I went to a recruitment event for a self-driving car company.

Last night, I went to a huge "Tech Talk and Happy Hour" put on by one of the major automobile manufacturers. They were recruiting talent for their engineering teams to develop a new infrastructure for self-driving cars. They even had an example on display. It was invitation-only and the recruiter tried extra hard to make sure I showed up.

They fed us pretty well; two free beers and all the tacos you could eat, and the tacos were made in-house and very tasty. So that was kinda nice. The place was crowded and there were a lot of people of various skills at the place.

I have very mixed feelings about self-driving cars. I suspect they're going to make life worse, not better; we may not have to take the wheel, and they may be safer than human beings once we solve a whole host of problems, but they're going to create more problems than they solve. Privately owned ones will stratify the rich from the poor even further; wealthy parents will be able to keep working while dispatching the car to get the kids to and from school, and wealthy owners will tell their cars to just orbit the block "until we're done," thus creating horrific traffic in city cores. Fleet cars will add to the street burden.

As a technologist, I think self-driving cars are significant and important. However, as a committed urbanist I want cities that are walkable, and mass transit that is frequent, useful, and adaptable. Self-driving cars will make cities less livable, not moreso. They have their place; as an adaptive technology for the disabled, they will be fantastic. As a convenient technology for the lazy, they're a communal and personal health hazard.

Also, the infrastructure for supporting a fleet of self-driving cars is an environmental nightmare. "We have four cars at the moment, and together those four cars generate as much data per day as all of Facebook." Facebook generates 19Kg of CO²per second; so do four self-driving cars. There are 268.8 million cars on the road. If one percent of them were self driving, that's 50,920,000 Kgs/CO² per second just for the "steering" part, never mind actually charging up the vehicle!

The good news, though, is that when the presentation was over, I went up to the people in the company shirts, and they eventually directed me over to a tech recruiter. My pitch was "Look, here's what I can do for you, now convince me you're not a dysfunctional mess," which he actually took as a bit of a challenge. When he asked me where I was, I explained that I had left Splunk and was taking a few classes, and then mentioned my project. "Wait," I said. "How nerdy do you want me to get?"

"I'm an engineer turned tech recruiter. Get as super-nerdy as you want." So after about 15 minutes of explaining the project, its origin, and the wild things it has led me to do (take classes in set theory, category theory, and Haskell, among other things), and concluding with a list of use cases and potential value-add projects, he said, "Oh, we have to hire you."

So there's that, I guess.

Bro Stoicism and self-reflection, or not.

Mike Stuchberry's recent and insightful tweetstorm about "Bro Stocism" has me thinking about my own complex relationship with Stoicism. I've always been a meditative sort, and while I liked what Buddhism gave me I had trouble wrapping my head around the mystical accretions of Buddhism. Steven Batchelor's Buddhism Without Belief was my go-to for accessing the tradition of "Western Buddhism," and it served me well, but I still felt that something was... off. In 2010 I found William Irvine's A Guide To The Good Life, and decided that it was a better guide, but not the only guide.

People need rituals. Daily rituals. Without them, our lives and sense of self fall apart. Choosing those rituals, consciously working through them, and adapting them to our selves is part and parcel of being effective. Habits are one thing— eat the same thing every morning, or brush your teeth every night. Rituals, on the other hand, require both the habit of committing them, and the mindfulness of asking, daily, what those rituals mean and do for us.

I still do traditional, Buddhist-style meditation every day, but I have others that also have daily use, and one special one that's for times when my brain feels full.

Here's the thing, though: unless you're actually working hard to be self-aware, and working every day on it, Stoicism is just going to wedge you into a corner of thought-terminating clichés. The Stoic precept to "accept reality as it is" does not mean to believe you shouldn't try to change it; on the contrary, the point of accepting reality as it is is to believe that it can be changed. Like the Randian "A is A," the red-pillers have taken this precept and turned it into a barrier to critical thought: whites have more power and authority than minorities and that's the way it is becomes whites should maintain that power. No investigation into the historical reasons for the uneven distribution of wealth and power needs to proceed. They allow no sense of responsibility for the circumstances obtained, and they definitely don't see anything wrong with the circumstances obtained.

I've been working my way though Ryan Holliday's "A Stoic Question a Day" book, and while I've enjoyed the practice so far, I can easily see how answering these questions can seem like putting your ankles into concrete. "Now that I've written down the one thing in life I'm here for, it would be a betrayal to do anything else."

Among Stoicism's precepts are "Man is capable of rational thought" and "Man is a social animal." We are made, every day, to take on the world with the help of our fellow human beings. Stoicism is an urban, cosmopolitan, communal practice, and it's not an unhappy one; there's a reason we talk about Stoic joy, which is what we feel when after much reflection we embrace a way of life that's beneficial, rather than passion, which is a momentary and fleeting thing that can easily be destructive without that reflection. Bro Stoicism is basically a perversion of Zeno and Epictetus's work.