She had also, in the two years they’d been together, discovered that Ho’s obsessive habit of optimizing everything could leak into almost every part of his life. When he decided to buy a house, he didn’t want to sit around going house by house and pondering whether to buy it. So he wrote a little piece of software into which he could dump the information for scores of San Francisco homes—like their locations, prices, and neighborhood statistics—and it would calculate its probable long-term value. (The program recommended a top pick; he duly bought it, and currently lives in it.) Because he hates shopping, he bought dozens of pairs of the same T-shirt and khakis—which, as he notes, also removes any decision-making time when dressing in the morning. A few years ago, tired of being out of shape, he decided to take up bodybuilding, since it seemed like a particularly demented optimization challenge. He began whipping out a food-scale at restaurants to weigh his portions, and devising ways to fit exercise into nearly any part of his day. If he passed a thick metal crosswalk bar, he’d use it to do pull-ups; if he passed a dumpster, he’d lift it up on one edge.