2025-10-09 17:03:00
For many of us in the industrialized world, happiness is directly related to how big the container is.
Overflowing vs. skimpy.
Adequate vs. generous.
Overloaded vs. slack to spare.
We know that making the plate smaller helps us appreciate what we’re served.
Get the bucket size right and your life changes. This is probably the easiest, fastest and most productive way to improve our well being.
2025-10-09 04:03:00
There’s more software available for free than ever before, and a lot of it is really good. Handmade by real people, for real people.
If we’re going to pay for it, it needs to be extraordinary.
For the last few years, I’ve been using Superhuman, which costs me about a dollar a day. Even if you don’t use email as much as I do, I think you’ll find that it’s a bargain. (The link gets you two free months). It takes about three hours to learn, which is a big part of why it works.
I also subscribe to the vetted suite of tools at Setapp. They rarely disappoint.
Roon is software to control your home stereo. I have a lifetime subscription, and the link gets you thirty days for free. If you love music, you’ll get a lot out of this.
Lightburn is my favorite way to control a laser cutter.
Bitwarden is a well crafted password manager, and it’s very cheap.
Nisus Writer Pro is a delightful word processor for the Mac. Not distracting or showy, it simply works great.
Ocenaudio is my audio editor of choice. I happily pay for it, but the free version is great.
And yes, Puzzmo. I had a really good score on Bongo today.
Qobuz unlocks millions of tracks of hi-rez quality music. I promise you can hear the difference, especially with headphones.
Yes, of course I’m using software from giant companies like Adobe and Anthropic, but you knew about them already.
And if it’s books you are after, seths.store is a place to find mine.
2025-10-08 17:03:00
A problem without a solution isn’t a problem, it’s a situation we have to live with.
But most existing problems do have solutions. We just don’t like that solution.
The solution might be challenging, or feel risky, or lead to an outcome we’re not happy about.
It’s tempting to announce that this means the problem is unsolvable. It’s not. It’s just not an easy or low-cost solution.
It’s even more tempting to do the worst thing: pretend that the problem doesn’t matter. Ignore it. Avoid people who insist that not only is it a problem, but there’s a solution worth pursuing.
Sometimes, problems ignored simply disappear. Not often, though.
2025-10-07 17:03:00
It doesn’t happen all at once.
And it doesn’t work suddenly.
A home pressure cooker doesn’t use more electricity than a hot pot. And it isn’t as fast as a microwave. Instead, it builds up over time, producing results with a surprisingly small amount of effort.
We’re impatient, and so we don’t consistently apply pressure when we have the chance, and we often crumple under pressure when it arrives.
Consistent, gradual and persistent are the unsung forces of cultural change.
2025-10-06 16:19:00
We talk about networks but we are rarely clear about what we mean.
A specific sort of network is the grid, and even that idea is complicated by two competing meanings.
There’s the benign and powerful grid of peer-to-peer connection. Culture is built on this grid. This is friends, neighbors, co-workers and people who find and engage with each other without a central authority. Some people are closer to you on your grid, while others engage over there.
Cities work because they amplify the power of the connections our grid provides. They enable more collisions and make those collisions more likely to be productive.
You can become a hermit by walking away from these peer-to-peer connections, but it’s likely your peace of mind and productivity will decline.
But when we talk about going “off the grid”, we usually mean something very different. This is the grid that is centrally controlled. If the power company or the water company or the social media company decides to raise its rates or cut us off, there’s not a lot we can do about it.
Solar power is a philosophical affront to power companies. It delivers the very thing they are built around, but without a centralized grid to profit from.
Peer to peer computer networks, built on adversarial interoperability, resilience and extensibility have long been competing with the AT&T/IBM model of centralized engineering, control and pricing.
Bill McKibben’s new book on solar is thrilling. It’s filled with good news about dramatic leaps in efficiency, cost-effectiveness and battery technology. Solar represents a system change in how people (particularly billions who currently have no electricity at all) will live. Acumen’s been doing groundbreaking work on this for more than a decade, and it works, despite the lack of interest from most big energy companies and from government officials that would prefer centralized authority.
Tim Wu wrote about the phone company’s desire for a chokepoint years ago, and Rebecca Giblin & Cory Doctorow update this with their brilliant new book on chokepoints.
Which leads to Cory’s latest, out soon. When companies run out of inspiration, creativity and innovation, they revert to seeking monopoly. Creating chokepoints and offering less and less value is a lazy way to make the stock price go up. No wonder it’s endemic. Enshittification is real, and if we care, we can make it go away.
We can get off the grid that maintains a sclerotic status quo and get to work at building something better. Something that relies on the other grid, the peer-to-peer grid we evolved to be part of.
2025-10-05 17:45:00
It’s easy to come to the conclusion that people with means and high cultural status choose things that are better.
Organic vegetables instead of junk food.
But there’s a long history of traditionally high-status cultural roles embracing demonstrably un-good choices. Things like bound feet, fox hunting, absinthe or cruise ships.
It’s hard to acknowledge that a choice we make isn’t a good one. But it might be, even if it raises our status.
