11 Marathon Row

2026-01-11 · 1165 words

Happy Sunday!

Two days ago, I woke up at 5:45am to row 26.2 miles. I walked on to the rowing team at MIT a year and a half ago. That might have been the greatest decision for personal development I have made. The row was hard work but I enjoyed it.

I really enjoy rowing. When you’re working hard there’s this acute pain and slow fatigue, but you learn to push through it and the feeling becomes normal, enjoyable even: it lets you know you’re engaged, it pushes you to row harder. If the row is already hurting, you might as well put in more work in so it goes by more quickly.

I have a few marathon projects I’ve been working on recently. One is Affetto, a systems programming language with affine algebraic effects. The other doesn’t really have a name yet, but it’s a distributed webassembly runtime, kind of like BEAM, that uses Wasm components as like the actor / module boundary, and automatically derives networking / serialization code from the WIT interface, so you can run apps across a cluster of nodes. It has dynamic addressing and supervisors and restarts works peer-to-peer and all that good stuff.

When I was in high school I was really into open source. (c.f. Passerine). I still really enjoy developing and working in the open. It would be something of a dream to be able to be paid to e.g. work full time on Affetto, or some other compiler.

I would also like to start a company, at some point. I have wanted to for a long time. I feel this natural clash of ethos between starting a company and pursuing working in the open. If I start a company, I want to do something meaningful. I believe that local-first software which preserves privacy and respects user freedom is something meaningful.

As the advice goes, “anyone can start a company; the challenge of designing a company is that of engineering an economic vehichle through which one can operationalize a change they wish to see in the world.” I don’t want to bet on the future with closed software. When I start a company, the software would have to be a complement of the main business, so I could release it openly. When I start a company, I might not even want to do software at all.

There’s this broader bits-to-atoms transition I’m seeing, as the egregore of the United States desires, to transition the economy back from services-based to mercantile. There’s this wonderful piece titled “America’s Advanced Manufacturing Problem—and How to Fix It”, it’s worth finding. According to the article, give or take: to secure an innovation lead post WWII, the US focused heavily on research, and moved the population from low-paying manufacturing jobs to high-paying knowledge work. Smart people these days work in software or finance as a result. A heavily-financialized economy can only look so good on paper. To me that means: we need more competition, consistent rules, and a game we can play worth winning. When you break the rules, the game stops, as Jean Baudrillard would say.

People demand too much of material reality. The machines have already mastered the dreamspace. The sublime. They are content wringing matter and creating wrought fantasy; they are content with simulation, we demand a collective fiction simulated on a material substrate. We demand houses and roads and experience and food and vacations. Yet despite this demand for the real we are so completely lost in the imagined we completely overlook the absurdity and collective insanity subsidizing our existence. It’s too complicated. It won’t win out in the long run. We may inherit the earth but it is a shallow inheritance if everything inherited is but a tiny distracted slice of the material universe. A game worth playing is one that forces the vast forces of the productive economy through the turnstiles of human flourishing. That’s the game we need to design if we wish to win the more we play it. I digress.

So on the atoms side of things, something meaningful worh doing would be acquiring or manufacturing many cheap solar panels and batteries to build out energy generation and storage infrastructure. This is one idea of billions, but the reality of Jevons dictates excitement.

Most startups fail for dumb reasons (poor leadership, sticking to an idea for too long, ignoring the customer, avoiding the economics). I don’t want to fixate on any one idea for now. Instead, I’d rather learn what it takes to run a company responsibly and efficiently; how to create and execute on a great opportunity quickly. To a certain extent, operational excellence requires being level-headed, assembling the right group of people, and being in the right place at the right time. Those are skills I can work to develop. I digress.

Perhaps because of all the work I expended rowing two days ago, I had a dream yesterday night. Dreams are rare, I dream infrequently. (We should stop conflating entering a state of REM with the experience of dreaming). In the dream I was on a competitive house-building team. We had to build a standard house to exact quality specifications as quickly as possible.

It is funny (to me) how much time people spend working out or in the gym. I’m one to blame: I do spend a lot of time working out (at least 20hr / week); I do spend a lot of time in the gym. That work, however, goes nowhere. Imagine how much could be done with the calories we collectively expend to be measured by machines. How many houses could we build a day? I digress.

Two days ago, I completed a marathon row. Compared to running a marathon, it’s probably quite a bit easier. The water was glassy like a mirror; the sun was low and the wind was right. The best part, however, was setting out on an adventure with friends at sunrise, to do something together that we would never do alone. I’ve realized that I really can’t do anything alone. Doing anything incredible requires many people to pour their trust in you; I want to be a vessel worthy of holding that trust.

My friend Will and I are both very excited about infrastructure, manufacturing, and energy production. He switched from CS to Nuclear Engineering, to learn how to refine fuel. I’m still studying Math + CS, for the time being; the universe is computable and I’d like a strong understanding of rules so I can learn to play its game. When you break the rules, the game stops.

Today I fly to Greece for another adventure. That, however, will be a story for another time. We’ll see how long I’ll be able to keep up this daily post marathon. I promise I’ll get better over time. Today was a little all over the place. Thanks for sticking with me.