work is dramatically more compelling to me, but that doesn’t give me much to action 😅.
Tidbits
We went shooting! Skeet shooting. Neither of us came away wanting to do more of it. We’ll try a rifle range next.
The cats have been renamed from Boba & Kiki to Beans & Toast. We’re still not happy with these names and they’ll probably change again.
If you’ve suggestions, the rules are (a) one name has to be orange-y and the other dark-mottled-y (b) each has to be one syllable (c) together they have to form a dumb joke.
I had my birthday dinner at Sushi Nakazawa. It was a fantastic meal - some of the pieces were among the best things I’d eaten in my life - but as with our previous every-few-years attempts at high-end restaurants, neither of us came away thinking it was worth it. Takeout next year.
One thing I did appreciate was that after ~20 pieces of sushi I was merely full, rather than the bursting I have been at the end of other tasting menus.
The Udvar-Hazy museum is superb. Or at least I thought so - I spent the whole time narrating Ella through the jets and rockets based on half-remembered Wikipedia articles. A+, would narrate again.