Ro's Lab

Neti Neti and Barrett

Sun, 12 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A continuation of the thread that began with Neti Neti and Rothko.

That post ended on a question I could not answer. Whether anything comes after the negation and the absurd, or whether the ouroboros is the point and the snake just keeps circling. I have been flirting with existentialism again, though in less continuous bursts this time. That is for the better, since the gaps force second-order thinking. The flirtation has been more meaningful, pun unintended, than it was before. For what good is reading about Camus and revolt when you have had nothing in life to reckon with as an adolescent. Right? Right.

Perfect Crystals and Heat Death

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I watched Veritasium’s The Most Misunderstood Concept in Physics during a stretch of free time and ended up in a months long rabbit hole. This post is a record of the confusions I ran into, the resolutions I found, and what I took away from the whole thing.

My Pals Fred and Al

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Fred went mad at 44. Al died in a car at 46. Neither made it to 50.

Friedrich Nietzsche looked at humanity and decided it could do better. He questioned God, dismantled morality, and documented everything he saw in the abyss. The work cost him his sanity. Albert Camus arrived a generation later and built something different on the same ground. One cleared the site while the other designed what went on it.

Refusing The Script

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Society will often tell you what you can or cannot do. Who you can or cannot be. Reject that script. Build your own morals and your own meaning. There is a price for being different and we are hardwired to try and fit in. Yet we must pay that price without flinching. The examples below are some that history remembers but there are countless others that it does not. That changes nothing. You stay unrelenting.

Neti Neti and Rothko

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I first sat in a room full of Rothkos at MoMA in late 2006 or early 2007. I had come to New York with my family and somehow ended up in that room full of giant rectangles of color. I had no idea what I was looking at or who Mark Rothko was at the time. I sat there for what felt like eternity, staring at life-size fields of color that evoked a strong feeling, drawing me in for reasons I could not name. I just know it mattered because I have never stopped chasing that feeling since.

Apollo, Dionysus, and Nietzsche's Horse

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Most people encounter Apollo and Dionysus through Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, where they serve as shorthand for the duality between order and chaos, logic and feeling, the Apollonian dream and the Dionysian frenzy. Nietzsche argued that great art, and by extension great living, holds both without letting either win.

Repeat Consumption Media

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Note: This post is a live list, revised over time.

The following is a selective and personal collection of media recommendations that I have found worth revisiting in my lifetime. List items appear in no particular order other than that in which they were recalled from memory.

Notes on Neurodivergence: A Love Letter

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The trope goes, “how do you know if someone is neurodivergent? They will tell you.” Yet, if we ever met IRL, there is only a 0.6% chance that I would have told you I am autistic because for the remaining 99.4% of my life, I just did not know. As it turns out, I have been trying to make sense of the world around me with physiology not suited to the majority of it.

Re-Considering The Lobster

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster is widely praised for its insight and depth. It challenges readers to rethink something as everyday as eating lobster. The essay made me stop and think about two important ideas that I thought deserve more attention. First, the assumption that a lobster’s attempt to escape equates to the human concept of suffering and second, the larger reality of the food chain and circle of life.

Creating a Spotify Playlist with AI

Sat, 01 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I wanted to build a playlist around a specific vibe but could not quite name it. Songs like Kurt Vile’s “Check Baby” and Mark Lanegan’s “Hit the City” captured a laid-back and unhurried aesthetic. Not slacker enough to be lazy but not energetic enough to be gym playlist material either. Just effortlessly cool. Searching by genre or artist for similar songs was not cutting it. The usual categories returned were too broad and thus too vague. So I decided to use AI to help me find every song in my 2,500+ track library that matched this idea of an aesthetic.

My Experiment With Vibe Coding

Sat, 18 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Last night I built a full-stack web app in under ten hours. I am not a software engineer and have near zero development experience, yet I shipped a tool that collects meeting inputs through a simple form, pulls details from internal directory and calendar APIs, formats a brief, and emails it to the intended recipients. I got the job done in a single extended evening using Cline inside VS Code for orchestration, Harmony for the app framework, and JDK 17 for the runtime. I also used MCP, the Model Context Protocol that lets an AI agent securely connect to tools, files, and services without hard-coding every integration.

Ethics of AI Content Creation

Fri, 29 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The use of AI to produce content raises questions about authorship, originality, and moral responsibility. AI does not act independently. Its outputs reflect the instructions and intentions embedded in the user’s prompt i.e., when users supply garbage in, AI generates garbage out. This premise creates a clear dependency where I am positing that a system output, AI or otherwise, is the work of the human who creates or operates it.

Truth in a Post-Truth World

Wed, 30 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Fat causes heart disease. This nutritional certainty dominated health advice for decades until emerging evidence suggested sugar is the real culprit. It is incredulous that experts in the field provided incorrect guidance for so long.

In the 1950s, two scientists proposed competing theories. Ancel Keys claimed saturated fat causes heart disease. John Yudkin argued sugar poses the real threat. Keys happened to hold positions on influential health boards and directed research funds toward supporters. When Yudkin published evidence against sugar, Keys called it “a mountain of nonsense.” Siding with the loudest voice, the nutrition establishment marginalized Yudkin and his research.

A Few Homonyms and Oddities

Sat, 26 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I recently came across some examples of homonyms and oddities of English language that caught my attention while writing for work. Nothing revolutionary here, just a few curiosities I enjoyed stumbling across, but still worth a quick mention since they do not seem to be talked about a lot outside a few niche online forum discussions.

How Bougie Lost Its Original Meaning

Sat, 26 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In contemporary American vernacular, calling someone “bougie” often carries a tone of light admiration. It suggests a life marked by taste, financial comfort, and upward mobility. Although there may be an undercurrent of teasing, the label typically signals aspiration rather than criticism.

Historically, the meaning was different. Bougie comes from ‘bourgeois’, a French word for describing the socioeconomic middle class but not necessarily from the perspective of wealth distribution alone. Rather for the materialistic aspirations and conventional attitudes that this group valued (said as historical observation, not judgment by any means). The bourgeoisie thus lived with awareness of their position between proletariat struggle and elite privilege.

Finding Flow

Fri, 06 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Flow is imagined as the repetition of meticulous accumulation of skills through practice followed by consistent conscious application when required. In reality, it is anything but. Flow is a transformation from deliberate conscious action towards what we know as autopilot mode. Skill at the highest level stops feeling like work because it no longer requires active management of every detail. In flow state, execution happens subconsciously.