Day 1 - game streaming

Day 2 - game streaming

Day 3 - WebXR samples

Day 4 - productivity, read a book

Day 5 - prescription lenses arrive, game streaming

Day 6 - general use, productivity

Day 7 - drawing apps supporting Logitech Muse

There were countless shifting thoughts and impressions throughout my time, and I kept discovering new details that changed my perspective. Rather than tell that evolution, I’ll share the themes that stuck with me. I’ll start with the most obvious, and end with what I think is the least obvious but most interesting.

Themes

Entertainment

Entertainment is a compelling but concerning use for VR, at least for those of us who are increasingly concerned about the effects of technology on the brain and society in aggregate. Look no further than the movie Wall-E for the supporting argument. With XR, floating screens are the norm, and it’s easily the most accessible use case for the Apple Vision Pro. Just find the most comfortable place to be, and look straight ahead into a floating screen while these headphones for the eyes output eye candy straight into your retinas for however long you want. It’s no surprise that the competing Samsung Galaxy XR offers a discounted bundle packed with streaming apps.

Of course, dismissive as I could be right now, the truth is that the experience was nothing short of impressive. I installed Steam Link and was able to play Halo with a friend just as you would on iPad and iPhone (of course, it requires some tinkering with settings, but that has more to do with Steam than the headset). The ability to do this should come as no surprise, since the Apple Vision Pro largely uses the same technology stack as iOS. What surprised me, however, is how clear the screen looked despite stretching it to what must have been at least a 100-inch (2.54 m) screen. I sat on my couch, set my virtual environment to a serene lake in a meadow surrounded by trees, set up Discord to voice chat (another iOS app that just works as you’d expect), and everything worked just fine.

As for watching videos, what happened there was even more grandiose. Instead of a floating screen in front of me like any other app, there was an immersive cinematic display that sat on the lake itself, complete with beautiful reflections on the water. I had my own private “outdoor” cinema on the lake.

Whether this is the future of binge-watching or game addiction is up to us, but I’m just here to report… it works, and it’s mind-blowing.

Web

After the brief indulgence with entertainment and a chance to catch up with a friend, I moved on to testing WebXR, which, I think, is a crucial use case for XR. Now, I don’t have much to say about it at this point, but the idea is simple… point your browser to a URL, and visit an XR app as you would visit any other web app. While there weren’t any samples here that I wanted to mention, I find the possibilities to be certainly interesting. By just clicking a link or looking at a QR code, I could be virtually transported to another reality instantly. This to me seems powerful, and makes me think about mixed reality as a more salient use of the web than we’ve seen so far. I could be handed an artist’s business card with a link to their portfolio, and in seconds find myself at their art gallery with all of their best work on display in their actual size and depth. More tellingly, our flat screens and print aren’t great at revealing some things like impasto, which I felt added a depth to Van Gogh’s work that I didn’t appreciate until I saw The Ravine in person at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. As another example, I could be ordering food at a restaurant with 3D previews of dishes instead of flat thumbnails… or when I buy a product, the setup guide could be played out in front of me like a 3D hologram… and the list goes on. This could really change how we use the web, not fundamentally, but at least experientially.

Every Form Factor Virtually Exists in visionOS

This last part will require a long explanation, but the biggest theme that I noticed about the Apple Vision Pro was how every other computing experience could be streamed or emulated by the device in very seamless ways. Look and pinch covers an astonishing amount of usage (as it replaces clicking/tapping/swiping), but you can also bring your keyboard and mouse, and gamepad, and it is starting to support a kind of 3D pressure-sensitive pen starting with the Logitech Muse. Additionally, you can bring floating screens close to you and sort of touch them (though you won’t feel anything, of course), and it will even sense your fingers hovering and let you pinch where your fingers are to emulate a touch.

Let’s start with the traditional desktop. As many people have shared, you can bring your Mac into visionOS as a floating screen. The interesting part is that when you look at other apps running on visionOS, it will switch focus to those apps, and the keyboard and mouse will work there too (like it does on iPadOS). So I can use whatever apps I want to on a Mac via Mac Virtual Display… but additionally use other apps on visionOS, allowing me to keep Safari, Music, and chats on the sides. Of course, we’re not just limited to Mac. I used Steam Link to bring up my Windows desktop as well, and I didn’t need any further setup to share keyboard and mouse between macOS and Windows, as I just glanced to switch between them.

As for iOS and iPadOS, you can usually install those apps directly on the headset, or you can mirror from an iPhone or iPad. I mirrored Nomad Sculpt from my iPad, and since it shows a brush circle from hovering, I was able to use my iPad as an indirect stylus (like when using a Wacom Intuos) to sculpt on an enormous floating screen with no glare or visible grain. I never even considered this until another friend asked me if it was possible, and I was pleasantly surprised that it was. Even more curious though was the very early Logitech Muse support that enables a stylus. While there are immersive apps that allow 3D drawing with the Muse, it also attempts to interact with iPad apps as a stylus. There are too many things wrong with it currently to list out, but it showed me a possibility of simply having as many virtual drawing surfaces of any size as you want. Of course, I wouldn’t give up my real iPad anytime soon, but I could see using this for gesture, sketching, or blocking out forms on a large digital canvas. After using XR to capture marks best made with gross motor movements, I could return to using a drawing tablet on a stable surface to harness fine wrist and finger movements for detail and polish.

Now the real breakthrough moment for me, personally, was when multiple input methods started to blend. Every so often all the inputs methods and the flexibility of visionOS interweave intuitively, like it did for me while using one of my favorite apps, Xmind. This has little to do with Xmind, but this is one app that really does better with more screen space as mind maps grow. I opened one of my larger mind maps with Xmind and pulled it close to me, stretched it super wide, and started poking the floating screen to interact with it as I would with an iPad (except, this is a giant floating screen, of course). I would have it hovering and angled facing upwards towards me at about 45 degrees, and my keyboard underneath. When I needed to type, I simply moved my hand down through the screen and typed. With my hands on the keyboard, sometimes I needed to reach a button or panel at the edge of the expansive screen, and I would just look and pinch without really repositioning my hands. I was getting used to the variety of input methods quickly, and it felt like a weird blend of tablet and desktop usability, with a little something extra new. I also had the usual background apps running and pinned on walls out of sight, but I wasn’t pressing any key commands like ⌘+tab / alt+tab to multitask… I just turned and looked and pinched.

A number of interesting little interactions and possibilities happened that were similar to what I experienced while using Xmind, and I’m starting to think maybe this has a much longer learning curve than I thought at first. It took much more than a few days for me to understand this device, and it took a concerted effort to explore further and see how numerous experiences all came together. Whether floating screens were big or small, near or far, or from a different form factor, I could interact with everything and everything lived together seamlessly. If you really give it a chance and think about the future of human computer interaction with a device like this, it starts to make sense why Apple, Google, and Meta have been bullish on this technology.

What Will I Be Doing with the Apple Vision Pro?

So now that I’ve thoroughly experienced the device, at least as far as you can without pulling up Xcode, it’s time for a reality check. As astonishing as all these experiences and possibilities are, I still mostly don’t know what to do with this thing. Like many other people, I found the headset exhausting to use, and I can only stand having it on for a couple of hours at most. I’m not even using it to write this article (I’m on my laptop). It’s such a relief to take it off, so I never really want to put it back on. For what I need to do daily, everything else still works great, and I can use everything else without strapping anything to my face.

So in truth, I want to return the device because it’s redundant and uncomfortable (let alone expensive)… but at the same time, I’m intensely interested to see where this is heading. I mean, I’m austere with computers and probably am too old to think of anything beyond a laptop as a serious device (yes, I do prefer making big purchases on my laptop). However, as this technology improves, I wonder if this could be a highly dependable form factor for future generations. Maybe this would become the best form factor for certain professions? Perhaps this form factor is significant for accessibility reasons?

I’m feeling uncertain, but I think I’ll probably keep it and see what I can build for it. I have no idea where spatial computing and XR is heading, nor premonitions saying whether it’ll become ubiquitous or fade away, but I struggle to see how all of this could get thrown away so easily.

What I Enjoyed the Most

With all that said and done, the thing I enjoyed the most was actually pretty simple. I went over to ArtStation, and as I found pictures I liked, I would just pinch them off Safari into a new window and pin them onto a big blank wall in my apartment. Images open in special Safari windows with no extra padding, borders, or toolbars; it’s just the borderless picture with rounded off corners. Within minutes, my wall was covered with interesting artwork, and I even felt a bit keen on buying some of them to get the 4k image and support the artist. Nothing fancy, but somehow very gratifying, like when I got my first PC (or rather, my first Windows account on the family computer) and learned how to change my wallpaper and theme.

My first experience with a head-mounted display was with the Oculus Rift DK1 at an unpaid internship for a photogrammetry and motion capture studio around 2014. My project was to use Unity and some very early SDKs to be able to walk around a virtual museum as a digital twin of myself. I would bring my ASUS laptop over, with its Core 2 Duo CPU and very limited NVIDIA GT-something-M laptop GPU that I vaguely recall could only reliably handle up to DirectX 9, and I’d get to work writing C# scripts while occasionally velcro-strapping the bulky plastic box to my face. Everything about the situation was a tad suboptimal. Between driving my father’s old green Toyota Camry ’03 with worn out brake pads and the bulky Oculus headset instantly giving me headaches, I felt that a virtual museum sounded nice, but otherwise never wanted to put one of those things on my head ever again. I wrote off virtual reality as a mistake and declared that unless Nintendo or Apple decided to jump into the game, this was a niche product category for the smelliest of techies (I might’ve been a tech-addicted recluse myself, but I’ve always enjoyed a long hot shower, thank you very much). Probably not a fair assessment, but I didn’t feel compelled to take VR seriously.

Roughly ten years later, Apple released the Apple Vision Pro, and my stance on VR, now part of a bigger “Mixed Reality” or “XR” concept, needed an update. So naturally, I demoed the Apple Vision Pro within a couple of months of its release. When I visited the Apple Store to do the demo, the device looked smaller in person, and the materials were an appealing blend of fabric, metal, and glass. It almost felt like I had walked into a dealership to test drive a brand-new car. Unfortunately, they were unable to make demo lens corrections for me, but my eyesight isn’t terrible without corrective lenses (I have 20/50 vision and slight astigmatism), and I still got the impression that this was nothing like my experience with the Oculus Rift. I didn’t really care for the 3D dinosaurs (or many of the other demos for that matter), but the machine felt like something totally new. It felt new… but just as useless as the online reviews were pointing out. The Apple Silicon M2 processor (along with the special Apple R1 coprocessor) was impressive, and I immediately understood how to look and pinch at things, but it was tiring and dim compared to real life. Just because the windows were floating now didn’t mean I’d be more productive. I didn’t make a purchase, but I did ask if I could trade in my Apple Studio Display (to which they told me that the Apple Studio Display won’t be available for trade-in credit until a second generation is made).

Long story short, it’s late 2025, and I had yet to own or regularly use a head-mounted display, but XR and Spatial Computing were now on my radar.

Eyeing the Apple Vision Pro (M5) Refresh

So now it’s 2025, the Meta Quest 3 and Meta Ray-Ban have gotten a lot of attention, Valve has announced their Steam Frame headset to a very enthusiastic customer base, Google is pushing Android XR with Samsung’s Galaxy XR, and Apple has refreshed the Apple Vision Pro. Things happen so quickly in tech, so I started to feel like if I blinked, I might just miss the moment spatial computing becomes a lucrative frontier and the opportunity to get in early (I didn’t do that internship 10 years ago for nothing!). I headed over to the Apple Store for another demo, curious to see if XR was really going to be a viable path forward. I showed up early to my appointment, but unfortunately, they again couldn’t get me corrective lenses for the demo. I told the specialist helping me that I’d be less interested in the guided tour, and more interested to see what visionOS 26 could do. She was very helpful and friendly in letting me just use the device however I wanted to, and reached out to her manager (who owned an Apple Vision Pro) for my more specific questions. At this point, I was looking for a development kit, and my options were vast. Despite not having corrective lenses, I could tell things were slightly better. The radius of the foveated rendering was bigger, the refresh rate was higher, and a simple hand gesture replaced having to look up to access the Home Screen. It was a good experience, I didn’t get any headaches or motion sickness, the new dual-band strap was much more comfortable, and I was left more curious than ever about spatial computing.

$3,500 was still too steep though for a development kit. Additionally, prescription lenses are $150, and other inputs methods (e.g., controllers) would be another $100 or so, and the developer strap (if needed) would be $300. Though, the real kicker was that if I wanted to use Unity, it would cost $200/mo for the ability to build for Apple Vision Pro. The other headsets conform to OpenXR and wouldn’t cost extra for Unity or other SDKs, so I found a Black Friday deal for the PS VR2 and a PC adapter, and figured that would be enough. Sadly, Horizon Call of the Mountain was a beautiful experience, but the PS VR2’s fresnel lenses left me disoriented within 15 to 20 minutes. I had to lie down for a few hours to let it pass, but I couldn’t help but try it again. I triple checked my fit and played around some more, but again, it just made me sick within 20 minutes. I might’ve won the fight with a mechanical dinosaur (why is it always dinosaurs?), but I otherwise failed the quest to find an inexpensive development kit.

My options were now the Meta Quest 3, Samsung Galaxy XR, possibly waiting for the Steam Frame, and the Apple Vision Pro. I remembered my demo and Apple’s holiday return policy, and decided to get the Apple Vision Pro (M5).

The Big Decision

And so I decided… I can demo the unit for a few weeks, and if things don’t work out, I can return it, like so many other people have done.

I placed my order online and picked up my unit. For anyone else picking one up this holiday season, just be sure to double-check the fit at the store. Maybe the lighting was poor at home, but the fitting test I did with my iPhone sized me a little too large. Had I not double-checked at the store, I probably wouldn’t have noticed and assumed the device was meant to fit that way. The prescription lenses will take another week to arrive.

Spatial computing could be having a moment, and it could be a breath of fresh air from several years of heavy focus on AI. XR could be an exciting frontier in 2026, and something to work on that isn’t threatening to replace us. Of course, there are still dystopian possibilities alongside idealistic possibilities, so I’m writing this with cautious optimism. I want to try it all, and see where we’re headed, even if the verdict is “not headed this way at all”.

I set the carrier onto the living room rug, and as I unzipped the top flap, Miri pushed and wiggled her way out nose first. She sprang out in a blur, landing gracefully onto the floor. She dropped onto her side in a huff, resolutely facing away from me. I guess she didn’t enjoy being probed by strangers at the VCA animal hospital nearby.

I needed a photo for my art lesson the next day, so I pointed my phone at her and murmured “pspsps”, hoping to get her attention. While her ears swiveled, she otherwise stayed put. After a pause, I urgently whispered, “Hey, Miri!”. Finally, with a look of betrayal and the slightest hint of violence between her glowing eyes, she turned and looked into the lens.

Bots overrun social media, AI slop inundates search results, and corporations alarm the public about the efficiencies of the latest AI-powered replacements for us all. It seems like any part of information-era society that systemizes will inevitably be automated with computer algorithms, and in a culture that suggests, “monetize everything”, that could mean nearly every facet of our lives. As we decry the situation, we are motivated to be scared of AI and to purchase a solution. In a bid to monetize hope and courage, maybe I could scare you into my standpoint and a subscription, or if not me, maybe some other aggrandizing figure appearing as an anti-capitalist, nationalist, pseudo-intellectual entertainer, or messianic intellectual could. Please beware insincere rhetoric, but moving on, I hope we can agree that we may be liminal participants in societies that we increasingly cannot participate in, and that our time to rationally envision a more excellent response to fear is waning.

“I should learn to use AI tools and be one of the people in charge of AI, and not be a sucker who can’t keep up.” If I enkindle such a view, what is it that I’m afraid of, and is that the right response to fear? Obviously, I’m afraid of irrelevance, but consider, is this about the loss of power? If this is about power, could this be about access to influence, intellect, money, or sexuality? Am I afraid I will fail at social obligations, or never become esteemed or accomplished? Am I insecure about my place and purpose in life? The question of purpose is ancient, and I would take refuge in centuries of wisdom from every cradle of civilization I can, whether it’s as near as Albert Camus, or as distant as Dogen Zenji. However, fulfillment of such an unendingly bookish approach isn’t necessary, since its relevance alone brings to light a basic reassurance: that humanity intends to flourish regardless of circumstance.

So in response to prophecies about AI, I anticipate the future, a likely post-AI reality, and consider works for that world. In such a world where we are gravely diminished or lost members of the societies we were brought into, what kinds of tools and technologies will a person need? So long as anyone exists, the problems of humanity innately persist. So long as I exist, the problems of humanity innately persist through me.

Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, written by Angela Duckworth, reveals “grit” as the key factor to success. It’s one of those books that not only points out what’s hiding in plain sight, but clearly demonstrates its remarks as it dissects what it’s pointing out. Surely, there are many reasons to read this book, but if you’re reflecting on your path in life and looking for some insights on how to proceed, it’s a powerful and enabling read.

Summary

Preface

• Angela Duckworth’s father would always tell her that she’s not a “genius”. In Adulthood, after Angela accomplished so much and received a McArthur genius award, her father told her he was proud of her, but Angela knew it wasn’t genius or talent that led up to that accolade. Angela believes it’s passion and perseverance that led to her success.

• Duckworth’s research has shown that “grit”, a measure of passion and perseverance, matters more than talent or genius.

• You can pursue what you love, spend your life working on that, and succeed regardless of talent or genius. Grit is mutable, and this book explains why.

Part 1: What Grit Is and Why It Matters

Chapter 1: Showing Up

• Psychologists have unsuccessfully tried to understand what predicts success at West Point, but while they had developed measures of talent, they did not have a measure of perseverance or “grit”. Measures of talent did not predict dropouts.

• Grit, a combination of passion and perseverance, did not correlate with talent, but did predict success. “Grittiness” was the key factor to success, not only at West Point, but also in other contexts (military, arts, education, business).

• Successful people have some sense of direction and persevere in going in that direction, and they handle failure well. On the other hand, there are many cases of talented people who quit when the going gets tough. Duckworth says, “our potential is one thing, what we do with it is quite another”.

Chapter 2: Distracted by Talent

• We’re attracted to talent, but effort is more important than talent in reaching our destination.

• Surveys indicate that Americans consistently endorse striving over talent, yet still act with a hidden bias for talent. Teachers will enjoy a “quick study” more than the struggling yet diligent student, and we admire when people are a “natural” at something.

• Darwin’s persistence in thinking hard about problems long after others have lost interest is attributed to his success.

Chapter 3: Effort Counts Twice

• We overemphasize talent, and underemphasize everything else.

• What we often admire as excellence and high performance is an aggregate of many small and mundane feats done persistently over a prolonged period of time. Therefore, greatness is achievable.

• We attribute a giftedness to achievers because it is easier to superficially recognize their perfection in the present moment than it is to deeply examine their past in a way that might expose our imperfections through contrasts with our past and theirs.

• Talent x Effort = Skill, Skill x Effort = Achievement

Chapter 4: How Gritty Are You?

• We have a top-level goal / ultimate goal / “ultimate concern”, and then many intermediate (mid-level and low-level) goals. The top-level goal is something you do “just because”, and is as if written in ink; the intermediate goals are as if they’re written in pencil and just serve the ultimate goal.

• If I were to list all of my career goals and only select three, the others are intermediate goals at best and, at worst, irrelevant things to avoid at all costs. It’s too easy to waste vital time and energy on things that are suboptimal to the goal hierarchy. There are many things that we might want to do, but only the things best aligned with an ultimate goal efficiently and sustainably invokes the depths of our abilities.

• “Passion is a compass.”

Chapter 5: Grit Grows

• Grit is only mildly heritable (say about 30%), and grit is mostly built through experience (say about 70%).

• Environment is a major influence, and environment is mutable.

• Older people have more grit, which may be a cultural difference between generations, or (more likely) a result of life lessons along the way.

• Necessity can invoke grit and serve as a life lesson. For example, when you have to be on time and being late is terminal, you will find a way to be on time.

• Grit can be grown through — interest, — practice, — purpose and — hope.

Part 2: Growing Grit from the Inside Out

Chapter 6: Interest

• Without interest, people become unhappy, unproductive, actively disengaged and fail to stick with it.

• “Before hard work comes play”. At first, it can take some playtime with something before you find it interesting. What is interesting might not be apparent with a shallow take on a potential interest. Once interested, it takes hard work to become an expert.

• Our interests and vocational leanings tend to develop around middle school.

Chapter 7: Practice

• Deliberate practice is how to improve and make progress towards a goal, rather than merely going through the motions and stagnating. Improvement is not simply about investing great amounts of time.

• Deliberate practice happens by breaking down the component skills, setting measurable stretch goals that challenge a skill beyond current capability, and repeatedly struggling towards the goal and reflecting on mistakes. It is best to have a consistent schedule and location to practice, which minimizes any overhead or distractions.

• Deliberate practice is different from the flow state. Deliberate practice is highly effortful and focuses on finding weaknesses and learning from mistakes, which can even feel frustrating when done right. Flow is an effortless state that feels sublime when done right. Practice is preparation, flow is performance.

• Deliberate practice, though often difficult and strenuous, can be enjoyable and gratifying. Don’t think that you have to torture yourself to improve, be positive. Don’t look backwards unsatisfied, look forward to growing. You may grow a taste for the strain and pain of practice.

Chapter 8: Purpose

• Purpose is “the intention to contribute to the wellbeing of others”. Purpose is the answer to why?, or what’s the point?.

• People with a calling say their “work makes the world a better place”. They have a purposeful and life-organizing top-level goal, and it serves the greater good.

• The key to cultivating a calling is finding a way to benefit the greater good.

• First, a person develops through self-oriented interest, then with deliberate practice, and then by helping others through an other-oriented goal (purpose).

Chapter 9: Hope

• Hope is resolving to improve tomorrow, rather than merely wishing tomorrow will be better. Despair and hopelessness, as opposed to hope, comes from a perceived lack of control regarding suffering. When an animal is incapable of altering the amount of suffering they must endure, they will eventually give up, even when a solution is introduced later (learned helplessness). When an animal is exposed to suffering, but has some control over the dosage of suffering, they do not acquire learned helplessness.

• Pessimists will believe that the cause of suffering is pervasive and permanent, whereas an optimist will believe that there is an opportunity to do things differently and search for it so they can try again.

• Optimists have a growth mindset, since they resolve to proceed in some way in response to setbacks and failure. This is the way to grow from failure, rather than to stagnate or quit.

• It’s not about avoiding setbacks and failures, but rather it’s about learning and growing from setbacks and failures. Setbacks and failures are inevitable, so it’s crucial to learn how to grow from failure. Don’t be discouraged for long, and take advantage of setbacks and failures to thrive.

• Encouragement and positive language cultivates hope. You can improve your self-talk to be more encouraging and positive by working with a cognitive behavioral therapist.

Part 3: Growing Grit from the Outside In

Chapter 10: Parenting for Grit

• We often think that being stern or tough with a child is mutually exclusive from being caring or loving. This is a false dichotomy, both are key components. The important aspect is that the parent is keeping the child’s wants and needs in mind, but, since a child’s judgement isn’t yet as well-formed, the parent will need to be stern in setting limits and guidelines.

• Warm, respectful but demanding caretakers are following the “psychologically wise” parenting style. Duckworth hopes to do more research to determine the best parenting style, but she believes this parenting style is the most successful.

• Regardless of our biological relation to someone, we can always demonstrate these qualities when mentoring an individual and help them realize their potential.

Chapter 11: The Playing Fields of Grit

• Students who followed through on sticking with an extracurricular activity for two or more years were much more likely to graduate from college than students who only participated for one year.

• Structured focused adult-supervised activities that are both challenging and fun put students into a virtuous cycle for developing grit.

• Opposite from “learned helplessness”, there is such thing as “learned industriousness”. “The association with working hard and reward can be learned”.

• Grit is transferrable to other contexts.

Chapter 12: A Culture of Grit

• People can cultivate grit by finding a gritty culture and joining it.

• By being in-group with a culture of excellence, other members will reinforce the right words and values needed to keep a person focused and striving. A person will find it easier to conform to the culture of excellence than to defy it.

• Excellent organizations are a result of their culture and can transform people into highly capable people, regardless of initial ability. An organization can enable a virtuous cycle of grit.

• Much like parenting, leaders are valuable in helping people have a plan for their vision, and helping them execute.

Chapter 13: Conclusion

• Grit can be grown inside out by cultivating interests, working hard and practicing, connecting that work to a purpose that benefits others, and keeping hope when all seems lost.

• Grit can be grown outside in by being influenced by our environment and leaders who instill the principles of grit in us.

• Grit correlates positively with wellbeing. It is one of the few traits that doesn’t follow the goldilocks rule, even the grittiest people wouldn’t say they would be better off with less grit. One caveat, however, is that sometimes sticking to things like a damaging job or relationship isn’t a good use of grit; rearranging intermediate goals is fine so long as the goals still serve the top-level goal.

• Grit isn’t the only important thing about a person’s character. While grit predicts success and achievement, it’s essential to be sociable and open to ideas. Duckworth identifies three clusters of virtue that make up the dimensions of character:

  • Intrapersonal, strength of will (grit, self-control, things that get you hired)

  • Interpersonal, strength of heart (emotional intelligence, things that make you memorable and a supportive friend)

  • Intellectual, strength of mind (curiosity, engagement with ideas, positive relationship with learning)

Questions

• How does a person actively develop a purpose / top-level goal and vision for themselves? The book almost makes it seem like a vision, with all certainty, simply comes to a person who is practicing something vigorously.

• Do gritty people look different? Can you see it in their micro expressions? Could Angela Duckworth guess someone’s score just by looking at them?

Works Cited

Duckworth, Angela. Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. Toronto, Ontario, Harpercollins, 2016.

I’m not entirely sure what I accomplished this year, but maybe accomplishing nothing was what I needed. I mean, things happened… I finished my first attempt at drawing photorealism, I helped host online art lessons for kids in Ukraine with Laurie, a friend and creative inspiration passed away so I gave the drawing to his mother, and I began participating in a local American Zen group. I also spent time reading, and I made good progress with my physical health. Perhaps the main thing to appreciate is how I’ve been able to connect with myself, especially in this past month, and how I’m beginning to see and accept all the anger and fear that I still have.

Anger is an emotion I’ve thought a lot about in the last few weeks. I think anger must be a signal that some boundary has been breached. If that’s the case, then it’s ultimately a manifestation of fear about that transgression. When our expectations aren’t met, such as when a boundary isn’t upheld, there’s an ending to our familiar construed image or known fantasy of how things are and how things would likely go. According to J. Krishnamurti in his book Freedom from the Known, fear is the ending of the known.

But to go further, consider that the word “transgression”, the thing that’s feared and causing the anger response, implies that there was an act of injustice. So if I were to analyze this anger and see if it’s justified, then I would be looking at nothing more than a moral question. Then, if anger is rooted in a moral question, how should a moral question be answered? This is an ancient problem. Ghandi interpreted the Bhagavad Gita to tell us that the moral answer comes from the moral conscience, and if we can awaken to this morality deeply embedded within us, the answer intuitively comes to us and right action follows. Furthermore, the awakening of the conscience, not only in ourselves but also in the transgressor, mutually reveals any moral failings, which leads to abundant conditions for reconciliation. Overall, this is a peaceful response to fear that heals and ends the proliferation of injustice; this is a peaceful karmic art of dealing with fear and its emotions.

To go even further, this isn’t only a matter of intuition and karma yoga, but also logic and reason since our perceptions can be flawed. We can challenge our perceptions and impressions with reason, and evaluate whether the anger and fear is rational and justified before seeking karmic action.

As the year comes to an end, the big takeaway that I’ve learned is to just sit with whatever it is that I’m experiencing, which Joko Beck articulates as a key point of Zen practice in her book Everyday Zen. To just sit unveils so much about my present state and conscience.

Everything is moving, but nothing isn’t moving. It’s always present, always right there.

This is a modestly cleaned up digital version of an old drawing from the start of the year. I gave the original away a couple months ago and had never made a proper digital copy for my records (you can read about it in the update to my original post, Orange Slice Drawing Practice).

As I no longer have the original and only have a handful of photographs, I used the latest and best shot from my photo reel to composite and crop the 2k image above in Affinity Photo on my iPad. The photo I worked from was taken on a sunny day in direct sunlight a little after noon. After adding a black/white filter, I set the tone of the paper near white, and then independently selected and balanced the orange slice to restore some of the subtle light gray tones. Finally, I repositioned the drawing and monogram, and cleaned up bits of the page with clone/heal stamp tools. It’s not perfect, you can see some bending in the paper, but I feel that I preserved the grain and subtle gradients that I remember spending hours working on.

It’s been a long year, but there’s still the holidays ahead, and I hope to finish one more drawing!

The last but not least of the primary colors in the series, this color experiment brings out gold and light.

Blue has wider range than red, so sometimes it’s interesting to recolor a red texture and see where it can go.

There is a field between thought and stimulus, and there is a method of understanding that comes from this nexus. I am referring to the field which is the seat of intuition, presence, experience and embodiment. For example, I could read all the books about the anatomy of the eye, the physics of light and color psychology… but if I were blind, I still wouldn’t understand what red looks like. Despite knowing its mechanical content, I would have never experienced red nor its interactions with other colors.

So if I were to gain sight and see red, the understanding would be instantaneous. The mechanical process of thought, which took time and energy like a machine learning algorithm, failed to achieve what could be done instantly by simply looking.

With that in mind, if I look at myself, it means I can intuitively begin to understand myself. Through meditation, I might find myself silently sitting with my fleeting thoughts and emotions. As I sit facing the wall, I turn inward and simply look at my sorrow, greed, joy, emptiness… I see all of my regret and all of the trauma passed down through generations.

In my day-to-day life, I can look at the world intuitively and understand the people I spend time with, and the society that I live in. By being mindful, perhaps I can gravitate towards an utterly simplistic state of mind, a timeless state of sheer intuition, and live with a mind unfazed by deleterious time. I simply look and see the callousness of everyday life, which is always fostering our aggrandizement and aggravation rather than nurturing our creativity and curiosity.

What would happen to the mind living a life of mere observation? What happens when we truly begin to see things for what they actually are, both within and without? There would be silence and understanding, because if you’re truly listening, you’re not talking. You would experience unspeakable serenity.

I finished this drawing a while ago, figured I should log it. It took me about 15 hours to start to understand the lesson here, and then 20 hours total to complete. The result still seems very crude to me, but it’s a start! Looking forward to my next drawing…

Update (10/7/2024): The original for this drawing was dedicated in memory of my late friend, Steve Zapata, and given to his mother. With his passing, it dawned on me how important it is to share our artwork and pass on our creativity. His encouragement won’t be forgotten as I continue on my own journey with those of us still here.

You can see some of his work at stevezapata.com.

As I was working on the studio’s first product, my mind wandered over to the studio website. I started to wonder what work I’d need to do so that I could add the first product page to the website. I originally did the design as a digital color study in red, but would this work for the products I’m planning for next year? One of them is a simple kids’ game. It uses pastel colors. I realized that I needed to better understand and clarify the visual language while working towards a more generic theme.

Revising the Navigation Menu

Today, I worked on a quick revision for the navigation menu, which is an area I’ve struggled with in this design. Before the update, the menu was placed on the right, but I initially thought I’d simply put the navigation links under the title. However, I needed to balance things out, so I designed the rightmost section. After deciding where to place it, I thought I’d just need to use a unique mix of motifs from the existing design to make it really stand on its own.

So with links placed and styled, each column/section in the old design had its own mix of color and font, distinguishing them from each other.

In the end, things fell into place… but it felt clunky.

Candidate Revision

The thing that stood out the most to me was the filled in rounded square icon. It was just too heavy. Also, the square shape visually grouped with the diamond pattern on the left (background), but the link’s white text color grouped with the title (foreground). To break those relationships, I switched to a transparent circular icon.

This started to feel like a step in the right direction. Developing the icon was a bit unusual, but quick. I figured it would be a basic shape, so I decided to just write it in SVG.

<svg viewBox="0 0 20 20" width="20" height="20" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">
    <circle cx="50%" cy="50%" r="9" fill="#2e0000" stroke="#ffd3d3" />
    <path
        d="
            M 7 10
            H 13
            
            M 13 10
            L 11 7
            
            M 13 10
            L 11 13
        "
        stroke="#ffd3d3"
        stroke-width="2"
        stroke-linecap="round"
        stroke-linejoin="round"
    />
</svg>

This was the first time I had written the path element by hand, but specifying the path with turtle graphics was straightforward. (M moves the cursor, H draws a horizontal line, L draws a line)

Final Revision

After switching to a circular icon, it felt better, but something else became apparent. The icon didn’t really use the same line qualities as the serif font used by the text next to it (Półtawski Nowy). What could I do differently? Well, the font grouped with the text in the middle section, but the right sections’s colors all grouped with the leftmost section. Maybe I should just have the right section completely group with the leftmost section?

To do this, I matched the font to the title font, Sofia. I immediately felt that it looked better. An easy fix!

Release

The final release, Spiralcy 5.1, was merged and is now live at Spiralcy.Studio. As the links are not yet active, they’ve been grayed out.

Past this release, there are a couple big changes that will need to be done to reach Spiralcy 6. The studio page will be switched to grayscale, and will support light and dark modes. The diamond shape may change to a swirl.

After Spiralcy 6, the theme will be templated so that individual product pages can use its own base color and shape. The red/diamond combination used so far will likely be saved for the Tales & Ivory product page.

It's been a few months since I've written a public entry, but I've had a lot of personal growth meanwhile. A lot of this growth feels ineffable, but trust me when I say that being mindful and trying new things pays off. These are true clichés.

One of the new things I’ve been really enjoying has been getting started with iOS engineering. Having spent time in Unity (hundreds, maybe thousands, of hours 😬) before joining the workforce as a backend software engineer, working client-side feels familiar and nostalgic.

In particular, Swift has a lot in common with writing high-performance C#. In both cases, I want simple syntax and memory to be automatically managed; however, I still want to be close to the hardware.

Of course, there are differences too. Swift doesn’t have a garbage collector, and it’s statically compiled (caveats: .NET Native AOT, Unity IL2CPP).

As I was sitting in a nearby coffee shop, I wondered what it would take to convert some code I wrote earlier this year. I was working with bit arrays in C#, and often wanted to test the cases of 0, 1, and the maximum 64-bit integer, as well as exercise some stray integers in between. It seemed I could do this by iterating over the sequence of base 2 integers 0, 1, 11, 111, …, 1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111.

IEnumerable

In C#, yield can be used to create the sequence. A method returning IEnumerable<ulong> can sequentially create and yield each bit array, and after the last value is yielded (when all the bits set to 1), it will halt.

static IEnumerable<ulong> PopCountProgression()
{
    for (var i = 0UL;; i = (i << 1) | 1)
    {
        yield return i;

        if (i == ulong.MaxValue)
            break;
    }
}

Alternatively, I can express this with Linq by calculating the bit array from the iteration count. (Note: left bit shift of 64 will perform a shift of 0, see ECMA-334 v7.0 §12.11 )

static IEnumerable<ulong> popCountProgression() =>
    from i in Enumerable.Range(0, 65)
    select i < 64 ? ((ulong.MaxValue << i) ^ ulong.MaxValue) : ~0UL;

Now, I can handle iteration idiomatically.

// Print from 0 through 18446744073709551615

foreach (var i in PopCountProgression())
    Console.WriteLine(i);

// Print from 0 through 127 (the first 8)

foreach (var i in PopCountProgression().Take(8))
    Console.WriteLine(i);

Sequence

In Swift, sequences are made by conforming to Sequence and IteratorProtocol. This isn’t like using a generator syntax, so I used the iteration count to calculate the bit array.

struct PopCountProgression: Sequence, IteratorProtocol {
    private var progress = 0

    mutating func next() -> UInt64? {
        guard progress <= 64 else { return nil }

        defer { progress += 1 }

        return (UInt64.max << progress) ^ UInt64.max
    }
}

for i in PopCountProgression() {
    print(i)
}

Similar to C#, I can rewrite this with functional programming.

func popCountProgression() -> LazyMapSequence<ClosedRange<Int>, UInt64> {
    (0...64).lazy.map { (UInt64.max << $0) ^ UInt64.max }
}

The type of the sequence is now more generic, and I can handle my sequence idiomatically, much like I would in C#!

// Print from 0 through 18446744073709551615

for i in popCountProgression() {
    print(i)
}

// Print from 0 through 127 (the first 8)

for i in popCountProgression().prefix(8) {
    print(i)
}

Wrap-Up

While Swift doesn’t have generators or Linq, it does have great support for functional programming. It was interesting to explore and see what’s possible in Swift. Despite being a younger language, it does seem like much of what I’ve done in Unity and C# will prove relevant with Swift.

See the complete code on GitHub Gist.

Further Thoughts

• Do the C# solutions cause heap allocations? Does it cause heap allocations in Unity IL2CPP? What other complexity could it be hiding?

• Since the Swift compiler is based on LLVM, would an iterator like this ever lead to auto-vectorization? Is there a possibility that the Swift Intermediate Language expresses a vectorizable loop?

• What other protocols are useful for this sequence to conform to in Swift?

I’ve been spending my drawing sessions this week on shading a sphere. Building off of my teacher’s method (rather than what I was previously taught), I think I’ve made some progress with my shading skills.

After my lesson, I went home and I drew a somewhat uneven sphere:

While it looks rather shiny and somewhat metallic, there’s a lot here to improve…

Not pleased, I decided to immediately try again:

I think there was quite a bit of improvement, but my hand really started to get tired, and I started things far too dark. Nonetheless, the improvements felt really encouraging, so I shared them with my teacher. After receiving her feedback, I decided to give things one last shot before my next lesson:

Now, I think I rushed this one, and I unfortunately made a lot of poor marks as I continued to shade despite my hand getting so tired. More than increasing my comfort with a pencil, I got much more practice with my kneaded eraser. I was being stubborn, and I just wanted to try a lot of different things this time. While I really struggled to incorporate the feedback, it still seems I’m getting somewhere! I’ll just have to keep on drawing 😌

I intended to draw today, and perhaps I’ll still find time, but I couldn’t help but get wrapped up in the controversy over Unity’s pricing changes. Long story short, they included a new runtime fee, seemingly with the intention to scale a revenue share with studios. Naturally, this caused a ton of confusion and outcry, and it really didn’t look like it would work. The Unity brand really took a hit, and influencers claimed it was the end of the world for the little engine that I had spent so much of my time with as a student.

Personally, I thought it was a poor attempt at revenue sharing, but perhaps studios with enough revenue should be able to incorporate such a cost. In my mind, the fee they initially introduced scales per user similar to how pay-by-usage typically scales with products based on AWS (including online games). The distasteful thing about it is that an instance of a Unity runtime isn’t incurring any cost to Unity. Unlike AWS, it isn’t using services for it to work. Your game could be using services for metrics or multiplayer, but those are separate products with their own pricing. The end user’s device and the app distribution (App Store, Google Play, Steam, etc.) do all the work for that runtime to be deployed and running.

So to take a step back, this really just boils down to… Unity sees I made more money, so maybe Unity should get more money too, right? In that case, I would’ve been far less concerned with a basic royalty no different from many other engine licenses out there (ex. Unreal Engine or CryEngine).

Well, today they announced an overhaul of that plan on their blog, in addition to releasing a pricing calculator that they call the “Runtime Fee Estimator”. As my friend pointed out to me, this calculator doesn’t include Unity’s cost per seat for the professional licenses, so it’s good to remember that the calculation is not the overall cost of building with Unity. With that in mind, I still put in some aspirational but plausible numbers and I got a charge of $0.

So after poking around with the numbers and listening to other people, I think I understand it, and I think there’s nothing to really worry about with this pricing structure. For me, this new fee wouldn’t change anything, and it helps that they threw in the removal of the “Made with Unity” splash screen requirement (this wasn’t a good look before, and I suppose it could be even worse now!).

For the industry at large, it looks to me like this really just squeezes the big studios. Hobbyists to mid-size studios won’t incur any fees. Because of the fee cap based on revenue, the bottom line is that, at worst, the big studios are looking at a 2.5% royalty compared to Unreal Engine’s 5% royalty. I’m guessing Unity didn’t intend to compete with engines like Godot in terms of pricing, and it seems they’ve adjusted accordingly. Unity likely will remain a competitive and compelling option across the spectrum.

So would I go back to using Unity with their new runtime fees? Well, at the very least, the pricing wouldn’t stop me.

About 10 years ago, I started this blog as a school assignment and pet project. It was for a new media class, and I think it was published on Tumblr. Like many people, I just wanted to create a log and space to reflect on all of those discoveries and tangents while studying or working at my desk. Those were some pretty focused days, often just me, some instant ramen and my student laptop. Life was far from demanding back then, but I certainly took on my own little challenges and loved what I was doing.

Since then, I’ve taken on a handful of jobs and wandered around the industry until I, unfortunately, got laid off earlier this year. I had some interesting projects along the way, but naturally there was a lot of stress. During that time, I mostly just tried to focus on my career and personal well-being, but I sadly dropped all of my pet projects. It was nice becoming financially self-sufficient, and certainly an opportunity to work with so many more kinds of people… but that’s not always very fascinating!

For this year, I’ve been spending a lot of time reconnecting with my interests, like visual art, algorithms, and writing. Today, I’ve decided to say hello to the world all over again. It’s been really great being able to get back to doing things that I like! A lot has changed over the last decade, but despite everything, I always wander right back to my keyboard with something warm to eat.

So this is my blog and my thoughts. Let’s explore something interesting!