astukari Newsletter #73 - Simple Solutions to Hard Problems

Hi friends,

Those of you who have been around for a while know that this whole “Astukari” thing is still very much in its incubation stage. Every day I’m making changes to the website, the newsletter, and other cogs in the machine to optimize for both identity (“What is Astukari? How does it fit in the world?”) and growth (“How do we get to 1,000 subscribers? 10,000?”). We’ve been on this path since October of 2018, making this the three-year anniversary of this whole project. In a world where every other day we see a blog post entitled “How we went from 0 to 100,000,000 subscribers in 2.5 months”, this seems shockingly slow. But I think Astukari’s greatest strength in identity is that it is so different from any other science, business, psychology, etc. blog out there that it by necessity requires a longer incubation. In other words, I don’t mind. Let’s see where things take us next.

🔨What I’ve Been Making

10 Tips on Writing - I’ve been writing on the internet since approximately 2013. That’s 8 years, roughly. Here are ten things I’ve learned thus far.

The Cost of Staying Alive in America - When you read the term “cost of living”, what do you think? Most people don’t realize that surviving in the modern world comes with a hefty price tag. This post goes over some of the math.

📚What I’ve Been Reading

Slowed canonical progress in large fields of science - Here’s a counterintuitive thought: what if innovation is slowing down because there’s too much science? What if stricter standards for major research publications have caused a lot of good progression to cease? More details of this argument follow in this article.

The Math of the Amazing Sandpile - This is a mostly fun article about the mathematics of avalanches and sandpiles. Not really relevant to the whole psychology, business, technology thing — but who cares?

Building 2,000 Unique SEO Pages with GPT-3 - Occasionally I am blessed with an article coming out which backs up a recent post of mine. What screams blog writing for robots more than 2,000 pages of GPT-3 ad copy? Authentic writing is the future, not content marketing.

Thoughts on Chess Improvement - I am not as big on chess now as I had been back in 2019/2020, but this is the guide I wish I had. Hell, I might get back in the swing of things just because of this article. A really great and concise guide on how to train your chess skills.

Decomplication: How to Find Simple Solutions to Hard Problems - Long story short: Find patterns in solutions, and use that to find a simplified answer. This is the preferred method of problem-solving I use, and it has become particularly clear in the writing of Apalla, but I think it’s sorely underutilized.