Skip to content
By using Twitter’s services you agree to our Cookies Use. We and our partners operate globally and use cookies, including for analytics, personalisation, and ads.
  • Home Home Home, current page.
  • About

Saved searches

  • Remove
  • In this conversation
    Verified accountProtected Tweets @
Suggested users
  • Verified accountProtected Tweets @
  • Verified accountProtected Tweets @
  • Language: English
    • Bahasa Indonesia
    • Bahasa Melayu
    • Català
    • Čeština
    • Dansk
    • Deutsch
    • English UK
    • Español
    • Filipino
    • Français
    • Hrvatski
    • Italiano
    • Magyar
    • Nederlands
    • Norsk
    • Polski
    • Português
    • Română
    • Slovenčina
    • Suomi
    • Svenska
    • Tiếng Việt
    • Türkçe
    • Ελληνικά
    • Български език
    • Русский
    • Српски
    • Українська мова
    • עִבְרִית
    • العربية
    • فارسی
    • मराठी
    • हिन्दी
    • বাংলা
    • ગુજરાતી
    • தமிழ்
    • ಕನ್ನಡ
    • ภาษาไทย
    • 한국어
    • 日本語
    • 简体中文
    • 繁體中文
  • Have an account? Log in
    Have an account?
    · Forgot password?

    New to Twitter?
    Sign up
vgr's profile
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr

Tweets

Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

Conversational account. For work follow @ribbonfarm, @breaking_smart, @artofgig. Tweets are 90% vacuous views, apathetically held. Mediocritopian. IKEA builder.

Los Angeles, CA
venkateshrao.com
Joined August 2007

Tweets

  • © 2020 Twitter
  • About
  • Help Center
  • Terms
  • Privacy policy
  • Imprint
  • Cookies
  • Ads info
Dismiss
Previous
Next

Go to a person's profile

Saved searches

  • Remove
  • In this conversation
    Verified accountProtected Tweets @
Suggested users
  • Verified accountProtected Tweets @
  • Verified accountProtected Tweets @

Promote this Tweet

Block

  • Tweet with a location

    You can add location information to your Tweets, such as your city or precise location, from the web and via third-party applications. You always have the option to delete your Tweet location history. Learn more

    Your lists

    Create a new list


    Under 100 characters, optional

    Privacy

    Copy link to Tweet

    Embed this Tweet

    Embed this Video

    Add this Tweet to your website by copying the code below. Learn more

    Add this video to your website by copying the code below. Learn more

    Hmm, there was a problem reaching the server.

    By embedding Twitter content in your website or app, you are agreeing to the Twitter Developer Agreement and Developer Policy.

    Preview

    Why you're seeing this ad

    Log in to Twitter

    · Forgot password?
    Don't have an account? Sign up »

    Sign up for Twitter

    Not on Twitter? Sign up, tune into the things you care about, and get updates as they happen.

    Sign up
    Have an account? Log in »

    Two-way (sending and receiving) short codes:

    Country Code For customers of
    United States 40404 (any)
    Canada 21212 (any)
    United Kingdom 86444 Vodafone, Orange, 3, O2
    Brazil 40404 Nextel, TIM
    Haiti 40404 Digicel, Voila
    Ireland 51210 Vodafone, O2
    India 53000 Bharti Airtel, Videocon, Reliance
    Indonesia 89887 AXIS, 3, Telkomsel, Indosat, XL Axiata
    Italy 4880804 Wind
    3424486444 Vodafone
    » See SMS short codes for other countries

    Confirmation

     

    Welcome home!

    This timeline is where you’ll spend most of your time, getting instant updates about what matters to you.

    Tweets not working for you?

    Hover over the profile pic and click the Following button to unfollow any account.

    Say a lot with a little

    When you see a Tweet you love, tap the heart — it lets the person who wrote it know you shared the love.

    Spread the word

    The fastest way to share someone else’s Tweet with your followers is with a Retweet. Tap the icon to send it instantly.

    Join the conversation

    Add your thoughts about any Tweet with a Reply. Find a topic you’re passionate about, and jump right in.

    Learn the latest

    Get instant insight into what people are talking about now.

    Get more of what you love

    Follow more accounts to get instant updates about topics you care about.

    Find what's happening

    See the latest conversations about any topic instantly.

    Never miss a Moment

    Catch up instantly on the best stories happening as they unfold.

    1. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 26
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      Learning a skill means internalizing a touch meta-pattern to the point where it becomes unconscious. I don't actually think of this iteration assemblage when I make coffee. The only things in conscious awareness are events that cue other events. Like water boiled --> wet filter.

      1 reply 1 retweet 16 likes
      Show this thread
    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 26
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      When you're learning a skill, you lack fluency. For eg. this morning, I was wondering why my 3d printer wasn't heating up. Then I realized I'd given it an stl file instead of a gcode file. Lots of little crappy things like that go wrong all the time in early learning stage.

      2 replies 0 retweets 9 likes
      Show this thread
    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 26
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      They're not bugs, they're fluency errors or something. I'm a bad learner in general, in part because all this preprocessing to set up my iteration assemblage to learn a thing feels like bureaucracy I get wrong all the time.

      1 reply 1 retweet 14 likes
      Show this thread
    4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 26
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      This is why when I *do* successfully learn a skill it tends to be where someone else has prepared a sandbox environment that has all the pieces scoped in properly, with the right UX to focus on just learning the "touch patterns" to do things with the assemblage.

      1 reply 0 retweets 11 likes
      Show this thread
    5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 26
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      Like take my annual ritual attempt to migrate my limited coding needs from Matlab to Python. Matlab is very much a closed-world sandbox where you can focus on the trial and error. Python, I think *just* got there with Anaconda. Even then it is too open for easy learning.

      2 replies 1 retweet 5 likes
      Show this thread
    6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 26
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      Thing is an open iteration assemblage (one where you need to constantly be doing adds/removes and package management and inserting new things you're not fluent in...) is qualitatively a level harder than a closed one.

      1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes
      Show this thread
    7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 26
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      Another example that doesn't cast me in as much of an inept light. I find working on courses much harder. The iteration assemblage is MUCH bigger: Teachable, Zoom (for recording video), PowerPoint, an organized folder for materials, Stripe, marketing on blog etc.

      1 reply 0 retweets 5 likes
      Show this thread
    8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 26
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      "Working on my course" means ranging over a very large, recursively nested set of things that contain more things. The REPL has a very low "visit frequency" for any individual piece of it. You can't gain fluency in larger patterns because they unfold over weeks, not minutes

      1 reply 0 retweets 6 likes
      Show this thread
    9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 26
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      I can "get good" (in an toolchain/infrastructure fluency sense) at any given piece of it, like video editing, but overall fluency is a bitch to attain.

      1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes
      Show this thread
    10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 26
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      The easiest iteration assemblages to work with have only 1 object in conscious view. That's why slide decks are so easy. It's one object -- unless you're so computer illiterate that the keyboard and touchpad feel like part of the conscious loop.

      1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes
      Show this thread
      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 26
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      Roam is in this early stage for me. I've never been big on keyboard shortcuts, but Roam relies on them so much you have to get fluent in them. So my iteration assemblage is: the roam page itself, the little helpbox at the bottom right, and occasionally, google.

      1:17 PM - 26 Nov 2020
      • 7 Likes
      • emperor of yugoslavia Virtual 🖤 Instinct Gordon Brander David o'Bedlam nikete Kevin C. Tolliver Tom James
      3 replies 0 retweets 7 likes
        1. New conversation
        2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 26
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          I'm trying to set up my workspace as a set of consciously designed iteration assemblages that are more complex than the one for "writing". It can get complex even for simple things. Like take "whiteboard use"

          1 reply 1 retweet 2 likes
          Show this thread
        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 26
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          I recently created an iteration assemblage for "whiteboard use" (whiteboard, iphone to take a photo, airdrop to mac, archive in a "whiteboard" folder on dropbox). I try to take the photo and upload right before I wipe it clean so the image file is date-stamped correctly, but...

          1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
          Show this thread
        4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 26
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          .... sometimes I forget, or do a batch of whiteboard photos but don't upload till later and the dates get lost. So new tool-hygiene step: date the whiteboard itself every time I use it.

          1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes
          Show this thread
        5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 26
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          Things I'm trying to create iteration assemblages for with varying degrees of success: Telescopy Astrophotography 3d printing Soldering Working with arduino+breadboard Breakfast burrito making

          1 reply 1 retweet 4 likes
          Show this thread
        6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 26
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          Here's one that's got weirdly complex: simply reading a book. Fiction on Kindle is easiest. Just kindle by the bedside, with charger. Read a bit every night. Non-fiction that I want to live tweet? Add the phone to the loop. Paper books? Just awful. Photos of pages 🤬

          2 replies 0 retweets 9 likes
          Show this thread
        7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 26
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          I should call iteration assemblages "object circuits" or even better "widget circuits" since that would apply to digital as well. Widget circuits!

          1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes
          Show this thread
        8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 26
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          Widget circuit engineering is an object-level (widget level?) meta-cognition skill in its own right, and really hard to acquire. It might be the "learning to learn" skill.

          1 reply 1 retweet 3 likes
          Show this thread
        9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 26
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          Failure to appreciate the complexity of it is I think what leads people to gadget-happy shopping spree. The hope is that by just building a completist collection of everything associated with a skill, the learning loop will magically take off. It doesn't.

          1 reply 0 retweets 6 likes
          Show this thread
        10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 26
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          You have to wire these things up into a proper widget circuit to sustain the REPL that needs bootstrapping.

          1 reply 1 retweet 2 likes
          Show this thread
        11. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 26
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          Aka Homer Simpson barbecue pit syndrome. Many of my learning projects are in this condition. All the parts are there. Just not in the right arrangement, and possibly irreversibly screwed up.pic.twitter.com/R0xFfskucT

          2 replies 0 retweets 8 likes
          Show this thread
        12. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 26
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          I'm pretty proud of myself for pulling together what for me is a pretty massive widget circuit for astrophotography: 1. Telescope 2. Camera adapter 3. SLR (advanced use) 4. Phone adapter Ran aground when trying to add stacking software to the loop: Macs have crappy options

          2 replies 0 retweets 3 likes
          Show this thread
        13. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 26
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          To level up, I have to either find software that works properly on Mac, or learn painful manual stacking on photoshop, or somehow run a Windows thing in an emulator. That defeated me. I'll get to it eventually.

          2 replies 0 retweets 3 likes
          Show this thread
        14. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 26
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          That I even got this far is entirely thanks to having a really attractive time-sensitive goal: photographing Mars, Jupiter and Saturn at their brightest. My capstone goal for the year is photographing the Jupiter/Saturn conjunction when they should be visible in the same fov.

          1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes
          Show this thread
        15. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 26
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          One thing I've gotten unreasonably good at is Ikea assembly. This is almost entirely because the widget circuit is entirely self-contained, and you only need fluency in 1-2 easy tools that they include. Here is my entire iteration history of flat-pack furniture over 20 years :Dpic.twitter.com/GzPLxk2FGB

          1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes
          Show this thread
        16. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 26
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          I should write a blog post on widget circuit engineering, but I probably won't because my widget circuit for writing big, ambitious blog posts has been broken by middle age :D

          2 replies 0 retweets 5 likes
          Show this thread
        17. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 26
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          Venkatesh Rao Retweeted Mr. Eli W. Jones

          It's actually more like recipe-ingredients coupling. What you do depends on what you have, what you have depends on what you've been doing. The uncoupled state of recipe and ingredients is the idealized closed-sandbox state.https://twitter.com/mreliwjones/status/1332081274396176384 …

          Venkatesh Rao added,

          Mr. Eli W. Jones @mreliwjones
          Replying to @vgr
          You have all the ingredients but not the recipe. In contrast to: You have the recipe but not all the ingredients.
          1 reply 1 retweet 0 likes
          Show this thread
        18. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 26
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          Widget Circuit Theorem 1: Activity devolves to the simplest widget circuit that can sustain a given energy level. It used to be TV + remote (unless you lost remote under sofa). Now it's phone+TV. If you lose the remote, you can use the app, or just let TV play while you tweet.

          1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes
          Show this thread
        19. End of conversation

      Loading seems to be taking a while.

      Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.

        Promoted Tweet

        false

        • © 2020 Twitter
        • About
        • Help Center
        • Terms
        • Privacy policy
        • Imprint
        • Cookies
        • Ads info