Avia pervia.
I · Manifesto
I am twenty-one and I keep two trades everybody tells me to separate. I decline: they are the same trade, which is to read something complicated you did not design and act on it without breaking it.
i.The yard's rule. No plan may be longer than the thing it plans. It cost me seventy days and a film: a master plan, a north star, a wiki, finished copy for every platform, and not one frame shot. The papers outlived their subject by ten weeks. The date is 13 June MMXXVI and you can check it in the wreck register, which exists because of this rule.
ii.The two-instrument law. One reading is not a measurement. Medicine taught me this before software did: a value you have not confirmed with a second instrument is not a fact, it is a story you happen to like. Every figure in this book has a command behind it, and the leaf that reports the ship's position works its own sun rather than asking a service.
iii.The night's distance. Between finishing and publishing, one night must pass. The first version is written by the excitement and the second by the person. This is the whole of my editorial policy, and the only reason I still stand behind the pages I set in July.
iv.The rule of the given word. Nothing is promised on means that are not yet in hand. I learned it by promising a great deal on money that was expected and never arrived, and the person who paid for that promise was not me. Since then, a promise on these pages is either something already in hand or it is not written down, and what I got wrong is printed with its date on the errata slip.
Four rules, all of them paid for. Salerno, MMXXVI — Vincenzo Lambiase
I · Manifesto — The Theses
Nine positions, nailed to the door.
The future is an arrival, not an invasion.
Panic reads a horizon as a wall and patience reads it as a tide. I was raised where the difference was a practical question. You will say it is easy to stay calm when it is not your trade disappearing, and that is fair: I have no job to lose yet. But a man afraid of a machine is looking at the implement and not at the trade, and no trade was ever carried off by an implement.
Medicine and machines are one trade.
Both are the same job: read a complicated thing you did not design and act on it without breaking it. I know the objection, I get it at dinner: at twenty-one everybody says that, and then they choose. Perhaps. But nobody who gives me the advice has ever been able to tell me which of the two I should drop.
On a patient you cannot iterate.
Six words that hold the whole of medical ethics, and the exact thing software culture never had to learn. We ship, we iterate, and the cost of the mistake is quietly handed to whoever is using the thing. You will say nothing would ever get built that way. The constraint is not slowness: it is that the mistake is paid for by the person who made it.
The diseases that still win are not sacred.
Cancer first, then ageing, which is only slower. I want both treated as engineering problems with a human deadline attached: mine, my parents', yours. I know how that reads from somebody who does not have a degree yet. It will stay written here, with its dates, and you are welcome to come back and check.
You own what you can hand on.
A career inside another man's company is not yours, and neither is the hospital you work in: the day you stop, what remains is the money they paid you. You will call that the arrogance of somebody with no mortgage. Maybe. Nobody has yet explained to me why building something that can be handed on should be a fault.
One reading is not a measurement.
A number you have not confirmed with a second instrument is a story you happen to like. It is the first thing medicine teaches and the last thing anybody applies to their own work, myself included: twice this summer I believed an instrument of my own that was lying to me. That is why every figure in this book has a command behind it.
Credibility is the one thing that cannot be bought back.
I have not had a first client yet and I have already decided whose money I will not be taking. You will say principles are cheap when there is nothing to earn, and you are right: I have not been tested. So the line is not I shall never take the wrong commission. It is that the day I do, you will find it on the errata slip, with its date.
Publish the wrecks.
Seven of mine are on the bottom with three hundred and fifty days aboard them, printed with their dates and their causes. You will say that showing your failures has become an elegant way of boasting. It would be, if they were few and old. They are seven, and they are from this year.
Optimism is a discipline, not a mood.
It is practised like scales: daily, in public, against the weather. Call it naivety with a better name if you like. I am not optimistic because things are going well: I am optimistic because in twenty-one years pessimism has not once repaired anything I own.
II · Method & Trajectory
Every big thing starts as a small word, repeated.
III · The Works — The Shelf
Whatever he finishes, he binds. What sank is bound too.
The Stations
Six rooms, one protocol, and it is a medical one.
The order is the one a ward round follows, and I run it on everything: take the history before touching anything; measure it twice, with two different instruments; make the smallest change that can be undone; write down what went wrong, with the date; sleep on it; then publish and keep the count. Six steps, and not one of them is about talent.
Medicinei is where I learned the order, and the machinesii are where I test whether I learned it. Filmiii carries the argument out to strangers and the voiceiv, a tenor's, teaches it to be heard at the back. Designv dresses the work before it is allowed out of the house, and the workshopvi keeps both hands honest, because a man who only types forgets what a real tolerance feels like. Different rooms, one protocol.
Ex Libris
This book belongs to Vincenzo Lambiase.
Twenty-one. Medicine by day, machines by night, tenor when the neighbours permit it. He is the kind of person who reads the manual, takes the thing apart anyway, and keeps the receipt of what it cost him to learn: this book is that receipt. Every word, figure, rule and letter on these pages was set by his own hand, one decision at a time, which accounts for both the care and the occasional crooked line. He is also unable to refuse anyone who asks him for help, which he files under defects. A personal site should conceal nothing more complicated than a person.
- Born
- MMV, in Italy, facing a very old sea
- Studies
- Medicine: the human machine, from the inside
- Builds
- Films, software, small machines that blink at night
- Sings
- Tenor, which is evidence that very old instruments still carry
- First mate
- Argo, the dog
- Flag
- Avia pervia — the trackless ways are passable
Sua manu. Signed by hand, like the rest of it
The Course Ahead
Three bearings. I intend to hold all three for the rest of my life.
Cure what kills us.
Cancer first, then ageing, which is only slower. At the end of it, a place a person can walk into: emergency surgery on one side, on the other the work that is not yet routine anywhere, and nobody sent home because the answer does not exist. You will say every first-year medical student says this. They do. Which is why the line under this one is a step and not a wish.
The next step, in my hands: finish the degree, and arrive in a laboratory able to read what a model claims and to say precisely where it is lying. A doctor who cannot audit the machine will be handed its answers.
Teach machines care.
Machines that behave the way a good doctor behaves: capable, unhurried, plainly on the patient's side. The capability is arriving without our help. The manners are not. You will say the manners are decided by whoever pays for the model, not by whoever uses it. For now that is true, and it is the reason to build the small ones myself.
The next step, in my hands: build tools that refuse to act on a single reading, starting with the ones I use myself. Nothing here asks the network a question it can answer alone.
More shores for the species.
To help the generation that gives humanity a second address. One address is one point of failure, and everything we love is currently kept at it. Said from a town of nine thousand people, I know exactly how that sounds. The part of it that is in my hands is small and it is below.
The next step, in my hands: keep the skills that travel and do not depend on a supply chain. Power, water, radio, code, and a hand that can repair what it owns.
That is the whole course. Everything else on my desk is rowing. — V.L.
The Course, Charted
Every voyage is drawn before it is sailed.
Leave an old coast. Hold a few bearings. Keep going after the paper runs out — the plan set down long before the sea agrees to it.
— and then it is sailed.
VII · The Logbook
The book stands still. The log doesn't.
Here the author sets the work down while it is still going wrong: what broke this week, which rule it cost him, what he has changed his mind about. The chapters behind you are finished, gentle reader. These pages are still wet.
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The room that was open for eight minutes
I built a room for this site, published it, and pulled it down the same morning. What actually broke, why my own bench could not see it, and the two rules it cost me. 2 min · Read ↗ -
Why this site pretends it is 1800
The site is set like a treatise from 1800. Not a costume: a set of constraints, and this is the working reasoning behind each one. 1 min · Read ↗
The Admission
Yes — it is too much. Polymath by temperament, megalomaniac by admission: I want the cures, I want Mars, I want machines with manners, I want films that outlive me. Good.
Ambition is only embarrassing when it stays vague. Mine is specific: one life, spent at the largest scale it can honestly reach — disease first, distance second, ignorance always. I want the money too, and I would rather say so plainly, because not one item on that list gets built without it; what I do not want is the money as the end of the sentence. You are thinking this is the usual page by somebody who has not done anything yet. Largely it is, and the count is in the wreck register: seven on the bottom, three hundred and fifty days aboard them. I am not asking you to believe me, I am asking you to come back in a year and check, because the dates are printed and they do not move. And if most of it fails: a family, a house that is warm, work I chose myself, and a few lives that went better because I was in the room. That is not settling. That is already a great deal.
Signed in royal blue — V.L., aboard L'Opera