Synchronicity

On A First Name Basis

One of my sons recently started consuming business communications books: The 48 Laws of Power1, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, and similar works. I had read these same books decades ago and was surprised to see them arrive with an Amazon delivery.

I could have just grabbed them from a box in the garage. Regardless, I pondered any similar books I might recommend.

I read the book How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie far in the past, but I couldn’t recall whether it held up to modern standards or if it was still worthy of a recommendation.

So I reread it. All 320 pages or so. And as I observed in the Filler Is Dead piece, much of the book is just filler. A basic premise – feign show interest in someone’s hobbies or activities – and then a dozen rather contrived, sleazy sounding anecdotes to support the contention.

The book is a classic sales bible, and it encourages a lot of behaviours that you encounter repeatedly when dealing with the same. It tries to frame it in authenticity and sincerity – e.g. don’t just pander to people’s egos to make the sale, but do so with genuine interest and authenticity – but then every anecdote is framed as someone trying to extract some win, such as the big woodworking sale, and it serves to undermine the whole premise.

In any case, I didn’t recommend it to my son. While the core message of “don’t be self-involved / self-centred” is a great one2, so many of the anecdotes were not only dated, they had such an ulterior motive that it made the whole thing feel incredibly scummy. It felt like “how to wear a human suit to pretend to be genuine and authentic…to make the sale and get what you want”.

In any case, I mention this book as one of its big recommendations is to constantly use your counterparty’s name. People love hearing their own name, the book advises, and the more you do it the better.

Synchronicity

Carl Jung (1875-1961), the father of Jungian psychology3, famously described an event called synchronicity. This is an acausal, meaningful coincidence between some external event and some personal psychological state, such as the visualizations in a dream. Basically coincidences that seem too perfectly aligned, and almost like a glitch in the simulation4. Originally he described it almost as quasi-parapsychological, but later he worked with a quantum physicists and described an Unus Mundus: a unified realm where matter and the human psyche are the same, and can interfere with each other outside the normal physical cause/effect world in the same way that quantum entaglement is a thing. Jung hypothesized that there are some archetypes that in a heightened emotional state can manifest as unrelated events.

He was basically proposing the simulation hypothesis ahead of its time.

I mention this because I had done some deep dives on Jung’s essays and lectures on the same day that I re-read Carnegie’s book. These had absolutely nothing to do with each other and it was just coincidence.

The very next morning I went out for a walk. The latest Hidden Brain episode, “Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain: Part 2”, was queued in my podcast app. Not really my cup of tea, but I hit play to see what it was about.

Synchronicity! It literally starts off talking about Carl Jung and the famous scarab-like beetle hitting his clinic window.

Weird stuff.

Regardless, his guest was a Professor of Psychology and Education, and she was detailing her own synchronicity. I mean, a critic might say it’s more of a frequency illusion, or the Baader-Meinhof phenomena, and she suddenly paid far more attention to something with personal importance, but regardless it had something to do with the spiritual brain.

What I immediately noticed from their exchange, however, is that she used the host’s first name, Shankar, constantly. Like every single reply she would jam his name in there. Needlessly and extraneously.

It was jarring, and immediately made me wonder if she’s a disciple of How to Win Friends and Influence People (synchronicity!). It actually felt scummy, specifically because this is something that manipulative people do as a mechanism of coercion.

Which made me ponder whether the problems I have with Carnegie’s book is specifically that a lot of manipulative people basically wore it out. Like if someone trying to get something from me uses my name repeatedly, shows interest in my interests, etc, I’m naturally skeptical and cynical, and it achieves the opposite result. It immediately puts my guard up. Are there other people who just aren’t aware of this stuff and for whom it actually still works?

LibJXL and Fable

If you’ve ever poured over LibJXL – the canonical library for compressing and decompressing JPEGXL files – you know that it’s an incredibly complex piece of C++ code, filled with fairly advanced algorithms that yield a headache-inducing code flow.

It is not a simple project to hack on.

The project started out with performance as a trailing concern, with the slowness of compression being a common criticism of the format used to advise against adoption, but after an enormous amount of work from a number of large orgs and individual contributors it has improved by magnitudes. It is now a refined, efficient library, including hardware optimizations and vectorization for a number of platforms.

Regardless, as Fable became available again I wondered how well it could make sense of it, and had a bit of my weekly quota left with only a few hours left to use it.

I grabbed the latest code and pointed Fable at it, asking it to look for some low-hanging performance optimizations it could perform on the compression path.

In a single pass it proposed a set of logical changes – these were not profile-guided, but were based completely on the code flow – and I said go.

It immediately made an A:B test with the test set of images to ensure that the resulting files were bit-identical with the original, as we weren’t looking to change the compression at all, just the performance in achieving it. It then applied a small number of logical changes in both lossy and lossless paths, including things like extraneous loops that are not necessary in many cases, optimizing preallocation of memory5, and so on.

It built and benchmarked the results, and it yielded an ~14% or so performance improvement, with the compression being bit-identical with the original. Peak memory usage actually declined. This is amazing for such a mature project with so much optimization work having been performed on it.

I did it on a lark with some leftover quota, with no real purpose. Normally I start such a process with profiling and then zeroing in on the largest contributors to cycle usage, but in this case I wanted to see what it could do based upon just the code.

Auditing the code, and it’s stylistically identical to the existing code, and the changes are very contained and logically clear. They’re consistent and perfectly cromulent with the rest of the code.

I have no real point with this section, beyond my continued amazement at how these tools have evolved and become formidable forces. Seeing the “what year is it?” AI-is-only-for-trivial-stuff-and-makes-bad-code nonsense constantly topping the front page of HN at this point is simply pathetic. It is futile raging against the dying of the light, and mostly seems to be a self-delusion and hopeful “say it enough and it will be true!” noise.

On Bridges

The Gordie Howe bridge debacle is apparently coming to a close. The billionaire did manage to get its opening delayed with some corrupt bribes – the US runs on corruption and bribery now, and it is no longer deniable – but it was becoming politically untenable to keep it closed. Political opponents6 were starting to make hay of it and gaining ground.

“Oh but I heard that the Art of the Deal rapist got a much better deal!”

LOL, no. I mean, yes that is what the American public is told – do Americans realize that US diplomatic staff are now telling foreign leaders and staff to just ignore the railings of the demented diddler, and that his railings are just for the domestic audience? – but the new arrangement is that Bridge Inc. will carry a loan, which is the money that Canada paid to build the bridge, and that Bridge Inc. needs to collect tolls, pay the loan and upkeep and staffing, and then the tiny scrapings of “profit” on the top will be split 50/50. Once the loan is fully repaid the “profits” will obviously be much larger, but Canada will get every penny back, as every bit of logic and business sense demands.

Footnotes

  1. This book is apparently controversial now, held as a “psychopath’s bible”. Similar to how Machiavelli’s The Prince ostensibly looks like a how-to guide, but most academics believe he actually wrote it as a satire, intending it as a cynical exposé to warn against tyrants.

    These books are useful to identify and guard against these tactics in others, and it is utterly bizarre how comically offended some become. It’s a great book.

    And like Jung’s shadow projection, I’m extra wary of people who get hysterical that no one should read this book. It almost seems like they want their secrets kept and feel a bit exposed. ↩

  2. It is better still in the leadership realm, where it encourages praise, discourages criticism, own your mistakes, and presents optimal ways of getting alignment. ↩

  3. A lot of Jung’s observations are considered dated now, but his work on shadow projection is masterful and critical. To recap, that is the tendency of people to project their own flaws and unrealized potential onto others, becoming angry and critical in excess because we haven’t acknowledged or dealt with these things deep in our own psyche. We go through our days looking for ourselves in others, angered at every instance. ↩

  4. Though there is a lot of overlap with mental illness. Paranoid delusions / schizophrenia also imagine these sorts of overlaps. ↩

  5. Way back in the browser wars, there was a period when Firefox was lagging significantly in many of the javascript benchmarks, especially Sunspider. I looked at the code and discovered that it was mostly hung up on string concatenation, and a simple change to over-allocate when concatenating strings would avoid an enormous number of memory copies. Firefox’s Sunspider runtime decreased dramatically, and this benefitted every concatenate-looping behaviour seen across the web. The point is that some very simple memory pattern optimizations can have an outsized benefit. ↩

  6. Though the idea that there are political opponents in the US is a concept that might be short-lived. The dirty diddler and his crew of Epstein garbage misfits are going to do anything to avoid accountability, and it was utter insanity to give this trash power again. Things are going to get very ugly, in short order ↩

See Also