Taylor TroeshModify

2025-04-09 08:00:00

I learned essential etiquette from LimeWire.

Seeders & Leechers

When freebooting on the web, people participate in a sort of distributed iterated prisoner's dilemma. Everybody shares bandwidth; everybody risks prosecution.

These conditions naturally create "seeders" and "leechers" -- those who create surplus, and those who exploit that surplus.

You also attract scammers and (angelic) archivists.

Networks are characterized by their incentives. The seeder/leecher distribution is largely determined by risk/reward (e.g. payoff matrices).

One investigation showed that of 123 randomly selected downloaded files, 37 contained malware – about 30%.

-- via Wikipedia

Within a network, individuals exercise discretion; the sum of rational decisions determine the fate of the network. Sometimes these equilibria tend toward tragic commons.

But humans can act irrationally. Some scoundrels pay dearly to reap revenge. Some Good Samaritans sacrifice their lives for others. Game theory only works when people play the game.

Etiquette

Trust lubricates networks; nodes can skip verification to contribute more surplus. You don't need proof-of-work in a high-trust society.

TLS costs more than TCP.

One such verification shortcut is etiquette. When individuals follow certain norms/conventions, they're signaling a willingness to participate a high-trust game.

Pedigree is another shortcut.

I went to see Mrs. B (Rose Blumkin), carrying a 11/4-page purchase proposal for NFM that I had drafted…. Mrs. B accepted my offer without changing a word, and we completed the deal without the involvement of investment bankers or lawyers (an experience that can only be described as heavenly).

-- Warren Buffet, Berkshire Hathaway 2013 Annual Report

My ideal world runs on handshake deals, but unverified agreements invite exploitation. When a pot grows too large, people defect.

Ray Kroc allegedly forsook his handshake deal with the titular McDonald family.

Prior to April 2004, the free version of LimeWire was distributed with a bundled program called LimeShop (a variant of TopMoxie), which was spyware. Among other things, LimeShop monitored online purchases in order to redirect sales commissions to Lime Wire LLC. Uninstallation of LimeWire would not remove LimeShop. These objections were addressed in 2004 with the removal of all bundled software in LimeWire 3.9.4.

-- via Wikipedia

As wolves don sheep's clothing, etiquette evolves new signals. The meta changes. "Networking" events fill with leechers; seeders start secret high-trust clubs.

Reputation

Reputation is the evergreen shortcut. It is hard to earn, harder to keep, and nearly impossible to salvage.

Reputable BitTorrent archives remain. Consider donating to archive.org, scihub, Anna's Archive, and LibGen.

To earn reputation, (1) act predictably and (2) maximize your seed/leech ratio.

Most real-world games are iterated. Predictable actors are more valuable than unpredictable ones.

Optimizing seed/leech ratio is a wicked problem. Nobody can define what seeding/leeching means for you, nor whether you're succeeding, nor whether it leverages your unique life experience.

Open-source software culture is exemplary. Where can you make the most impact in OSS? Contributing to an existing project or starting a new one? To serve the status-quo or betray it? Solving a few big problems or lots of small problems? Individual contribution or management or governance? DPS, support, or tank?

When seeding your network, you learn how the system really works. By continued good-faith effort, you discover friction and opportunity.

I experienced this phenomenon on this blog. By sharing others' essays online (e.g. HN), I honed a sense of valuable/viral content. By consistently contributing such surplus, I've learned to anticipate specific wants/needs of the network. It's wholesome fun -- promoting friends' blogs and tickling the imagination of the masses.

Like money, you can apply leverage to reputation. By staking time/resources/connections on people, you extend your reputation like a line-of-credit. Each time this cycle succeeds, surplus can be reinvested in your local network.

As surplus grows, people become more tempted to defect. Beware greed; embrace "enough". Prune disreputable acquaintances. Adhere to your principles; continue to pursue others' wants/needs. Establish trustworthy neighbors and help them flourish.

It's difficult to identify/articulate "core" issues, and most polite folks will not advertise their troubles. People appreciate an opening for sincere dialogue: "What are you looking for right now?", "How can I help?", "Need any money for that?", and so on.

Lately, I've been working hard to (1) find "dream" jobs for friends, (2) find capital for friends' startups, and (3) find startups for my friends' funds. It costs me nothing to dramatically improve the lives of my loved ones. Ask friends what they want; go make it happen.

Extend trust; tragic commons are not inevitable. Don't let the leechers win. Flood this world with abundance.

2025-03-28 08:00:00

Loyal bytes toil in memory, on disk, across wires, etc. They crunch our numbers; we cast them to the garbage collector. Et tu, brutus computus.

And so I've been thinking about "compassionate" compilation. How can we learn to love our languages again? How can we reduce our energy footprint? How can we tame the chaos monkeys? How can we reignite the joy of simple software? How can we share our abundance as if recycling air?

The Modern Stack

Modern web computing looks vaguely like this:

• TSX → unspeakable horror → HTML/CSS/JS
• HTML/CSS/JS on CDN → HTTP → HTML/CSS/JS into DOM → process layout and run JS → virtual DOM
• Rust → ??? → LLVM IR → LLVM → server executable → Dockerfile → Docker image
• virtual DOM → DOM → browser → JSON → HTTP → JSON → server executable -> SQL → PG protocol → query planner → PG tuples → MVCC magic → PG protocol → server executable → JSON → HTTP → JSON → browser → DOM → virtual DOM

This is barely a map of the happy path. It skips error states, compiler internals, OS, CI, package management, containers, garbage collection, CPU caches, etc. How many allocations--

Nope. It's too much for my sad synapses. I cannot pretend to comprehend the journey that my data take to load a single web app.

A Convenient Package

Computers are crafted at the nanometer scale; they are the pinnacle of human precision. But software squanders this power. Our precision engines evoke frustration, bugs, and inconsistency -- "did you try turning it off and on again?". Codebases devolve into chimeras of LEGO, Lincoln Logs, cement, popsicle sticks, duct tape -- software cannot succeed like this.

But to wrest LEGO and Lincoln Logs from y'all would be folly. I cannot coerce an entire industry to converge on compatible standards. No, no -- please keep your familiar tools/toys.

Here's my proposal: we choose one "good enough" data layout, and we squeeze it for as much mileage as it can bear. Such a format must encode most popular formats, respect bandwidth, support single-pass execution, allocate sparingly, afford sublinear lookup (for lists/dicts), and remain simple to understand/implement. Good news: our computing forefathers already solved these problems -- we just need to cram them into a single convenient package.

tl;dr flat scraps = bootleg MsgPack + bootleg IPFS + bootleg XSD + bootleg FORTH

Boring Data

Integers, floats, strings, bytes, arrays, maps, variants, types -- any serialization format that encodes these data will do. CBOR and MsgPack are reasonable starting points.

Flat scraps are still in the discovery phase! Meanwhile, check out Max Bernstein's elegant ~100 LOC scrapscript serializer.

Most popular markup/config/data formats (JSON, YAML, XML, CSS, HTML, CSV, Dockerfile, etc.) can be efficiently encoded as CBOR/MsgPack (sketched here as scrapscript types):

()

; csv :
    list text

; css :
    list css-rule
; css-rule :
    | #style { selector : text, declarations  : list decl }
    | #at { name : text, prelude : text, block : maybe (list decl) }
; css-decl :
    { property : text, value : text, important : bool }

; html :
    xml

; xml :
    | #text text
    | #float float
    | #bool bool
    | #object (list xml)
    | #doctype { name : text, attrs : dict text xml }
    | #tag { name : text, attrs : dict text xml, body : xml }

; yaml :
    json

; json :
    | #null
    | #bool bool
    | #int int
    | #float float
    | #text text
    | #list (list json)
    | #dict (dict text json)

; dockerfile :
    { base : (pair text text)
    , instructions : list (
        | #from (pair text text)
        | #run text
        | #copy (pair (list text) text)
        | #workdir text
        | #env (list (pair text text))
        | #expose (list int)
        | #volume (list text)
        | #user text
        | #entrypoint (list text)
        | #cmd (list text)
        | #comment text
      )
    }

CSS parsers should live in editors, not browsers. You can still write as much CSS as you want -- just don't send it around as CSS text. Text is floppy. It's hard to cache, hard to compress, hard to parse, hard to validate, etc. Send data structures instead.

Shareable Data

By shoving all these data structures into the same serialization format, all software can reap the rewards of common infrastructure: shared compression, shared schema validation, shared optimizations, shared versioning, etc.

Scrapscript (and flat scraps) extend "sharing" further. You can replace any "scrap" of data with its cryptographic hash to reference it and reuse it. For example, we could serialize HTML pages like this:

<html>
  <html title="meta" href="scrap://$e9a23cbc455158951716b440c3d165e0"/>
  <body>
    <html title="header" href="scrap://$099fb995346f31c749f6e40db0f395e3"/>
    <main>
      <p>hello world</p>
    </main>
    <html title="footer" href="scrap://$d7eb6b340a11a367a1bec55e4a421d949214759f"/>
  </body>
</html>

Suddenly, without any syntax changes, every format acquires the powers of git at the semantic level. Replace any chunk of JSON/CSV/etc with its hash and it can hit a cache on the other side of the wire.

It gets better. We can use scrap maps to name (and version) arbitrary hashes:

<html>
  <html href="scrap://taylortown/example/meta"/>
  <body>
    <html href="scrap://taylortown/example/header"/>
    <main>
      <p>hello world</p>
    </main>
    <html href="scrap://taylortown/example/footer"/>
  </body>
</html>

But wait -- it gets even better.

Flat scraps have a type system. Imagine succinct JSON Schema, friendly XSD, serializable Haskell, etc. You can reuse all the exact same tools for maximum strictness:

package-json
; package-json :
    { name : text
    , version : text
    , description : maybe text
    , main : maybe text
    , types : maybe text
    , scripts : dict text text
    , repository : maybe { type : maybe text, url : text, directory : maybe text }
    , keywords : list text
    , author : maybe { name : text, email : maybe text, url : maybe text }
    , license : maybe text
    , bugs : maybe { url : maybe text, email : maybe text }
    , homepage : maybe text
    , dependencies : dict text text
    , devdependencies : dict text text
    , peerdependencies : dict text text
    , optionaldependencies : dict text text
    , engines : maybe { node : maybe text, npm : maybe text }
    , private : maybe bool
    , publishconfig : maybe { registry : maybe text, access : maybe text }
    , workspaces : maybe (list text)
    }

You needn't f*ck around nor find out. You can infer/enforce types at runtime or compile time. You can ensure that all configs and messages are truly compatible.

You may enjoy my talk from UNSOUND '24.

Programs

But that's just static data. You can also efficiently encode arbitrary programs this way. Code can be data, too.

By extending CBOR/MsgPack with executable data, we unlock new superpowers: dynamic configs, templating engines, RPCs, client-side codegen, hot reload, Smalltalk-esque images, etc.

Behold the reigning champion of simple computing: FORTH. Stack languages are the simplest means of practical memory/compute. Uxn is exemplary.

Why not WASM? LLVM IR? In short, they're not simple enough for my tastes. I think humans write more code than we can responsibly maintain. In my experience, bloat is the nastiest unsolved problem in software; slow/buggy software is holding us back.

Most people consider reverse-polish notation an eye blight, but computers kinda prefer it over prefix and infix notations.

We might be able to get the best of all worlds by embedding "performance hint" operators: explicit allocations, SIMD, etc.

{ add1 = n -> n + 1 }

-- flat scrap (bytes):
--   { "add1" = expr[var(n) var(n) 1 op(+) op(->)] }

Here's my compromise: flat scraps use RPN; scrapscript reflects them as an infix notation.

While I've been off exploring flat scraps, Max (and friends) have been turning scrapscript into a real high-level programming language with a world-class compiler!

The Scrap Stack

This is the vision I'm working toward with flat scraps:

• lex/parse: scrapscript → flat scrap
• eval: flat scrap → flat scrap
• optimize: flat scrap → flat scrap
• print: flat scrap → scrapscript
• compile: flat scrap → executable
• deploy: flat scrap → tcp → flat scrap
• serve: flat scrap → tcp → executable → tcp → flat scrap
• query: flat scrap → tcp → flat scrap → dirtdb → flat scrap → tcp → flat scrap

It looks stupid, because yes -- it's stupid.

Computing can be simpler.

• Help me release smel shell.
• Contribute to Max's compiler.
• Visit the Scrapscript Discourse.
• Email me at [email protected].

2025-03-17 08:00:00

There are no shortcuts. You cannot build a successful company in five weeks.

But for optimists (and lunatics), five weeks is plenty to start a company.

You probably have a dayjob. Exceed your employer's expectations. Don't accept paychecks you don't deserve. Work on your startup mornings (not evenings) and weekends. Save your PTO until the third week, and then start taking off Mondays/Tuesdays (not Thursdays/Fridays) if needed. If you can no longer maintain stellar quality at work, it's time to move on.

Week 1

Founders must adopt an investor mindset. If you want to create value, learn how to assess opportunity, how to leverage assets, and how to hedge risk.

It's okay to fundraise and it's okay to bootstrap. Either way, don't let ego rule you. Capital can be a tool like any other.

Investors don't choose startups, they choose founders. They want to multiply their money, and they want you to do it. But you can't just "pivot" a lousy personality. Nobody wants to bet on a billion-dollar idea that's chained to a fool.

If you are worth investment, then invest in yourself.

1. Get a haircut. Maintain a clean/fresh appearance. Any style will do.
2. Learn to listen. If most strangers don't describe you as "charismatic", you must upgrade your EQ. Read HTWFAIP, Motivational Interviewing, and Supercommunicators. Use AI to practice listening.
3. Hire a therapist. Launching a venture is hard. Secondhand-stress ruins relationships. Your spouse is not your therapist. If you vent more than you listen, your support system will avoid you in proportion to how much you need them.
4. Look in the mirror. Who are you? What values will you compromise? How do you want to behave? How do you want others to perceive you? What do you want living to feel like?
5. Get enthusiastic consent. If you can't sell your vision to your inner circle, you are not ready to start. Friends/family should call your startup idea "obvious". If they aren't ecstatic about your gameplan, you haven't (1) demonstrated competence/value or (2) hedged against known risks.
6. Take a headshot. A high-quality profile picture indicates that you were once worth a professional photo.
7. Become searchable. Investors hesitate to throw money at mysterious strangers. Update your LinkedIn work history. Also consider Googling yourself to find/delete unused accounts.
8. Upgrade your audio/video. Buy a mic (if you can afford it). Buy a webcam light (even if you can't afford it). If you've got Apple devices, buy a mount for Continuity Cam.
9. Go hands-free. As a business owner, you will be a slave to the telephone; invest in some comfortable bluetooth headphones so you can walk and talk.
10. Learn to send emails. Quick replies impress investors and customers. Respond to every email/SMS/voicemail within 12 hours (preferably less). Master the art of terse emails.
11. Accept AI. Founders wear all the hats. Pay the extra cash for Grok DeepResearch (great for web search) and Claude (best for everything else). LLM text has a pungent odor, so beware of copy/paste. And remember that LLMs bias toward "unsurprising" results; even correct advice can revert you towards the mean.

Week 2

Good businesses create non-zero-sum wealth. If you sell that wealth for dollars, you can create more wealth to sell.

Outside of theft and burglary, the only way to make money is to convince other people to give you their money.

1. Close a customer. A business with no customers is just a stressful hobby. Opt for FPC (First Paying Customer) before MVP. Nominal revenue (e.g. $1) counts. Don't prematurely automate; do boring manual labor and sell before you're ready.
2. Serve your customer. Deliver your promise. Compromise nothing. Treat your customer like a deity.
3. Upgrade. How can you make this customer exchange more delightful? Smoother? Less stressful? Adopt processes. Purchase tools. Hire people.

Week 3

The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.

Create wealth and sell it to customers. You will not succeed if you cannot (1) create wealth, (2) find customers, and (3) sell that wealth.

1. Close five customers. You can do this. You have something they need.
2. Serve your customers. Pamper them. No excuses.
3. Upgrade. Adopt/build/hire processes/tools/people that increase quality, improve consistency, increase speed, reduce cost, etc.
4. Land a loan/investment. By working with customers, you've probably identified a concrete use for capital. Convince a family member or friend to send a small check ($1k-$25k). Simple loans are easiest; you can remain a sole-proprietor indefinitely and skip loads of paperwork. If you want to exchange equity (i.e. a security), they probably need to be an accredited investor (i.e. "millionaire"); you'll need to incorporate (e.g. Stripe Atlas) and manage stakeholders (e.g. AngelList). Each investment -- no matter how small -- is faith in you. Make every penny count; repay their wagers tenfold.
5. Follow up. You're sending more emails; don't wait for people. Pester Plan A, start Plan B, and devise Plan C. This is your life now.
6. Create visual media. You will soon be sharing pitch decks, ads, etc. You need professional illustrations, a "good enough" logo, high-quality photos (or renders), explainer videos, etc. You might have good enough taste to do it yourself, but you do not have enough time. Hire somebody (e.g. Fiverr) to produce more materials than you think you need. Don't be lazy -- stock photos and AI images reek of corporate cringe.

Week 4

Don't lose focus. Share your wealth.

1. Delight existing customers. This is (and will forever be) your main duty.
2. Meet new customers. Who are your customers? Where do they go? What are their wildest hopes/dreams?
3. Upgrade. Better. Faster. Cheaper.
4. More loans/investments. Befriend leverage. Deploy capital.
5. Launch a landing page. The internet is cool, but don't overdo it. Choose a simple website host (e.g. Squarespace, Shopify). Embed/link a webform for leads.
6. Advertise. Yes, everybody hates ads. Swallow your pride and advertise on Instagram, Google, Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc.
7. Share your pitch deck. If you're going to fundraise, start now. Build a pitch deck. Do not reinvent the wheel; investors expect slides with specific information. If you're lucky, somebody will spend 20 seconds scrolling through it on their phone. Prefer pictures/charts over words; Claude/ChatGPT can plot data quickly. Your goal is to (1) prove competence, (2) guarantee profits, and (3) mitigate risks. Ask Grok DeepResearch to match you with compatible VCs/incubators/accelerators; submit your deck to each website.

Week 5+

Put everything together. Construct an engine that predictably transforms money into wealth, and then wealth into more money.

1. Grow. Delight customers. Meet customers. Upgrade. Borrow. Advertise. Repeat.
2. Pitch. If fundraising, submit pitches. Listen. Hedge risks. Refine your thesis. Repeat. Don't be greedy, and never cash a check that is chained to a fool. Revere $1K checks, $1M checks, $1B checks. Somebody believes in you; don't betray that trust. Live your values without exception. Protect every damn ounce of reputation.
3. Recruit. Go fast alone; go far together. Find friends. Surround yourself with your favorite people; bring out their best. Help them achieve their wildest dreams, and don't get left behind.

This is just the beginning. The rules are simple, but the game is grueling:

• When demand is scarce, listen to customers. You should (A) increase quality/experience, (B) reduce costs, (C) educate customers, and/or (D) admit defeat.
• If capital can help, ask for it.
• If you've got more demand (customers) than supply, you should (A) raise prices and/or (B) increase supply.
• If each new customer brings $10 of profit, you should spend up to $10 to find a new customer.

If you succeed, share that abundance with others. Remember where you're going, remember where you came from, and choose who you're becoming.

2025-03-16 08:00:00

Many folks find me abrasive. I pry, probe, steamroll conversations, miss social cues, argue, trounce boundaries, send mixed/unintentional signals, deeply offend, and so on.

I'm as charismatic as a root canal.

But I'm determined to grow. Books like HTWFAIP and How to Have Impossible Conversations and How To Talk So Kids Will Listen contain countless gems to evoke the best from people.

Unfortunately, I can't use that wisdom. When it comes time to put my mouth where my mouth is, I drown in the speed of normal conversation.

People somehow learn this stuff. There's literally school for it. How do they learn to talk and listen?

There are no shortcuts. In licensed therapy programs, professionals evangelize conflicting frameworks and nobody knows what's going on. I'm here to share one such framework.

Motivational Interviewing

Motivational Interviewing was developed for substance abuse rehabilitation, but it's grown popular with clinical psychologists, therapists, counselors, etc.

I'm no professional -- just some random internet person -- but MI has dramatically improved my listening skills.

My amateur summary of MI is that (1) people feel ambivalence, (2) change comes from within, and (3) "OARS" conversations hasten that change.

Ambivalence

I suddenly spotted that ambivalence everywhere. People frequently feel anxiety/grief about work, family, health, etc. These enormous feelings leak into conversations as venting, gossip, smalltalk, and current events.

Street Epistomology offers guides on how to encourage productive dialogue. Consider using those techniques to help others explore beliefs and feelings.

Change

Watching somebody's brain "click" is a rare delight of life. All of a sudden, that face lights up -- loss to enlightenment.

These moments rarely happen during dialogue, because you can't change the brain through the ears.

Think about your own experience. Most "a-ha" moments don't occur in the classroom -- they happen while doing the homework. There is no substitute for first-person learning.

You cannot lecture somebody into changing beliefs/feelings/motivations, but you can totally watch friends do their homework.

Don't assume too much -- part of the magic is learning what homework they've assigned themselves.

OARS

When people share confused/conflicting feelings, you can use OARS:

• Open-ended Questions: Encouraging elaboration with "what," "how," and "tell me about" questions that explore feelings, values, and priorities while avoiding judgmental "why" questions that can shut down conversation.
• Affirmations: Recognizing strengths, efforts, self-awareness, and courage shown through expressing conflicting feelings, including positive qualities the person might not recognize in themselves.
• Reflective Listening: Demonstrating understanding of their perspective using both simple and complex reflections that capture underlying meanings and both sides of ambivalence, sometimes incorporating metaphors to represent emotional complexity.
• Summarizing: Collecting and linking important elements by highlighting key tensions, structuring summaries to show relationships between different feelings, and ending with an invitation for correction or further exploration.

Yeah, I hate social-science acronyms too. I've internalized it as an algorithm:

1. Move conversations along via "You…" statements. Where do you think they're going with this? e.g. "You're thinking about quitting.", "You're frustrated by your progress.", "You're unsure what to do next." If you don't know where they're going next, ask an open-ended question.
2. If you're impressed by somebody's strength/courage/etc, pay them a compliment. Never lie or patronize.
3. When they conclude a line of thought, ask an open-ended question.
4. When lots of tangents/threads are open, identify themes/patterns and try summarizing.

Practice your conversational skills with this LLM prompt: "Help me practice OARS via role-playing. You are a friend I haven't seen in a few weeks."

Examples

I'm thinking about trying that new restaurant downtown, but I saw some mixed reviews online. Some people loved it and others said the service was terrible.

• Open-ended Question: "What kinds of things make or break a restaurant experience for you?"
• Affirmation: "You're doing your homework before spending your money there."
• Reflective Listening: "You're curious about the place but hesitant because of what you've read."
• Summarizing: "You want to check out this new spot, but the inconsistent reviews have you wondering if it's worth the risk of having a disappointing night out."

Everyone's talking about that new show, but I watched three episodes and just couldn't get into it. I feel like I'm missing something.

• Open-ended Question: "What about it didn't click for you?"
• Affirmation: "You gave it a fair chance instead of just going along with the hype."
• Reflective Listening: "You're feeling a bit out of step with what everyone else seems to be enjoying."
• Summarizing: "So while this show is getting all this buzz, it just didn't connect with you despite giving it several episodes, and now you're wondering if there's something you're not seeing that others are."

Did you hear about that big tech company layoff? They cut 5000 jobs after reporting record profits last quarter. It seems so unfair.

• Open-ended Question: "What do you think is really behind these kinds of corporate decisions?"
• Affirmation: "You're keeping up with business news and noticing the contradictions there."
• Reflective Listening: "The timing of cutting jobs right after announcing big profits feels wrong to you."
• Summarizing: "So you're seeing this disconnect between a company doing well financially and still eliminating thousands of jobs, which raises questions about their priorities and values."

I hate my job. My boss micromanages everything I do, and I feel like I'm wasting my talents. But I can't afford to quit.

• Open-ended Question: "What bugs you most about your everyday work life?"
• Affirmation: "You really know your worth and you're being smart about the money side of things too."
• Reflective Listening: "Sounds like you're stuck between a job that's dragging you down and bills that need to be paid."
• Summarizing: "So your boss's hovering is driving you crazy, and you know you could be doing better things with your skills. But right now, the financial reality is keeping you from making a move."

I know I should exercise more and eat better. Every Monday I start a new routine but by Wednesday I'm back to my old habits. I just don't have the willpower.

• Open-ended Question: "What tends to throw you off track around Wednesday?"
• Affirmation: "I notice you keep trying every week - that takes some real persistence."
• Reflective Listening: "It's pretty frustrating when you start strong but can't seem to keep it going."
• Summarizing: "You want those healthier habits and you give it a fresh shot every week. You start off great, but something happens a couple days in that knocks you off course, and that's got you thinking maybe you just don't have what it takes."

I've been offered two jobs. One pays better but requires long hours. The other is more aligned with my interests but the salary is lower. I've been going back and forth for days and can't decide.

• Open-ended Question: "Besides the money and hours, what really matters to you in a job right now?"
• Affirmation: "You're not jumping at the first offer - you're really thinking this through."
• Reflective Listening: "You're torn between the paycheck and doing something you actually care about, and it's stressing you out."
• Summarizing: "So you're at this fork in the road - more money but less life, or work you care about but tighter finances. It's tough because both paths speak to different things you value."

My partner and I keep having the same argument. They say I'm not communicative enough, but when I try to talk, they interrupt or criticize what I'm saying. It's easier to just stay quiet.

• Open-ended Question: "What would good talking between you two look like?"
• Affirmation: "You're pretty tuned in to what's happening between you two."
• Reflective Listening: "You're in this loop where trying to open up just leads to feeling shut down, so why bother?"
• Summarizing: "So they want you to talk more, but when you do, you get cut off or criticized. That makes you clam up, which brings you back to square one. No wonder you're frustrated."

2025-03-15 08:00:00

Quantity

Probability

Time (seconds)

Frequency (hertz)

Money (dollars)

Dollars per day

Days per $1000

Dollars per kilogram

Kilograms per dollar

Energy (Joules)

Power (Watts)

Kilowatt hours (kWh)

Milli-amp hours (mAh)

Energy Storage Density (Wh/kg)

Dollars per kilowatt hour

Kilowatt hours per dollar

Information (bits)

Throughput (bps)

Operations

Operations per second

Operations per Joule

Operations per dollar

2025-03-13 08:00:00

In 2022, I was an alcoholic with a newborn baby and a startup, so I decided to ride a bicycle from San Francisco to Los Angeles (877km or 545mi).

AIDS/Lifecycle is a great charity (donate), but it was insanely selfish of me to commit to something like this at the time. I am so grateful for Chelsea, who supports my ambitions and forgives my folly.

This decision defied logic. Dad bod claimed me long before the baby arrived. I knew nothing about cycling. I did not own a bike.

But I had to change something -- no, I had to change myself. To become somebody else, I decided to start living somebody else's life. I don't remember how the bicycle got involved.

I wasn't ready to be sober, nor to be a father, nor to start a company, nor to ride that bike.

Seriously, I rode the first 100 miles with two flat tires because I assumed all tubes needed exactly 12 PSI.

You'll never be ready for such things. Do them anyway.