Mark Ayzenshtat

Startup founder (acq. Twitter). Technologist. Psychology + Systems. Attunement, presence, family.

[Mark Ayzenshtat @shtat]

@yrechtman As someone who wrote 1,500 words deriving a scoring system for friendship from first principles, I may have this affliction.

[Mark Ayzenshtat @shtat]

Food memories are generous.

A few weeks ago, I started eating almond milk yogurt. I hadn't had yogurt in years - maybe the occasional mango lassi or something in a restaurant dish - but my memory of the dairy kind was still king.

The first spoonful was fine, the way a hotel bed is fine. You lie down and your body immediately tells you what it's not. The plant yogurt was smooth and cold and tart, and my brain instantly protested. Not yogurt. How shrewd I was to spot this impostor so quickly.

I kept eating it because the macros fit. I mixed in frozen blueberries and basil seeds, which gave it the texture of chia pudding. For the first few days, I measured every bite against a memory - and the memory always won.

A food memory stores the best version, at the perfect temperature, from the time you were hungriest.

After about a week, the spoonful wasn't "not yogurt" anymore - just the cold, tart thing with the blueberries bleeding purple through it. Then the bright, refreshing thing. I started looking forward to it. Then, craving it - reaching for the bowl before I'd even made coffee.

A memory can only override experience for so long. If you keep eating the new thing, eventually the new thing becomes the standard. The comparison falls away, and what's left is just: do I want this? And it turns out I do.

Frozen veggie burgers had this problem for decades. People ate them as hamburger substitutes and tasted what was missing. Beyond and Impossible tried to fix this by closing the gap between beet and beef, but that just makes the comparison permanent. A well-seasoned black bean burger that you think of as its own thing - just a tasty sandwich - sidesteps the whole problem. You start wanting that sandwich, and you stop comparing.

Week 1 is a referendum on what we're giving up. Week 2 is when it starts to become the thing we crave.

[Mark Ayzenshtat @shtat]

New essay: https://t.co/pa0aCqrObj

[Mark Ayzenshtat @shtat]

George Carlin memorized an hour of material down to the syllable - and somehow, every time, it looked like he was making it up as he went. I've been thinking about what that trick looks like when it leaves the stage.

[Mark Ayzenshtat @shtat]

I got home late last night after ten days away. As a homeowner, I've learned to expect a surprise or two when returning from a trip - a leak, a crack. Something the house decides to do on its own to keep life interesting.

I put my bags down and went to pour myself a glass of water. When I returned to the entryway, I heard a faint, steady buzzing coming from somewhere I couldn't place.

I was exhausted and just wanted to unpack and go to bed, but you can't ignore a sound like that. I asked an AI agent. It had a few theories: insects in the wall, an electrical issue, the HVAC, or - its best guess - the original doorbell circuitry wearing out. That sounded right. Too steady for insects, too mechanical for plumbing. So instead of unpacking, I found myself making a checklist: flip the breaker tomorrow, isolate the circuit, call an electrician. I held a drinking glass to the wall. Was it coming from the floor or the ceiling? I couldn't tell.

Eventually I punted the problem to Future Me and started getting ready for bed. I moved my bags to the stairwell, walked back to the entryway to turn the light off, and realized the buzzing had stopped. I stood there for a moment, almost suspicious. Then I walked to the stairwell - and heard it there instead. I checked the walls again. Nothing.

The AI, consulted again, now thought it might be the HVAC circulating air between zones. "Don't worry about it tonight." Fine. I was too tired to argue with my phone.

I hauled everything upstairs, unzipped my suitcase, and the buzzing got louder.

My electric beard trimmer had been jostled on during baggage handling. It had been running for hours. The battery light was flashing red.

If you've seen Fight Club, you know the scene.

[Mark Ayzenshtat @shtat]

Finally got around to Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe, and I ended up listening to the audiobook, narrated by Matthew Blaney. Blaney is from Northern Ireland, and there’s something about the way his accent carries the story. It makes these people feel like neighbors rather than historical figures, which makes the violence hit even harder.

There’s a musicality to his voice that got into my head the way a jingle does. I found myself repeating lines in his accent while doing dishes, folding laundry, walking between rooms. The one that really stuck was a phrase from a Belfast graffiti mural: “God made the Catholics, but the Armalite made us equal.” I didn’t even know what an Armalite was before listening. Still. I must have said this phrase fifty times the day after I heard it.

I wasn't thinking deeply about the Troubles while scrubbing a pan. But the words had an arc to them in a way they just don’t in my flat American English. Which is perhaps its own lesson about the conflict: that slogans about political violence can have a rhythm and poetry to them that makes them stick and makes them feel almost good to say. It’s part of how they work.

[Mark Ayzenshtat @shtat]

Write-up + live demo + library: https://t.co/iBnTbXtDDj

[Mark Ayzenshtat @shtat]

Every tree & boulder in my roguelike engine is unique - generated on the fly from a single seed. ~400 sprites in 16ms.

Wrote up how it works and released the sprite generator as a standalone TypeScript library.

#roguelike #gamedev #indiedev #procgen

[Mark Ayzenshtat @shtat]

I've been tinkering with a roguelike called Brileta - Python, WGPU-driven lighting, utility AI, procedural generation. Just made the repo public. I replaced ASCII character trees with a procedural per-pixel sprite generator. Four tree archetypes, three-step canopy shading, dynamic sun lighting. Same seed, same forest, no two trees are alike. Was fun to build and tune!

[Mark Ayzenshtat @shtat]

New essay: Love as a Second Language https://t.co/KrbebsgN7M

[Mark Ayzenshtat @shtat]

My dad and I speak different languages. What happens when we keep reaching across a gap we can't quite close?

[Mark Ayzenshtat @shtat]

New essay: https://t.co/bnax31wg4C

[Mark Ayzenshtat @shtat]

Some relationships look solid but feel fragile. Everything works - but nothing's been tested. The autopilot runs. Then a crisis hits, and you discover the bedrock was scaffolding. I wrote about how to tell the difference before it matters.

[Mark Ayzenshtat @shtat]

@freyaindiaa "You have attachment issues" sounds like insider knowledge, more sophisticated than "I'm afraid you'll leave." Mostly it's a way to hold the beautiful mess of love at arm's length.

[Mark Ayzenshtat @shtat]

@yearning_slav Immigrant parent energy. My dad's reply would be a Soviet-era joke about intelligence and a doodle of himself giving a thumbs-up.

[Mark Ayzenshtat @shtat]

@RomeoStevens76 And the inverse pattern - confabulating discomfort with virtue. "If it hurts, I must be doing the right thing."

[Mark Ayzenshtat @shtat]

Christmas morning thought: "The sooner I eat all the holiday cookies, the sooner I'll no longer have holiday cookies tempting me to eat them."

Airtight reasoning, brain.

[Mark Ayzenshtat @shtat]

@diorvijane "Romance" is the grand gesture. Love is the quiet record - her tea, her scarf, her song. He thought he was failing at one, but it looks like he mastered the other.

[Mark Ayzenshtat @shtat]

@p_millerd The twenties thing lands. I thought the hustle was all mine - so much of it was just wanting what the people around me wanted.

[Mark Ayzenshtat @shtat]

@jonathanbfine I'll admit that the timeshare pitch at orientation was a bit aggressive.

[Mark Ayzenshtat @shtat]

@robkhenderson The bookish kid version of this was inverted - half the words I knew from reading I'd never heard pronounced out loud. First time I tried to use "epitome" in conversation I said "epi-TOME" - "tomes" seemed heavy and vaguely important.