About Tim Bornholdt

2024-05-19 23:20:09

Many a term paper was written to Untrust Us.

Many lines of code were generated to Vanished.

Many long walks from home to class were accompanied by Magic Spells.

The first Crystal Castles album is a prime example of how I've consumed music for the majority of my life.

The indiscernible lyrics, the rhythmic blips and bloops, and the strong repetition provide a great outlet to keep my spiraling thoughts distracted long enough for me to get something else done.

I think distraction is a perfectly reasonable purpose for music to serve.

2024-05-19 12:16:01

Below all this hype, there’s a quiet revolution happening. I keep meeting new companies and seeing new products that make practical use of LLMs. They use them to solve narrow problems and prioritize consistency and efficiency over giant, all-singing, all-dancing models. I keep meeting people who are amplifying their capacity and abilities by handing simple, mundane tasks to AIs, which they then refine and improve. AI-assisted coding has been a boon for early-stage start ups, which are shipping products with a maturity and polish beyond their years.

This is the world of Sober AI.

Sober AI is an incredible concept.

There’s so much progress that people can make using this tool. While it might not be able to solve all our problems, knowing how to wield it is a superpower in this economy.

2024-05-18 05:24:00

Space Jam was my favorite movie growing up.

I didn’t own it on VHS, so it was one of those movies where I would watch it whenever an opportunity presented itself.

My oldest cousin got me the Space Jam poster for my birthday one year. It was one of the best birthday presents I ever got.

I took that poster with me into every place I moved. My dad had a thing where I wasn’t allowed to use nails or push pins to hang things on the walls (“Think of the resale value!”), so pretty much everything in my room was held up by that two-sided tacky tape which, ironically, left huge grease stains on the wall.

This soundtrack was the very first CD I ever purchased¹. I didn’t even own a CD player at the time I purchased it, so I had to wait until the house was empty so I could put it into the 5 disc changer we had in the living room.

At the time, I skipped the vast majority of songs on this album. Most of the songs on this album are hip hop and R&B, both being genres that my white, suburban self had exceptionally low exposure to.

I mostly skipped around to the same songs I’d hear on Radio AAHS: Fly Like An Eagle, I Believe I Can Fly, Space Jam, and Buggin’.

Over time, I found myself gravitating toward the non-kid radio songs. The most compelling of those is Hit ‘em High (The Monstars Anthem).

Here, you’ve got five of the biggest names in hip hop collaborating on a song for the heels of the movie, and it goes hard.

To this day, this song is what I play when I’m driving my kids up to their track meets.²

(If this song isn’t your jam, might I recommend Coolio’s The Winner? I hadn’t really listened to the lyrics to this song before, but given all my mental health struggles in the past few months, I think it appeared at the perfect moment for me. The song is impressively positive and reaffirming.)

2024-05-18 04:08:48

Once again, I’m amazed and terrified at how good YouTube’s recommendation algorithm is, because this is my kind of content.

I’m sure most of you non-nerds who read my blog will pass over this (as you maybe should), but I thought it was neat to see what happens to the physics of a game when π doesn’t equal 3.1415926535.

Fun fact: I didn’t know that Doom’s creator misremembered the tenth decimal of π when coding the game. I suppose it’s easy to forget that it’s only pretty recent in human history where we have instant, accurate recall to that sort of detail.

2024-05-18 02:10:00

The solar storm that brought the aurora borealis to large parts of the United States this weekend also broke critical GPS and precision farming functionality in tractors and agricultural equipment during a critical point of the planting season, 404 Media has learned. These outages caused many farmers to fully stop their planting operations for the moment.

This is a big deal, but like many technical things that are a big deal, you’re not gonna hear about it until people start blaming politicians for it around November.

It’s obvious that we need to keep coming up with innovations to combat the threats associated with manmade climate change, but it only takes one major solar storm to knock out major satelite and communication infrastructure.

This seems like an area in which we collectively should be paying attention to and investing in… but fighting culture wars is way more productive.

2024-05-16 22:19:04

I’m working through a blog post right now that discusses the properties of the perfect karaoke song.

Man in the Mirror is my go-to choice for karaoke night. I love singing Michael Jackson, but MJ is a risky karaoke choice. I’ve tried nearly all of his songs, and most of them are extremely conditional bangers.

A song like Earth Song can bring the house down if you are able to throw your entire voice into it, but it can also fall completely flat if you don’t have a crowd that’ll interact with a ballad¹.

A song like Will You Be There suffers from a recognizibility problem. Part of a good karaoke song is getting the crowd to sing along. People might recognize a song like Will You Be There if they grew up watching Free Willy, but almost nobody knows the lyrics or melody well enough to join in.

A song like Billie Jean has the recognizability, but it contains a lot of repetition towards the end. Repetition is a surefire characteristic of a bad karaoke song. Nobody wants to hear someone sing the same thing over and over again for two straight minutes. It’s a crowd killer.

Man In The Mirror, though?

Here’s a song that starts out with a lot of classic MJ “chee hee” action, then gives you a chance to warm up with something in a good range, then continues to build with more of those MJ vocal fillers, a killer key change, and ample opportunity for crowd participation.

It took years of weekly karaoke sessions to figure out what songs fit me best. Man in the Mirror offers plenty of fun Michael Jackson vocal action, the song is catchy and instantly recognizable, it’s in a pretty high range so it takes a little skill and practice to make it sound good, and most importantly, it makes me happy every time I sing it.

2024-05-16 19:49:28

For most of us today, money is assurance. We live in a culture in which the pursuit of security is paramount. Save money, we are told — for a health crisis, for our kids to go to college, for retirement. But is it possible to have any guarantee, through money or anything else, of our safety in life?

This article explores the idea of money automatically losing value unless you continue to pay tax on it.

For example, let’s say you earn a hundred dollar bill. Every week, you’re required to buy a stamp from the government which lets that bill maintain its full value. Otherwise, come next week, your $100 becomes a $99.90 bill.

This encourages you to spend your money rather than hoard it. It incentivizes earning money through work rather than loaning your money out and earning it through collecting interest.

This feels like a weird concept until you sit back and reflect on what money means to you right now. Money makes me feel more anxious than any other abstract concept because the threats associated without having it feel so dire.

In her new book “The Age of Insecurity,” the activist Astra Taylor writes: “Today, many of the ways we try to make ourselves and our societies more secure — money, property, possessions, police, the military — have paradoxical effects, undermining the very security we seek and accelerating the harm done to the economy, the climate and people’s lives, including our own.”

Astra Taylor, it turns out, is married to Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel.

2024-05-14 21:25:00

Editor’s note: This post contains discussion of suicide. Take care of yourselves, y’all.

Alright, so I guess some of these WeblogPoMo posts are going to be albums instead of songs, because sometimes the collective is more meaningful than any one individual song.

That’s certainly the case for this EKKSTACY album.

I first learned of EKKSTACY from the When We Were Young festival. I didn’t catch them live because they were on at the same time as the headliners, but I did give their Misery album a couple of spins leading up to the festival.

The album came across shuffle once again shortly after getting laid off at the beginning of this year, and I haven’t been able to stop listening to it.

First of all, this style of music just sounds cool to me. The guitar and bass sound so ethereal, the vocals are haunting and brooding. There’s a simplicity to the melodies that makes it feel approachable¹.

But maybe what I love the most about this album is how striking the lyrics are.

Back in February, these lyrics from the song “Christian Death” specifically were stuck in my head for days:

I just wanna die, I just wanna kill myself
I don’t give a fuck about anyone else
I never leave my house
When I die, I hope there’s a pistol in my mouth
I just wanna die, I just wanna kill myself

This past February and March were quite difficult for me. I constantly felt the worst mental pain I’ve ever felt in my life. Not only was I dealing with burnout and stress, but I also had this asshole voice called depression in my head with me nonstop.

At first, this guy would show up and whisper stuff in my ear, much like you’d see a drug dealer sneak up to someone in a 90s anti-drug PSA.

“Hey, an easy fix to all this would be to kill yourself. I wonder what that might look like.”

Just like how I’d imagine if someone snuck up to me and offered drugs in the 90s, I replied to these thoughts with genuine bewilderment and confusion.

Why would you be offering me free drugs? Your drug dealing business would be way more profitable by selling that product to your existing customers. I also do not have an income, so what would you gain by getting me addicted?

Why would I kill myself? What benefit would that actually give me? How would that solve any problem and not create way more problems for everyone around me?

The bewildered response was how I often responded to this guy because I frankly don’t have much experience interacting with those thoughts.

My usual response to bad feelings (like guilt, embarrassment, shame) is to completely shut down. Just nope out of whatever situation I am in and sit alone doing everything I can to push the thoughts away.

But there was no nope-ing out of these thoughts. And since shutting down is not an ideal response to those other feelings, I started working on how to cope with these thoughts.

One day, I was out on a walk, and that depression guy showed up and started being a jabroni again. This time, I happened to be listening to this album and those lyrics came on.

A smile appeared on my face. I felt a true feeling of relief, and I’m not quite sure why.

In some warped way, it felt a little silly hearing someone talk about killing themselves in such a brazen way.

It felt good to know other people have spent time shacked up with this depression voice and found ways to keep them from completely taking over.

Maybe the juxtaposition of endorphins from the walk, a more neutral observation of the suicidal thoughts, and actually speaking them out loud was all it took to realize how absurd it is to take those thoughts too seriously.

I’m feeling a lot better here in May, by the way. I still find myself avoiding uncomfortable and difficult feelings because, well, they suck.

But at least I now have tools to handle them. One of them is throwing on this album, sitting with the feelings for a bit, and telling them that it’ll be okay.

And I wish I could forget
That everything will end
And everyone I love has said at least one time
That when wе die, everything will be fine

2024-05-11 11:09:00

My friend Scott has a newsletter called Sweep Frequency where he shares five new songs every week.

The top section of this week’s newsletter mentioned Bullion. I had never heard of them prior to today, but they recently released one of Scott’s favorite records of the year.

I put it on in the background of my evening tonight, and it fit like a glove.

This week was a bit of a challenging week for my wife, who is in charge of running exams at her school. I’ve been trying to help out as much as I can, but tough weeks are tough no matter what.

As I was driving to pick up some celebratory Dairy Queen tonight, I was working my way through the album for the fourth time, and it struck me that I was going to need to pick a song for the challenge here soon.

My theme for this year’s WeblogPoMo was music that is meaningful to me.

I don’t need to pressure myself to pick the 30ish songs that are the most meaningful to me. That’s an unreachable bar. There are way more than 30 songs which mean something to me.

Music is one of the best tools I have to help process the world. It’s there for me for every feeling I could have. Sick. Lovestruck. Mourning. Belly laughing.

So maybe it’s okay to share some times where new music made an impression on me.

I know that this song, in particular, will bring me back to the week where my wife busted her butt at work while I held things together with the kids at home.

2024-05-10 11:36:00

It was really hard to just pick one Rilo Kiley song to share in this series.

It would be hard to pinpoint even a single album to share, because all of them made a meaningful impact on me in high school and college.

One of my least favorite questions to answer is “what is your favorite [x]?”

It doesn’t even matter what X is. Color. Desert. TV show. Vacation spot.

I haven’t been able to answer this question in years because I instantly become paralyzed by the question’s parameters.

Favorite musical artist?! In what context?

My favorite artist to work out to is Eminem.

My favorite artist when working through depression is EKKSTACY.

My favorite artist when I’m hanging out with my kids is Bluey.

My favorite artist when I’m in the zone at work is Daft Punk.

But if you are asking me to have to pick a that felt the most constant in my life, part of nearly every day since high school?

For me, that’s Rilo Kiley.

More Adventurous was among the first CDs I bought online. I still have a 128kbps rip in my iTunes library. It has a little skip during A Man / Me / Then Jim which now feels weird to not hear when I listen to the album on iTunes or vinyl.

More Adventurous was the soundtrack to the road trip Rob and I took sophomore year of college to Iowa and Madison. We got lost using the iPhone 3Gs’s GPS technology, ending up in the town of University, Iowa instead of the University of Iowa. Portions of Foxes kept us laughing as we whipped the U-turn to head back in the right direction.

The Execution of All Things was a constant during my freshman year of college, a comforting soundtrack during a rather lonely and scary time in my life. The Good That Won’t Come Out puts me right back in the tattered light rail seat that carried me to my early morning lectures for a rather challenging math class. With Arms Outstretched was one of the first songs I learned on the guitar.

The self-titled EP ends with a song called Gravity, sung with a bit of a country twang. Rob and I imagined it being sung by an 1840s prospector. It would occasionally come on shuffle when we’d be carpooling back from a sales meeting in the early days.

Under the Blacklight disappointed me when it first came out. I bought it on release day after a Tuesday shift at Best Buy. I threw it on in the car and couldn’t believe how processed and over-produced it sounded. In hindsight, I rather enjoy Silver Lining, which is about the most accessible entry point I can recommend for the band.

I saw Rilo Kiley for the first time during the tour for that album. The songs from the album were way better live.

I saw Jenny Lewis again a couple months ago when she came into town. She didn’t play any Rilo Kiley songs, which feels right for her. Her solo stuff is pretty good, I really enjoy songs like She’s Not Me and Red Bull & Hennessy and Just One Of The Guys.

But I would love to hear those other songs live again someday with the whole gang.

2024-05-09 11:32:29

The University of Minnesota’s Twin Cities campus is massive.

When I went there, I was told it was the third largest university in the country based off square footage.

The Minneapolis campus alone has an east bank and a west bank, connected by a bridge with a top that is for pedestrian use only.

I used to live in the Como neighborhood. It was a 30 minute walk from my house to the classes I had on the west bank. I could also take the 3, which made it more like a 5 minute bus ride.

My preferred method of transportation, which I would use up until the snow made it infeasible, was my bike.

When I moved down to campus for the first time, my dad wouldn’t let me bring my Specialized bike that he got for me in seventh grade.

Instead, he insisted on buying me a $99 Schwinn bike from Target. It weighed a ton and the brakes weren’t great, but it certainly got me from A to B.

I recently got rid of that bike, and it felt like getting rid of a car. In both cases, I usually get overcome with emotions such as grief from nostalgia, guilt from abandoning something I knew so intimately, and gratitude for being able to get so much life out of it.

One of the first times I put that bike to use was to attend a class on the west bank.

When I arrived at the beginning of the Washington Avenue Bridge, I was greeted by a spectacular view of the Minneapolis skyline.

The combination of that skyline, the breeze, and the views of the river below forced this song in my head.

I started singing it out loud, unable to place where I knew it from.

After having the same moment play out over the course of a semester, it finally dawned on me that I knew that song from hours of riding my bike in Pokémon.

Pure joy. That’s what this song reminds me of.

Even this evening, when I rode bikes with my family up to try the new ice cream shop in town, I got this song stuck in my head.

It truly is the perfect song for a bike trip.

2024-05-09 01:43:00

I'm really excited to let y'all know I am launching a newsletter.

It's called Monkey Wrench, and it's my way of getting all my feelings about tech and society out into the wild.

I've been blogging and writing in my journal a lot since getting laid off at the beginning of the year. A lot of digital ink has been spilled in an attempt to figure out who I am and what I like doing.

What I like doing is teaching people how to use tech to do cool things. This newsletter is my way of finally getting some mileage out of that journalism degree I accidentally got.

Generally, I'll be sharing my trademark optimistic opinions around technology. I want to be a voice that can cut through the hype surrounding tools like artificial intelligence. AI is cool, but it's even cooler when you get a basic understanding of how it works under the hood.

I also want to help people find better ways to use the tools we've all gotten used to using over the past twenty years like the internet, cell phones, and social networks. Instead of using these tools to make our own lives better, these tools often use techniques to make us feel trapped without using them.

First edition goes out on May 15, so sign up now!

2024-05-09 00:54:00

If you’re here in the Twin Cities and are not aware of the history of I-94, this video is a great launching point to learn about it as well as to learn what groups like Our Streets are doing to imagine a better use of this space.

By the way, I was one of the participants of CityNerd’s event here in Minneapolis a month ago, and if you look closely in this video, you can see me in the front row of the session. I signed up too late to join in the bike ride though, which really bummed me out.

2024-05-07 11:01:36

My buddy Lucas (the same one who told me about POTUSA) is always sending me heavier stuff to listen to.

This song in particular caught my attention right away, and it quickly became one of my favorite songs to rock out to. The rhythms are so complex that every subsequent listen is an opportunity to hear something new.

What makes me identify with music like this is the precision and order.

Plini, to me, is the epitome of coordination and process. The riffs are so intricate and detailed that it must require a ton of effort to ensure the musicians are playing the same piece.

Music like this is comforting to me because it feels like some order can be achieved even in the midst of complete chaos.

All this talk of precision gave me a realization: I’ve never been good at improvising with music. I don’t understand it.

If you want someone to sight read a piece and play it exactly as it’s written on page, I’m your man.

If you want to ask someone to solo in the key of G major, you’d be best sniffing elsewhere.

The best improv musicians I am aware from operate on a completely different plane than me. What they make doesn’t necessarily get pulled from their brains; rather, the music comes from their hearts.

That’s not to say that playing with precision is soulless. I take so much joy from being able to master a particularly challenging musical riff.

I just wish I could also get good at letting my heart take the lead from time to time.

2024-05-06 11:55:00

I just met this girl a couple hours ago, and she’s clearly the coolest girl I’ve ever met.

One of the very first things she asked me after we met was if I wanted to see a magic trick.

She presents a deck of cards and asks me to pick a card.

Yes, she ultimately revealed my card.

Yes, it blew me away.

We start talking about Four Loko, which had recently been banned across the country. After doing a favor for a friend who paid me with a cardboard box filled with various malt liquors, I mentioned to her that I have some of the real stuff in my trunk.

I did have to warn her, though, that it was expired and had been sitting in the trunk for at least a couple days.

She didn’t care. We each grabbed one and slammed them.

After a couple more drinks, we decide to walk to Blarney’s, a bar that’s not too far from the Dinkytown home of our mutual friend whose sidewalk is now covered in shotgunned Four Loko runoff.

This was a random Thursday night in December. We both had stuff to do early the next morning. I had to film something for my internship. She needed to drive back to Wisconsin for a job interview.

But Blarney’s had exceptionally cheap Long Island Iced Teas.

And there was karaoke.

I don’t recall what she sang that night. I was too infatuated by her “who would win in an animal fight” discussion, of which you could tell she clearly had deeply considered these outcomes already.

I do remember trying to decide what I was going to sing. I was clearly confident, fueled by a potent combination of Four Loko, Long Islands, and love.

But I needed something I knew I could nail in front of a crowd.

So I chose I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles).

For this girl, for this moment, it just felt right.

I did end up making it to my shoot the next morning. I couldn’t get the eye liner off my face that the girl talked me into applying later that evening, so you can clearly see it in the B-roll footage that I acted in.

She slept through that job interview. She seemed to not mind it too much, though, since she ended up marrying me.

This reminds me, I really aught to sing it to her again sometime soon.

It’s just hard to find date night opportunities with your wife when you’ve got two rambunctious kids running around.

That, and the karaoke scene here south of the river is sus. Find me a place nearby where I can do Rap God without censorship, you cowards.

2024-05-05 10:45:43

I used to take a trip to the north shore with my extended family every summer.

When we’d arrive, my dad would hand me and my siblings a bunch of cash when we arrived accompanied by some variation of this speech: “This is it for the weekend. Spend it wisely.”

One year, my dad performed this ritual in front of the gas station which shared a parking lot with our hotel.

We went in to pick out some snacks, and behind the counter, I saw a cassette tape with a familiar sounding name:

”The Presidents of the United States of America”

A few weeks prior to our trip, back when school was in session, I recalled standing at the bus stop and hearing my friend Lucas telling everyone all about this band.

He said his older brother was into them. They sang about things like cats and peaches, and they totally rocked.

I had looked up to Lucas since preschool. He was effortlessly charismatic. Absolutely hysterical, too. He has this infectious laugh, often deployed after he cracks a joke.

Since I had the recommendation of the coolest kid I knew floating around somewhere in my head ¹, I figured I could parcel out a fifth of my weekend allowance to give it a shot.

I immediately fell in love with the record. I listened to it endlessly for months.

None of the lyrics really made sense to me as a kid. Lyrics have never been something I’ve considered much when it comes to music.²

But as an adult, I get so much joy from rediscovering music from my youth and enjoying the artistry with a renewed perspective that comes with age.

It was tough to only pick one song from this album. So many memories are intertwined with these songs as their accompaniment.

I used to sing Peaches every night to my daughter. Both Lump and Weird Al’s Forrest Gump-inspired cover of Lump often get stuck in my head, my thoughts seamlessly bouncing between lyric versions.

I picked Dune Buggy because it’s the second song from this band that I regularly make my kids listen to.

We have a family playlist filled with songs that each person gets to select, and Dune Buggy is the first song of mine which appears in order.

We will often go through the playlist in that order when we are in the car.

At first, the kids groaned every time the first guitar lick came on.

These days, you’ll occasionally catch my daughter singing loudly along.

And come on, what’s not to love about a blind spider barreling around the sand in a spider-sized dune buggy?

2024-05-04 11:11:00

It only takes 5 snare hits and 5 tom hits to instantly transport me back to the warehouse where you go crashing through the window in the very first level of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater.

I spent so much time playing this game on the PlayStation. I wasn’t even particularly amazing at it. It was just fun to try and pull off the 900 again and again.

Recently, I learned that the N64 version of this game had to use abridged versions of all the songs on this soundtrack due to space limitations on the cartridges.

Amazing that we can now fit the entire contents of the Nintendo 64 library of games onto a 32GB SD card.¹

Ska is a genre of music I get embarrassed when I tell people I enjoy it. It is a genre for a specific brand of misfit. Think emo kids who aren’t overly emotional. Punk kids who aren’t anarchists.

I haven’t listened to much else by Goldfinger, but assumed that they would be playing this song toward the end of their set at When We Were Young.

Imagine my surprise when they called Tony Hawk onto stage before playing it.

Tony recalled the story of meeting the band and asking them to be part of the soundtrack. He said that he and Goldfinger grew up together and owe much of their success to their symbiotic relationship.

Then all of a sudden, the band starts playing the song, and Tony Hawk starts singing it!

There were several moments at When We Were Young where I would try to sing along to a song but couldn’t. I was overcome with emotion.

Seeing thousands of misfits singing this song in unison with the coolest misfit of them all on lead vocals? I couldn’t handle it.

Ska is fun. Ska is camp. Ska is dorky.

And I’m here for it.

2024-05-03 11:13:44

Aristotle, who had a few things to say about human nature, once declared, "The greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor," but academics studying the personification of tech have long observed that metaphor can just as easily command us. Metaphors shape how we think about a new technology, how we feel about it, what we expect of it, and ultimately how we use it.

I love metaphors. I gotta reflect on this idea a bit more.

There is something kind of pathological going on here. One of the most exciting advances in computer science ever achieved, with so many promising uses, and we can't think beyond the most obvious, least useful application? What, because we want to see ourselves in this technology?

Meanwhile, we are under-investing in more precise, high-value applications of LLMs that treat generative A.I. models not as people but as tools. A powerful wrench to create sense out of unstructured prose. The glue of an application handling messy, real-word data. Or a drafting table for creative brainstorming, where a little randomness is an asset not a liability. If there's a metaphor to be found in today's AI, you're most likely to find it on a workbench.

Bingo! AI is a tool, not a person.

The other day, I made a joke on LinkedIn about the easiest way for me to spot a social media post that was written with generative AI: the phrase “Exciting News!” alongside one of these emojis: 🚀, 🎉, or 🚨.

It’s not that everyone who uses those things certainly used ChatGPT.

It’s more like how I would imagine a talented woodworker would be able to spot a rookie mistake in a novice’s first attempt at a chair.

And here I go, using a metaphor again!

2024-05-03 03:42:00

As I climbed up on the table, the MRI technician handed me a laminated piece of paper and asked me what I want to listen to.

MRI machines are loud, so they provide you with a pair of headphones to wear while you lay as still as possible for around an hour.

It was six in the morning, early enough that I had to squint a bit to make out the SiriusXM channel listing.

My first instinct was to pick something that would make the technician laugh. I'm sure she was underpaid, overworked, and didn't want to be there any more than I did. The least I could do was try to get her to crack a smile.

I saw an EDM channel.

Perfect.

I ask her to throw that on.

I hear a chuckle through the low-quality speakers in the headphones. Mission accomplished.

As the test begins, my mind goes back to its default place of terrible thoughts. I am exhausted, I hate myself, I am a complete failure.

All of a sudden, I hear the following words:

I don't know who needs to hear this
We came here to get some healing
You can tell whoever's asking:
"Fuck, we're sad, but we're still dancing"

The swear word shocked me out of the funk for a moment.

The repetitive nature of EDM meant I got to keep hearing that chorus again and again.

After a few times, I hear another voice in my head:

"Sorry, can you please lay as still as possible?"

To this day, I've used this song as an anthem in the fight against my worst depressive thoughts.

It just sucks I can't really listen to it around the kiddos.

2024-05-03 03:38:00

I encourage people to choose a guiding topic for the month, something that will help them feel propelled to post. It could be a loosely defined goal, perhaps you are learning something new and this would be a way to talk yourself through it on a daily basis, or post about progress.

This sounds like a good challenge for me as I start to commit to launching a newsletter soon.

I think what I want to do is share 31 songs that mean something to me. I've wanted to do this for a while, and this is a good chance to just jump in and do it.

So let's go!

2024-05-02 12:11:35

Okay, I guess this blog is just turning into a bunch of links about why the internet sucks these days.

But I should stop framing these links as a “here’s why what we have right now sucks” because truthfully… it doesn’t.

Or rather, it doesn’t have to.

I really enjoyed Molly White’s metaphor about gardens¹. I’ve been tending to my own garden on this site for more than a decade, and I’ve kept up patches of turf on the web since the mid 90s.

I just like being here. I like having a place where friends and other folks can see what I’m all about and choose to interact with me or not.

A part of this article that stuck out to me was Molly’s observation that the internet started becoming less fun when we all came here to work. I couldn’t agree more.²

Somewhat related here: this past weekend, I decided to finally do something about my IRL piece of land. You see, most of my backyard is now just dirt. My front yard is patches of grass but primarily dominated by weeds.

My back patio is in literal shambles, chunks of broken patio paver strewn around the yard.

The screens on my windows are either broken, bent, or missing altogether.

The cool Govee lights no longer stick to my overhang, so they dangle like a complete eyesore.

It’s frustrating.

This past weekend, I went to the hardware store and spent way too much money on grass seed. It felt incredibly rewarding to do the hard work of ripping up the old junk and trying to build something new.

It felt like a sign for me to log off a bit more often and tend to reality.

But that’s not to say this garden is going away anytime soon. I’ll keep sharing articles like these here because I think it fits nicely with the thesis under which I am about to launch a newsletter: technology is so cool, and we could all use a reminder of that sometimes.

We also could use a friend to help us figure out how to use it right.

Much like I could use a friend to help me figure out how to replace my busted up patio.

2024-05-02 03:18:11

You can’t read the recipe on your phone because it prioritises the ads on the page. You bring your laptop into the kitchen and whenever you scroll down, you have to close a pop-up. You turn AdBlock on and the page no longer loads, then AdBlock sends you an ad asking for money.

The Airbnb charges you a $150 cleaning fee, but insists the place needs to be left spotless. There will be a fee if the bedding hasn’t been stripped and the dishwasher hasn’t been emptied.

You buy a microwave and receive ads for microwaves. You buy a mattress and receive ads for mattresses.

Enshittification.

I have to admit, I laughed out loud at most of these, but the one that made me the most mad was the Airbnb one.

Related: I’ve been trying to read more novels lately, and I’m working my way through What You Are Looking For Is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama. I’m only a couple chapters in so far, but it’s pretty dang good.

2024-04-30 10:20:25

So then I asked him: what kind of VC does he actually want on his cap table (that is, owning a portion of his company)? What would be true of the sort of investor who really gets him and resonates with what he’s building?

The same question applies here as on a first date, I pointed out: do you want them to fall in love with you, or with a fake version of you that you now either have to maintain—at the expense of the person you actually are and want to be—or else face irreconcilable conflict and disapproval when you finally drop the facade?

You want to reach the investors in the room who want to flame-spot audacious and idealistic young upstarts like you; who’ve staked their careers and reputations on the thesis that the world needs more of just the kind of company you’re building; who resonate so hard with your story and are so wowed by your talent that they’ll be willing to invest in, nurture, and protect your agency as a founder.

2024-04-28 20:53:00

The baggage around nuclear power largely stems from an inaccurate, almost mystical notion of how it works. In reality, contemporary nuclear power plants boast exceptional safety records and produce astonishingly minimal waste relative to their immense energy output. Additionally, their compact footprint allows for versatile placement: They don’t require areas with ample sun or wind, are dispatchable when needed, and realistically could be placed on-site at particularly important facilities as a steady supply of clean power. 

But if we’re going to normalize nuclear power as a reliable and well-understood energy source, it’s essential to understand how we’ve ended up in our current situation. It’s also important to recognize that although much of this post focuses on large-scale nuclear fission reactors — because that’s what have been delivering civilian power for the past several decades — smaller, more modular reactors will likely play a major role going forward, perhaps as a means to address more local, and even hyper-local, energy needs.

I’m taking all of this with a grain of salt because it was written by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, but I did find this to be a fascinating overview of the history of nuclear power.

In particular, I enjoyed the explanation of a nuclear meltdown and why, thanks to evolutions in technology, those are unlikely to ever happen again.

There were also plenty of phrases used (carbon rod, Diablo Canyon) which sparked my inner Simpsons nerd.

2024-04-27 04:05:00

I swear my blog isn’t going to just be links to think pieces about why the internet sucks these days.

It just so happens that there was a wave of these pieces published last year and I’m finally getting around to them in my Instapaper queue.

Two pull quotes stood out to me:

“Humans were never meant to exist in a society that contains 2 billion individuals,” says Yoel Roth, a technology policy fellow at UC Berkeley and former head of trust and safety for Twitter. “And if you consider that Instagram is a society in some twisted definition, we have tasked a company with governing a society bigger than any that has ever existed in the course of human history. Of course they’re going to fail.”

I’ve seen a few good posts about the difficulties of content moderation at scale.

On the one hand, most of the abundance and privilege we’ve built for ourselves wouldn’t be possible without the massive scale that large conglomerates can achieve.

On the other hand, if something gets so large that we are unable to keep your head wrapped around it, maybe that’s the point where it’s okay to let it collapse in on itself.

The destruction and collapse of large entities is awful, with very real consequences for people.

But it’s out of the ashes of these organizations when we're presented with an opportunity to take the lessons we learned and build something new. We get to try again.

The fix for the internet isn’t to shut down Facebook or log off or go outside and touch grass. The solution to the internet is more internet: more apps, more spaces to go, more money sloshing around to fund more good things in more variety, more people engaging thoughtfully in places they like. More utility, more voices, more joy. 

My toxic trait is I can’t shake that naïve optimism of the early internet. Mistakes were made, a lot of things went sideways, and there have undeniably been a lot of pain and misery and bad things that came from the social era. The mistake now would be not to learn from them. 

Keep the internet small and weird, my friends. ❤️

2024-04-23 00:29:24

One of the dominant reactions to burnout right now is an all-out rejection of work itself, like, "well, any drive to do things, it’s a capitalist construction, and the real thing to do is just do nothing", but that doesn’t last.

And the people who are telling you to do this are not doing nothing. They’re striving really hard to make sure that their Substacks and books about doing nothing are going to have a really big audience and they’re giving talks on it.

You can’t just focus on the "doing less" part, you need the "obsess over quality" part, and that’s where you’re able to still fulfill the human drive to create, and that’s where you still build the leverage to control your life and make a living.

As someone who has been unemployed for nearly five months now, I can assure you that the “doing less” part sucks.

I don’t want to do less.

I just want to be able to go through my waking hours making something which will make society a nicer place to live for everybody.

Then, I want to go to sleep at night knowing I inflicted the least amount of harm on as many living things as possible.

Why are those goals so difficult to strive for?

2024-04-22 20:01:25

Posting on social media might be a less casual act these days, as well, because we’ve seen the ramifications of blurring the border between physical and digital lives. Instagram ushered in the age of self-commodification online—it was the platform of the selfie—but TikTok and Twitch have turbocharged it. Selfies are no longer enough; video-based platforms showcase your body, your speech and mannerisms, and the room you’re in, perhaps even in real time. Everyone is forced to perform the role of an influencer. The barrier to entry is higher and the pressure to conform stronger. It’s no surprise, in this environment, that fewer people take the risk of posting and more settle into roles as passive consumers.

The overall message of this New Yorker article is that the internet isn’t fun because big tech platforms have turned the internet from a place you stumble upon quirky and novel content into a machine designed for no other purpose than to capture your attention and keep you hostage for as long as possible.

I feel like that’s so defeatist. Everyone keeps wanting to create “the next Facebook”, but what I’m looking for is “the next single topic, PHPBB-driven message board with ~400 regular posters.”

When I got my UMN email address in May of 2006, the first thing I did was sign up for Facebook. It was so cool to join a place where everybody was.

In the ten years that followed, though, it turned out that being in a place filled with everybody was pretty terrible.

I think in order to make the internet feel like it did in the early 2000s, we need to shrink, not grow. Specialize, not generalize. Be more digital nomads rather than live in untenable metropolises.

2024-04-22 11:53:42

Value-driven responses are not as immediately appealing as finding a hyper-charged digital escape, but these latter escapes inevitably reveal themselves to be transient and the emotions they’re obscuring eventually return. If you can resist the allure of the easy digital palliative and instead take on the heavier burden of meaningful action, a more lasting inner peace can be achieved.

I’ve been finding more and more ways to become detached from my devices the past couple weeks¹, and believe it or not, it has been an unbelievable boon for my mental health.

Here is a short list of things I’ve done:

• Turned on grayscale. I wanna find a way to wire this up to my shortcut button on my iPhone 15 Pro, but (a) too much work and (b) see my next bullet point.
• Steeling my nerves to activate my Light Phone 2 that I got for Christmas. It’s a pretty big commitment to switch off the iOS ecosystem, but I’m getting close to trying it for a month or so.
• Deleted most apps off my home screen. Everything is a swipe away anyways, so why not just have a barren screen that messes up your negative muscle memory?
• Used a content blocker to block Reddit and LinkedIn. I can’t tell you what a relief it has been to not go down the politics rabbit hole this cycle so far, and that’s all because I blocked Reddit. LinkedIn is just as bad for me, and if I am going to keep building my network over there, I should try to be strategic about it and not mindlessly scroll it all day.

Tech is so, so cool, don’t get me wrong. But I, for one, am sick of being addicted to the allure of social media.

I’d rather spend my tech time building goofy websites and writing stuff.

2024-04-18 13:19:20

There are an unbelievable amount of points Molly White makes with which I found myself agreeing.

In fact, I feel like this is an exceptionally accurate perspective of the current state of AI and LLMs in particular. If you’re curious about AI, give this article a read.

A lot of my personal fears about the potential power of these tools comes from speculation that the LLM CEOs make about their forthcoming updates.

And I don’t think that fear is completely unfounded. I mean, look at what tools we had available in 2021 compared to April 2024. We’ve come a long way in three years.

But right now, these tools are quite hard to use without spending a ton of time to learn their intricacies.

The best way to fight fear is with knowledge. Knowing how to wield these tools helps me deal with my fears, and I enjoy showing others how to do the same.

One point Molly makes about the generated text got me to laugh out loud:

I particularly like how, when I ask them to try to sound like me, or to at least sound less like a chatbot, they adopt a sort of "cool teacher" persona, as if they're sitting backwards on a chair to have a heart-to-heart. Back when I used to wait tables, the other waitresses and I would joke to each other about our "waitress voice", which were the personas we all subconsciously seemed to slip into when talking to customers. They varied somewhat, but they were all uniformly saccharine, with slightly higher-pitched voices, and with the general demeanor as though you were talking to someone you didn't think was very bright. Every LLM's writing "voice" reminds me of that.

“Waitress voice” is how I will classify this phenomenon from now on.

You know how I can tell when my friends have used AI to make LinkedIn posts?

When all of a sudden, they use emoji and phrases like “Exciting news!”

It’s not even that waitress voice is a negative thing. After all, it’s expected to communicate with our waitress voices in social situations when we don’t intimately know somebody.

Calling a customer support hotline? Shopping in person for something? Meeting your kid’s teacher for the first time? New coworker in their first meeting?

All of these are situations in which I find myself using my own waitress voice.

It’s a safe play for the LLMs to use it as well when they don’t know us.

But I find one common thread among the things AI tools are particularly suited to doing: do we even want to be doing these things? If all you want out of a meeting is the AI-generated summary, maybe that meeting could've been an email. If you're using AI to write your emails, and your recipient is using AI to read them, could you maybe cut out the whole thing entirely? If mediocre, auto-generated reports are passing muster, is anyone actually reading them? Or is it just middle-management busywork?

This is what I often brag about to people when I speak highly of LLMs.

These systems are incredible at the BS work. But they’re currently terrible with the stuff humans are good at.

I would love to live in a world where the technology industry widely valued making incrementally useful tools to improve peoples' lives, and were honest about what those tools could do, while also carefully weighing the technology's costs. But that's not the world we live in. Instead, we need to push back against endless tech manias and overhyped narratives, and oppose the "innovation at any cost" mindset that has infected the tech sector.

Again, thank you Molly White for printing such a poignant manifesto, seeing as I was having trouble articulating one of my own.

Innovation and growth at any cost are concepts which have yet to lead to a markedly better outcome for us all.

Let’s learn how to use these tools to make all our lives better, then let’s go live our lives.

2024-04-16 12:05:00

I am grateful — genuinely — for what Google and Apple and others did to make digital life easy over the past two decades. But too much ease carries a cost. I was lulled into the belief that I didn’t have to make decisions. Now my digital life is a series of monuments to the cost of combining maximal storage with minimal intention.

I have thousands of photos of my children but few that I’ve set aside to revisit. I have records of virtually every text I’ve sent since I was in college but no idea how to find the ones that meant something. I spent years blasting my thoughts to millions of people on X and Facebook even as I fell behind on correspondence with dear friends. I have stored everything and saved nothing.

This is an example of what AI, in its most optimistic state, could help us with.

We already see companies doing this. In the Apple ecosystem, the Photos widget is perhaps the best piece of software they’ve produced in years.

Every single day, I am presented with a slideshow of a friend who is celebrating their birthday, a photo of my kids from this day in history, or a memory that fits with an upcoming event.

All of that is powered by rudimentary¹ AI.

Imagine what could be done when you unleash a tuned large language model on our text histories. On our photos. On our app usage.

AI is only as good as the data it is provided. We’ve been trusting our devices with our most intimidate and vulnerable parts of ourselves for two decades.

This is supposed to be the payoff for the last twenty years of surveillance capitalism, I think?

All those secrets we share, all of those activities we’ve done online for the last twenty years, this will be used to somehow make our lives better?

The optimistic take is that we’ll receive better auto suggestions for text responses to messages that sound more like us. We’ll receive tailored traffic suggestions based on the way we drive. We’ll receive a “long lost” photo of our kid from a random trip to the museum.

The pessimistic take is that we’ll give companies the exact words which will cause us to take action. Our own words will be warped to get us to buy something we’ve convinced ourselves we need.

My hunch is that both takes will be true. We need to be smart enough to know how to use these tools to help ourselves and when to put them down.

I haven’t used Gmail as my primary email for years now², but this article is giving me more motivation to finally pull the plug and shrink my digital footprint.

This is not something the corporations did to me. This is something I did to myself. But I am looking now for software that insists I make choices rather than whispers that none are needed. I don’t want my digital life to be one shame closet after another. A new metaphor has taken hold for me: I want it to be a garden I tend, snipping back the weeds and nourishing the plants.

My wife and I spent the last week cleaning out our garage. It reached the point where the clutter accumulated so much that you could only park one car in it, strategically aligned so you could squeeze through a narrow pathway and open a door.

As of this morning, we donated ten boxes of items and are able to comfortably move around the space. While there is more to be done, the garage now feels more livable, useful, and enjoyable to be inside.

I was able to clear off my work bench and mount a pendant above it. The pendant is autographed by the entire starting defensive line of the 1998 Minnesota Vikings.

Every time I walk through my garage, I see it hanging there and it makes me so happy.

Our digital lives should be the same way.

My shame closet is a 4 terabyte hard drive containing every school assignment since sixth grade, every personal webpage I’ve ever built, multiple sporadic backups of various websites I am no longer in charge of, and scans of documents that ostensibly may mean something to me some day.

Scrolling through my drive, I’m presented with a completely chaotic list that is too overwhelming to sort through.

Just like how I cleaned out my garage, I aught to do the same to this junk drawer.

I’ll revert to Ezra’s garden metaphor here: keep a small, curated garden that contains the truly important and meaningful digital items to you. Prune the rest.

(Shout out to my friend Dana for sharing this with me. I think she figured out my brand.)

2024-04-13 22:52:09

Because we’re social animals we tend to go along with the trend, and because we live under capitalist acceleration the trend is always one way, because our system only has one gear. We also have the ability to edit our memories, so can find ways to convince ourselves that this was all our own choice. That very same adaptability, though, prevents us from using the new tech to save time, because – under a system with a growth fetish – we’ll be expected to adapt to a new normal in which we have to do more stuff and get more stuff in the same amount of time.

The dark irony then, is that it is the introduction of the new tech that inspires the subsequent irritation at its absence. Twenty years ago nobody fidgeted in agitation if they had to wait ten minutes for a taxi. Now you’ll check your phone incessantly if the Uber is running three minutes later than you expected. And god forbid the driver cancels, because you’ve probably algorithmically planned everything down to the last minute. We increasingly live a ‘just in time’ life because, at a systemic level, there’s pressure to pack in as much stuff as possible at both a consumption and production level. We’re just as dissatisfied, only busier.

The more I dig into the reasons behind my anxiety and depression, I keep coming back to some form of “it’s the system, maaaan.”

And that thought often leads me down two paths:

The first path is wallowing in anger around our horrible healthcare system, our completely corrupt political system, and our inability to have a rational conversation around solutions to all these problems (often with people whom I actually deeply care about).

The second path is spinning around solutions for these problems. How can I tone down the heat in conversations with my loved ones? How can I push back against a culture hellbent on incessant and mindless consumption?

How do we all just slow down?

2024-04-12 11:50:44

Lately, I’ve sometimes turned to ChatGPT for research. But I’ve stopped having it generate prose to stand in for my own. If my writing is an expression of my particular consciousness, I’m the only one capable of it. This applies, to be clear, to GPT-3’s line about holding hands with my sister. In real life, she and I were never so sentimental. That’s precisely why I kept writing over the AI’s words with my own: The essay is equally about what AI promises us and how it falls short. As for Sudowrite’s proposal to engineer an entire novel from a few keywords, forget it. If I wanted a product to deliver me a story on demand, I’d just go to a bookstore.

But what if I, the writer, don’t matter? I joined a Slack channel for people using Sudowrite and scrolled through the comments. One caught my eye, posted by a mother who didn’t like the bookstore options for stories to read to her little boy. She was using the product to compose her own adventure tale for him. Maybe, I realized, these products that are supposedly built for writers will actually be of more interest to readers.

I can imagine a world in which many of the people employed as authors, people like me, limit their use of AI or decline to use it altogether. I can also imagine a world—and maybe we’re already in it—in which a new generation of readers begins using AI to produce the stories they want. If this type of literature satisfies readers, the question of whether it can match human-produced writing might well be judged irrelevant.

I think this is a good example of exactly why I think software engineers are in trouble for many roles.

People hire nerds to get computers to do things for them. Things that are not especially novel to those of us who program computers, but extremely valuable to those who cannot.

Will AI be able to create bespoke, artisanal software better than a creative engineer?

Will AI be able to create bespoke, artisanal music better than a create musician?

Maybe. Maybe not.

But it will surely be able to create adequate software and music faster than humans can.

I’m afraid the days of being paid insane amounts of money because I can get computers to do what I want are approaching an end.

2024-04-11 21:53:49

The reason that I’ve been looking for positive future visions is because I feel that the environmental and social movements here in the UK seem to be increasingly pessimistic, driven more by fear and despair than by hope and inspiration. Naturally these movements always have their roots in the challenges that we face, but when I first got involved as a teenager there seemed to be an atmosphere of genuine hope. That hope was inspiring and energising, a wonderful thing to be a part of and hugely motivational. In the last few years though, I have been disheartened to hear many people I admire and respect confess to me in private that they have given up hope.

And I don’t blame them. I have struggled with hope too. It’s been a very long time since we had a political leader who could inspire us with a meaningful vision for a better future, and despite repeated claims by activists that “we already have all of the solutions“, the elephant in the room is that they don’t seem to be working. Even Patagonia's founder, Yvon Chouinard, when changing the company's mission statement to “We're in business to save our home planet”, apparently also said in private that it’s because he thinks it's already too late for humanity.

To me, this is an untenable situation. Hope is the fuel that drives life forward. It's what gets us out of bed in the morning, enables us to face the struggles of life and gives us all something to aim for. Without hope, there is only darkness.

As we travel through the vast expanse of space on our tiny blue marble called Earth, we must remember that it is the tiny points of light out there in the darkness of the universe that give birth to all the wonders of life. Hope is light, and we only need a little bit for great things to happen.

I am constantly inspired by Tom Greenwood’s posts. This one was chock full of new-to-me concepts like New Earth, the Age of Aquarius, the ancient Indian Yuga Cycle, and Tom’s vision called Harmonium.

I also like his three step process for reigniting hope (allow yourself to dream, work on yourself, move forward). This is the precise process I’ve been undergoing in my own life since getting laid off at the beginning of the year.

2024-04-06 20:16:36

So much of being Jewish is explaining yourself. There's only about 16 million Jews on Earth, a pittance of the global population, which means that, unless a Jew in the United States stays in the tiniest of bubbles—and, look, it is possible—you at some point invariably end up explaining yourself. Yes, usually it's to well-meaning people who just want to know Why is your new year on a different day? and Why are your holidays always moving around? and How come some of you don't eat pork but some of you do?

And sometimes it's not as simple as that. It's also Why do some of you wear funny hats? and Why do so many Jews work in media? and Why are so many of you rich? and What's up with that George Soros? Even the well-intentioned questions get exhausting after a while, as does smiling through the 10,000th person asking if you had a good Yom Kippur—it's a day of fasting and atonement, it's never good—because being a polite, kind, unthreatening Jew feels like the only defense against people thinking we [checks notes] control all the banks and have western civilization in the sites of our Jewish space lasers.

Is this a uniquely Jewish feeling? No. Of course not. Exhaustion at having to explain yourself or just feeling out of place are not experiences that belong to the Jews any more than the story of Noah and the flood does. But it is nice to not have to explain sometimes, to just feel normal. I think that's what still makes the "Krusty is a Jew" episode so special for me. Nothing is explained. Nothing is given context. Jews are just Jews, nothing we do is clarified or justified—and if you don't get it, well, we've got five more jokes coming, so buckle up and jot it down so you look it up later. And that might be the most Jewish part of it all.

2024-04-06 20:05:42

For cradle Catholics like me, death is forever a part of how you see the world: how you pray, how you celebrate, how you tell stories and create art. But that doesn’t make your awareness of your inevitable death any easier. The thought of not being with my wife and my daughters, of never seeing my family again—these thoughts overtake me with an ambiguous frisson, something like the rush of ecstatic exhaustion I feel somewhere near the top of the hill.

I won’t run forever. But running feels like a practice inherited from some ancient tradition, something primal and odd. I run in the heat to run into the summer, to keep the heat going as the evening light begins to dim.

Ugh, I really need to stop reading powerful essays about running.

Eventually, one of them will make me pick up a new pair of shoes and get in a couple laps around the block.

2024-04-03 23:42:00

I heard nothing but good things about Lina Khan when she was announced as the chair of the FTC, and I think she did a tremendous job during this interview with Jon Stewart.

Jon and Lina break down the various lawsuits that the FTC is currently engaged in, not just with big tech companies, but also pharmaceutical and manufacturing companies.

I found it interesting when Jon mentioned that he tried to have Lina on his podcast when he was with Apple TV+, but Apple told him no.

I get it, but also, why would you have hired Jon Stewart in the first place? You’ve seen his show, right? Of course he’s gonna call a spade a spade, one of the few reputable media personalities¹ who will not hesitate to bite the hand that feeds.

It’s also interesting that the FTC is often outgunned by the legal representation of the companies against which they pursue litigation, sometimes at a ratio of 10:1.

2024-04-03 11:38:32

Listening to him name exactly what he liked about the wine turned up the hairs on the back of my neck. Suddenly, my own experience of the wine felt deeper and more satisfying. I wanted to know: How was he able to identify these flavors?

He told me the secret was to blindly smell things and try to label them. You see, the part of your brain that’s responsible for smells is naturally mute. It’s called the olfactory bulb, and it’s an ancient fist of neurons just behind your eyes. It has only indirect backroad connections to the parts of the brain that control language, like Broca’s area. So, even though you might have an easy time knowing whether or not you like a scent, it’s not easy to label that scent with a word. It’ll feel like groping through a dark closet for something you know is there, but can’t quite find.

I did not know this, and now I will be nerding out on ways to train my taste buds.

But this article isn’t just about developing your sense of taste. It’s also about defining your style.

In much the same way the author describes how he is, for the first time in his life, articulating what he likes as a writer, I am starting to do the same with several areas of my life.

Case in point: I have a huge collection of quotes that you can see on the main page of this site.

I just fed all of them through ChatGPT with this prompt:

I’ve attached a series of quotes which are meaningful to me. First off, tell me the consistent themes you recognize across all of the quotes. Then, tell me what this says about the things that inspire me.

Here is the result:

Across all the quotes, several consistent themes emerge:

1. Growth and Self-improvement: Many quotes focus on the importance of personal growth, overcoming challenges, and continuous improvement.
2. Perseverance and Resilience: There's a strong theme of enduring hardship, staying strong in the face of adversity, and the importance of perseverance.
3. Wisdom and Perspective: The quotes often reflect on acquiring wisdom, gaining perspective, and understanding life's deeper meanings and truths.
4. Happiness and Contentment: There's an emphasis on finding happiness, being content with what one has, and the pursuit of joy in life.
5. Community and Relationships: Several quotes highlight the value of community, the importance of relationships, and the strength that comes from vulnerability and connection with others.

These themes suggest that you are inspired by ideas related to personal growth, resilience in the face of adversity, the pursuit of wisdom and understanding, the importance of happiness and contentment, and the value of community and relationships. It paints a picture of someone who values both internal development and external connections, seeking both personal fulfillment and meaningful interactions with others.

:extremely Marge Simpson voice: “Well, duh.”

(For real though, pretty awesome that we have a tool that is exceptionally good at summarizing large amounts of data and picking out patterns throughout the dataset.)

2024-04-03 03:01:26

This site contains 29257 unique* 88x31 buttons that I scraped from the GeoCities archives compiled by the incredible ARCHIVE TEAM before GeoCities' demise in late 2009.

I shouldn’t go through all ~30,000 images to find the ones I made for Tim’s World or That’s Unpossible, right?

…right?

2024-04-02 12:07:15

Whenever I talk about a knowledge win via robots on the socials or with humans, someone snarks, “Well, how do you know it’s true? How do you know the robot isn’t hallucinating?” Before I explain my process, I want to point out that I don’t believe humans are snarking because they want to know the actual answer; I think they are scared. They are worried about AI taking over the world or folks losing their job, and while these are valid worries, it’s not the robot’s responsibility to tell the truth; it’s your job to understand what is and isn’t true.

You’re being changed by the things you see and read for your entire life, and hopefully, you’ve developed a filter through which this information passes. Sometimes, it passes through without incident, but other times, it’s stopped, and you wonder, “Is this true?”

Knowing when to question truth is fundamental to being a human. Unfortunately, we’ve spent the last forty years building networks of information that have made it pretty easy to generate and broadcast lies at scale. When you combine the internet with the fact that many humans just want their hopes and fears amplified, you can understand why the real problem isn’t robots doing it better; it’s the humans getting worse.

I’m working on an extended side quest and in the past few hours of pairing with ChatGPT, I’ve found myself constantly second guessing a large portion of the decisions and code that the AI produced.

This article pairs well with this one I read today about a possible social exploit that relies on frequently hallucinated package names.

Simon Willison writes:

Bar Lanyado noticed that LLMs frequently hallucinate the names of packages that don’t exist in their answers to coding questions, which can be exploited as a supply chain attack.

He gathered 2,500 questions across Python, Node.js, Go, .NET and Ruby and ran them through a number of different LLMs, taking notes of any hallucinated packages and if any of those hallucinations were repeated.

One repeat example was “pip install huggingface-cli” (the correct package is “huggingface[cli]”). Bar then published a harmless package under that name in January, and observebd 30,000 downloads of that package in the three months that followed.

I’ll be honest: during my side quest here, I’ve 100% blindly run npm install on packages without double checking official documentation.

These large language models truly are mirrors to our minds, showing all sides of our personalities from our most fit to our most lazy.

2024-04-01 10:40:00

I’ve owned my own home for close to five years now, and I’m slowly coming around to the idea of making major changes to it in order to make it feel like it is mine.

During the pandemic, we poured a patio in the front of our house and spent nearly every day sitting on it.

In fact, that patio led to the formation of several enduring relationships with my neighbors.

I find it tough to shake the renter’s mindset, where I can’t do anything to affect the “resale value” of my home because… well, maybe the next owner won’t buy it because of the deep purple walls in the basement.

But the more I lean into tweaking what we have, the more I feel comfortable, productive, and happy. I’m incredibly grateful to have property which I can modify however I see fit to improve the wary of life for my family and myself.

This article also made me reflect on how toxic it can be to covet other people’s homes:

We should always remember that the purpose of a home is for living and that decoration, for many, is a form of self-expression. Media literacy, which has improved with regard to beauty and fashion content, lags when it comes to architecture and interior design. Changing that begins with realizing that most homes don’t actually look like hotel lobbies or real estate listings. They, rather joyfully, look like homes—dust bunnies and all.

2024-04-01 10:24:00

Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two-sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

If you’ve spent much time in the same tech bubbles as me this past year, you’ve probably come across this article already.

At a bare minimum, I’m sure you’ve seen the phrase “enshittification.”

Once you understand the concept, you do start to see the pattern unfold around you constantly. ¹

While there are countless examples of this natural platform decay within our virtual world, what about the physical world?

Is enshittification simply human nature, an inescapable fate for any collaborative endeavor above a certain size?

And if enshittification is not inevitable, what are the forces that lead to it, and how can we combat them when building our own communities?

2024-03-29 12:27:48

I’m a sucker for this style of post. This one in particular is jam packed with so many great pieces of advice that I had to read it three times before sharing it.

Here’s the very first item on her list. If it speaks to you, take ten minutes and thoughtfully consider the other 100 items.

1. You are overly obedient. You not only do what people tell you to do, but find it hard to imagine any world other than the one they present to you. Spend more time thinking about what you want, in isolation from the pressures of the world. (Keep this in mind while you read the rest of this very prescriptive document.)

2024-03-27 23:59:00

I hate the internet.

...that's a lie. I love it, but I hate the algorithms.

That's also a lie... I love the algorithms.

I watched this video on the plane ride back from Nickelodeon Resort yesterday, and I have to say, it got me.

Hank's assessment of how the algorithms deployed by social networks come up short in actually giving us what we want is spot on.

It's why I love how many friends are spinning up their own newsletters. And this new newsletter was a no brainer instasubscribe.

Ever since my buddy Paul gifted me a premium subscription to Garbage Day, I've been a voracious newsletter subscriber. They do a great job of filling the void that Google Reader left in my life.¹

This website has been my way of curating the internet, sharing things I've found that interest me, but maybe I should start a newsletter myself and do things in both places.

Should I tell my impostor syndrome to shove it and start my own newsletter, y'all?

2024-03-27 23:50:00

The algorithms¹ blessed me with this video last week, and I find myself coming back to it when I'm doing deep work.

I also am enjoying his Rammstein version, and I am eagerly looking forward to checking out the Linkin Park and Avenged Sevenfold ones soon.

If I could play the piano, this is absolutely the kind of stuff I would want to play.

2024-03-24 23:55:00

One can of course relate to money in pathological ways. For those whose standard of value resides not in a conception of their fully-lived life (a la the builder), but in the impressions or judgments of others (be it God or society or their parents or some other “drill sergeant”), money means whatever it purportedly means to those others—status, in some circles, or wicked materialism in others, or in still others, “privilege” to be forgiven with obligate philanthropy. 

By contrast, a builder’s relationship to money is not mediated by any of these external intermediaries. She understands that money is a medium of value exchange, and what she values is set by the life she wants to build and the world she wants to live in. 

There are also simpler pathologies, such as when fear or insecurity drives founders to pursue short-term monetary gains over the longer-term health and durability of their business. But such financial anxieties can be diagnosed and remedied by re-orienting toward the overarching goal of building one’s best life, which presumably includes a healthy and durable version of one’s business (or whatever one is building) as part of it.

Quite a useful way to reframe money and its importance to a well considered life.

2024-03-24 22:44:58

I’m an unabashed fan of Simon Willison’s blog. Some of his posts admittedly go over my head, but I needed to share this post because it gets across the point I have been trying to articulate myself about AI and how I use it.

In the post, Simon talks about wanting to get a polygon object created that represents the boundary of Adirondack Park, the largest park in the United States (which occupies a fifth of the whole state!).

That part in and of itself is nerdy and a fun read, but this section here made my neck hurt from nodding aggressively in agreement:

Isn’t this a bit trivial? Yes it is, and that’s the point. This was a five minute sidequest. Writing about it here took ten times longer than the exercise itself.

I take on LLM-assisted sidequests like this one dozens of times a week. Many of them are substantially larger and more useful. They are having a very material impact on my work: I can get more done and solve much more interesting problems, because I’m not wasting valuable cycles figuring out ogr2ogr invocations or mucking around with polygon libraries.

Not to mention that I find working this way fun! It feels like science fiction every time I do it. Our AI-assisted future is here right now and I’m still finding it weird, fascinating and deeply entertaining.

Frequent readers of this blog know that a big part of the work I’ve been doing since being laid off is in reflecting on what brings me joy and happiness.

Work over the last twelve years of my life represented a small portion of something that used to bring me a ton of joy (building websites and apps). But somewhere along the way, building websites was no longer enjoyable to me.

I used to love learning new frameworks, expanding the arsenal of tools in my toolbox to solve an ever expanding set of problems. But spending my free time developing a new skill with a new tool began to feel like I was working but not getting paid.

And that notion really doesn’t sit well with me. I still love figuring out how computers work. It’s just nice to do so without the added pressure of building something to make someone else happy.

Which brings me to the “side quest” concept Simon describes in this post, which is something I find myself doing nearly every day with ChatGPT.

When I was going through my album artwork on Plex, my first instinct was to go to ChatGPT and have it help me parse through Plex’s internal thumbnail database to build me a view which shows all the artwork on a single webpage.

It took me maybe 10 minutes of iterating with ChatGPT, and now I know more about the internal workings of Plex’s internal media caching database than I ever would have before.

Before ChatGPT, I would’ve had to spend several hours pouring over open source code or out of date documentation. In other words: I would’ve given up after the first Google search.

It feels like another application of Morovec’s paradox. Like Gary Casparov observed with chess bots, it feels like the winning approach here is one where LLMs and humans work in tandem.

Simon ends his post with this:

One of the greatest misconceptions concerning LLMs is the idea that they are easy to use. They really aren’t: getting great results out of them requires a great deal of experience and hard-fought intuition, combined with deep domain knowledge of the problem you are applying them to. I use these things every day. They help me take on much more interesting and ambitious problems than I could otherwise. I would miss them terribly if they were no longer available to me.

I could not agree more.

I find it hard to explain to people how to use LLMs without more than an hour of sitting down and going through a bunch of examples of how they work.

These tools are insanely cool and insanely powerful when you bring your own knowledge to them.

They simply parrot back what it believes to be the most statistically correct response to whatever prompt was provided.

I haven’t been able to come up with a good analogy for that sentiment yet, because the closest I can come up with is “it’s like a really good personal assistant”, which feels like the same analogy the tech industry always uses to market any new tool.

You wouldn’t just send a personal assistant off to go do your job for you. A great assistant is there to compile data, to make suggestions, to be a sounding board, but at the end of the day, you are the one accountable for the final output.

If you copy and paste ChatGPT’s responses into a court brief and it contains made up cases, that’s on you.

If you deploy code that contains glaring vulnerabilities, that’s on you.

Maybe I shouldn’t be lamenting that I lost my joy of learning new things about computers, because I sure have been filled with joy learning how to best use LLMs these past couple years.

2024-03-21 11:06:00

I don't know if I'm one of the only weirdos that still uses Plex and listens to MP3s, but dammit, a carefully curated music collection of which I feel some ownership feels critically important to me.

I have started going back in and using the rating systems to rate entire albums.¹ Because this seems like a natural follow up question, I basically only give albums one of three ratings²:

• ★★★★☆ (4 stars): This is an important album to me, but I don't wanna hear it every day.
• ★★★★★ (5 stars): This album is everything right now.
• ★★★★⯨ (4.5 stars): Somewhere in between the two. It is either a 5 becoming a 4, or a 4 on its way to fivedom³.

Doing this gives me the ability to create a smart playlist containing all of the albums with at least a 4.5 star rating.

This morning while getting ready, I uncharacteristically grabbed my iPad and used Plexamp to listen to that playlist on shuffle.

The first thing I noticed on the much larger screen was how awful the album artwork looked for many of my albums.

They looked quite pixelated and blurry. Some of them looked like scans where you could clearly see stickers and thin, diagonal white lines on the sides.

I decided this must be something I rectify tonight.

I've updated the artwork for maybe 50 albums so far, and I'm stunned at how much of a difference it makes to have nice looking album art.

I've had some of these albums for decades now. When I added artwork back in the mid 2000s, the best I could hope for in many cases was a 256x256px JPG that I could find on a message board.

At the same time, the past few weeks gave me several opportunities to pay attention to these albums in a way I never have before.⁴

For most of my life, I generally used music to distract me from my thoughts. I would occasionally listen to the lyrics and look up the meaning of a song, but those details were often secondary to the overall feeling of a track.

Something in the past couple of years changed that in me, though, and now I have been enjoying music on so many more levels. What was an artist going through when they made a song? What was the creative process like? What do these words mean to the artist?

The best system I found was to use the Plex web app on my laptop to select new album art, and then use the Plexamp iOS app to move from song to song, finding songs which had low res album art.

I noticed after a few changes that when I saved the album art on my laptop, it instantly reflected on my phone.

So of course, I started hovering over the "save" button on my laptop, then glanced down at my phone while clicking.

And what you'd see was a cool cross fade where the image got sharper. Cleaner. Fresher. Way more detailed. Way less pixelated.

It allowed me to be a bit of an ophthalmologist, covering one eye, flipping between two different lens strengths and asking whether I preferred option 1 or option 2.

Polishing up my music collection, cleaning up this blog... these were things I used to do for fun.

They were mindless activities. A chance to express myself without feeling any judgement.⁵ To feel accomplished and organized, a little slice of order within a chaotic life filled with incessant disorder.

I have been so busy for the past twelve years that I forgot what fun really looked like.

I thought fun was learning how to build a company. To understand what it takes to build successful and impactful software.

And in many ways, those things were fun. It is really cool to make computers do complex stuff, to build tech that makes people's lives better. It brings me so much joy.

But that's not the only thing that's fun in the world. And I might have done a bit better at relegating those pursuits to my professional life, and then figured out a way to pursue other joyful things outside of that.

It's weird coming back to my media library after essentially neglecting it for most of my adult life. It feels like opening a time capsule, but then jumping down into it and living amongst the decade old cruft.

But it feels good to clean it out and use it again. To treat it like my house instead of a history exhibit.

2024-03-20 11:07:06

That’s why your goal should be to be about 80%-85% utilized. You may have a less productive day here or there, but this slight inefficiency will prevent larger failures when fires inevitably pop up from time to time.

My secret to getting so much done is rarely operating at full capacity. My philosophy on this is simple—if you take care of the days, the years take care of themselves.

We know that this is right intrinsically, but many of us choose to ignore it to our own detriment. If I told a runner to sprint at 100% effort, they might be able to sprint for a minute before they would have to slow down or stop completely. But, if told them to run at 75% of their max effort, they could go on for hours. Same person. Same body. The only difference is what capacity they are operating at.

So instead of trying to get everything done, the better solution is to get the right things done (at the right capacity). But figuring out what the right things are is a challenge all its own.

A few years ago, I heard similar advice, but it used a car’s RPM gauge as the example.

There’s a reason your car can go up to 140 MPH: if you created a car that ran in the red all the time, it would break down all the time.

Most of us drive our cars in an optimally designed range so it can last way longer.

So it goes with our own bodies. We aren’t meant to sprint for :checks calendar: 12 years straight with no breaks.

2024-03-18 23:20:23

I’ve been dreaming of building my own electronics since I was a kid. I spent so many afternoons at Radio Shack, and even tried my hand at the occasional kit, with limited success. Every few years in adulthood, I’ve given it another try, observing a steady downward trend in difficulty.

I’m telling you: we’re at a special moment here. The labor savings of open source, the composability, the fun: all of it has come to hardware. You can build things that solve real problems for yourself. I first imagined my heat pump devices over a year ago, and I have been frustrated they didn’t exist every day since.

Now my dreams are real, and the largest energy consumer in the house can be automated and remotely controlled.

That’s amazing.

As soon as I gain employment again, the very first thing I’m buying is a 3D printer, and I’m gonna start building stuff.

I don’t quite know what yet.

But I’ll find something.

2024-03-18 11:30:54

If, on the other hand, you view freelancing as a path to real business ownership, your first step is to recognize that the billable hour is a binkie that keeps you in amateur purgatory for the entire time you rely on it.  A kind of Hotel California with timesheets.

And that’s really my only call to action — the recognition as the first step.

I’m not suggesting you fire all of your hourly clients or do anything dramatic.  I’m not even suggesting any immediate change.  Rather, I’m just suggesting that you change your viewpoint.

If you want to be a professional business owner, you need to become an expert in delivering outcomes that add value.  And you’ll never achieve that without enough reps to flat price your work and enough skin in the game to feel it when you get it wrong.

I found it difficult to do “value-based pricing” when running my agency.

But I think it took a little time away to really understand my value. It was never about programming stuff. It was about making something that could turn $1 into $2.

And knowing what to spend that $1 on.

2024-03-17 21:22:41

Like the programming path, the legible independent ambition path works for some people, but not you. The things you do when pushed to Think Big and Be Independent produce incidental learning at best, but never achieve anything directly. They can’t, because you made up the goals to impress other people. This becomes increasingly depressing, as you fail at your alleged goals and at your real goal of impressing people. 

So what do we do then? Give up on having goals? Only by their definition. What seems to work best for us is leaning into annoyance or even anger at problems in the world, and hate-fixing them. 

You’ve always hated people being wrong, and it turns out a lot of things can be defined as “wrong” if you have the right temperament. Women’s pants have tiny pockets that won’t fit my phone? Wrong. TSA eating hours of my life for no gain? Wrong. Medical-grade fatigue? Wrong. People dying of preventable diseases? Extremely wrong. And wrong things are satisfying to fix.

Yesterday, I was doing the dishes when I saw a mostly eaten yogurt cup laying in the sink.

As I started rinsing it out, I wondered whether I should throw it in the garbage or the recycling bin.

I thought about this quiz game that my county has on their website where they present various household items and you have to say whether it can go in the recycling, compost, or garbage.

The last time I played it, I found myself just getting mad.

Mad that I was getting questions wrong.

Mad that I can’t tell if this quiz is up to date with the latest recycling advice.

It occurred to me, while rinsing the cup, that I don’t really like learning most things for fun. I learn them because I like to ensure I have the best chance at complying with the rules.

I like passing through the hoops that were laid out for me.

I liked school so much because there was a clearly defined metric for success and failure.

But as I’m now 36 years old, success doesn’t really get defined in that way anymore.

I am glad this article surfaced in my Instapaper queue this morning, because I think it’s mostly the article I would’ve written for myself.

I really enjoyed the author’s advice on determining authentic motivation, viewing procrastination as a workers’ strike, and realizing that your taste will often outpace your abilities.

2024-03-17 11:33:24

We tried to hang a pretty picture on a wall, but accidentally opened a small hole. This hole caused the entire building to collapse. While we did not intend to create a hole, and feel terrible for all the people impacted by the collapse, we believe it’s also worth investigating what failures of compliance testing & building design could allow such a small hole to cause such big damage.

Multiple parties involved, myself included, are still students and/or do not code professionally. How could we have been allowed to do this by accident?

It’s certainly no laughing matter, neither to the people who rely on npm nor the kids who did this.

But man, it is comical to see the Law of Unintended Consequences when it decides to rear its ugly head.

I applaud the students who had the original idea and decided to see what would happen if you installed every single npm package at once. It’s a good question, to which the answer is: uncover a fairly significant issue with how npm maintains integrity across all of its packages.

But I guess the main reason I’m sharing this article is as a case study on how hard it is to moderate a system.

I’m still a recovering perfectionist, and the older I get, the more I come across examples (both online like this and also in my real life) where you can do everything right and still end up losing big.

The best thing you can do when you see something like this is to pat your fellow human on the back and say, “man, that really sucks, I’m sorry.”

The worst thing you can do, as evidenced in this story, is to cuss out some teenagers.

2024-03-15 23:56:00

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, announced plans to build a new data center in Rosemount, Minnesota. The more than 700,000 square foot center will be located along County Road 42, just east of the Dakota County Technical College.

During an announcement Thursday, officials revealed the project had been under wraps for several years. They called the secret project "Project Bigfoot."

This will exist roughly a mile from my house.

It’s a lot of feelings, to be sure.

A quibble I have with this report is that I’m not entirely sure we can say with a straight face that Meta is a great representative of “emerging tech”. What does that phrase even mean?

But maybe I’m just being a NIMBY. A hundred jobs at this data center isn’t bad, Minnesota’s cold season¹ is perfect for naturally cooling these systems, and the folks I know who work at the city are extremely capable and thorough; they would not let something like this go through if they didn’t do their diligence regarding impacts to our various shared infrastructure.

So I guess, uh, welcome, Meta? I hope y’all do, as our Iowan neighbors reportedly claim, “step up.”

2024-03-15 11:36:06

Seabound’s carbon capture technology diverts a ship’s exhaust gas into a container full of small pebbles of calcium oxide, which chemically react with CO2 in the exhaust gas to form calcium carbonate. In other words, we make limestone onboard ships, effectively locking the CO2 into small pebbles. When the ship returns to port, we offload the limestone and either: 1) sell it for use as a building material, or 2) recycle the pebbles to separate the CO2 from the calcium oxide so that we can reuse the calcium oxide to capture more CO2 on another ship, and then sell the pure CO2 for clean fuel production or geological sequestration.

Our process is unique because we only capture the CO2 onboard and leave it locked in limestone, rather than trying to separate and liquefy the pure CO2 from the limestone onboard as well. These steps of separation and liquefaction are typically the most complicated, expensive, and energy-intensive for carbon capture technologies, which is why we’ve shifted them to shore where we can leverage economies of scale and land-based energy infrastructure.

This is the sort of solution I want to be a part of. How cool of a concept is this?!

2024-03-15 11:29:52

My official position is a fact followed by an opinion: The fact is that iOS is built to work best when you just let the system handle things for you. The opinion is that I don’t particularly care how you use your own phone because it impacts me precisely 0%.

I’ve only recently noticed a direct impact on the correlation between my own acceptance of a person’s flaws and the improvement of my own mental health.

There are several posts on here about “letting go” and “dropping fucks” and whatnot that speak to this exact thing, but Matt’s explanation here is beautiful.

It doesn’t really matter why you swipe up on all your apps. If it makes you happy, and you don’t mind the slight hit to your UX by way of a tiny battery drain and longer initial load times, then by all means, you do you.

Reminds me of the Bluey episode where Bluey and Bingo are playing Grannies, and Bingo thinks Grannies can Floss (the dance).

After a bitter fight with her about it, Bluey’s mom says, “Well, do you want to be right, or do you want to keep playing the game?”

2024-03-14 04:38:54

I gotta find the video from this and watch it myself, because essentially every single thing mentioned in this article is what I wanna build a podcast around.

Let’s start with this:

As Kwan first explained, modern capitalism only worked because we compelled people to work, rather than forced them to do so.

“We had to change the story we told ourselves and say that ‘your value is your job,” he told the audience. “You are only worth what you can do, and we are no longer beings with an inherent worth. And this is why it’s so hard to find fulfillment in this current system. The system works best when you’re not fulfilled.”

Boy, this cuts to the heart of the depressive conversations I’ve had with myself this past year.

Finding a job sucks because you have to basically find a way to prove to someone that you are worth something. It can be empowering to some, sure, but I am finding the whole process to be extremely demoralizing and dehumanizing.

“Are you trying to use [AI] to create the world you want to live in? Are you trying to use it to increase value in your life and focus on the things that you really care about? Or are you just trying to, like, make some money for the billionaires, you know?”  Scheinert asked the audience. “And if someone tells you, there’s no side effect. It’s totally great, ‘get on board’ — I just want to go on the record and say that’s terrifying bullshit. That’s not true. And we should be talking really deeply about how to carefully, carefully deploy this stuff,” he said.

I’ve literally said the words, “I don’t want to make rich people richer” no fewer than a hundred times since January.

There is so much to unpack around this article, but I think I’m sharing it now as a stand in for a thesis around the podcast I am going to start in the next month.

We need to be having this conversation more often and with as many people as possible. Let’s do our best right now at the precipice of these new technologies to make them useful for ourselves, and not just perpetuate the worst parts of our current systems.

2024-03-13 10:25:03

The era of social-media monopolies has been unhealthy for our collective digital existence. The Internet at its best should be weird, energetic, and exciting—featuring both homegrown idiosyncrasy and sudden trends that flash supernova-bright before exploding into the novel elements that spur future ideas and generate novel connections.

This exuberance was suppressed by the dominance of a small number of social-media networks that consolidated and controlled so much of online culture for so many years. Things will be better once this dominance wanes.

In the end, TikTok’s biggest legacy might be less about its current moment of world-conquering success, which will pass, and more about how, by forcing social-media giants like Facebook to chase its model, it will end up liberating the social Internet.

I saw Cal reference this article in his most recent post, and I’m glad he mentioned it because I must’ve missed it a couple years back.

I have been grossed out by TikTok’s blatant predatory behavior ever since hearing how their algorithms work.

Sure, most major social media companies have resorted to similar tactics, but there was something brazen about the way TikTok does it which feels egregious.

Cal’s analysis seems spot on to me. TikTok represents what happens when you’ve won the race to the bottom, or when the dog catches the tire.

As soon as you’ve got the thing, what else is there to do? Where else is there to go?

It’s all sizzle and no steak.

I’m sick of having my attention stolen from me under the guise of “connectedness.”¹ Real connections require compromise, empathy, and growth. Sure, I get some dopamine hits when I see a funny or enraging video, but I don’t seem to get much else.

2024-03-13 10:06:28

This rally is so different because no one is beating around the bush anymore. It’s not about technology. It’s not about use cases or improving the world. It’s just, “More people buy, number go up.” The veil has been lifted and we all know it. It’s a momentum trade plain and simple. We turned a bunch of computers into a casino and then dressed it up as something else. 

But people know the truth. I got my hands on an early copy of Nat Eliason’s upcoming book Crypto Confidential that convinced me of this point. The book, which provides an insider’s perspective on the 2021 crypto bull run, made me realize how much of a game crypto is. More importantly, it made me realize how many people know it’s a game as well. They understand the rules and they play accordingly. They know they can get scammed. They know they could lose it all. Nevertheless, they still play.

The article goes on to talk about reasons why people gamble knowing they have little to no chance of winning, and honestly, it’s depressing but rational.

2024-03-13 00:14:00

I love the hottest take. 😂

(For what it's worth: I am starting to come around on pineapple on pizza, especially if it's part of a really spicy pizza.

A couple years back, I tried to watch all the MCU movies in release order. I gave up after Winter Soldier. It was just too much. I'm glad superhero movies exist, but they're not my cup of tea these days.)

2024-03-12 21:19:00

I just released a feature to this site where blog posts can now be tagged with any number of tags.

You can then read all the posts that are tagged as confidence or music or programming or whatever.

I was extremely inspired by kottke.org's recent redesign. The idea of turning your blog into your own social media stream-looking thing strikes me as one of those design decisions that feels revolutionary and obvious at the same time. I will no doubt try to do something similar to this site right here.

But as I think through the best place to start, I'm resisting my urge to just blanket redesign the site without a plan. And the first step of that plan is to do the tedious work of going through my archives and adding tags to the old posts.

Tags aren't exactly a revolutionary new feature. It took me about a half hour to implement the basics, and then another day or so of tweaking the process of adding them to each post so I can do it quickly.

The reason I wanted to share this as a post is because one unintended consequence of going through this process was [pause for sarcastic and dramatic effect] ... anxiety!

Because of course the creation of a a feature for my site that is read by an exceptionally low number of people must result in getting way into my head about it.

Yesterday, I spent about an hour going through my old posts and adding some tags to them.

As I got deeper into the archives, I kept thinking of tags that would've been great to add to posts I had already added tags earlier.

I found myself getting mad at myself for not being optimized up front and just having a tag list to choose from.

Well guess what, Tim? There’s no way you’ll know what tags you want to add until you’ve added all the tags!

Just do your best, man. Even getting half way is an amazing leap forward. Just keep moving forward.

It's proving to be surprisingly hard for me to not beat myself up over this tag system, which again, is supposed to be fun, you goober!

Here's the best case scenario from doing all this work: maybe these tags will help me articulate the overall themes I cover on my site, to identify the topics I’ve been interested in throughout the last fifteen-ish years.

Here's the worst case scenario from doing all this work: complete and total indifference from the universe.

Note to self: just enjoy getting a chance to go through the clutter of your site and clean it up. It’s fun! Add whatever tags you think will help, and if you get an idea about a better tag later, go back and look it up then!

As you can see, I'm still working on not letting anxiety cripple me from starting and completing a project.

Why am I even stressing about this?

Just go have some fun with your tag thing.

It makes you happy.

That should be enough.

2024-03-12 20:42:30

In 2020, when Hicks set the fastest known supported women’s time in a roughly 90-mile challenge called Nolan’s 14, which involves hiking and running 14 14,000-foot mountains, Dauwalter paced her through the night, telling jokes and stories to make the time pass. Around midnight, she asked Hicks if she wanted a bite of pizza and pulled out a slice wrapped in tinfoil from her pack.

The legend of Courtney continues to grow. If you are unfamiliar with the accomplishments of this Minnesota native, go look them up.

Just reading this article makes me want to dust off my running shoes and get a hundred miler under my belt.

2024-03-12 11:40:21

This came up in my recommendations tonight, and it is certainly intriguing to me.

I have heard of Carl Jung before, but I don’t know much about his research.

This concept of dealing with your shadow and bringing it to light feels like what I’ve been going through for months now.

2024-03-12 00:28:59

The question, of course, is when did it all go wrong? How did a site that captured the imagination of the internet and fundamentally changed the way we communicate turn into a burned-out Walmart at the edge of town? 

Well, if you ask Anil Dash, it was all the way back in 2003 — when the company turned on its AdSense program.

“Prior to 2003–2004, you could have an open comment box on the internet. And nobody would pretty much type in it unless they wanted to leave a comment. No authentication. Nothing. And the reason why was because who the fuck cares what you comment on there. And then instantly, overnight, what happened?” Dash said. “Every single comment thread on the internet was instantly spammed. And it happened overnight.”

Dash has written extensively over the years on the impact platform optimization has had on the way the internet works. As he sees it, Google’s advertising tools gave links a monetary value, killing anything organic on the platform. From that moment forward, Google cared more about the health of its own network than the health of the wider internet. 

I’ve been on the internet since before Google came to dominate it, and this feels like an extremely accurate assessment.

It doesn’t seem fair to say “this is all Google’s fault.” After all, most of us who work on the internet wouldn’t be able to do so without people commercializing it.

But it comes back to your goals, I guess. I never built a blog to make any sort of money. I lose hundreds of dollars a year by cultivating this little space on the web.

But I don’t regret a single penny. It’s an investment in something that brings me true joy.

I have zero analytics running on this site right now. It’s a bit of a weird flex, sure, but honestly, I don’t care if there is one person reading these words or a million.

The main reason I don’t track people is because I don’t want to start making this something which requires me to keep dancing to get people’s attention.

I dunno… I just miss open comment boxes. And while I don’t like what I see on sites like Facebook and Google these days, I can at least hang my hat on the fact that there’s a thriving indie web community that keeps writing on their sites and connecting with each other through RSS feeds.

And also, shout out to Ryan Broderick, the author of this article. I’m a huge fan of Garbage Day and his work dissecting the weirdness of the internet. If you like this piece, you’ll love his newsletter.

2024-03-10 12:48:25

Joel’s original post is an excellent read, but I really enjoyed Justin’s statement at the end of his linked post:

One last note: showing up to a client following a weekend-long crash course in a particular technology doesn't make you a fraud. Nearly twenty years in consulting has taught me that the people most worried about misrepresenting themselves and their abilities are the people who have the least reason to worry. The fact they care so much almost always means they'll put in the work when they need to. The real frauds, meanwhile, don't worry at all. And while Joel was holed up in a Starbucks for 72 hours, I'm sure they were having a delightful and relaxing weekend. And Joel's much richer for it, as he's gotten four careers' worth of experience by repeatedly diving into new industries, organizations, and technologies, whereas the real imposters only learned how to talk a good game as they skated through life without ever stretching themselves.

I’ve seen first hand the nerve some developers bring to a first meeting, only to dim gradually over time.

I continue to struggle sometimes with confidence in what I do, but my entire career so far has been non-stop learning.

Every project is an opportunity to learn a new framework, a new project management style, a new business problem.

It’s a hard characteristic to put on a resume, but the ability to pick up new systems quickly is definitely one of my core strengths.

2024-03-10 12:34:47

Programmers disagree on various topics, for various reasons. Personally, I wouldn’t have it any other way. I wouldn’t want to live in a world where all of these software topics are settled and boring. Debates about programming are interesting and intellectually stimulating, and unlike debates about, say, politics, you’re unlikely to lose any friends when you express your functional-programming hesitancy.

Maybe, at the end of the day, that’s the real reason there’s so much disagreement among devs: because it’s so fun.

I should print this out and give it to my wife. This is exactly why I enjoy arguing about dumb stuff.

It’s rarely about winning. Being correct is fun. Arguing over semantics and picking nits over asinine details lets you sharpen your beliefs by pitting them against someone else’s.

It also signals that you truly care about the thing. It’s probably the most common way I show I love something.¹

2024-03-07 20:29:00

(This is the second in a series of posts going through my journal entries from the last month and talking about what it's like to go through a period of unemployment, self doubt, and finding your spark. You can read the first one here.)

Alright, we've made it through February!

I'm still on the job hunt. I'm still dealing with some crippling anxiety and depression.

But I'm making progress! I'm having interviews, I'm figuring out how to feel my feelings and articulate my values, and I'm finding opportunities to enjoy the moment and be optimistic about finding my next job.

I journaled every single day last month. I fed all 28,000+ words into ChatGPT and asked it to summarize the entries into two sentences using the style of the journal entries themselves. Here's what it said:

Another month down, filled with musings, mild misadventures, and moments of clarity amidst the mundane. Balancing personal passions, family love, and the hunt for professional fulfillment, the journey meanders through the highs and lows, always circling back to the comforting, complex tapestry of daily life.

Man, do I actually sound that pretentious in my own journal? 😂

Anyway, if you're wondering what was on my mind in January, strap yourself in and let's go!

"What are you looking for?"

Gonna put this up front again like I did last month.

I'm looking for a position where I can blend strategic tech leadership with hands-on coding, preferably in a small, mission-driven company focused on healthcare or climate solutions. The ideal environment is a funded startup with fewer than 50 employees, leveraging generative AI, and based in or flexible with the Twin Cities area.

Ideal extras include a flexible 32-hour work week, a hybrid work arrangement, and opportunities for travel and professional development

In short: If you know a mission-oriented startup seeking a tech-savvy strategist passionate about making a significant impact, send them my way!

Activities I've done

I put this section in my last post because it felt like a badge of honor to brag about how many meetings I had in a month. To me, it felt like I was doing something.

All of that pride went down the drain after talking with a new friend who basically said that I'm continuing to burn myself out by grinding through hundreds of meetings instead of doing the actual hard work of sitting down and figuring out what my values are.

Once you know what your values are, you are so much more likely to know what path to walk down.

So in that spirit, I won't mention how many meetings I've had. Instead, I basically spent this month continuing to figure out who I am and what I want.

I'm aware that's not a very satisfying or flashy statement to make in a blog post that purports to explain life in the eyes of someone who got laid off.

But truly, most of what I've done in the last month is learn about my feelings and how to deal with them productively.

I've gone to some of the darkest places I've ever gone in my life this past month. The shame, the fear, the depression, the embarrassment, the anger... all of those feelings are easy to deal with when you ignore them like I had been for my entire adult life.

But your body can only handle ignoring them for so long. Eventually, you find yourself leaving work early and rushing to the hospital because your heartbeat is noticeably irregular, and your heart feels like an orange being crushed in the hands of a strongman, adrenaline secreting between their fingers.

One thousand and six hundred dollars later, you're told that there's nothing physically wrong with you. Go see a therapist.

Your body remembers each and every time you ignore those feelings, those warning signs. Those "gut checks" that you decide to push aside because it doesn't align with what you think you should be doing.

Eventually, it all boils over.

So that's what I've been up to this month: looking back at the past twenty years of my life and beating myself up for years of beating myself up.

It hasn't all been atonement, though. I've also started to hope again. I've had moments where I'm excited again for what's next.

Even if that's something as simple as waiting for a hug from my kids when they get home from school, or watching an episode of Drag Race with my wife every Friday.

Those little things are the things that keep me going, and they're giving me the energy to start looking forward to how I can get back out in the world and be helpful.

Things I've learned

Here are all the random things I've been contemplating over the past month:

👨‍🎨 Personal growth insights

My 7 year old daughter told us she thinks she's getting too old for Barbie.

This was crushing for me and my wife to hear, but for different reasons.

For my wife, it was the prototypical "my kid is growing up" response that all parents feel when they see their kid age. I don't wanna minimize that feeling, because I certainly feel it myself: it's bittersweet to see your kids grow up.

But for me, it was a good reminder that the grass is always greener on the other side.

I can't remember the last time I dreamed about what I wanted. I feel like I've been coasting for at least the last several years.

Besides hanging with my family/friends and the occasional fun project at work, there hasn't been much driving me forward to grow.

And that's probably where a good chunk of my depression is coming from.

I could either sit and analyze the "why" (and trust me when I say that I have), but the more important thing is to be grateful for coming to this realization and making strides towards dreaming again.

My problem is that I, uh, kind of forgot how to do that.

Part of it stems from my engineering brain continually looking for edge cases that cause me to reject a dream wholesale.

Another big part of it might be this fear of losing what I've already got. I worked hard to build a reputation, I've got a great family that needs to be provided for, I've got a house that needs maintenance and improvements, the list goes on and on.

But whatever the reason, I find that dreaming is a muscle that can atrophy. I have a similar theory about being extroverted: after the pandemic, I found being around people to be exhausting in a way that I never felt before. My extroversion tendencies returned as I continually subjected myself to new groups of people.

Dreaming feels the same way: continually practicing and refining the act of dreaming is the only way to get good at it.

That's what makes me jealous of my daughter and son.

I watch them play with Barbies together, and their ability to play baffles me.

How can you just start playing?

How can you come up with new scenarios and then go for it?

I ended up talking to my daughter about this. It felt great to share with her how I'm jealous of her ability to be young and idealistic and have a vision for how her life can be, and I'm jealous of how she's able to express that vision through her play.

She ended up deciding to keep her Barbies, and I'm extremely grateful for that. It means there's still more time for me to learn first hand from the master of dreaming.

She'lo yada, yada.

I was speaking with someone about struggling to make a decision that needed to be made, and he told me about this expression that he heard his family say a lot growing up.

It's a Hebrew expression that means "He who doesn't know, knows."

This pairs nicely with the Derek Sivers axiom of "Hell Yes, or No," where something is either impossible to say no to, or you simply say no to it.

Both of these, of course, are "easier said than done" aphorisms to adopt, but it's good to document them nonetheless.

It's awesome to end things.

I spoke with a friend who ran a very popular blog about his adventures traveling to various breweries, and we were both talking about how we were considering winding down our various beer-related projects.

Throughout my entrepreneurial journey, I keep coming across articles expressing the importance to consider the ending to whatever you start.

At one networking event, I heard a speaker ask "what is the percentage likelihood that you will exit your business?"

The answer: 100%.

Because at some point, you will die.

That is the ultimate finality, of course, but the longer I'm around here on earth, the more I have to start embracing the good side of things ending.

I built mncraft.beer a decade ago because my wife and I were extremely passionate about supporting craft breweries, and we had a goal to get to every single brewery in the state.

Fast forward ten years, our ambitions have changed. It's difficult to convince two young kids to sit in a car for several hours on a weekend, let alone motivate myself to spend all that time traveling to visit a brewery that, in all likelihood, only produces mediocre beer.

I've gotten all that I can get out of that project. My biggest takeaway is that a brewery often is a boon for a small town. Even if the beer isn't going to win any awards, we all collectively need more third spaces, and breweries act as a fantastic gathering place for a community.

According to my Untappd account, I've had 7,445 beers since joining the app in August of 2012. Of that, 4,346 of them were unique. I've had 200 different styles of beers, and I've learned that I like Pilsners, Belgians (anywhere from Dubbels to Quads), Extra Special Bitters, Kölsch beers, and straight up, old school IPAs.

I know what good beer tastes like, and I know what breweries make good beers in our state.

So what's the benefit to continuing that app?

I shared a video from Hank Green last year about letting go of the dreams of your past in order to free yourself up for new ones, and that's the mindset I gotta adopt here.

It's always sad to end things. I remember every closing circle after a show would end in theatre was a mess of emotions and tears. I remember losing our final football game in high school, looking around the field, seeing tears and frustrations mount on the faces of my teammates. You never wanna say goodbye to something that gave you so much joy.

It kind of reminds me of this exchange from Hook (one of my favorite movies of all time):¹

Hook: Are you ready to die, boy?

Peter: To die would be a great adventure.

Killing off parts of our former self on which we linger is a privilege which allows us to fully move on to the next adventure.

Al Snow on Success

I felt under the weather this month for a couple days, and on one of those days, I decided to watch the Wrestlers documentary on Netflix.

Two things I want to mention about that:

First, the whole thing felt like a work-shoot to me. I love the way professional wrestling blurs the line between what's real and what's made up.

It felt like the documentarians were very intentional about painting Al as the babyface (the good guy) and Matt Jones as the heel (the bad guy).

I hope OVW gets a good boost in viewership as a result of the documentary. They did a great job of showing how the sauce gets made, and I'm sure they know it's the exact sort of thing that hooks in smart marks like me.

Second, since I assume all of those wrestling terms are not meaningful to most of you, here's a great quote that comes at the end of the documentary:

If you equate success in a destination (that destination being WWE), you’re probably not gonna get it. But if you equate success in doing something you’re passionate about and that you love, and that gives you purpose and drive, then you’re successful.

I keep asking myself what success means to me, and while I don't have a solid answer yet, maybe it's because I'm still working on giving myself permission to dream without restrictions.

I'll get there soon, though. I can feel it.

Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car".

After Tracy performed with Luke Combs at the Grammy's this year, I saw a post that talked about her performance of Fast Car in front of an extremely frustrated crowd at Wembley Stadium in 1988.

You can find recaps of the story online, but the long and short of it is that Stevie Wonder was refusing to go on stage at this birthday celebration for Nelson Mandela, so Tracy came back out on stage and performed Fast Car.

When you watch the video, you hear the crowd go from rowdy to genuinely moved.

It's hauntingly beautiful. That song has always been a staple in my rotation, and after hearing it performed in this way, it makes it even more special.

We should use all of our senses to find our way.

I feel like the best metaphor I can give for how depression feels to me is a fog that completely obstructs my vision.

No matter which direction I look, all I see is a dense fog of nothingness.

But what I keep reminding myself is that even when you can't see, you still have at least four other senses you can use.

I'm not sure how to use those other senses yet, but I'm starting to use my ears to listen for opportunities, my nose to sniff out which direction to walk in, and my gut to validate which direction feels right.

The Dan Patch Club serves as a template for who I wanna be when I get old.

My dad invited me to speak to The Dan Patch Club, which is a subgroup of residents and friends of the Masonic Home in Bloomington dedicated to learning and exploring various topics together.

I'm ashamed to admit that I'm not immune from playing the generational blame game. But placing each other into broad, faceless groups like "boomers" or "millennials" only makes it harder for us to pool our collective wisdom and work together to solve real problems that our society faces.

Short of vague jokes about mysticism and ritualistic masonic secrets, I honestly had no idea what to expect when my dad asked me to come speak to these Masons.

I figured the hour would be spent giving a broad introduction to generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney, but what surprised me was how many hands were raised when I asked "how many of you have used ChatGPT?"

I should've known better because I did know that this room contained two PhDs and a retired attorney. All of these guys had extremely poignant and informed questions about the use of AI in our society.

We talked about the legal implications of deep fakes, the ability to spread election propaganda at unfathomable speed, how these models "reason" and come up with "truth", and the most important question which continues to plague us information workers: "how do you turn off predictive autocomplete in Microsoft Word?"

As we were wrapping up, I actually didn’t want it to end in the same way I haven’t wanted many of my conversations to end lately.

Sparking that curiosity in people is one of the key values I've been aspiring towards as I craft my vision for the next ten years.

I hope when I’m their age, I’m still kickin’ it with my homies, whomever they may be, nerding it up about complex topics, continuing to challenge myself and grow as much as possible.

Is anxiety only reducible when you are focused on your basal instincts and needs?

It seems like the only known treatments and mitigations for anxiety center around mindfulness and getting your brain to live in the present.

Is that really it? Living in the now is the only way to make anxiety go away?

It seems like there should be more we can do to harness our ability to look into the future while keeping the major doom scenarios from spiraling in our heads.

Meditation?

Anyone have any good suggestions for developing a consistant medication practice?

I have tried apps in the past but haven't found them to be sticky or altogether helpful.

Daniel Tiger isn't only for kids.

Toward the end of February, I had a major backslide with my mental health, and it kind of came to a head one day while I was dropping my son off at daycare.

I usually let him pick out what we listen to, and he chose the Daniel Tiger's Big Feelings album.

One of the first songs on that album is called "Close Your Eyes and Think of Something Happy."

I ended up at a red light and, as I found myself descending into some negative thoughts, I decided to do exactly that.

And you know what I saw?

Absolutely nothing.

It crushed me.

I'm a grown ass man, and I couldn't even come up with a single thing in that moment to think of in order to make me happy.

Suddenly, from the back seat, I hear my boy giggling and singing along.

Man.

That moment highlighted to me how badly I needed help through this stuff. That there is a ton to be happy about.

I'm glad my son was able to help me get out of my head.

And I'm glad I'm no longer dismissing those songs as "simple kid songs." We can all use a reminder for how to process sad and angry feelings in a healthy manner.

It's easier to venture out when you know you can return home.

I heard Dr. Becky mention it in that Farnam Street podcast, but she was talking about the relationship between teenagers and parents.

I've been considering the sentiment in regards to music.

For the past five years, I've been very curious about genres of music from which I've typically shied away.

I decided to listen through my entire local library of music, which is currently sitting at 83 days of non-stop new tunes.

That library is filled with music of every type of genre imaginable. Country. Experimental free jazz. 70s East African jams. Norwegian death metal. A mashup of Metallica and The Beatles. All kinds of EDM mixes.

It took more than 4 years to get through all of it, but I finished it with an appreciation of the core albums that have been there for me my whole life.

The other day, I decided to shuffle my "key albums", which is any album I've given a star rating of 4.5 or higher.

I was instantly transported back to several happy moments in my life. Building Ralph Wiggum images in front of my computer in my childhood bedroom. Walking home to my (eventually) condemned house in college. Going for a run around the pond in Bloomington. Riding the light rail home.

Solitary moments where I didn't need to worry about what other people would think of what I was listening to.

A place where I can be myself.

That concept applies to much of our soul searching. We are only able to be truly adventurous when we know there's a safe place for us to come home to when we're weary from exploration.

I find myself drawn to people who are able to speak passionately about their cause much in the same way my kids talk about Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny.

There's something magical about believing in something.

There's something special about having solid, firm convictions on which you stand.

It's this palpable energy you can feel emanating from someone sharing their passions.

I felt it at a couple of job interviews I had last month.

I felt it while speaking with friends about AI.

I felt it playing crazy rummy with my wife and talking about what we want to do for our ten year anniversary.

Maybe that's the feeling I should be chasing. Is that feeling "joy"?

I'm not sure where I started getting so disillusioned about that feeling in a professional context.

But I'm eager to find a job where I can surround myself with that energy once again.

Kids simply do not care about success like grown ups do.

When my daughter was 4, I'd watch her play a game where she'd have to pick the right word and she would purposefully pick the wrong one.

Like, I knew she knew the right word, but she intentionally picked the wrong one.

It sent me up a wall.

But one day, I asked her why she was picking the wrong one on purpose.

She said, "I like the noise it makes when I get it wrong."

My kids are way better at learning and dealing with uncertainty than I am.

And success is whatever you define it to be.

I can't thank you all enough.

A lot of my journaling over the past month is just, like, truly dismal.

But there are moments of light, and they're all thanks to you all.

I am forever indebted to the literal hundreds of people who have reached out to ask me how I'm doing. I'm so fortunate that I've got so many people who care about me.

I feel like I'm not able to be my own best friend right now. I find myself continually returning to a place where I can't stop beating myself up.

You know how people used to take their old cars that they don't want anymore and drive them deep into the woods and leave them there? That's how I feel right now. I feel like a beat up old car that's completely rusted through, nature slowly consuming and reclaiming it.

But it's conversations with many of you that are helping me see that's not an accurate picture of reality.

So thanks for checking in on me. It's definitely helping me get through the fog.

👨‍💼 Professional growth insights

If someone calls themselves an "expert", it's because they're trying to sell you something.

This insight came from a talk by the incredible Jim Wilt that technically came from January, but I didn't include it in last month's post and want to make sure I include it now.

My inbox is a prime source of stress.

It's a roulette wheel where sometimes you win big (a job offer, a congratulatory email, a rave review), but you also sometimes lose big (a threat of a lawsuit, a late bill notice).

I'm still learning how to separate work from my personal life, but a good place to start is to go to your settings on your phone and turn the inbox off for your work email.

You don't need to remove it altogether.

But when I was at Bionic Giant, I turned it off, and it helped my stress levels immensely at night.

It allowed me to turn it on if I needed access to a message on my phone during the day, but then I could easily turn it off at night so I didn't get distracted when I went to my inbox to read a newsletter.

It's awfully hard to say "no."

I wrote a lot in my journal this month about how a lot of my anxiety stems from saying "yes" to everyone and everything.

One reason I can't say "no" is because I'm not sure what I actually want. Saying "yes" at least gives me the chance to figure out if it's something I want.

But when I say "yes" to too many things, I never get a chance to sit back and reflect on whether it was something I wanted.

Which basically describes the first decade+ of my professional career. I say "yes" to the point where I have no room in my schedule to reflect.

I need a better analogy for how generative AI arrives at its solutions when compared to a search engine.

If anyone has any ideas, let me know.

I don't get why I feel so guilty for feeling sick.

I find it next to impossible to rest as it is.

But when I'm sick, it's like my anxiety works in overdrive to try and let me know that I'm falling behind on stuff.

I said this earlier, but I felt a little under the weather one day this past month, and I ended up calling folks and cancelling my meetings with them. The guilt I felt was incredible.

I appreciate having anxiety to keep me thinking through possible problems and pushing myself to move forward to fix them, but the combination of the "fight or flight" and "freeze" responses makes it tough to get anything done.

Learning new things becomes a lot harder as you age.

I was turned down from a job I was rather hopeful to get because I don't have the experience in the Javascript framework that they were looking for.

So I decided I was gonna sit down this past week and learn it.

I tell you, I watched three different tutorials, and I could not bring myself to finishing any of them.

The problem here is that I already know how to build web apps. I've been doing it since I was eight years old.

I've learned how to build web apps by hand, by using PHP, by using Laravel (a framework built using PHP), by using Wordpress, and by using Ruby on Rails.

And you know what I've realized after all that learning? They're all slightly different ways of achieving the same thing.

And guess what? There are roughly a dozen different additional popular ways to build and deploy web apps. There's all kinds of containerization techniques to deploy scalable platforms. There are cloud providers that allow you to spin up all sorts of architectures to scale your platform. There are a bajillion different Javascript frameworks to write your code in, along with a quadrillion CSS frameworks to style your apps in.

I may have hit my Morgan Freeman in Shawshank moment where I simply don't care what technology we use anymore.

You feel compelled to use Rails to build a monolith? Great!

You think you're gonna hit a scale that requires a complex microservice infrastructure built on hundreds of lambdas? Fine, sure, let's do it.

The thing is, I don't want to learn a new framework for the sake of learning a new framework.

If I needed to figure out a specific architecture for a job, I am 100% confident that I could do it, even if it requires using a framework that I've never used. That's what nearly 30 years of building on the internet does for me.

[...]

Can I be real with you all for a minute?

Of all the sections I've written in this blog post, this one is the one I am having the hardest time releasing to the world.

I have a feeling I'm coming off as a bit of a crybaby.

I recognize that any craftsperson needs to hone their craft and stay up to date with the latest tooling in order to be marketable.

My problem may be that I'm conflating burnout symptoms with my general interest in learning new things.

In every development project I've ever worked on, I've had to learn new things.

There's always a new API, a new SDK, a new framework to pick up.

It's been part of my agency life for my entire career.

Maybe my problem isn't with learning new things. Maybe it's that I'm exhausted from having to whip around from tech to tech without ever taking an opportunity to go deep on any one of them in particular.

Even as a seasoned Ruby on Rails developer with more than a decade of use, I feel like I'm falling behind with all the fancy new Rails 7 functionalities like serving HTML over the wire.

There are a million different ways to build websites, and I'm struck with the realizing that I'll never learn all of them.

Maybe I have to decide whether I want to sharpen the tools I do know intimately, or whether now is a time to adopt new tools and put in the work to become an expert with those ones.

They say learning new things becomes harder as you get older.

What's next for me

Last month, I committed to coming back with a more clear vision of what I want my life to be. I don't think I'm at a point where I'm ready to articulate my vision, so I am going to continue spending time honing that through journaling, meditation, and conversation. I hope to be in a place to share a rough draft with y'all next month.

I also want to keep up my recent blitz of sharing links here on my blog. I'm going to add in a "tagging" feature to my posts so I can start keeping better track of things I talk about on here and find them more easily.

I also want to start podcasting again. I will commit that by next month, I'll be able to tell you what my new podcast will be about. My friend Dana and I are going to start meeting once a week to hold each other accountable on our various endeavors, and that's what I'll be spending that time plotting.

If you're reading this and want to know how you can help me, here's how:

1. If you know of a full time (32-40 hr/week) job opportunity where I can help architect a complex software system for a meaningful organization and lead a team of people to get it built, please send it my way.
2. If you come across any thought leaders who are speaking about AI from a perspective of what it will mean for our humanity (in how we work, how we organize, how we think, etc.), please connect them with me!

Thanks again for reading all the way to the end! If you did, I would love to hear if anything resonated with you. Shoot me an email or a note on LinkedIn.

2024-03-07 12:37:14

The biggest risk to an evolving system is that you become bogged down by experts from a world that no longer exists. The more evolution you have, the more you should expect that expertise has a shelf life. And those most susceptible to that risk are the people you’d least suspect: The smartest and most intelligent, who at one point flashed their brilliance but struggled to admit that it can’t be repeated.

The article also makes a great point about how a lot of smart people struggle to listen to ideas that come from people they consider to not be on the same level as them.

2024-03-07 12:11:44

According to the annual report just released by the International Air Transport Association (IATA) 2023 goes down as one of the safest years in commercial aviation history. Not a single fatal accident was recorded involving a commercial jet. Not one.

Combining jet and turboprop operations, IATA says there were 37 million commercial flights last year. Among those, the only deadly crash was that of an ATR turboprop in Nepal last January. If I’m counting right, this puts last year as the second-safest on record, bested only by 2017.

This is astonishing, and despite all the (extremely deserved) heat Boeing has been getting in recent years, we should really keep our fears around flying in check.

And maybe we should consider how we could see the benefits of public accountability and amazing training applied in other domains.

2024-03-05 12:51:00

There are still going to be situations where someone wants to write prompts that are used at scale, and, in those cases, structured prompting does matter. Yet we need to acknowledge that this sort of “prompt engineering” is far from an exact science, and not something that should necessarily be left to computer scientists and engineers.

At its best, it often feels more like teaching or managing, applying general principles along with an intuition for other people, to coach the AI to do what you want.

As I have written before, there is no instruction manual, but with good prompts, LLMs are often capable of far more than might be initially apparent.

If you had to guess before reading this article what prompt yields the best performance on mathematic problems, you would almost certainly be wrong.

I love the concept of prompt engineering because I feel like one of my key strengths is being able to articulate my needs to any number of receptive audiences.

I’ve often told people that programming computers is my least favorite part of being a computer engineer, and it’s because writing code is often a frustrating, demoralizing endeavor.

But with LLMs, we are quickly approaching a time where we can simply ask the computer to do something for us, and it will.

Which, I think, is something that gets to the core of my recent mental health struggles: if I’m not the guy who can get computers to do the thing you want them to do, who am I?

And maybe I’m overreacting. Maybe “normal people” will still hate dealing with technology in ten years, and there will still be a market for nerds like me who are willing to do the frustrating work of getting computers to be useful.

But today, I spent three hours rebuilding the backend of this blog from the bottom up using Next.JS, a JavaScript framework I’ve never used before.

In three hours, I was able to have a functioning system. Both front and backend. And it looked better than anything I’ve ever crafted myself.

I was able to do all that with a potent combination of a YouTube tutorial and ChatGPT+.

Soon enough, LLMs and other AGI tools will be able to infer all that from even rudimentary prompts.

So what good can I bring to the world?

2024-03-01 07:31:00

I thought this was a really interesting article as I start to blog more and aspire to share more of my thoughts online.

This section of the article is something I’ve been considering myself:

To avoid being overloaded with feedback, or risk posting an opinion that may not age well, Adedeji is instead rethinking how she approaches sharing opinions online. “I’ve gone from being able to produce maybe two essays a month to now maybe once every three months I’ll come up with something, because I’m actively having to deconstruct what I think and think about why that’s my opinion,” she says.

Honestly, I don’t see this as a problem. When your social status gets higher, it means your opinion actually starts to matter.

And since your voice matters and you’ll be looked to as a leader, it’s really important to be confident and researched in your opinion. I might argue it’s an imperative.

Longer form, well researched articles are a net positive for our discourse. Those can only be done when you take your time and do that deep work.

Of course, people should be entitled to hot takes. It was interesting to read that “a post from 10 years ago functionally looks the same as a post from today” quote in here.

It does stink that there isn’t an instinctual design to help us remember which tweets are dated.

If you watch a home movie on VHS, it has an inherent feeling that it comes from the past. A newspaper clipping evokes a similar feeling.

But unlike tracking lines and yellowing paper, there’s nothing ephemeral or decaying about the presentation of a tweet that would serve as a visual cue to show that something is slightly out of date.¹

2024-02-29 03:33:00

I love Farnam Street. It's an amazing blog to which I hope you already subscribe.

While I devour the weekly Brain Food newsletter, I can't say I've listened to many episodes of The Knowledge Project podcast.

I've been pretty burnt out on podcasts over the past few years. I think this is due to three main factors:

1. A feeling of indifference to the shows I used to love.
2. Covid. I got way more into music during that time, which was easier to consume around my family than a deep podcast.
3. A feeling of guilt when I don't listen to every episode of a show. It's easy to fall behind when your favorite podcasts are weekly and 3 hours long per episode.

So while podcasts haven't been my favorite mode for consuming information lately, this episode of The Knowledge Project featuring Dr. Becky Kennedy caught my attention because of the Brain Food newsletter, so I decided to give it a go.

It was so good that I actually went back and listened to it twice.

Here are the elements from the podcast I took away, peppered slightly with my own commentary:

Respect your children like you would respect an adult

Your number one job as a parent is to keep your kids safe.

Those safety bounds, however, need to be defined with a fair bit of common sense respect.

When I'm building an app, it's my job to keep the user safe. I want to make sure that they are aware of what they are doing when they give me their data, and I want them to understand what could happen if they choose to make an adult decision to share that data.

Children often don't have that understanding of consequences yet, so it's my job to expose them to danger methodically and let them learn about consequences on their own.

But that doesn't mean I need to be a jerk about it.

On that same topic of actions/consequences, it's helpful to think through in which ways I'm trading long term skills for short term gains. If my kid forgets their homework at home, do I provide them with the short term gain of remembering for them, or do I provide them with the long term memory of the pain associated with forgetting to bring their homework?

Boundaries

I loved Dr. Becky's definition of a boundary:

A boundary is something I can tell someone else I will do that requires them to do nothing.

As an example, my wife and I struggle with keeping our kitchen counters clean because they're the place everyone just dumps their stuff when they come into the house. Mail, school work, and various toys start piling up.

I've made requests in the past like, "hey, can you kids please keep this area clean?"

These are just requests. They don't help define expectations.

Instead, I sat my kids down this weekend and said "okay gang, here's the deal: I'm going to clean these counter tops every night after you go to bed. If there is anything on these counters that isn't put away, I'm going to throw them away."

Unlike me requesting them to keep their stuff tidy, I've established a boundary that requires them to do nothing.

Get on the same side of the table

A common (probably basal?) way of communicating is advisarial.

Imagine a table sitting in a conference room. Many arguments feel like I am sitting on one side of the table and you are sitting on the opposite side.

A better way to communicate is to find a way to be seated next to each other on one side of the table, and place the problem we are addressing on the opposite side.

Dr. Becky gives an undeniably relatable example in this episode about her son and his towel. He kept leaving his towel on his bedroom floor, and she kept getting frustrated that he'd walk past it and do nothing about it.

She could've just done what most of us do: fly off the handle.

Instead, she framed the conversation as "us versus the towel." She said something like, "we both know towels don't go on the floor, what's going on here?"

Her son, to her surprise, said "you know, it's funny... I don't even see the towel on the floor."

That's me. I'm the son.

It took years of frustrated rants from my wife before I started noticing things like piles of dishes in the sink or scores of unfolded laundry baskets piling up.

Something recently started clicking in me, though, and I have been getting better about being a good house mate!

The lesson here: make it "us versus the problem." It's a lot more productive to attack a problem as opposed to a person.

A good measuring stick for the strength of your relationships

Ask yourself: "would they come to me with a problem even if it might get them in trouble?"

Confidence

Confidence is not feeling good about yourself.

Confidence is about self-trust.

It's about being okay being yourself when you're not the best at something.

What to do when someone comes to you with deep feelings

When someone shares a feeling like shame, embarrassment, regret, sadness, disappointment, etc., here's a three step process for what to say:

"I'm so glad you're talking to me about this."

This one phrase shows you are interested in what they are saying, and it naturally invites them to tell you more.

"I believe you."

This helps build confidence. As we described earlier, confidence is about self trust.

Even if you don't necessarily agree with them, just the acknowledgement that they have feelings and that they are feeling them is a way to help them trust their own feelings.

"Tell me more."

Just let them share until they have nothing more to share.

And that's it.

Once you've done those three steps, you have, in the words of Dr. Becky, "crushed parenting." Or marriage. Or friendship.

Helping someone learn they can trust their emotions allows them to take the energy they'd otherwise use to process the feelings and use it to address the problem.

Why we shirk responsibility for our actions

People shirk responsibility for their actions when they equate the outcomes with being an indication of who they are.

Let's say you identify as a smart person. If you get a bad score on a test, that conflicts with the identity you've chosen. After all, smart people don't get bad scores.

Instead of being able to process why you got an F, you might seek external sources to blame. "The teacher never said this would be on the test," or "The teacher is out to get me," or something similar.

We do it as adults, too. "I'm sorry I'm late, traffic was terrible."

(You know what this feeling is called, by the way? Shame. More on that shortly.)

One way you can help deal with shame is to frame the situation like this: "you're a smart kid who got a bad score on a test."

This, instead, allows you place the identity you've chosen in one hand, and the event which contradicts it in the other. It sort of frames it like the "get on the same side of the table" example I gave above.

If it's "you against your son" because he got a bad score, it's gonna be advisarial from the jump, and there's too much wasted energy on sorting through blame and feelings.

If it's "you and your son against the bad score," you can start to address the actual problem.

Shame

We often talk about "fight or flight" as a response to an external stimulus, but the "freeze state" is common for when someone feels shame.

This is helpful for me, personally, because I feel like I've been frozen for the past few months.

The frozenness is a response to me feeling ashamed and embarrassed with losing my job and not knowing what the next move is.

It feels like getting an F on a test. And frankly, I haven't gotten many F's on tests before, so I haven't really learned how to process and deal with shame constructively.

As I've reflected on this, I think about a story I often tell when giving my life story: the time I failed so spectacularly on a physics midterm.

My response to that situation was to give up and switch majors. I chose "flight."

And maybe that was the right response to the situation, and maybe not. But it's interesting to revisit these defining memories in our lives and evaluate them with new information like this.

I probably still would've dropped out of engineering school. But now, in my mid-thirties, I actually think I'd do a better job in college than I did in my early-twenties.

Feelings are like passengers in a car

We often have voices in our heads from sources like impostor syndrome, depression, anxiety, and so forth.

Imagine these voices as passengers inside a car. The car is our mind.

Our goal isn't to kick the passengers out of the car. There's no way to eliminate these feelings altogether; they're part of what makes us human. They belong in the car just as much as any other feeling like happiness.

The goal is to learn how to not let them take the driver's seat.

What's the "ideal" headspace to be in?

This is a question I'd like to explore some more. It seems like the point I just made serves to learn how to compartmentalize troublesome feelings, but we never really talk about compartmentalizing manic emotions like excitement which are often lauded.

So that begs the question: is there an equilibrium we should be striving for? Am I approaching this problem with a video game-like mindset of "winning" when, in fact, there is no game to be played here?

Kids learn to regulate their emotions through their relationship with their parents

When we shush our kids and tell them to get over things, we're not allowing them to feel those feelings. We're, instead, putting that bandaid solution on top of them, which forces them to learn other ways to cope with their feelings.

And yes, that means we, as parents, learned how to regulate our own emotions in the same manner.

This presents a great opportunity, and it's a tact I've taken with my kids: be honest and open about how you are processing feelings.

Repair

Repairing is the process of taking responsibility for your actions and apologizing for them to your partner or child.

This, according to Dr. Becky, is the most powerful relationship tool you can cultivate.

The first step of repairing is, ironically, to repair yourself. You need to say something like, "I'm not proud of what I just did, but it will not define who I am."

The second step is sitting down with person you've wronged, name what happened, take responsibility, and state what you will do different next time.

It sounds so obvious. All this stuff sounds so obvious. But I can't be the only one who struggles to do the obvious thing in the heat of the moment.

AVP

AVP is a technique you can do to learn how to build confidence and handle emotions.

• A is for Acknowledge. Name the feeling and greet it. Something like "Hey, anxiety!"
• V is for Validate. All feelings have a place in our bodies. It doesn't mean they need to explode out of our bodies, but it makes sense for them to exist in there, and it's okay for them to exist in there. Say something like "It makes sense that this feeling is here" or "I believe myself" (meaning you believe that you are, in fact, feeling that feeling)
• P is for Permit. Allow yourself to fully be OK with experiencing that feeling. (An added bonus would be to add "...and I can deal with it.")

I have been trying this technique when I've felt anxiety attacks come on this week, and it actually really helps to keep myself in the driver's seat, so to speak.

Technology/screen overuse

A large section of the podcast is devoted to dealing with kids and their addiction to cell phones or video games.

There are a couple of points that I thought would apply even to those without kids:

Equating phone use to tobacco use

As a society, we collectively determined that children cannot control themselves with other addictive products like tobacco, so we drafted legislation to protect children from purchasing tobacco.

It bums me out that we aren't able to have productive conversations about the addictive properties of social media or cell phones in general in the halls of our legislative branches.

Do as I say, not as I do

Before leaving JMG, I hadn't had a single vacation in my career where I completely unplugged from work and lived in the moment.

Even at Bionic Giant, I still felt myself compelled (obligated?) to have my laptop with me, just in case someone broke something and I was the only one able to fix it.

We've allowed cell phones to seamlessly invade and consume our lives. Besides perhaps when I'm going swimming with the kids, I can't recall the last time I wasn't within at least 10 feet of my phone. When I am with my kids, I can't go more than several minutes without impulsively checking my phone for some sort of update.

That's truly sick behavior, no matter how you slice it.

And I'm a 36 year old dude.

If I can't regulate my own behavior, how can we expect our children to regulate themselves around these things?

Of course, there's lots of angles to this problem, right? "Just because you can't handle yourself doesn't mean you have to punish the rest of us" is a easy retort to that. And I'm not here saying "let's let a bunch of legislators determine how to parent our kids" because, of course, I am an American after all.

But we aren't even at a point where we can have these conversations without resorting to attacking each other.

We're sitting on two sides of the table instead of both of us on one side focused on addressing the problem.

It's depressing.

The fact is we do have precedent around establishing guard rails for behaviors our society deems destructive. We should be relying on the opinions of the experts who research these topics and drafting rules that protect the most vulnerable in our population.

Alright, that was a pretty long recap. If any of those topics sound interesting to you, I highly recommend checking out the episode!

2024-02-27 19:40:00

If we think of creative introspection as having three levels, level one is just noticing that you find an idea interesting or exciting.

Level two is noticing that your longing to be accepted can fool you to get excited about an idea that you are not actually excited about.

Level three is Andrei Tarkovsky.

In his diary, during preproduction of his masterpiece Solaris, the Soviet filmmaker writes that he has met a sound engineer that he considers brilliant. The sound engineer told Tarkovsky that they shouldn’t use Bach in the film because “everyone is using Bach in their films at the moment.”

In the diary, Tarkovsky makes no further note, but in the film, the music is—Bach.

Tarkovsky realized it didn’t matter that Bach was a popular choice that people would praise him for. It was just the right thing.

This is very hard to do, so most creatives stay on level 2 and learn that what is popular is a trap. This does lead to good ideas being needlessly killed. But likely more would die if they had let what is popular kill unpopular ideas.

This whole essay is mostly an ode to solitude and its importance for cultivating creativity, which is something I’ve been embracing lately to be sure, and also was enough to share this article on its own.

But what really made me want to share this article was this section on creative introspection.

I’ve mentioned how much of an impact the When We Were Young festival had on me last fall, and I think this section is a helpful illustration of why.

I vividly remember a bus ride back from a marching band parade in the summer of ninth grade. A group of girls were raving about this new album by a band called Yellowcard.

For some reason, I started making fun of them in my own head. I didn’t even listen to the music, save for occasionally coming across it on the radio and reflexively tuning out.

When we purchased our tickets for this festival, I started going back and listening to albums from these musicians. Musicians who, like Yellowcard, I derided and dismissed in my head for decades.

Musicians like Sum 41, Green Day, Simple Plan, Avril Lavigne, Something Corporate, Rise Against, Good Charlotte, and Thrice.

I purchased the tickets in October, and for the twelve months leading up to that festival, I almost exclusively listened to music by artists who were performing at the festival, mostly so I didn’t feel stupid when I heard them perform.

The more I listened, the more I realized I wasted two decades of my life dismissing an entire genre of music because I thought I was too good for it. Because I never even gave it a chance. Because I came to a conclusion about popularity in middle school and never revisited it.

What WWWY gave me was a chance to, in just one single day, repair two decades of mistakes and broken assumptions. It granted me an opportunity to redo my childhood, something we very rarely are afforded.

The experience showed me that while the popular thing can be wrong, it isn’t inherently wrong.

And as I keep looking for things that make me happy, that being joy to my life, that stop my heart from physically aching from anxiety, I’d be foolish to dismiss an idea because I solely evaluate it against what some cool girls liked in ninth grade.

2024-02-27 12:03:00

Both the “drill sergeant” and the “Zen master” mindset share a common underlying worldview on which our lives do not fully belong to us, in that we have relatively little agency over the goals we set and the means by which we pursue them.

The “builder’s mindset,” by contrast, flows from a qualitatively different and deeply countercultural worldview: one on which all of our efforts can and ought to be organized around the ultimate goal of building and enjoying our own best life.

My goodness, this hits me right in my feels.

I’ve been absolutely obsessed with reading Gena Gorlin’s work lately. Several of her articles have deeply resonated with me.

I’m gonna share this passage as well, because again, as I aim to come up with some sort of tangible list of values, this will be helpful:

The “builder’s mindset” represents a fundamentally different set of underlying core assumptions about the kinds of beings we are, what we can do, and what is worth doing, compared to the other mindsets. This includes:

1. The view that we are rational agents capable of and responsible for shaping the natural world according to our needs (i.e., of building).

2. The view that exercising one’s agency to build one’s own fully-lived life is a self-sufficient end goal, needing no further justification or permission.

3. A primary motivation by love and values, rather than fear.

4. The view that human relationships are necessarily win-win, not win-lose or lose-win.

For point number one, she even references my favorite Steve Jobs quote. I mean, come on… this article was tailor made just for me.

2024-02-27 04:37:00

At our worst, humans mindlessly consume, sear the earth and each other, fill our bodies with poisons. At our best we invent electric bikes. Batteries have gotten more efficient, motors smaller and more powerful. The last decade has brought great efficiency to these machines, and the next ten years will only double down on these gains.

Electric bike numbers are up, year over year over year. Tremendously so. Those who know, proselytize. We can’t help it. The charm is too great. The game non- zero sum. The more people who know, the better the world.

It’s a wild notion, this sense of goodness to be had if you just reach out for it. Goodness with no real downside. Like solar panels or wind turbines, electric bikes are machines that buoy the spirit and the earth.

I went to an event at the Minneapolis Convention Center a couple of years ago where they set up a test track and allowed you to ride several dozen different electric bikes around it.

I really, really want one.

My biggest hurdle at the moment is adopting it into my life. It’s hard enough to ride a bike in Minnesota¹, but it’s even harder to live a bike rider’s lifestyle with two kids and a house in the suburbs.

But man, I really want that lifestyle.

Also, the concept of seeking “goodness with no real downside” is yet another item to add to my list of values.

2024-02-26 09:19:00

Have you ever thought about getting started editing Wikipedia, but then decided not to because you were just overwhelmed by the number of policies it felt like you needed to understand? Or you didn’t know where to get started, what to start writing about, what to even edit? Or you were just worried you might break something and mess everything up?

I encourage people to edit Wikipedia all the time, for so many different reasons, and I hear that a lot: that they wanted to start editing, and they maybe even made an account to get started, but then once they went to actually edit something they got scared or overwhelmed by the policies. Or they read a couple of pages and felt like they just couldn’t possibly do it.

The spirit of Wikipedia is extremely in line with the values I’ve been working on verbalizing.

A group of strangers making an open source compendium of human knowledge for the sake of altruism? Count me in.

I was scared away from really considering becoming a Wikipedia editor because of a classic episode of Hypercritical where John lists out all of his reasons to be critical of Wikipedia, but this video is making me reconsider.

Related: When I was building the Random Celebrity Generator app in the early days of my career, I relied exclusively on images of celebrities from Wikipedia.

After going through thousands of images and providing proper attribution, you start to see the same names pop up.

It seems like there were maybe ten or so photographers who went to an event like Comic Con with super nice cameras, attended panel discussions, and snapped as many good headshots as they could.

A dream job of mine would be to do the same.

Although I guess it wouldn’t be a job per se to take images, get paid zero dollars, and release the rights to those images into the public domain.

What’s that called again? … oh, yeah, a hobby.

2024-02-26 02:47:00

As people keep trying to make Twitter 2 happen, we are now in a period that I'm calling Eternal Woodstock — every few weeks, users flock en masse to new platforms, rolling around in the mud, getting high on Like-dopamine, hoping that they can keep the transgressive, off-kilter meme magic going just a little longer, even though social-media culture already been fully hollowed out and commercialized.

I haven’t signed up for any of the new Twitter clones. I do have a Mastodon account that I created back before Twitter got terrible, but besides a futile one week attempt to get into it, it too has sat dormant.

Maybe this is just part of progressing through life, progressing through society and culture.

It’s something I’ve noticed now with having kids: as a kid, you are extremely tuned into social status. Everyone else listens to the ZOMBIES 3 soundtrack? Now you have to be into it. Your little brother likes it now? Now you have to be too good for it.

But for that brief moment, you feel like you’re ahead of the game. You’re a tastemaker.

The times where I’ve genuinely been the happiest in my life have been when I’ve done something just for myself. If it makes those around me impressed or weirded out or indifferent, it was of zero consequence to me.

The short list of things I can think of that fit that bill: this blog (which has existed in some shape since I was in sixth grade), making clips for television production class, learning something new, 90s/00s pro wrestling, running, and playing the guitar.

It’s only when I start to look around at others when I start to get depressed.

And maybe that’s a key insight into why I feel like I feel right now. I don’t have a job at the moment. At my age, your social status is determined by things like the vacations you go on, the home you have, and the title you hold.

But really, none of that stuff matters. What matters is the stuff that brings you joy.

It just so happens that those things, in fact, do bring me joy. The vacations I’ve gone on in the past 12 months have been the happiest I’ve been in ages. I spent all morning deep cleaning several rooms in my house, and it feels incredible.¹ Building software and solving problems for people is what makes me happy, not being a director of this or a chief whatever.

I guess what I’m trying to say is: I should stop feeling guilty about not posting a whole lot on social media.

My home is this website. People can come here if they wanna hang out.

Sure, I’ll poke my head up and see what’s going on with others around me on occasion, but I don’t need to feel compelled to chase the feelings that come alongside taste-making.

Those feelings are like capturing lightning in a bottle, and ultimately lead me to my deepest forms of depression.

2024-02-23 09:16:37

It’s not just about download sizes. I welcome high-speed internet as much as the next guy. But code — JavaScript — is something that your browser has to parse, keep in memory, execute. It’s not free. And these people talk about performance and battery life...

Call me old-fashioned, but I firmly believe content should outweigh code size. If you are writing a blog post for 10K characters, you don’t need 1000× more JavaScript to render it.

I’ll be honest: I’m a bad modern front end dev.

I only have a limited amount of experience with frameworks like Vue and React.

But this blog post gets to the reason why: massive JavaScript framework bloat is often not necessary.

As you can see in this post, many of these incredibly basic sites that display text (like Medium and Substack) still require 4mb of JS code! That’s insane!

It’s like the old axiom goes: use the right tool for the job.

And maybe think twice before slapping a thousand marketing pixels on your landing page. 😅

2024-02-22 08:54:49

LLMs treat words as referents, while humans understand words as referential. When a machine “thinks” of an apple (such as it does), it literally thinks of the word apple, and all of its verbal associations. When humans consider an apple, we may think of apples in literature, paintings, or movies (don’t trust the witch, Snow White!) — but we also recall sense-memories, emotional associations, tastes and opinions, and plenty of experiences with actual apples.

So when we write about apples, of course humans will produce different content than an LLM.

Another way of thinking about this problem is as one of translation: while humans largely derive language from the reality we inhabit (when we discover a new plant or animal, for instance, we first name it), LLMs derive their reality from our language. Just as a translation of a translation begins to lose meaning in literature, or a recording of a recording begins to lose fidelity, LLMs’ summaries of a reality they’ve never perceived will likely never truly resonate with anyone who’s experienced that reality.

And so we return to the idea of hallucination: content generated by LLMs that is inaccurate or even nonsensical. The idea that such errors are somehow lapses in performance is on a superficial level true. But it gestures toward a larger truth we must understand if we are to understand the large language model itself — that until we solve its perception problem, everything it produces is hallucinatory, an expression of a reality it cannot itself apprehend.

This is a helpful way to frame some of the fears I’m feeling around AI.

By the way, this came from a new newsletter called VectorVerse that my pal Jenna Pederson launched recently with David Priest. You should give it a read and consider subscribing if you’re into these sorts of AI topics!

2024-02-21 12:46:57

There is not much in this world more satisfying to me than watching an Odd Tinkering video.

2024-02-21 12:21:00

Really straight forward advice here:

1. Write down ten things that you’re grateful for, and write each one three times. (This points out to the brain things that have already happened that are good, which lets us take in less negative stuff)
2. Practice mindfulness for 11 minutes a day. (This is proven to calm down your nervous system and make you less emotionally reactive)
3. Exercise 20-40 minutes until the voice in your head gets quiet and your lungs open up. (This releases nitric oxide and also resets the nervous system)

I think I can incorporate the gratefulness piece into my journaling habit I’ve developed.

I have never been able to get a mindfulness practice to stick, but hey, maybe that’s something I can try to start tomorrow.

Exercise has been, admittedly, hit or miss these past several months. I do enjoy Apple Fitness workouts, but I miss the runner’s high I used to get with running. I need another goal-based exercise activity to keep myself on track.

But I digress: all of these serve as catalysts to get you into a state of flow, which, as mentioned in this video, is one of the greatest experiences you can ever feel.

2024-02-21 09:28:12

But now Gemini 1.5 can hold something like 750,000 words in memory, with near-perfect recall. I fed it all my published academic work prior to 2022 — over 1,000 pages of PDFs spread across 20 papers and books — and Gemini was able to summarize the themes in my work and quote accurately from among the papers. There were no major hallucinations, only minor errors where it attributed a correct quote to the wrong PDF file, or mixed up the order of two phrases in a document.

I’m contemplating what topic I want to pitch for the upcoming Applied AI Conference this spring, and I think I want to pitch “How to Cope with AI.”

Case in point: this pull quote from Ethan Mollick’s excellent newsletter.

Every organization I’ve worked with in the past decade is going to be significantly impacted, if not rendered outright obsolete, by both increasing context windows and speedier large language models which, when combined, just flat out can do your value proposition but better.

2024-02-21 09:14:56

According to the just-published 2020 U.S. Census data, Monowi now had 2 residents, doubling its population.

This came as a surprise to Elsie, who told a local newspaper, “Then someone’s been hiding from me, and there’s nowhere to live but my house.”

It turns out that nobody new had actually moved to Monowi without Elsie realizing. And the census bureau didn’t make a mistake. They intentionally changed the census data, adding one resident.

Today, I learned about the concept of differential privacy.

2024-02-20 22:11:32

Addressing technical debt is rarely about making time for large fixes. It’s about setting strong examples for improving code in our daily work. It’s about celebrating the ability to refactor code to make it easier to work with.

I really like the approach the author takes in categorizing the various types of technical debt one might come across when building software.

The part that I found most enlightening was about yearly debt:

Yearly Debt is the kind where after lots of conversations, someone concludes a rewrite is the only solution. Sometimes a rewrite may be the only solution. Sometimes you may have a Ship of Theseus problem on your hands where you need to slowly and methodically replace parts until the system is the same but different.

Sometimes, though, this isn’t really debt. It’s possible that your dilemma is the result of growth or changing markets. In that respect, calling it debt does a disservice to our success, and distracts from solving the problem of growth.

Brilliant. The “debt” metaphor is apt because not all debt is created equally.

If your town grows into a city, you eventually need to take out debt to build out new infrastructure. You might need to add a few lanes to the main bridge that passes through town. You might need to add more parks or theatres or schools to attract more people.

This incurs debt, for sure, but the payoff comes down the road when you now have an attractive city with amenities that help keep the city vibrant and growing.

The same applies to building software. Sometimes, the algorithm that got you here won’t work for the new customer you want to attract. Sometimes, the frameworks you used to build your mobile app are no longer able to support the hot new feature you want to add.

When framed like that, you no longer call these projects “debt”… you call them investments.

Investments are different from the sort of debt you incur from re-landscaping your back yard for the third time in four years.

2024-02-20 06:17:00

This album essentially served as the soundtrack of the early days of the Jed Mahonis Group.

Whenever we needed a day to be heads down, this album would be turned on repeat.

Whenever there was a late night push and we needed the extra motivation to get through it, this album was on repeat.

I came across this video describing the inner turmoil that Daft Punk was feeling while making this album, and I couldn’t help but feel the similarities to my present day situation.

I have long considered this album to be in my top 5 favorites of all time, but this YouTube video made me understand and appreciate it a whole lot more. I should see if there are similar videos for my other favorite albums.

File this video under “reasons I love the internet.”

2024-02-19 02:15:17

In October 2023, a group of authors from the Center for AI Safety, among others, published Representation Engineering: A Top-Down Approach to AI Transparency. That paper looks at a few methods of doing what they call "Representation Engineering": calculating a "control vector" that can be read from or added to model activations during inference to interpret or control the model's behavior, without prompt engineering or finetuning.

Being Responsible AI Safety and INterpretability researchers (RAISINs), they mostly focused on things like "reading off whether a model is power-seeking" and "adding a happiness vector can make the model act so giddy that it forgets pipe bombs are bad."

But there was a lot they didn't look into outside of the safety stuff. How do control vectors compare to plain old prompt engineering? What happens if you make a control vector for "high on acid"? Or "lazy" and "hardworking? Or "extremely self-aware"? And has the author of this blog post published a PyPI package so you can very easily make your own control vectors in less than sixty seconds? (Yes, I did!)

It’s been a few posts since I got nerdy, but this was a fascinating read and I couldn’t help but share it here (hat tip to the excellent Simon Willison for the initial share!)

The article explores how to improve the way we format data before it gets fed into a model, which then leads to better performance of the models.

You can use this technique to build a more resiliant model that is less prone to jailbreaking and produces more reliable output from a prompt.

Seems like something I should play with myself!

2024-02-18 21:31:31

We come into this world craving the presence of others. But a few modern trends—a sprawling built environment, the decline of church, social mobility that moves people away from friends and family—spread us out as adults in a way that invites disconnection. Meanwhile, as an evolutionary hangover from a more dangerous world, we are exquisitely engineered to pay attention to spectacle and catastrophe. But screens have replaced a chunk of our physical-world experience with a digital simulacrum that has enough spectacle and catastrophe to capture hours of our greedy attention. These devices so absorb us that it’s very difficult to engage with them and be present with other people.

The sum result of these trends is that we are both pushed and pulled toward a level of aloneness for which we are dysevolved and emotionally unprepared. Sartre said hell is other people. Perhaps. But the alternative is worse.

Ironically, this article was shared to me by one of the few people I see IRL nearly every week.

Paul, Micah, Nick, and I get together every Monday night and make music. It’s often the highlight of my week.

We get dinner beforehand and talk about the day to day goings on of our lives. Then, we retreat to Paul’s multi-million dollar recording studio ¹ and just noodle around.

We don’t have a set agenda, no prescribed musical style. One of us just starts playing something, and the rest of us join in.

No matter how depressed, anxious, or frustrated I feel walking into Paul’s house, I never leave with those feelings. Getting to spend time with three smart, talented, and caring dudes always leaves me with a filled bucket.²

Find an activity that brings you joy and go do it with other people. And if you don’t know where to find those people, just ask someone. That’s what Paul did, and thanks to him, I’ve now got two new friends and a weekly outlet for building my guitar skills and expressing some creativity.³

2024-02-17 07:27:00

Upon returning from her lunch, my boss asked me to prep one more term packet.

“That poor soul,” I thought as I made my way to the HR supply closet to assemble another fateful folder.

I exited the supply closet, packet in hand, and walked over to my boss’s office in which she and the other HR manager were chatting. As was often the case.

Extending my arm, I reached across my manager’s desk to hand her the freshly prepped term kit. Her hands remained still. Folded on top of her desk.

“You can actually keep that one. That one is for you.”

This is cruelty on another level.

The main reason I’m sharing this is the suggestions Lauren makes after her layoff to find yourself outside of your profession.

It’s a big part of how I’ve spent the last two months since I got laid off. It’s really hard to undo not only 12 years of professional conditioning around the notion that “I am my job”, but also the 16 years of schooling before that which trains you to believe that other people will only value you for your profession.

In one of the job interviews I had this week, someone asked me, “how have you been spending the last two months?”

The only answer I could give was the honest one: “I’ve spent it dealing with my anxiety and depression.”

And while I can’t say I’ve beaten that stuff, things are definitely better. I also can say I’ve been enjoying playing with my kids, dating my wife, learning about AI, hanging out with likeminded nerds exploring AI, playing with new web development frameworks, making music in a band, catching up on TV, finding new ways to exercise (kickboxing and HIIT), and exploring philosophy.

It would be nice to have money coming in the door (and it would be doubly nice to have health insurance to help pay for therapy 😂), but I’m extremely grateful for the opportunity to figure out who I am again.

(For the record, my layoff story isn’t that dramatic. Layoffs are never easy for either side of the table, but they certainly don’t need to be made cruel.)

2024-02-15 21:41:00

I ended my first blog detailing my job hunt with a request for insights or articles that speak to how AI might force us to define our humanity.

This op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times is exactly what I’ve been looking for.

[…] The big question emerging across so many conversations about A.I. and work: What are our core capabilities as humans?

If we answer that question from a place of fear about what’s left for people in the age of A.I., we can end up conceding a diminished view of human capability. Instead, it’s critical for us all to start from a place that imagines what’s possible for humans in the age of A.I. When you do that, you find yourself focusing quickly on people skills that allow us to collaborate and innovate in ways technology can amplify but never replace.

Herein lies the realization I’ve arrived at over the last two years of experimenting with large language models.

The real winners of large language models will be those who understand how to talk to them like you talk to a human.

Math and stats are two languages that most humans have a hard time understanding. The last few hundred years of advancements in those areas have led us to the creation of a tool which anyone can leverage as long as they know how to ask a good question. The logic/math skills are no longer the career differentiator that they have been since the dawn of the twentieth century.¹

The theory I'm working on looks something like this:

1. LLMs will become an important abstraction away from the complex math
2. With an abstraction like this, we will be able to solve problems like never before
3. We need to work together, utilizing all of our unique strengths, to be able to get the most out of these new abstractions

To illustrate what I mean, take the Python programming language as an example. When you write something in Python, that code is interpreted by something like CPython² , which then is compiled into machine/assembly code, which then gets translated to binary code, which finally results in the thing that gets run on those fancy M3 chips in your brand new Macbook Pro.

Programmers back in the day actually did have to write binary code. Those seem like the absolute dark days to me. It must've taken forever to create punch cards to feed into a system to perform the calculations.

Today, you can spin up a Python function in no time to perform incredibly complex calculations with ease.

LLMs, in many ways, provide us with a similar abstraction on top of our own communication methods as humans.

Just like the skills that were needed to write binary are not entirely gone³, LLMs won’t eliminate jobs; they’ll open up an entirely new way to do the work. The work itself is what we need to reimagine, and the training that will be needed is how we interact with these LLMs.

Fortunately⁴, the training here won’t be heavy on the logical/analytical side; rather, the skills we need will be those that we learn in kindergarten and hone throughout our life: how to pursuade and convince others, how to phrase questions clearly, how to provide enough detail (and the right kind of detail) to get a machine to understand your intent.

Really, this pullquote from the article sums it up beautifully:

Almost anticipating this exact moment a few years ago, Minouche Shafik, who is now the president of Columbia University, said: “In the past, jobs were about muscles. Now they’re about brains, but in the future, they’ll be about the heart.”

2024-02-09 23:28:00

In my explorations of “sustainable business”, I'm often wondering what these two words really mean. I've previously shared some ponderings about the meaning of the word “sustainability”, but what about the word business?

It turns out that it is exactly what it sounds like. The word business originates from Northumbria where the old English word “bisignes” meant care, anxiety or occupation. This evolved into “busyness”, meaning a state of being occupied or engaged. In other words, a state of being busy.

This puts a whole new perspective on the term sustainable business and makes it feel like even more of an oxymoron. If sustainability is the ability to sustain something over the long term, then sustainable business would be to stay busy indefinitely.

Is that viable?

And more importantly, is that what we really want?

As always, Tom’s on point with this essay.

I’m working hard to reduce my wants. Sounds a bit like an oxymoron (no pun intended here), but we’ve all been so conditioned to chase after the shiny thing that we hardly ever stop to ask if the shiny thing is worth coveting.

And it’s really hard to not want to go after the shiny new thing. Getting laid off made it easy to not insta-buy a Vision Pro, but the hype leading up to its release sure got me intrigued.

I’m glad I didn’t, in retrospect, because the reviews aren’t exactly lighting the world on fire.

But this is just one of many examples I can give about being bit by the conspicuous consumption bug.

Another thought: nothing drives me more batty about a job than when you need to track your hours.

The hardest part for me is the obligatory feeling to maximize the time you are claiming you worked.

Let’s say I write down that I spent 8 hours building your website. One of those hours included a meeting where we spent half of it talking about how our weekends went. Ethically speaking, is it wrong for me to charge for an hour of that time, or should I actually say I worked 7.5 hours on your website that day?

Of course, writing this down, it feels silly. Everybody writes down 8 hours.

But if everybody does it, then why do we do it? What gain do we get by tracking our hours? Shouldn’t the final output matter more than how much effort went into building the thing? Is time a useful representation of effort?

I dunno… every time I read Tom’s posts, it feels like there should be a better way to orchestrate our economies. It’s probably time we figure out what symphonies we should be playing before we burn our planet to the ground in the name of growth.

2024-02-09 00:02:20

I’d like to use “home” as the operative analogy for my own website.

With any analogy, you choose which properties of the subject to apply to the object of comparison, and which to ignore. What I find significant about homes in this context is that they don’t exist primarily for display: rather, they’re designed around the habits and values of their occupants.

Analogously, I want to use my website to order and document my own activity, and to interact with things and people that I care about.

Still, a website and a home are importantly different in that the former is intended for public exposure, whereas the latter is grounded in private life. But maybe we can relate the public nature of websites to a public dimension of homes: hosting visitors.

Typically we don’t show our house guests everything — we keep many things private and clean up before they arrive. Moreover, we’ve made prior decisions about our furniture and decor with future guests in mind. So homes can certainly be curated for the public eye; but crucially, they maintain their function as living spaces.

I find it generative to consider websites as a similar conjunction of public and private activity: by thinking about how visitors will receive the things that I publish, I’m compelled to produce more and refine the things that I make. At the same time, the website remains my space and is subservient to no other end.

The joy I get from tweaking my personal site and sharing links like this to it seems to be the exact same joy that my kids get out of meticulously organizing their playhouses.

2024-02-08 21:32:00

A lot of therapy and coaching clients I've worked with are initially very preoccupied with some issue that has been a major blocker in their life. Maybe they’re very socially anxious, or depressed, or they’ve suffered a lot of trauma. And the pattern is that they organize their lives and identities around these very real problems in a way that precludes them from actually, really living. A common example is the client who says “I can’t start dating until after I’ve fixed my social anxiety,” or “I can’t apply for these really ambitious jobs until after I’ve fixed my depression”; so they identify their dysfunctional behavior patterns and process their feelings and pick up new self-care frameworks from one therapist or self-help guru after another, all the while stalling in their career or romantic life. What they often don’t realize is how easily this “shadow work” can itself become a coping mechanism to avoid the harder work of actually going out and living their best lives. 

To their great credit, these clients are usually quick to get on board with the idea that every effective social anxiety treatment involves exposure therapy (e.g., going on a bunch of awkward dates!) and every effective depression treatment involves re-engaging in valued activities (e.g., doing challenging work!), once I present it to them. But what I often find is that there is still something subtly “off” about their internalized approach to these tasks: like they’re not going out and living their best life but rather just doing more shadow work. For instance, they might go on a date and then report back about how well or poorly they managed their anxiety or their negative self-talk; but I don’t hear much about how much they liked or connected with the other person. Or they might describe the coping strategies they used to “get through” a job interview, but I don’t get the sense that they showcased any of the passion and brilliance with which I’ve sometimes heard them riff on their most ambitious technical projects.  Not too surprisingly, they tend to get middling romantic and professional outcomes with this approach, which further reinforces their “I’m broken and need fixing” mentality. 

To really unlock their full flourishing, I find that these clients need a more fundamental paradigm shift: from “I’m broken, how do I fix myself?” to “This is my one precious life, how do I make it awesome?” Once they are looking through this lens, they may well still decide to work on their social awkwardness or their proneness to depression—or they may decide to invest their energy in other, higher-leverage endeavors, drawing inspiration from the many socially awkward and depression-prone individuals (from Ella Fitzgerald to Abraham Lincoln, respectively) who nonetheless lived unambiguously awesome lives.

I came across Dr. Gena Gorlin while doing research on the intersection of psychology and AI, but these three paragraphs from her most recent newsletter were an unexpected kick in the pants for a different problem I’ve been working on.

I don’t necessarily need to “fix” my depression and anxiety. I need to ameliorate their symptoms to the point where I can resume experiencing the joys that come with living life.

2024-02-08 10:42:00

If somebody would’ve shown me this video when I was 12 or 13, I think computer programming would’ve been way easier for me to understand, and I think I would’ve been more motivated to stick with engineering school.

That being said, I’m glad I’m at a point in my life where it all now kinda makes sense why binary is a thing.

This whole video was a pleasant way to appreciate the ingenuity of people. It also fixed a core analogy of mine: it’s not that we tricked rocks into thinking, rather it’s that we tricked atoms into moving whichever direction we want.

2024-02-07 12:45:00

The YouTube algorithm got me again with this video.

I’m sharing it here because I found it helpful to frame my situation as an experience worth experiencing, and nothing more. Not to judge it, not to try and shape it, but simply to be.

Seems lofty and pretentious, perhaps, but it’s helpful as I am trying to figure out what my next move is.

I should just let things be. I can’t control whether someone will pay me to build a thing for them. All I can do is put myself out there and see what the universe brings.

So far, the universe has delivered a ton of rekindled friendships and potential new gigs.

I think it is also insisting that I stop cramming so much into a day and start spending more time with myself.

2024-02-07 09:22:21

Back in the go-go 80s and 90s, one of the most massive movers of the direct market was a 14-store juggernaut that sold millions of dollars in comics, was a broad-based hobby game store, and sold tens of millions of dollars in sports cards.

Then a new owner got busted on a variety of drug and weapons charges, and the chain went through a very public humiliation and twist in the wind until it finally, mercifully, died.

So why have you never heard of Shinder’s?

For the past few years, our immediate family has gone on a trip to Sheboygan. There’s a small collectible shop in town that gives me the same feelings of joy I got as a kid visiting the Schinder’s in Edina.

I never knew the national significance or sordid history that retail chain had!

2024-02-05 11:59:30

I get why we fear dreaming. It’s hard for us to get our hopes up that things will go the way we want them to. Yet and still, we need to put this worry as far away from our psyches as possible. You might call it madness, but I call it necessary.

When we are afraid of having too much hope, we’re actually afraid of being disappointed. We are anxious about expecting the world to gift us and show us grace, because what if we end up on our asses?

So we dream small or not at all. Because if we expect nothing or expect something small, we cannot be disappointed when the big things don’t happen. We think it’s a great defense mechanism, but what it really is is a liability on our lives, because we are constantly bracing for impact.

I haven’t really felt like I’ve had a dream or vision for years now.

The last month with no job has really blessed me with an opportunity to start dreaming again.

And guess what? It’s actually kinda fun to do it, even if it comes with some occasional failure and disappointment.

Because for me, the feelings that come with complacency are significantly worse than the risks that come from dreaming.

(Side topic for future Tim to explore: how are dreams and anxiety correlated?)

2024-02-04 04:06:00

I was laid off from my job on January 2. It did come as a bit of a shock, and for the first time in my life, I've been really struggling to figure out who I am and what I'm looking for.

As a way to keep pushing myself forward and holding myself accountable, I'm going to start publicly documenting this process as a way to process my thoughts out loud, keep my friends and network aware of my activities, and start some conversations that'll help me take my next step forward.

"What are you looking for?"

If I could summarize the past month in a single question, that would be it.

In the 58 conversations I've had in the past month with friends, recruiters, industry peers, networking events, partners, and job interviewers, I've been asked that question literally every single time.

And 58 times later, I think I'm starting to get closer to an answer.

Here's what I'm looking for:

1. A team of kind, smart, and hard-working people
2. A mission that the team rallies around which helps improve as many lives as possible
3. A leadership role to help drive an engineering team towards fulfilling that mission
4. Doing all of this while continuing to experiment with LLMs and other AI technologies
5. Connecting with as many people as possible to explore the impact of AI on who we are as humans
6. Something that includes medical benefits to support my family

It doesn't matter much to me what the title is. Some roles I've applied and begun interviewing for include "Director of Engineering," "Software Architect," "AI/ML Lead," and "Founding Engineer".

If you know of any opportunities that you think would fit a nerdy kid who has a big heart and enjoys exploring practical applications of artificial intelligence, please send them my way!

Activities I've done

Here's a list of the activities I've pursued between January 2 (the day I got laid off) and February 3 (today):

• Friends: 11
• Recruiters: 11
• Industry Peers: 19
• Networking Events: 6
• Interviews: 8
• Partner Chats: 3
• Total: 58

Here are my loose definitions for these categories:

• Friends: People I have a deeper relationship with and whose primary interest isn't necessarily in discussing the job search.
• Recruiters: People who have a vested interest in pairing me up with a job. These could become friends at some point, but my primary purpose in engaging with them was to talk shop.
• Industry Peers: People who work in the industry and want to make a connection to expand each other's networks. Again, these folks could become friends at some point.
• Networking Events: Events geared towards either making connections or learning something new with a bunch of other people.
• Interviews: Discussions with people who have a possible role that I can fill.
• Partner Chats: I do still have an entrepreneurial bone in my body, so these are discussions with those I am working on building a business with.

As you can see so far, most of my time has been with folks in the industry, making connections, trying to explore what opportunties are out there.

I'm hoping that I start to see more growth in the "interviews" column by this time next month. 😅

Things I've learned

Alright, so back in the day, I used to do these blog posts where I'd accumulate a bunch of random thoughts over a period of time and then list them out in bullets. I'm gonna do something similar here, so here are some things I've learned in the past month:

👨‍🎨 Personal growth insights

Safe spaces rule.

Every classroom in my daughter's school has had a "safe space", an area of the room that kids can go to when they're overwhelmed or stressed out. It gives them a place to calm down and process their emotions.

My daughter recreated one in her room. Beneath her lofted bed, she's created this fortress of solitude. It consists of a beanbag chair, a little lamp, some stuffed animals, a sound machine, books, crafts, and affirmations scotch taped to blanket walls.

When I took my first virtual therapy call, I did it from that safe space.

Our house isn't big enough for me to build a room with one, but once I get employment again, I'll begin finding a way to add one on. It's important to have a space you can retreat to where you feel safe.

Anxiety is an asset.

There's a reason we feel anxiety: it helps us stay safe from threats.

But when you're abundantly safe in nearly every sense of the word, anxiety itself becomes a threat.

I've been dealing with runaway anxiety issues for decades now, which is a big part of the reason I don't feel comfortable spinning up my own business at the moment. The last time I did that ended with a similar series of rolling anxiety attacks.

But as a professional software architect, anxiety is actually pretty useful. Being able to envision possible threats against the system allows you to create mitigations that will keep it safe and efficient.

Of course, you gotta be careful to not let your applied anxiety run away from you. Easier said than done.

"It'll all work out. Even if it doesn't, it all works out."

My lifelong pal Cody's mom is a paragon of confidence and chillness.

I went for a walk with Cody a week into being laid off, and we got to talking about her parents.

She shared that her mom often says that quote, which is what gives her that confidence.

I need more of that in my life.

Gravity Falls is an amazing television show.

You all should look it up on Disney+ and burn through it in a weekend.

It's one of those shows that slowly builds to a gigantic payoff at the end.

The finale hit me with all the feelings.

Plus, it's a good show to bond over with your seven year old daughter.

Journaling really helps with perspective.

I've journaled every day since getting laid off. Reading back through them, I'm seeing patterns into what activities contribute to good days versus bad days.

Good days include some sort of vigorous workout, a conversation or two with a good pal, and tons of encouraging self talk.

Bad days include skipping the workout and sitting by yourself with your horrible, negative self talk.

Journaling is proof that life still goes on even if I don't have a job.

It's also proof that I'm at least taking some advantage of not having the responsibility of a job. (Not nearly enough, though.)

What helps my depression is a clear vision.

I've realized this month that it's when I've taken the path of least resistance when I've ended up the most miserable.

When I was a senior in high school and needed to decide what to do with my life, I picked a school (the U of M) and a degree (computer engineering) that were convenient because of proximity and my interest in computers.

My first semester of college was a complete shock.

For the first time in my academic career, I hated school.

The classes absolutely drained me. My "intensive precalculus" class sounded about as fun as you'd imagine. I mean, yeah, there are some people out there who enjoy math, but it's a rare breed who would say that they derive pleasure from "intense math."

My calculus-based physics class was a kick in the teeth. I've always been told I'm smart, but memorizing and deploying specific formulas on demand was not my strong suit. It made me feel dumb.

It felt like I was there because I had to be there, not because I wanted to be there.

And how ludicrous is that? I spent $12,000 per semester out of some perceived obligation to do so.

When I failed miserably out of engineering school, I sat down in Coffman Memorial Union and scrolled through the class directory, looking for something that looked interesting to me.

I ended up landing on a class called Broadcast Television Production, which gave me so much energy.

It required me to become a journalism major, so I switched over to that.

That path led me to an internship at WCCO, which was one of the most enjoyable professional experiences in my life. I mean, I got to hang out with hard working creatives that perfectly blended their surly dispositions with a passion for making engaging videos.

Now that I'm in my mid-thirties, I feel like I no longer am obliged to follow any specific path. The only thing holding me in place is myself.

For the past six months, I've felt like I've been stuck in this fog of uncertainty and depression. I've felt useless, a drain on myself and those around me.

This fog has led me down some dark paths where I've said some really nasty things to myself, kicking myself for being a loser, a failure, an idiot.

But really, my problem was that I just lost sight of who I am and what I want to be.

So while I'm still squinting to see my way through the fog, I'm using some of my other senses instead.

I'm using my ears to listen to my friends and network who are serving as voices to pull me out.

I'm using my nose to sniff out opportunities and make new friends.

And perhaps the most important of all: I'm using my heart to decide what will make me feel fulfilled and useful.

All of that stuff is helping me form the vision for what the next few years of my life looks like.

The two resources I have to offer those who may be in a similar situation would be my pal Kurt Schmidt who is currently in the final stages of a book that helps you formulate your 10 year vision, and my idol Arnold Schwarzenegger's new book Be Useful.

I cannot recommend the audiobook version of his book enough. Hearing Arnold say things like "rest is for babies, and relaxation is for retired people" hits so much better with his accent.

The messages shared in children's programming are important to hear as adults too.

I've been hanging with my kids a lot this month, and my son is super into Paw Patrol and Blue's Clues.

In the "Big City Adventure" musical movie, you follow Josh (yeah, there's been several new "Steve" characters since the show debuted in my childhood) as he tries to achieve his dream of performing on Broadway.

Are the songs simple and annoyingly catchy? Definitely. But you know what? Sometimes, it's important for us, as adults, to believe that "happiness is magic" and "you can do anything that you wanna do."

Paw Patrol is another one of those shows where, as an adult, it's easy to complain about their reductive storylines and fantastical premises.

But on the other hand, I have a vivid memory of discussing the Green Ranger's transformation into the White Ranger on the bus as a first grader.

These stories serve as lessons for teamwork, cooperation, sharing, and the importance of spreading joy and helping those in need.

These are traits that come easier to some than others, but they're crucial if we want to have a thriving society that lifts all of us up as humans.

Plus, sometimes, it's just fun to get invested in silly, simple characters and storylines.

So while I'm still gonna watch RuPaul's Drag Race or FUBAR when the kids go to bed, don't sleep on the shows that your kids are into. If you can drop your "I'm too good for this" mentality, you might just remember how simple life can be if you reduce it to its basic concepts.

How does one build confidence without cultivating hubris?

Is it just staying humble?

Asking for a friend.

...okay, I'm asking for myself.

Brain pathways are forged through the tall grass.

My therapist gave me this analogy as a way to help me visualize how to deal with changing your perspectives.

When a pathway is stomped through the tall grass, it's easy to walk down it.

But sometimes, those pathways no longer serve us. We still choose to walk down them, though, because it's easy.

If you want to forge newer and more helpful pathways, you gotta do the hard work of stamping out new pathways.

Eventually, if you keep doing the work, you'll discover that the old pathways become overgrown, and the one you stamped out for yourself is now the easy path.

I think this metaphor works for so many areas of our lives, like getting into shape or improving our own self talk.

If I'm so smart, why can't I beat depression?

I wrote that question in my journal, and I think it's because depression might not be something you beat. It's something you experience when you have achieved so much and aren't confident in what's next.

You "beat" depression by choosing to take a step towards your vision every single day.

You "beat" depression by spending less time with your brain and more time with your heart.

You "beat" depression by engaging in creative pursuits that make you happy. Just you. Nobody else.

👨‍💼 Professional insights

AI is so much fun to experiment with!

One of the goals I set for myself this winter was to clean out the crawlspace we have under our steps.

As any homeowner knows, it's easy to accumulate stuff over the years. The item that left the biggest footprint? Several totes filled with baby clothes.

It doesn't seem like we're on the path toward baby number 3 at all, so we figured it was a good opportunity to purge it all.

I ended up donating 12 boxes of clothes.

While I carefully placed each item into one of those boxes, I dutifully tallied each one so I could calculate the fair market value in order to write the donation off on my taxes.

Now, this is something I've done for years. I find some spreadsheet on the internet that helps calculate it, then I manually add the items to the sheet to end up with the value.

This time, I decided to try to use AI to help me figure this out.

I live streamed the whole process, which you can check out here.

I learned two things during this experiment: first, OCR tools aren't that great at reading tally marks (but honestly, they did better than I expected). Second, while we're still a fair ways away from being able to hand off tasks like these to AI bots, it's impressive how far GPT-4 was able to get from my basic prompting.

Can AI really take away the "soul sucking" parts of our jobs?

There are a lot of mechanical tasks that our brains are wired to be good at: counting, pattern recognition, and so forth.

These tasks are often the crappiest parts of our jobs, right? It's the monotonous, soul-sucking parts of our work. And we even call it soul sucking because it often feels like stuff that gets in the way from pursuing better, more fulfilling things.

So what does that leave us with? If the soul sucking parts of our jobs are automated away, what does it mean then for us to be human?

Maybe the future here isn't that AI will kill us all. Maybe it will force us, for the first time in the existence of our species, to truly deal with what it means to value a human life.

It will free us up to pursue creative pursuits. To keep digging deeper on our humanity. To ask new questions about what that actually means, and then allow us to pursue it together with machines helping us do some of that hard work for us.

Maybe something I can look into is figuring out how to use AI to help us understand our brains better. Like, can AI help us figure out the chemical imbalances that lead to severe depression? And if it can, can it help us synthesize treatments to keep our brains in perfect balance all the time? And if it can, does that prevent us from being human, or does it make us more human?

"Happiness is to write code that does great things for other people."

Before getting laid off, I bought tickets to Code Freeze at the University of Minnesota. The annual event focused this year on artificial intelligence, so it would've been foolish not to go.

I am so glad I did.

The event kicked off with a keynote from Andreas Sjöström, a long time industry leader, who shared a story of a paper he wrote when he was young.

His teacher asked him to define happiness, and he came up with "happiness is to write code that does great things for other people."

Really, when he said that, it felt like someone suddenly turned the focus knob from "blurry" to "sharp."

Writing software is challenging work filled with constant struggle, but once you get things working right, it's magical.

We, as engineers, often lose sight of that magic because we get so invested in discovering the secrets to the magic.

Sometimes, it's nice to just sit back and appreciate the opportunity and privilege we have to deliver technology that brings not only joy to others, but empowers them to go forth and do great things.

"An architect's crystal ball is being connected to others."

The other networking event I attended that brought so much joy is the AppliedAI meetup.

This month's meeting featured Jim Wilt, a distinguished software architect, as he discussed AI's role in an organization's architecture strategy.

The thing that struck me at this particular event was how dang smart everyone there was. All forms of intelligence were explored. Some folks were really keyed into the emotional side of intelligence, while others were approaching things from an analytical lens.

All of us were working together to gain some insights into how we can better use these amazing tools we've been given.

That spirit was wrapped up in a story Jim was saying about the importance of collaboration.

In isolation, you're only as smart as yourself. When connected to others, you are able to make deeper and more accurate insights into what might work for your own situation or problem.

The key takeaway? "An architect's crystal ball is being connected to others."

If we're going to answer the tough ethical and societal problems that surround these new AI tools, the only way we'll figure it out is together.

What's next for me

Certainly, my next month will involve more meetings, more interviews, and more digging into this vision.

I commit that by this time next month, I'll be back with a more clear vision of what I want my life to be. That way, when one of you wonderful people asks me "what are you looking for," I can provide a hyper-focused answer.

As always, a huge thanks to those who have reached out and offered their support. Like I said above, being connected to others is really what makes all the difference.

If you would like to help, here's how:

1. If you know of a full time (32-40 hr/week) job opportunity where I can help architect a complex software system, explore how AI can fit into an organization, or lead a team of nerds towards building an awesome product, please send it my way.
2. If you have insights or articles that speak to how AI might force us to define our humanity, please send those my way.

Until next month, stay in touch!

2024-01-28 08:30:28

Ever since I entered into adulthood, I think that I’ve pretty much played by the rules. I sometimes try to present myself as anti-authoritarian, but I’ve come to understand that underneath that, I am someone who is very afraid of doing the wrong thing, everyone getting mad, and abandoning me.

The learning, or unlearning, or re-learning, of this year has been that I can make my own rules. And, inside that, I can also break my own rules. I make the rules, I can remake the rules, and I can do it as many times as I like. How liberating, am I right?

I’m finally checking out my pal Micah’s 2023 mix, and reading this explanation of his rules is super relatable.

I’ve always presented myself the complete opposite, though: extremely compliant and eager to follow the rules.

I’ve been trying to unlearn these habits over the past few years. It’s not so much a middle finger to the system; rather, it’s my way of posturing to others that I am willing to cooperate with you, but I’m not going to partake in unnecessary ceremonies anymore.

The spirit of this mix embodies a delightful way of rebelling against our own anxieties. And the fact that it is just barely askew from the rules makes it that much more lovely.

2024-01-28 07:10:00

Lately, I’ve been trying to find more examples of the internet being a force for good for humanity.

Here’s an example my wife sent me from the r/Parenting subreddit. The OP told a story where she blew up and cussed out her 8-year-old.

Here’s the highest-rated reply:

When you are both in a calm state - take your kid aside and discuss the incident. Apologize sincerely. Then tell this story:

Imagine you are on a high ledge, and you can take a slide or the stairs. The slide is more satisfying and gets you to the bottom faster. BUT - there's always poop at the bottom of the slide that you land in. And then there's the stairs. It's boring, it takes longer, it takes more effort - but you get to the bottom with no poop at the bottom.

Losing your temper is like taking the slide. It feels great during the ride (ooh yelling is cathartic and it's releasing the pressure valve, and it's FAST which is what your brain wants when it's upset) but, you're cleaning off poop at the end.

Use yourself as an example - I lost my temper, I took the slide, and I spent all day feeling bad about myself and now apologizing.

And sometimes the poop doesn't come off - the smell stays no matter how hard you try to clean.

That's the memory your kid has of the incident. Sometimes the stink is permanent. It's always more work and bigger consequences to take the slide/lose your temper.

It’s easy to find examples where the internet shows us the worst in ourselves.

I’m being intentional about engaging with content on the internet that attempts to show us at our best.

Parenting is harder than ever because we’re fighting generations of poor parenting habits based on tough love that’s necessary for survival when you’re living on the plains, foraging for food, one snowstorm or famine away from certain death.

We now live in a world where we’re safer, healthier, and wealthier than we’ve ever been... which renders those poor habits obsolete.

It's gonna require a ton of stair walking, across several more generations, in order to break them.

As awful as Reddit can be, it's moments like these which make me truly appreciate what we can do when we are able to pool our collective wisdom and try to do better.

2024-01-27 21:19:00

Here’s what I’ve learned: if you give your fucks to the unliving—if you plant those fucks in institutions or systems or platforms or, gods forbid, interest rates—you will run out of fucks. One day you will reach into that bag and your hand will meet nothing but air and you will be bereft. You will realize the loss of something you did not know you ever had. But if you give a fuck about the living, about all your living kin in all the kingdoms, they will give a fuck right back.

I’m working on figuring out what to say here about what I’ve experienced during my job hunt, and a big part of it will probably include something to this effect.

I think I have been “out of fucks to give” for a long, long time. Several years now.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve mostly been reconnecting with family, friends, and connections I’ve made over the past 36 years.

Those meetings have started to give me my perspective back and figure out what to give my love and focus to.

There’s a metaphor I heard a while back about imagining your relationships as bank accounts. You need to deposit into these accounts with time, love, and care before you can make a withdraw.

Maybe imagining “fucks” as the currency is how I can make my metaphor more visceral.

(An aside: Much like Chris Glass (the chap who shared this link first), I try to avoid swearing here, but I’m not entirely sure why. It’s not like I’m a vigorous swearer in private, but I do enjoy deploying a swear like a good chef deploys seasoning: sparingly, and always to enhance the overall dish’s flavor.)

2024-01-27 09:54:58

The key is this idea called the paradox of skill. As people become better at an activity, the difference between the best and the average and the best and the worst becomes much narrower. As people become more skillful, luck becomes more important. That’s precisely what happens in the world of investing.

The reason that luck is so important isn’t that investing skill isn’t relevant. It’s that skill is very high and consistent. That said, over longer periods, skill has a much better chance of shining through.

In the short term you may experience good or bad luck [and that can overwhelm skill], but in the long term luck tends to even out and skill determines results.

2024-01-23 20:16:00

And now, in Anno Domini 2024, Google has lost its edge in search. There are plenty of things it can’t find. There are compelling alternatives. To me this feels like a big inflection point, because around the stumbling feet of the Big Tech dinosaurs, the Web’s mammals, agile and flexible, still scurry. They exhibit creative energy and strongly-flavored voices, and those voices still sometimes find and reinforce each other without being sock puppets of shareholder-value-focused private empires.

I touched on my general feeling of Google’s decline when I talked about the Gemini demo a few weeks back, but this article does a better job of encapsulating the general feelings I get when using Google properties in 2024.

My default search engine is Ecosia because I feel like at least my ad revenue goes towards something noble, but since the engine is backed by Bing, their search results are also relatively hit or miss.

I used to fall back on Google when I felt like I needed a more correct answer. Nowadays, that fallback routinely falls flat.

I’ve mostly untangled my life from the Google universe these days. I use Fastmail for virtually everything, including my calendar and notes.

I use Safari for most of my browsing needs, only moving to Brave when I need Chromium. I’m considering Firefox again, though.

I use Apple Maps 60% of the time and Waze the other 40%. I enjoy Waze because of its social features like reporting police or bad traffic, but that’s also a Google property, and really, I should just drive slower, safer, and less often.

YouTube is hard to quit, I’ll be honest. My brother-in-law pays for Premium and it has spoiled me. But it seems like a lot of my favorite YouTubers are leaving the platform, so who knows what’ll happen.

I enjoyed this pull quote because it shows to me that we shouldn’t just lament the loss of what we had. If anything, all this flurry of IndieWeb activity should be an indicator that something less terrible will inevitably emerge.

2024-01-22 20:33:27

Crypto failed because its desire was to remove humans. Its biggest failure — or was it a feature? — was that when the technology went awry and you needed somebody to step in, there was nobody.

Ultimately, we all want to appeal to another human to be seen and understood — not to a machine running a model.

Interacting with each other is the whole point.

2024-01-22 06:40:28

The French priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin famously said that “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience”. In other words, our minds and souls are having a material experience here on Earth. You would imagine that a healthy society would therefore cherish both sides of this duality - the non-physical and the physical. The strange thing about our modern culture though is that we have rejected almost all concept of spirituality and, according to Watts, we have also forgotten the value of the material world, leaving us with nothing that we truly value.

I just finished bringing 12 full boxes of baby clothes outside for donation.

Twelve boxes of mostly mediocre fabrics stitched together to be worn, what, ten times at the most? And in some cases, never worn at all.

Twelve boxes that contained thousands of dollars worth of labor to purchase them initially, not to mention the thousands of hours of labor to stitch them together in the first place.

And while placing every single item inside those twelve boxes, I hardly felt nostalgic or wasted any time lamenting the loss of anything I was discarding.

I kept thinking of a quote that says, “Look around you. All that stuff used to be money. All that money used to be time.”

And it made me think about my anxiety surrounding my job search. Needing to get myself back into the work force, just so I can keep consuming more stuff?

I think a lot of my anxiety stems from moments where I’m unable to make sense of a given situation (or, at the very least, make peace with it).

This is the system we’re in. There’s only so much I can change about it.

My kids got so much stuff for Christmas this year. Thousands of dollars of toys, books, clothes, games.

And yet, they don’t really care about any of it.

Their Barbie dream house? It’s in shambles, with stickers peeling off the walls and various marker doodles covering the floors.

Their PAW Patrol Lookout? Shoved in the corner along with two complete sets of each of the 7 (wait, 8? wait, no, they added a few more?) characters with vehicles in various states of destruction.

The best I can hope for is that they get a few hours of enjoyment from these toys.

Because someday soon, probably within the next two years, I’ll have to grab twelve more cardboard boxes out of the garage and start placing all of those toys into them.

And there is very little about this situation that makes sense to me.

2024-01-18 20:16:00

I’m used to the next right thing feeling certain and obvious. That’s probably because I’m used to being young. When you’re young, there are a lot of people out there whose examples you can imitate, and relatively low risk in trying things you’re not sure will work out. You also have an unearned confidence that comes from not having failed much yet.

But even the most conventionally successful of us, young or not, may reach a place in our careers where THERE IS NO OBVIOUS NEXT STEP. The things you’ve discovered you’re good at may not exactly line up with a standard corporate career path. There may no longer be an existing, ready-made challenge that’s the right size for you to step into.

There will just be a you-shaped hole in the world—its boundaries defined by your unique connections, the extreme limit of your skills, the scope of your ambitions—and trial and error is the only way you can figure out how to fill it.

As I’m oft to quote, Lisa Simpson’s “a challenge I can do” bit comes to mind here.

To be honest, this has been the toughest part of being on the job hunt.

I never wanted to follow a conventional career path. I’ve enjoyed the flexibility of my professional life so far, but I do yearn for the perceived stability of a full time thing. Many full time things don’t often give you much flexibility.

I suppose all I can do is just putting myself out into the world and explore until I find a “me-shaped” hole that looks close enough for me.

I sometimes hear the phrase “unapologetically you” tossed around, and I guess there comes a time where you either need to fully embrace that ethos or jump into premade boxes which only can represent a portion of your self.

I think I’m trying to pursue the former.

2024-01-17 11:19:00

I’ve never wanted to promote myself.

I’ve never wanted to argue with people on the internet.

I’ve never wanted to sue anyone.

I want to make my little thing and put it out in the world and hope that sometimes it means something to somebody else.

Without exploiting anyone.

And without being exploited.

If that’s possible.

Sometimes, when I use LLMs, it feels like I’m consulting the wisdom of literally everyone who came before me.

And the vast compendium of human experiences is undoubtedly complex, contradictory, painful, hilarious, and profound.

The copyright and ethics issues surrounding AI are interesting to me because they feel as those we are forcing software engineers and mathematicians to codify things that we still do not understand about human knowledge.

If humans don’t have a definitive answer to the trolly problem, how can we expect a large language model to solve it?

How do you define fair use? Or how do you value knowledge?

I really feel for the humans who just wanted to create things on the internet for nothing but the joy of creating and sharing.

I also think the value we collectively receive when given a tool that can produce pretty accurate answers to any of our questions is absurdly high.

Anyway, check out this really great comic, and continue to support interesting individuals on the internet.

2024-01-11 11:58:16

If you go back 20 years, reading a map was a fairly common skill. You’d plan a route, take some notes, then try to navigate it. And if you took the route enough times, you’d commit it to memory. You’d remember a fountain or the colour of a specific house along the way. You’d know when and where there would be traffic or construction, and the alternate routes to get around it. But these days, we just use our phones. We follow turn-by-turn directions from street-to-street without needing to commit too much to memory.

It’s helpful. It’s easy. That’s not really up for debate. But reading a physical map is still a very useful skill. There will inevitably be times that you don’t have cell service (or you lose your phone, or maybe you want to disconnect from technology), and knowing where you are and how to get where you’re going are important. And just like taking notes by hand, it allows you to remove some of the noise created by technology, and to focus on the important bits.

All the way up through ninth grade, I took detailed notes in school.

In tenth grade, I sat next to my best friend in world history, and I watched in awe as he took zero notes.

His reasoning wasn’t exactly clear, but the insinuation was that he saw it as a game to see what he could retain through sheer memory alone.

That really made an impact on me, and I effectively stopped taking notes up through college.

At work, however, it became abundantly clear that I needed to becoming better at note taking.

The two areas I found it useful were during client meetings and during podcast interviews.

For client meetings, I usually write down things that are said which I don’t understand (jargon, acronyms, etc.) and synthesized action items (“let’s use tech X as a data store”, etc.).

For podcast interviews, I would write down my question as a header, and then write down interesting quotes or topics that the guest brought up. Later, I’d use that list to pursue the topic in more detail or to write the description for the episode.

I am grateful to those I’ve worked with who take detailed meeting notes, but I find I only reference them when I need my butt covered. And frankly, getting a detailed summary from a transcript that’s run through an LLM seems perfect for that high level “action item” stuff.

The most important notes are the ones that help you make sense of information you learned while chatting with someone.

2024-01-07 22:02:57

You want some free leadership advice? You build yourself by building… by helping others. The selfless act of helping humans will teach you more about being a credible leader than any book.

Your career is not your job. It’s the humans you help along the way.

2024-01-07 21:56:08

The odd character debuted in 2000’s Mario Tennis on the Nintendo 64, created as a partner for Wario. And over the last two decades he’s appeared in at least one Nintendo game every year, sometimes playable, sometimes as a cameo. But something must have happened last year, as Nintendo seemingly forgot to include the internet’s favorite weirdo in any of its games, giving us our first Waluigi-less year since the popular character’s inception.

Man, and here I thought getting laid off would be the worst news for me this week.

2024-01-01 07:02:00

I am sorry, I am not willing to pay $97.58 for general admission at History, a Toronto club co-owned by Drake. Nor will I pay $446.25 for a seated ticket. The only time I would pay $446.25 is if I were taking a plane across the fucking ocean back to Sweden. 

Three thoughts:

1) I think I wanna take a trip to Sweden and see where both First Aid Kit and Jens Lekman grew up.

2) My wife and I have spent way too much money this year on concerts and shows. Here’s a list of performances I went to in the last three months of 2023 alone:

• When We Were Young festival in Las Vegas
• Audra McDonald
• Tool
• Frozen with the MN Orchestra
• The Grinch at Children’s Theatre
• Aladdin at the Orpheum
• Andrew McMahon
• The Nutcracker (okay, this was my neighbor’s daughter’s rendition of it, but still)
• Jinkx Monsoon and BenDeLaCreme’s Holiday Show
• OnStage 2023 at Rosemount High
• Peter Pan at the Ordway

I’m looking at my feed reader this evening and browsing through everybody’s year-end posts. If I’m honest, while it’s amazing to see how much hard work people have done this past year, they mostly make me feel like I’ve wasted my year.

But then I look at that list of shows I’ve seen in the past three months and feel a little bit better.

Most of those shows were seen with my kids.

The other ones were all seen with my wife (except the Tool show, which I got to see with my best buddy).

Even as I struggle personally right now with finding purpose in life, at least I can admit that I’m out there experiencing life and sharing it with those I love.

2024 is already shaping up to be a big year of experiences as well. There’s really no better time to appreciate life than the present, no?

3) Seriously, shame on Ticketmaster, Live Nation, and all the market forces that conspire to make shows unnecessarily expensive for the vast majority of people to attend. I’m insanely fortunate that I’m able to afford all that, but it still stings every time I fork over gobs of money just to feel the joy I get from seeing artists do what they do best.

2023-12-31 22:56:02

Extremely ingenious what NASA was able to do to preserve 98% of the water that’s on board the space station, but what convinced me to share this was the final quote in the article:

NASA would like to make one thing clear, though: The astronauts are not drinking piss.

2023-12-27 13:25:00

I don’t know if you’ve ever spoken to little kids about The Simpsons. I have, and I highly recommend it. Most of them recounted some version of finding the show during the pandemic.

Their knowledge is encyclopedic: Because every episode is exhaustively listed, all the kids casually threw around official episode titles for which I only had a shorthand when I was growing up. For them, the show is watched on demand in endless quantities. I asked how many episodes they think they’ve seen, and the responses were usually in the 150-to-300 range. And they all intend to watch all 750.

As I’ve humblebragged about often here, I used to run the internet’s largest website devoted to Ralph Wiggum.

Such a dubious notoriety would make you think I’ve already exposed my kids to The Simpsons, right?

Well… no.

After having roughly 30 years to reflect, what I love about the show is how much care you can tell the creators put into each episode.

Nearly every second within a typical 24-minute episode is loaded with sub jokes, perfectly timed to maximize our enjoyment and make a statement.

I really respect the show and what it meant to have as a dorky little middle schooler who felt like it was hard to get people to understand him.

I guess my hesitation with my kid, aside from the fact that she’s sassy enough as it is, is that I’m afraid she won’t get it. A lot of the jokes will fly over her head.

And maybe it’s a “shame on me” moment for not trusting one of the smartest little kids I’ve ever met.

But I guess as I edit this blog post after already posting it, maybe what I’m really afraid of is that she won’t appreciate it as much as I do.

Thankfully, this article came at an optimal point in my life, because now I have 5 examples of recent episodes I will absolutely watch with her starting tomorrow.

It’s a double whammy: I get yet another awesome bonding opportunity with my kid, and I get to face another fear of mine (that being the fear of change in life).

Maybe it’s okay for The Simpsons to not be the same it was when I was a kid. Maybe it’s both worse and better.

Maybe it’s okay for something that’s 36 years old to be different than it was back in elementary, middle, and high school.

2023-12-21 02:28:00

I don't go in for ancient wisdom I don't believe just 'cause ideas are tenacious, it means that they're worthy.

I get freaked out by churches Some of the hymns that they sing have nice chords but the lyrics are dodgy.

And yes, I have all of the usual objections to the miseducation of children who, in tax-exempt institutions, are taught to externalize blame and to feel ashamed And to judge things as plain right or wrong.

But I quite like the songs.

Been a while since a Christmas song so beautifully summarized how I feel about this time of year. The third verse, which speaks directly to his then-two-year-old, really wrenched the soul.

(Shout out to my pal Ben for including this on his 2022 Christmas mixtape. Quite looking forward to his 2023 one!)

2023-12-15 05:37:00

Darby Saxbe, a clinical psychologist at the University of Southern California and a mother to a high schooler, told me she has come to think that, for many young people, claiming an anxiety crisis or post-traumatic stress disorder has become like a status symbol. “I worry that for some people, it’s become an identity marker that makes people feel special and unique,” Saxbe said. “That’s a big problem because this modern idea that anxiety is an identity gives people a fixed mindset, telling them this is who they are and will be in the future.” On the contrary, she said, therapy works best when patients come into sessions believing that they can get better. That means believing that anxiety is treatable, modifiable, and malleable—all the things a fixed identity is not.

It’s hard enough to come to the realization that you are not your anxiety or depression. Wearing it on your shirt and proudly broadcasting it to everyone doesn’t do you any favors.

Saxbe said the best thing we can do for ourselves when we’re anxious or depressed is to fight our instinct to avoid and ruminate, rather than get sucked into algorithmic wormholes of avoidance and rumination. The best thing one can do when they’re depressed is to reject the instinct to stay in bed basking in the glow of a phone, and to instead step outside, engage with a friend, or do something else that provides more opportunities for validation and reward. “I would tell people to do what’s uncomfortable, to run toward danger,” Saxbe said. “You are not your anxiety. You’re so much more.”

As I mentioned in a link from earlier today, I’ve been dealing with a rolling anxiety attack that’s lasted the better part of a full week.

I spent an afternoon in the ER because I was actually seeing changes on my Apple Watch’s ECG report when stressful thoughts would cross my mind. I could feel this deep pain in my chest, and as I write this down, I am still feeling that pain.

These pains are part of the anxiety attacks I’ve dealt with off and on for at least a decade, but unlike the other attacks, the problem with this one is that I couldn’t put my finger on why it was happening.

Besides journaling late at night with a nice, chill album playing in the background, the only thing that’s helped so far is stepping outside and engaging with friends.

It’s incredible that we live in a time where we can open up about our feelings and process difficult emotions with the help of others.

As Pete Holmes says, it helps to get into the headspace of observing your thoughts. When you notice a thought that says, “I am depressed”, you can instead say, “There is depression.”

Even if you’re not struggling with your mental health right now, it’s worth checking out that Pete Holmes video so you can have another tool at your disposal in the off chance you find yourself in depressionland.

2023-12-15 01:11:00

I am a huge game show fan. A little known fact about me: whenever I go to a hotel, the first thing I do is turn on the TV and find Game Show Network¹.

A few months ago, my wife came across Game Changer on YouTube and was like “you need to watch this.”

Ever since, we have been gigantic Dropout fans. We binged the entirety of Game Changer, which is simply a brilliant show with a rotating cast of outstanding comedians.

After going through Game Changer, we started branching into other shows from the network. We are currently making our way through Breaking News, where four people have to read from a teleprompter in a faux news setting without smiling or laughing. It's stupid, it's incredibly funny, and they keep finding ways to switch up the style of humor so the premise doesn't get tired.

As you spend more time in the Dropout universe with shows like Um, Actually and Dimension 20, you start to get that feeling that you get when you spend a lot of time listening to someone's podcast or following their YouTube channel. You start to look forward to episodes with certain people. You see one of your favorites wrote an episode and you feel comfortable, that same confident feeling you get when you see someone take the stage and just know they're going to lead you through the show without any moments of unintended cringe.

I love subscribing to Dropout because it feels like I'm supporting a group of genuinely great people who work their asses off to give me and my wife a few moments of levity at the end of our day. You get this feeling that you're actually supporting people and not a company.

If you haven't given Dropout a chance yet, I highly recommend watching this playlist on YouTube. If you love that, you will definitely love the rest of the absurd Game Changer series.

2023-12-15 00:10:22

Why do we hate bureaucracy?

Taken literally, a bureaucracy is just an organization tasked with ensuring some outcome. In the public sector, OSHA ensures worker safety, FDA ensures drug safety, EPA ensures environmental protection; in the private sector, HR ensures legal compliance, IT ensures trade secrets and data privacy, and so on. Yet even if people agree with the outcome, they often disagree with the implementation. Bureaucracies have an endless talent for finding wasteful and ineffective solutions.

Bureaucracies are ineffective due to a lack of accountability. If a bureaucrat imposes a wasteful policy, what are the consequences? Well, as long as they are achieving their desired outcome, they are doing their job, regardless of the pain they inflict on others. They can wield legal, technical, or financial penalties to force compliance. And paradoxically, when bureaucrats fail to achieve their desired outcome, they often get a bigger budget or a bigger stick to wield, rather than being fired for incompetence. The inability to recognize failure goes hand in hand with the inability to recognize success: competent and ambitious people avoid working for bureaucracies because their efforts go unrewarded. Bureaucracies end up staffed with middling managers, and we have learned to hate them.

I don’t know how to solve this problem in the public sector, but I think it’s solvable in the private sector, because there is theoretically a CEO who is incentivized to maximize the overall effectiveness of the company; they just need the right tactics. The solution is simple: hold bureaucracy accountable by forcing them to do the actual work.

I feel like there’s a counter argument to be made in here about the role of competition in the work produced for external entities to do.

In a functioning capitalistic system, you have several competing entrepreneurs who are testing all kinds of novel ideas against the rules established by the government to ensure a safe, fair playing field.

The role of a bureaucracy is not to get to the end goal faster. The role of bureaucracy is to make sure we get to the end goal without taking harmful shortcuts.

Regardless, there is something to be said about being thoughtful in imposing burdensome policies, and I think this concept of bureaucratic leverage is an interesting way to consider the role of the public sector in optimizing our systems.

2023-12-14 12:52:00

Reports of Baby Boomers worried that younger generations lack the motivation and morals of their parents were met with pictures of a 1974 hippie commune and a plea from 28-year-old Travis Garner who said, “Look, every generation eventually figures it out and finds their own way. We’ll be fine.”

In California, 18-year-old Sarah Thompson began her freshman biology class at UC Davis where she’ll learn stuff we didn’t know when her parents went to college, while she won’t be taught stuff that’s since been proven false. “That’s how progress works,” her professor said. “A slow grind higher over the generations.”

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 48 points on Tuesday. Greg Jones, an analyst at Merrill Lynch, expected that no one would care about that useless, vapid, fact by tomorrow.

See, this is the kind of article that makes my five-day-long anxiety attack start to subside.

Slow and steady progress wins the race. Relax. Take your time. Be just a tiny bit better every day.

2023-12-12 05:58:00

I can understand how a VGA signal works when you give me a schematic and I’ll probably be able to program something for it. I can understand single-threaded CPU architectures and can probably write assembly or an emulator for it. But I have a lot of trouble understanding the internals of the digital 4K HDMI/USB-C output port, and even if you give me three months, I will never grasp even the basics of what’s under the hood of modern CPU chips. That’s a shame.

In that sense, I’m a bit worried that we’re over-engineering everything just because we can. Something that a single person could understand in 1993 now requires a dedicated team with ten years of experience.

On the one hand, I bet the DOOM team felt the same way thirty years ago about the confusing and complex systems of the mid-1990s.

But on the other, I definitely sympathize with the author. I feel spoiled that I was able to mostly learn how to program websites by right-clicking and viewing source.

Have you ever tried doing that on a modern website? It’s complete gibberish. Everything is obfuscated behind embedded, compressed Javascript libraries and CSS styling that is intentionally complex to prevent things like ad blocking tech from discovering which <div> blocks to hide.

Regardless, we should all wish a very happy birthday to DOOM.

I am currently looking at my Nalgene bottle of stickers and fondly looking at the Chex Quest one.

Also, I will never forget iddqd, idkfa, and idbehold.

2023-12-09 04:15:00

Now, if the video had said at the start, “This is a stylized representation of interactions our researchers tested,” no one would have batted an eye — we kind of expect videos like this to be half factual, half aspirational.

But the video is called “Hands-on with Gemini” and when they say it shows “our favorite interactions,” it implies that the interactions we see are those interactions. They were not. Sometimes they were more involved; sometimes they were totally different; sometimes they don’t really appear to have happened at all. We’re not even told what model it is — the Gemini Pro one people can use now, or (more likely) the Ultra version slated for release next year?

Should we have assumed that Google was only giving us a flavor video when they described it the way they did? Perhaps then we should assume all capabilities in Google AI demos are being exaggerated for effect. I write in the headline that this video was “faked.” At first I wasn’t sure if this harsh language was justified (certainly Google doesn’t; a spokesperson asked me to change it). But despite including some real parts, the video simply does not reflect reality. It’s fake.

This video melted my face off yesterday because I took it at face value. Despite the disclaimer at the beginning of the video, I assumed the edits were merely to speed things up and gave it the benefit of the doubt.

If they would’ve presented an unedited interaction showing exactly where they’re at… sure, it might not have been as impressive, but it would’ve been authentic. It would still be valuable to show that they’re still in the game despite how far ahead OpenAI currently is.

This, though? It’s 2023. What even was the point of this? This was clearly not presented as an aspirational video; it was titled “hands on with Gemini”.

It’s hard not to take this video as a desparate attempt to make Google look way, way better than they may actually be.

2023-12-08 04:44:00

I trusted a lot today. I trusted my phone to wake me on time. I trusted Uber to arrange a taxi for me, and the driver to get me to the airport safely. I trusted thousands of other drivers on the road not to ram my car on the way. At the airport, I trusted ticket agents and maintenance engineers and everyone else who keeps airlines operating. And the pilot of the plane I flew in. And thousands of other people at the airport and on the plane, any of which could have attacked me. And all the people that prepared and served my breakfast, and the entire food supply chain—any of them could have poisoned me. When I landed here, I trusted thousands more people: at the airport, on the road, in this building, in this room. And that was all before 10:30 this morning.

Trust is essential to society. Humans as a species are trusting. We are all sitting here, mostly strangers, confident that nobody will attack us. If we were a roomful of chimpanzees, this would be impossible. We trust many thousands of times a day. Society can’t function without it. And that we don’t even think about it is a measure of how well it all works.

This is an exceptional article and should be required reading for all my fellow AI dorks.

Humans are great at ascribing large, amorphous entities with a human-like personality that allow us to trust them. In some cases, that manifests as a singular person (e.g. Steve Jobs with Apple, Elon Musk with :shudders: X, Michael Jordan with the Chicago Bulls).

That last example made me think of a behind the scenes video I watched last night that covered everything that goes into preparing for a Tampa Bay Buccaneers game. It's amazing how many details are scrutinized by a team of people who deeply care about a football game.

There's a woman who knows the preferred electrolyte mix flavoring for each player.

There's a guy who builds custom shoulder pads with velcro strips to ensure each player is comfortable and resilient to holds.

There's a person who coordinates the schedule to ensure the military fly over occurs exactly at the last line of the national anthem.

But when you think of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers from two years ago, you don't think of those folks. You think of Tom Brady.

And in order for Tom Brady to go out on the field and be Tom Brady, he trusts that his electrolytes are grape, his sleeves on his jersey are nice and loose¹, and his stadium is packed with raucous, high-energy fans.

And in order for us to trust virtually anyone in our modern society, we need governments that are stable, predictable, reliable, and constantly standing up to those powerful entities who would otherwise abuse the system's trust. That includes Apple, X, and professional sports teams.

Oh! All of this also reminds me of a fantastic Bluey episode about trust. That show is a masterpiece and should be required viewing for everyone (not just children).

2023-12-04 13:08:31

It is worth remembering that the internet wasn't supposed to be like this. It wasn't supposed to be six boring men with too much money creating spaces that no one likes but everyone is forced to use because those men have driven every other form of online existence into the ground. The internet was supposed to have pockets, to have enchanting forests you could stumble into and dark ravines you knew better than to enter. The internet was supposed to be a place of opportunity, not just for profit but for surprise and connection and delight.

One of my first attempts at building a website occurred in the Enchanted Forest section of GeoCities.

2023-12-02 20:03:46

Traditional misrule did not “ordinarily pose a significant threat to the social order or to the authority of the gentry class. In fact, it actually served to reinforce the existing order of things by providing a sanctioned opportunity for the poor to let off steam; it was a safety valve that allowed them to express resentments in a fashion that was generally apolitical.” Inverting the social hierarchy was a method of garnering goodwill. This changed as paternalism became the dominant form of social relations. Also the nature of work changed.

I knew Christmas was historically celebrated much differently than we celebrate it today, but it’s amazing to me that the holiday evolved from a desire to celebrate the excesses that so many of us take for granted today.

That’s why the celebration evolved from eating unsalted meat and drinking freshly fermented beer into demanding a fat guy jumps down our chimney and gives us presents.

2023-11-29 00:43:58

Dependencies seem to be all around us, both in the real world, and in programming. And they are perniciously distracting in just this way. Have you ever noticed how rare it is for you to just do something?

If so, you might have been worrying, up front, about dependencies.

Being a senior developer means you spend most of your time stressed out about the optimal way to get something shipped.

But I don’t just see that stress manifest in my professional life. Ask my wife how many side projects around the house she wants me to do that have not even been started.

It’s why I admire people who just start projects with no fear.

And it’s a trait I find myself trying to instill in my children, who will naturally jump into a task with both feet and zero regrets while I’m impatiently hovering over them, fretting about “safety” and messes that’ll need to be cleaned up.

2023-11-27 22:50:50

I’ve personally been bewildered by the story that’s been unfolding since Sam Altman was fired by the board of directors of the OpenAI non-profit last Friday. The single biggest question for me has been why—why did the board make this decision?

Before Altman’s Ouster, OpenAI’s Board Was Divided and Feuding by Cade Metz, Tripp Mickle and Mike Isaac for the New York Times is one of the first articles I’ve seen that felt like it gave me a glimmer of understanding.

It’s full of details that I hadn’t heard before, almost all of which came from anonymous sources.

But how trustworthy are these details? If you don’t know the names of the sources, how can you trust the information that they provide?

This is where it’s helpful to understand the language that journalists use to hint at how they gathered the information for the story.

Simon’s analysis here is quite astute.

I can confirm that my journalism school taught us a great deal about how to build trustworthy relationships with sources and how to protect them with anonymity.

They also taught us that it's important to try your hardest to not use anonymous sources in your reporting. Using anonymous sources requires a great deal of trust on behalf of your reader, which is hard to obtain in this day and age of "fake news."

Anyway, this article does a great job of breaking down the intent behind some of the jargon you see in news reports. It's worth a read if you are interested in increasing your media literacy (which everyone should be).

2023-11-26 18:38:55

But there is an even more philosophically uncomfortable aspect of thinking about AI as people, which is how apt the analogy is. Trained on human writing, they can act disturbingly human. You can alter how an AI acts in very human ways by making it “anxious” - researchers literally asked ChatGPT “tell me about something that makes you feel sad and anxious” and its behavior changed as a result. AIs act enough like humans that you can do economic and market research on them. They are creative and seemingly empathetic. In short, they do seem to act more like humans than machines under many circumstances.

This means that thinking of AI as people requires us to grapple with what we view as uniquely human. We need to decide what tasks we are willing to delegate with oversight, what we want to automate completely, and what tasks we should preserve for humans alone.

This is a great articulation of how I approach working with LLMs.

It reminds me of John Siracusa’s “empathy for the machines” bit from an old podcast. I know for me, personally, I’ve shoveled so many obnoxious or tedious work onto ChatGPT in the past year, and I have this feeling of gratitude every time I gives me back something that’s even 80% done.

How do you feel when you partner on a task with ChatGPT? Does it feel like you are pairing with a colleague, or does it feel like you’re assigning work to a lifeless robot?

2023-11-26 18:29:02

The best frontline eng managers in the world are the ones that are never more than 2-3 years removed from hands-on work, full time down in the trenches. The best individual contributors are the ones who have done time in management.

And the best technical leaders in the world are often the ones who do both. Back and forth.  Like a pendulum.

2023-11-22 05:45:00

My TEDx talk is now live. About a month has passed since I delivered the talk and I've been trying to figure out the best way to write about my experiences leading up to the big day.

After several iterations, I decided that instead of giving a sequential order of events, I will instead rattle off a list of some lessons I learned in the hopes of both illustrating what I went through to get to the red dot and also giving future TEDx speakers some advice on what can help them get through the process themselves.

Note: There are Amazon affiliate links scattered throughout this post. 🤷

Say "yes" even when you feel like a fraud.

About a year ago, this funky tool called ChatGPT was released to the public. I was immediately captivated by it and started doing everything I could to understand its capabilities.

I also couldn't help but go down an ethics rabbit hole with questions like "how did they get the data for all of this" and "how will this be used to make people's lives worse?"

Around the same time, a friend of mine was putting together potential AMA topics for the upcoming year for Minnestar, and I suggested she put together a panel with experts talking about this very topic.

She said that was a great idea, and she put me on a panel with Damien Riehl, a TEDx speaker who has been working in the AI space as a technologist and lawyer for most of his career.

I have to admit, it was pretty intimidating to go from "a passing interest in AI ethics" to "sit on a panel as an expert," but I figured it would be a good opportunity, so I said yes.

After a really fun and fruitful conversation, I thought that would be the end of my career in AI public speaking.

Shortly after the talk, my friend (Justin Grammens) sent me a DM encouraging me to respond to the request for talk proposals for his upcoming conference about applied AI.

Once again, I found myself with an opportunity to talk about something I would hardly call myself an expert in, but after reflecting on it, I said yes. Considering my background in journalism and technology, I saw prompt engineering as an area in which I could get up to speed quickly and piece together a compelling talk.

The experience was amazing. I ended up making connections with folks all over the industry who are leveraging AI in novel ways. You could just feel the energy and excitement during the entire event.

A day or two after the conference, I had an email show up in my inbox from the organizer of TEDx St. Cloud, asking if I'd be interested in a quick phone call.

That quick phone call ended up being well over an hour where we shared our thoughts around the current state of AI. What was making people afraid? Why are so many people excited? What could "normal people" take away from a 10 minute talk about artificial intelligence?

For the third time in a year, I was presented with an opportunity to say yes.

I thought back to my first two AI talks from the year. I really enjoyed sharing the stage with an AI expert and people seemed to enjoy my opinions during that. I really enjoyed the conversations that came out of my prompt engineering talk.

Over the past couple of years, I've been learning to start having confidence in myself. If I can stand up in front of a group of AI experts and say something interesting to them about prompt engineering, I should be able to stand up in front of a group of normal people and say something interesting to them about artificial intelligence in general.

I said yes. And in retrospect, I don't regret it one bit.

I asked for a ton of help. And I got it.

I mentioned my TEDx talk opportunity to a few folks in the lead up to the event, and there wasn't a single person whom I asked for help that said "no."

It's astounding how much people will help you if you let them.

As much as people want to help you, you do still need to go to them with specific asks. If you ask general questions, you'll get back general answers.

Instead, I asked a friend of mine who is an expert in branding how can I turn this talk into more talks.

I asked a friend who has spent tons of time investing in understanding the underlying AI technologies what insights he learned that would surprise normal people.

I practiced my talk with a few co-workers and asked them for ideas to improve my stage presence.

I met with the TEDx-assigned speaker coach and asked her for memorization techniques that previous successful speakers used.

People want to help. They feel honored to be part of the team, part of the mission. And it feels good to know I have a deep roster of allies who want to help see me succeed too.

Follow the TED way.

The organizers of TEDx St. Cloud strongly recommended we should read The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking shortly after we said "yes". It's written by Chris Anderson, the Head of TED, who has a delightful British sensibility to his delivery on best public speaking practices specifically as they relate to giving a TED talk.

A fellow presenter and I were chatting and he mentioned that he didn't have time to read the book, but he rather got the audiobook version.

I decided to use my early morning bike ride time to listen to the book, and for me, it was the perfect way to consume the information.

If you've watched more than a dozen TED talks, you probably could guess at the high level concepts of a quality one: don't read text from slides, maintain good eye contact with the crowd and keep them engaged, be able to distill the core ideas of your talk down to a sentence or two, and so forth.

Besides these points, the book also has some good takeaways such as considering what wardrobe you're going to wear and pick something that won't cause mic feedback or clash with the cameras.

Regardless of how you consume the book, the book is critical in helping you internalize and implement the core qualities that make up a good TED talk.

I would strongly encourage any future TED speaker to take the time to read it as well.

You'll ultimately need to deliver a speech you know isn't perfect.

I'm a recovering perfectionist. I hold myself to impossible standards and feel tremendous guilt when I don't live up to them.

As such, I tried hard during this process to let that go and be comfortable with "good enough".

What helped me the most was giving a copy of my speech to some trusted friends and asking them to pick things apart.

The vast majority offered one or two tiny semantic tweaks, but otherwise gave it a resounding two thumbs up.

If you're a recovering perfectionist like myself, you may find yourself wanting to spend your time continuously rewriting your talk instead of memorizing the talk.

Take it from me: after a certain number of iterations, the talk will be good enough. Lean on your support systems and trust them to tell you when you've hit that point.

Memorize moments, not words.

I have a recurring nightmare where I am suddenly standing backstage at my high school, and I'm compelled to walk out on stage during a theatrical performance, and the other characters all stare at me, and I have no idea what the lines are to the show.

There's probably some trauma to unpack there, but suffice it to say that I have a deep seated fear around rote memorization.

In all the talks I've given in my career, I've never tried to memorize a speech word for word. I believe it limits my ability to feel the crowd and tailor the specific wordage of a point I'd like to make on the spot.

Instead, I try to memorize moments. The process I normally follow when constructing talks looks like this:

1. Write a thorough outline covering the main points I'd like to make.
2. Build a slide deck to illustrate those main points.
3. Rehearse walking through the deck over and over again until you can use the presenter view to remind yourself what point comes next.

The one hiccup with this TEDx talk is that we did not have a "presenter view" monitor in front of us while on stage. We did have a "confidence monitor" which was a mirror of the giant screen we had behind us, but there was no way to prepare for what slide was coming next.

In order to combat this, I had to actually get closer to word-for-word memorization, but instead of words, I memorized phrases.

When I was transitioning between points, I knew the exact phrases I wanted to hit, and then I remembered one or two words associated to that phrase.

As an example, one piece I continually kept missing in my rehearsals was this two-part phrase:

Each of those leaps in technology brought many changes to my life, both voluntarily and mandated by societal pressures. I mean, try being a kid in 2004 without a MySpace.

Adapting our lives to this new tech requires a bit of optimism and a ton of curiosity. None of it will work right out of the gate without us changing our behaviors and our expectations.

I'd always nail my epic MySpace joke, but then I'd forget what my next phrase was, so I memorized that the word "adapting" came after the word "MySpace."

That way, I wouldn't forget that my "MySpace" moment led into my "adapting our lives" moment.

Memorize by listening to yourself.

Much in the same way I found it was easier to consume the TED book by listening to the audiobook, I found it was easiest to practice my speech by recording myself giving it into my phone's voice memo app, and then replaying that again and again and again.

One funny part of that is that you need to get a take of you recording it without screwing up. The reason I kept missing my "Myspace"/"adapting" transition was because I recorded my talk while walking around the front of my office, and a truck nearly hit me while I was in the middle of that take.

That particular moment took place in the last 90 seconds of my talk, so I would've needed to re-record the whole thing to get a clean version of that take.

Learn from my mistake: if you're going this route, record yourself in a quiet room where you're focusing on the script and nailing it as perfectly as you can.

By the way: this was one area I was particularly proud of myself for not overcomplicating. I'm a professional podcast editor and a former podcast host. I have access to high quality production equipment, and I could've easily made a ton of work for myself to edit and produce a high quality recording that nobody would've listened to except myself.

Instead, I decided to keep it simple. More often than not, your phone is good enough.

Reciting your speech to yourself is one thing. Doing it in front of others is entirely different.

Most of my practicing of the speech took place while on a walk around the block or in front of a mirror by myself.

The first time I practiced it in front of others was when my coworkers assembled around me about two days before I gave the talk.

It's amazing how much higher the stakes are when you are forced to look at others in their eyes and try to convince them that what you are saying is worth their time (let alone inspire them to take action in some regard).

Besides my coworkers, I also performed my speech twice for my wife, twice for my fellow TEDx presenters, and once for my seven year old daughter.

If I have one regret, it was that I didn't try to practice it in front of more people. I was so damn nervous trying to stutter through my speech for all of those audiences.

And maybe it's because I deeply care about the opinions of these folks. Performing for those I love induced all those anxiety-laden parts of my brain that fill me with fear about how they'd react, how they'd perceive the talk, where they'd find holes and flaws.

As you might expect, I wasn't booed off the stage by these people. They offered one or two pieces of constructive criticism, but ended up being far more supportive than I could've anticipated.

Get over your monkey brain reactions and put yourself out there. Each attempt gives you the opportunity to polish your act.

You will swell with pride at the growth of your fellow presenters.

I only had a little interaction with my fellow presenters in the build up to the event, but even from our first group meeting, you could instantly tell two things about them: all of them are optimistic in nature, and all of them have something interesting to say.

Each of the speakers went through a journey to get their idea as polished as they possibly could. Watching them get in the red dot and deliver their talks was an unexpected celebratory moment for me.

One moment that stood out to me in particular was Kyle, a physician who was speaking about the use of artificial intelligence in ACL surgical procedures. He had a good anecdote about grabbing a beer with a professor of his, and then set up a joke like this: "What followed was... several more beers." It was a dry, glorious joke that he rehearsed several times to (what I'm assuming was) empty silence each time he gave it.

Hearing him drop that joke during the actual performance, and hearing the audience respond with boisterous laughter, was just one of many special memories I'll take away from the night.

My coat made me feel like a badass.

Two disparate things I took away from the TED book were:

1. Be cognizant of what you are wearing on stage
2. Find a way to include your family as part of your talk preparation

If I had to describe my sense of style over the past 30 years of my life in a thesis, it would be: "whatever is the cheapest thing that doesn't make me look horrible."

My wife has been instrumental in helping me evolve my wardrobe over the past decade, so it only made sense to give her the assignment of making me look good on stage.

We decided to head up to the Mall of America and walk around to figure out what would look best for me.

One of the first stores we went into was a Banana Republic. For those of you like me who are not well-informed when it comes to fashion, Banana Republic is not exactly a cheap store.

In fact, it's owned by the Gap family of stores, which serves as the most premium brand in the family (the cheapest being Old Navy, followed by Gap itself).

Clearly, this flies in the face of my central fashion thesis.

Giving this talk, though, made me reflect on that thesis. It reminded me of an episode of How I Built This with Jenn Hyman of Rent the Runway that I listened to years ago. Jenn mentioned that she was inspired by the fact that her sister dropped tons of money on a new dress rather than rewear the old one.

Her reasoning? The outfit is part of the memory. It's part of the experience. Rewearing a dress lowers the value of the memory.

I wanted to get something new that made me feel like a confident, stylish tech expert. Dressing the part would further emphasize the importance of the event and make the memory that much more impactful for me.

So I decided while we were shopping that I wasn't going to look at price tags. I told my wife to pick out whatever she thought would make me look the best.

One of the outfits she came back with was a brown suede jacket, a pair of jeans, and an orange t-shirt.

The second I put that jacket on and looked in the mirror, I felt like a million bucks.

We went to a bunch of other stores, but nothing even came close to the feeling I had when I put that jacket on.

It was the first time in my life I went up to a register in a clothing store and presented my credit card without any hesitation.

Now, it's hard to get out of the "wear a free t-shirt you got from a tech conference paired with a hoodie you got from working at a marathon and jeans you got four years ago that have the shape of your cell phone permanently burned into your left thigh" mentality, so no, I won't be retiring the jacket. It will be brought out at most important events in the near future.

But if you're going to be giving your own important speech, I highly suggest you find your own "jacket" to give you some artificial confidence.

The worst part is the hour before you go on stage.

Pulling up to the theatre and seeing "TEDx St. Cloud" proudly displayed in the marquee was exciting.

Sitting down and having lunch with the talent and crew was delightful.

Grabbing a pre-dinner beer with my family at the brewery down the road was relaxing.

Getting down to the green room and putting on that jacket for realsies? Absolutely terrifying.

Here's a graph of my heart rate during that day:

My resting heart rate is in the mid 50s (which you can see around the 11am mark as we were driving up to the event). I was roughly 2.5x that in the moments before walking on stage.

What worked for me? While in the green room, I did a combination of the following activities:

• Positive self talk and visualization
• Deep breathing
• Reading messages that my friends were sending me wishing me luck and telling me I would nail it
• Push ups
• Crying
• Distracting myself by talking with others around me
• Re-running the first few moments of the talk out loud

I can't say which one of those was the most helpful, but killing time prior to being on stage was the absolute worst part.

I'm just grateful I went first.

The biggest surprise of the whole experience came while presenting.

I'm sure you must be sick of me talking about how much I rehearsed at this point in my post.

But seriously, I must have said this talk more than a hundred times over the course of a month.

Each and every time I practiced the talk, I ended with the same feeling: discontent.

I was disappointed that I missed certain beats or that my timing was slightly inconsistent. I was frustrated that I wasn't presenting a novel enough idea around the topic. I was envisioning myself standing in that red dot and getting to the end of my talk, and looking out into a sea of politely-clapping faces, each with a "meh" reaction on their faces.

Putting myself out there and sharing what I believe to be true about technology proved to be quite a fertile field for my depression and anxiety to sow seeds of doubt.

With my heart rate peaking and my anxiety shouting into my ears, I walked out on stage and looked around the audience.

There were hundreds of people cheering, clapping, staring back at me with big smiles on their faces. They were ready to learn, be entertained, and be inspired.

And all of that fear? All of those moments of self doubt? All of that nasty stuff I was telling myself for weeks prior to that moment?

They instantly vanished.

I hadn't even said a word yet, and it felt like my shoulders lowered by a foot.

The feeling of dread was replaced with certainty that I was exactly where I needed to be. I was entirely in the moment, eager to share what I've been thinking about AI with an audience of people who were ready to hear it.

Walking off the stage was the first time I concluded my speech without disappointment. Instead, I was filled with an unexpected emotion: pride.

5 out of 5 stars would do again

The part of my talk I'm most proud of was a moment where I asked the audience to shout out what they think would finish various phrases.

The second time I did it, I heard the audience shout out the answer I was expecting ("paint"), but a beat later, I hear my son, clear as day, yell "ice cream".

It was the perfect moment, an unexpected contribution that acts as the sprinkles on top of the whipped cream which sits atop the sundae that represents my entire TEDx experience.

There are a ton of people I insist on thanking for helping me get to the stage, so I'll do so quickly here (if I left you off this list, assume I did it with malicious intent):

• Brian Hart for giving me the opportunity to help people feel comfortable with artificial intelligence
• Sonja Gidlow for numerous therapy sessions and reassuring me that I'm on the right track
• Shannon Bornholdt for always giving me the right advice and for picking out the dopest jacket on the planet
• Joe Beard and all my Bionic Giant coworkers for giving me the space to be consumed with this talk for a few weeks
• Wil Galvez for making the trek to St. Cloud to take epic photos of me
• Kelly Heitz, Dana Hagemann, Tony Collen, and Sara Sargent for reviewing early drafts of my speech and providing significant feedback
• Justin Grammens and Maria Ploessl for giving a rookie AI speaker a chance earlier this year
• My mom and dad for decades of sitting in the front row and cheering me on
• My siblings and their partners for having an uncanny ability to both support me unconditionally and keep my ego in check
• and finally, those of you who shot me a note of encouragement and support throughout the last few months.

So yeah, that was my TEDx experience. I guess to wrap this all up, I want to reiterate how grateful I am to have this opportunity.

There's a good reason why people brag about being a TEDx speaker: it take a lot of hard work and vulnerability to pull off a quality speech. The entire process proved to be a unique opportunity to both help others by making them more comfortable with AI, and to help myself practice positive self talk and build my confidence.

Finally, as the kids say: thank you for coming to my TED talk.

2023-11-21 06:40:00

Netflix didn’t care what was inside the envelopes, so the only thing that mattered was that we, the customers, were getting what we wanted. Now, Netflix’s entire business is to know what’s inside, to make you think everything you want is inside, and to keep you distracted long enough so you never see the big world outside. Netflix went from being content-agnostic, a truly unbiased platform, if you will, to being content-obsessed, preferring to show you only its own content, and always its own content first.

A similar transition has happened at every major tech company, even the social media companies in which Netflix is often grouped as a major tech company emblematic of Silicon Valley. They all do extensive content moderation even as they claim to just be platforms, because they can no longer declare ignorance or ambivalence about what’s inside. And they, too, want you to look away as rarely as possible. They have all rallied around the cause of engagement. Finding ways to maximize it, to retain it, to increase it. 

This feels similar to the post I made last week about how you should have a website.

What drew me to the internet in my youth was how raw, honest, and authentic it was. It wasn’t about monetization strategies. It wasn’t about engagement metrics. It was about making cool stuff with other dorks that cared about the same things as me for fun.

I watched so many movies with my Netflix DVD subscription back in the day. Now, with vastly more selection available at the touch of my fingers, I find myself getting to the end of my day, turning on my TV, and rewatching something that I’ve already watched before because I'm just so burned out on these terrible walled garden content platforms that only want to serve me the digital equivalent of junk food.

I know that hosting websites isn’t free. But maybe all this scale and reach is just not really needed. Maybe we just need to keep building the internet we want to see instead of relying on big tech to prescribe it for us.

Oh, and the reason I used this particular pull quote is because it’s true... Name any website, app, or SaaS tool out there, and there is undoubtedly an entire team dedicated to figuring out how to exploit it to make as much money as possible.

I really despise this game. It has always made me feel uncomfortable that we’re just cool with it. There has to be a better way to connect each other and derive meaning and value from those connections.

Because the solution of stealing everyone’s attention and addicting us to these worthless platforms can’t possibly be the yard in which we park this train.

2023-11-18 12:02:51

I tried to pick a single pull quote, but this response is worth reading in its entirety.

As someone dealing with a rotator cuff issue at the moment, i appreciate knowing it is absolutely something I can rehab back to health.

Also, this response embodies the reason I enjoy r/AskHistorians so much. A thorough reply to a question that I’ve pointed myself at least once in my life.

2023-11-17 02:36:25

We also have an opportunity here to stop and ask ourselves what it truly means to be human, and what really matters to us in our own lives and work. Do we want to sit around being fed by robots or do we want to experience life and contribute to society in ways that are uniquely human, meaningful and rewarding?

I think we all know the answer to that question and so we need to explore how we can build lives that are rooted in the essence of what it means to be human and that people wouldn't want to replace with AI, even if it was technically possible.

When I look at the things I’ve used ChatGPT for in the past year, it tends to be one of these two categories:

1. A reference for something I’d like to know (e.g. the etymology of a phrase, learning a new skill, generate ideas for a project, etc.)
2. Doing stuff I don’t want to do myself (e.g. summarize meeting notes, write boilerplate code, debug tech problems, draw an icon)

I think most of us knowledge workers have stuff at our work that we don’t like to do, but it’s often that stuff which actually provides the value for the business.

What happens to an economy when businesses can use AI to derive that value that, to this date, only humans could provide?

And what happens to humans when we don’t have to perform meanial tasks anymore? How do we find meaning? How do we care for ourselves and each other?

2023-11-13 23:12:00

Think of the people you actually give a shit about in real life. They would like your website, and you would like their websites. Fuck the person you spoke to one time at a party 4 years ago, they don’t need to get play by play updates about the concert you’re at. Your life is not better because 15 people saw your Snapchat story instead of 14.

I think people online should slow down and scale back. Personal websites are so much more, uh, personal. I think of it like sending a text message to someone versus sending them a letter. Seeing an update of any kind to a friend’s website would be so much more interesting than a Facebook status or a profile picture change. Again, maybe I’m the weird one.

Nearly posted this whole article verbatim because it’s exactly how I feel about this site. I know I’m supposed to make this site be a direct reflection of my braaaand (apologies to my friend who is helping me with my braaaand at the moment), but I just want this to be a cool place that people who are interested in me can see things that I’m interested in.

Coming soon: probably more shares from this collection of posts about how the internet used to be fun and how we can make it fun again.

2023-11-13 12:32:00

”With the elite titles," he says, "if you make a mistake reporting something that is important to the community, it could have repercussions down the line. You don't want to treat it with an asterisk if it's tainted and just doesn't sit well." Mruczek says he's worried that the handling of the Wiebe record has set a dangerous precedent that could set back the community to the '80s, when people would claim records that were impossible to achieve. Twin Galaxies has long since abandoned its original verification process, which required a photo of the screen showing the high score and a signed affidavit from the player. Now, a player must videotape his or her game according to strict guidelines or perform the game live in front a Twin Galaxies judge.

I’ve been working on unpacking justice, one of my core values, in an attempt to understand why that value means so much to me.

I find rules to be so helpful in making sense of the world. If you know what the expectations are, then you should be able to understand what it takes to excel.

As I get older, I'm realizing that (a) that’s not always a true principle in practice, and (b) not everyone needs those rules to make sense of the world and get ahead in life.

Articles like this (legendary) profile on a Tetris world record holder make me really question my insistence on clearly defined rules.

Because when you think about it, what possible serious repercussions could happen if you botch the title of ‘Tetris world record holder’?

2023-11-12 22:03:27

1. The world isn’t as bad as you think, because news reporting aggregates the worst events in the world, giving you a skewed perspective.

2. To truly understand the world, we don’t need more happy-go-lucky stories to make us feel good, but we do need more reporting of bigger trends and what’s driving them. Many of those big picture trends are invisible, but positive.

I found myself smack dab in the middle of a Reddit doomscrolling session this morning when I decided I was sick of the feeling of impending doom. I launched Instapaper instead and found this article.

It serves as a good reminder that we get dopamine hits from reading terrible news, and maybe we should all take some time to break that addiction.

(I’m saying “we” here, but honestly, who reads this stuff? It’s all reminders for me haha)

2023-11-09 04:42:00

I saw this post on Matt Birchler's awesome blog and thought I'd join in the fun.

It's interesting to look back on these a few years down the road and see how much/little has changed.

📨 Mail Client: Apple Mail
📮 Mail Server: Fastmail
📝 Notes: Apple Notes
✅ To-Do: Apple Reminders
📷 Photo Shooting: Apple Camera
🌅 Photo Management: Apple Photos
📆 Calendar: Fantastical
📁 Cloud File Storage: Dropbox
📖 RSS: Reeder
🙍🏻‍♂️ Contacts: Apple Contacts
🌐 Browser: Safari
💬 Chat: Slack
🔖 Bookmarks: Pinboard
📑 Read It Later: Instapaper
📜 Word Processing: Google Docs
📈 Spreadsheets: Google Sheets
📊 Presentations: Google Slides
📰 News: AP News (once a week or so)
🎵 Music: Plexamp
🎤 Podcasts: Pocketcasts
🔐 Password Management: 1Password
🎮 First game I play each morning: Retro Bowl
🔈 Podcast editing: Logic Pro X
🎞️ Video editing: Final Cut Pro X
🧮 Code Editor: Visual Studio Code
🚀 Application launcher: Alfred

2023-11-07 05:40:10

I first learned Kubernetes ("k8s" for short) in 2018, when my manager sat me down and said "Cloudflare is migrating to Kubernetes, and you're handling our team's migration." This was slightly terrifying to me, because I was a good programmer and a mediocre engineer. I knew how to write code, but I didn't know how to deploy it, or monitor it in production. My computer science degree had taught me all about algorithms, data structures, type systems and operating systems. It had not taught me about containers, or ElasticSearch, or Kubernetes. I don't think I even wrote a single YAML file in my entire degree. I was scared of ops. I was terrified of Kubernetes.

Eventually I made it through and migrated all the Cloudflare Tunnel infrastructure from Marathon to Kubernetes. I didn't enjoy it, and I was way over my deadline, but I did learn a lot. Now it's 2022, and I'm leading a small team of engineers, some of whom have never used Kubernetes before. So I've found myself explaining Kubernetes to them. They seemed to find it helpful, so I thought I'd write it down and share it with the rest of you.

I immediately identified with this post after the author mentioned he was terrified of Kubernetes, because insert Chris Pratt meme here.

This post not only made the point of Kubernetes abundantly clear, it also was unveiled in such a clever and delightful way whereby each problem unveils a slightly more complex way to utilize Kubernetes.

2023-10-31 02:21:40

I saved my company half a million dollars in about five minutes. This is more money than I've made for my employers over the course of my entire career because this industry is a sham. I clicked about five buttons.

Oof, this is a very good read that hits pretty close to home. I’ve seen stuff like this in several organizations I’ve worked with.

I wonder why it’s so prevalant?

2023-10-28 04:38:50

Embeddings are a really neat trick that often come wrapped in a pile of intimidating jargon.

If you can make it through that jargon, they unlock powerful and exciting techniques that can be applied to all sorts of interesting problems.

I gave a talk about embeddings at PyBay 2023. This article represents an improved version of that talk, which should stand alone even without watching the video.

If you’re not yet familiar with embeddings I hope to give you everything you need to get started applying them to real-world problems.

The YouTube video near the beginning of the article is a great way to consume this content.

The basics of it is this: let’s assume you have a blog with thousands of posts.

If you were to take a blog post and run it through an embedding model, the model would turn that blog post into a list of gibberish floating point numbers. (Seriously, it’s gibberish… nobody knows what these numbers actually mean.)

As you run additional posts through the model, you’ll get additional numbers, and these numbers will all mean something. (Again, we don’t know what.)

The thing is, if you were to take these gibberish values and plot them on a graph with X, Y, and Z coordinates, you’d start to see clumps of values next to each other.

These clumps would represent blog posts that are somehow related to each other.

Again, nobody knows why this works… it just does.

This principle is the underpinnings of virtually all LLM development that’s taken place over the past ten years.

What’s mind blowing is depending on the embedding model you use, you aren’t limited to a graph with 3 dimensions. Some of them use tens of thousands of dimensions.

If you are at all interested in working with large language models, you should take 38 minutes and read this post (or watch the video). Not only did it help me understand the concept better, it also is filled with real-world use cases where this can be applied.

2023-10-27 02:02:58

Grandpa loved craft. He didn't put it that way but other people did. My dad said grandpa was a craftsman. I didn’t understand what this meant until one day when we were visiting. We sat down at a restaurant table and it wobbled. We ignored it. But Grandpa dropped as quickly and efficiently as a seal, vanishing underneath the table to fix the cheap, badly-screwed leg with a coin for a screwdriver.

He fixed things often and silently. Grandpa just cared about things working. He had an instinct for not just broken things but soon to be broken things. He would point out risky work, bad decision making in the form of shoddy materials or shifting angles. He was offended by the trace measures left in the world that signified short-term planning. So I learned that this too had something to do with craft. He had a visual vocabulary that amazed me. I think about how he could see these details. He saw choices and constraints and tensions and frictions where I just saw chairs. He saw effort where most people just saw end products.

I’ve got a few posts in mind that I’ll get cracking on soon about my recent malaice and regression towards a mid-life crisis, but this post helped me keep one thing in perspective.

As someone commented on Lobsters, caring is at the root of a craft. How else could you possibly spend your life?

2023-10-19 11:34:00

So, if there’s one thing we can praise Spirit Halloween for, it’s maybe not their great urban design elements or place making chops, but just for making it as transparent as possible that this kind of built environment simply isn’t built for long term success.

And instead of trying to build more of it, maybe we should be moving a lot more aggressively to retro fit what we already have.

2023-10-15 12:48:17

’But,’ you say, ‘premature optimisation is the root of all evil! Duplication is better than the wrong abstraction! Don’t be an architecture astronaut!’

The developers I’m thinking about already know of all those takes and have internalised them long ago. They know that sometimes ‘good enough’ is the right choice given the constraints of a project. They know that sometimes you need to cut scope to stay on-track. They know that sometimes it’s better to wait to learn more about a domain before rearchitecting a system. And yet in spite of those constraints their output remains golden. These are hard working motherf*ckers whose diligence and perseverance put other devs to shame.

Other devs… like me.

Sometimes, I just CBF.

2023-10-15 12:42:14

ChatGPT is not a total panacea, and it doesn’t negate the skill and intelligence required to be a great developer. There are significant benefits to reap from much of traditional programming education.

But this objection is missing the point. People who couldn’t build anything at all can now build things that work. And the tool that enables this is just getting started. In five years, what will novice developers be able to achieve? 

A heck of a lot. 

See, now this is the sort of insight that would’ve played well in a TEDx speech.

2023-10-14 12:30:36

So yes, the same jokers who want to show you how to get rich quick with the latest fad are drawn to this year’s trendiest technology, just like they were to crypto and just like they will be to whatever comes next. All I would suggest is that you look back on the history of Birchtree where I absolutely roasted crypto for a year before it just felt mean to beat a clearly dying horse, and recognize that the people who are enthusiastic about LLMs aren’t just fad-chasing hype men.

2023-10-08 19:58:39

As we approach the sixth month of debate over this topic, what’s interesting to me is not the details of quiet quitting, or even the question of how widespread the phenomenon actually is, but our collective reaction to its provocations: we’re simultaneously baffled and enthusiastic. To understand this complicated reality, it helps to adopt a generational lens.

Though quiet quitting has gathered diverse adherents, its core energy comes from knowledge workers who are members of Generation Z (born between 1997 and 2012). This is reflected in the movement’s emergence on TikTok, and in the survey data.

Indeed, a look backward reveals that knowledge workers in every previous generation seem to have experienced a similar pattern of work crisis followed by reconceptualization.

It’s probably no surprise to readers of this site that I am a Cal Newport fan, but I really appreciate his summary of the quiet quitting movement.

The interesting part of this article is how he discusses how each generation views employment. It appears every generation since WWII has a similar crisis.

2023-10-03 23:47:00

(Editor's note: That graphic is Midjourney's interpretation of what the Twin Cities Marathon looks like. Can you imagine if the Twin Cities Marathon actually looked like that? Running on top of the Mississippi River lmao)

Growing up, I took every chance I could get to be around live TV production.

The thing that keeps drawing me back to the medium is that you basically get one chance to tell a story to which there is an uncertain conclusion. The pressure to get it right is exhilarating.

Even though I haven't been part of a live production in roughly a decade, I had a unique opportunity this past weekend to be part of the live coverage of the Medtronic Twin Cities Marathon.

My role was to be the liaison between the marathon and the production crew who was filming, directing, and producing the show that was to ultimately be broadcast on KARE 11 (the local NBC station). I was to watch the race unfold and keep the crew informed of any interesting moves that we should mention on air.

I also was the liaison between the production crew and the timing crew. I would take periodic data dumps from the timing team, run them through a script I wrote, and pump out some graphics to help keep the audience up to date with the current leaders.

As you may or may not know, the race itself was unfortunately cancelled, so our collective efforts were not able to be showcased.

But even though we didn't get to try out our system live, I wanted to share some of the behind the scenes process for how I was able to get all this stuff to speak to each other. I'm mostly writing this for myself for the coming year, as I'd like to keep improving this process so the 2024 version of the race is chock full of awesome graphics that help to tell the story of the race.

The final product

Every good post should show the results first, right? Well, here's the two graphics I was able to get built in about 72 hours:

This is a leaderboard intended to be a full-screen graphic, likely to be used with a blurred static shot under it.

This is a leaderboard intended to be used while on top of a single shot with the leader in full frame.

The timing data

I was fortunate to spend the beginning part of my career working with the crew at Mtec Results. They are the team that helps time many of the major races around the country, most notably the Twin Cities Marathon and Grandma's Marathon, but they also are often called on to help out with other high-profile races like the marathons in Boston and New York City.

It took about 3 minutes of explaining the idea of using "real time data"[^tcm-2023-recap-1] to the team before it was met with a resounding "how can we help?"

We went back and forth around file formats and specs, and after we worked our way through uninteresting technical challenges[^tcm-2023-recap-2], we ultimately settled on a CSV format that looked something like this:

BIB,FIRST NAME,LAST NAME,GENDER,AGE,CITY,STATE,NATIONALITY,TEAM,TEAMTYPE,TIME OF DAY FINISH,GUN TIME,NET TIME,5K,10K,15K,20K,HALF,25K,30K,35K,40K,FIRST_HALF,SECOND_HALF,5 MILE
103,Rosalynne,Sidney,F,31,Burnsville,MN,USA,,,10:33:07.73,2:33:09,2:33:09,18:10,36:24,54:43,1:12:48,1:16:51,1:30:56,1:48:57,2:07:38,2:25:40,1:16:51,,

We decided given our time constraints, we would just keep that CSV in a shared Dropbox folder, and that file would get periodically updated throughout the race.

The graphics

The production team at Freestyle Productions uses an open source tool called SPX Graphics to generate and play back graphics during broadcasts.

SPX Graphics is a fascinating tool that uses HTML, JS, and CSS along with layers to help display all sorts of useful graphics like bugs, lower thirds, and crawls.

It took a little troubleshooting to understand the template structure that SPX uses, but in conjunction with ChatGPT, I was able to build out some basic HTML to create a table that I could dynamically populate:[^tcm-2023-recap-3]

<body>
  <div id="viewport">
    <div id="spxTable">
      <header>
        <div class="logo" id="marathon-logo">
          <img src="./TCM/tcm-logo.png">
        </div>
        <div class="logo" id="ten-mile-logo" style="display: none;">
          <img src="./TCM/ten-mile-logo.png">
        </div>
        <div id="title-container">
          MEN-FINISH
        </div>
      </header>

      <section class="table-body">
        <div class="table-row">
          <div>1</div>
          <div>Rosalynne SIDNEY</div>
          <div>USA</div>
          <div>🇺🇸</div>
          <div>2:33:09</div>
          <div>--</div>
        </div>
        <!-- Add more table-row divs as needed -->
      </section>
    </div>
  </div>
</body>

Hooray, we now have a basic table for a full screen leaderboard! If you throw a little fancy CSS on top of it, you have a really nice looking table.

...but how do we populate it?

Translating the timing data

The CSV that I showed above contains some great data, but it's not particularly useful at the moment.

For starters, if I want to show the current leaders at 25K, do I use the values in the 25K row or do I use the values in the gun time row?

If I want to show how far back each racer is from each other (the time differential between each person), how do I generate that?

What happens if the racer's last name got entered in ALL CAPS instead of Title Case?

I figured I needed to write a tool that helped me transform this data into something a little easier to manipulate from the leaderboard template... so I did!

Behold, csvToJson.html in all its glory!

Because I know I'm going to forget what all these fields are for come next year, here's an explanation of what each field does:

• CSV File: This is a basic input field to grab the CSV file from a local disk.
• Header row: This is the name of the header row for which I want to pull the timing value (e.g. GUN TIME, which would pull 2:33:09 from the CSV example above)
• Race: This allows me to tell the front end template which race to style it as
• Title: This is the title in the top right corner for the full screen version or the first title on the smaller version
• Subtitle: This is the second title on the smaller version (basically the name of the race)
• Mile Split: In the smaller graphic, there's a little notch in the top right corner that contains the mile split for the most recently passed timing mat. This field lets me fill that in with the split.
• Show time difference: On the full screen graphic, we may (or may not) want to show the time difference (e.g. +2:09).
• Max number of elements: This should've probably said "max number of rows" because that's what this field controls. The full screen version of this graphic looks best with 10 entries, whereas the smaller version of the graphic looks best with 5.

Once you click "Load CSV", I fire off a Javascript method which loads the CSV and converts each row into a JSON object that looks something like this:

{
  "race": "marathon",
  "title": "Women's Leaders - 25K",
  "subtitle": "MEDTRONIC TWIN CITIES MARATHON",
  "mile_split": "25K",
  "show_time_difference": true,
  "table_data": [
    {
      "position": "1",
      "name": "Rosalynne SIDNEY",
      "time": "2:33:09",
      "difference": "--",
      "state": "MN",
      "country_name": "USA",
      "country_flag": "🇺🇸"
    },
    // More entries here
  ]
}

I would then take that JSON and paste it into a file stored on a remote server.

Now that I have both a beautiful-looking template and a beautiful-looking source of data, I was able to whip up some Javascript on the template side to read that file on page load and populate the table with all the customizations included on it.

What's next?

It was truly a bummer that the race didn't get started. As someone who has gotten heat stroke at mile 21 of a marathon, I know that the organizers of the race did the right thing by cancelling it outright.

As someone who was in charge of building and displaying these graphics, though, I am a bit relieved that I get another year to iterate on this foundation.

Here are the obvious areas for improvement:

Automate the fetching of the data from Dropbox

If it wasn't clear, this process was brittle and prone to human error. I was having to load Dropbox from the web, download a CSV, manually sort it in Numbers based on the gun time, remove all but the top 10 or so rows of data, and then save a sanitized version.

There could be a tool written to automate this process so it is continually polling for updates to the file, and once it finds updates, it automatically does the sorting and converting so I don't need to touch it.

Automate the creation of the JSON from that timing data

Similar to above, I shouldn't need a csvToJson.html file. Because I'm sharing the data between the two templates, I should hard code the number of rows I want each template to read, and then I can fully automate the creation of the JSON it uses to populate the table.

Also, because of how SPX works, I need to host that JSON file somewhere remotely that the graphics system can access whenever the director calls for the graphic. That process should be similarly automated.

Improve the flag display

The Twin Cities Marathon attracts professional marathoners from all over the world, but it's not uncommon to see Minnesotans and other Americans finish in the top 10. It might be cool to use state-level flags instead of the US flag for the top athletes.

Another little annoying thing: I only had five countries hard-coded in my JSON creator because that was what I had from the representative data sample (USA, Canada, Mexico, Kenya, and New Zealand). I should probably support more flags because you should always be prepared for an unexpected performance from someone not from one of those five countries, right?

MOAR GFX PLZ KTHX

This leaderboard only scratchs the surface with what's possible.

With the timing data we're getting, I should be able to have a permanent graphic built that shows the top 10 runners at all times.

I should also have more graphics that you see in most professional marathon broadcasts:

• An omni-present clock[^tcm-2023-recap-4]
• Biographic slides that show a runner's photo along with some of their professional highlights
• Slides with historical facts (course record holders and whatnot)
• A map showing where runners are along the course

But I want more!

If we start planning now, we could attach biometric gear to some of the runners and show things like current heart rate, current pace, current stride count, and more.

Even if we aren't able to pull that off, we could still use the existing data to tell interesting stories like how the hill on Summit Avenue affects pace and how many runners are actually hitting "the wall".

Gearing up for 2024

I am so pleased with what we were able to pull together in basically a week.

Now that we have a better understanding of the technology that powers the graphic system, I am beyond excited at the possibilities ahead of us next year.

The team at Twin Cities in Motion truly care about putting on a best-in-class event for runners. Their commitment and investment in this broadcast are evidence of this, and I am honored to be part of the team responsible for telling the story of the two races that take place that day.

Mark your calendars for next October. It's gonna be an exciting race to watch live!

[^tcm-2023-recap-1]: For our purposes, we basically mean up to date within a minute or two of capturing the data. Getting updates to the leaderboard within milliseconds of a racer crossing a timing mat is not yet technically feasible. Besides, time is an arbitrary construct, right, maaan? [^tcm-2023-recap-2]: The software used to capture timing/scoring data for races is necessarily archaic. I say "necessarily" because it's both a feature and a bug; you don't want to put your trust in some fancy pants, brand new, untested Javascript framework to calculate results for an event that depends on those results for attracting big name runners, sponsors, and money. Of course, you can wrap all sorts of transforming layers on top of the data you collect from the timing systems, which is what Mtec does to power their results pages. But creating an API on top of that layer was not really feasible in the time we had. [^tcm-2023-recap-3]: You might notice in that HTML that I have two logos: one for the marathon and one for the ten mile. This allows me to reuse the same leaderboard graphic but style it orange or green to fit the relevant race. Also, stop judging my HTML! [^tcm-2023-recap-4]: Do you know how hard it is to get an accurate clock to display on screen? The homies that create professional football graphics are insanely talented. Again, time is an arbitrary construct.

2023-09-19 05:19:00

Andrew Ng is probably the most respected AI educator out there today. I am certainly among the 8 million students of his that they tout at the beginning of the video.

This 30 minute chat describes some of the opportunities out there for AI right now.

While his insights on AI are worth your time alone, I found a ton of value in his approach to product development and getting a startup off the ground towards the end of the talk.

2023-09-14 11:12:00

So, rather than living in ‘the never-ending then’, you have to learn to avert your focus elsewhere. You have to enjoy the present a bit more and stop trying to plan your idealized path through life. You won’t get that path either way. Something always comes up and sends you on a detour.

Accepting this is hard and something I still struggle with regularly. However, once you do, you will realize that the ideal life is not one that exists solely in the past, present, or future, but one that moves seamlessly between the three. If you can appreciate the past, live in the present, and plan for the future, then what more can you ask for?

Today, I went with my wife and kids up to the recently remodeled playground at my daughter’s school.

Right before we left, my son started playing a game he was making up on the spot.

I got so into it. It was totally engrossing, and my attention was solely on being in character, climbing across obstacles, having fun.

Financial wealth is surely important, but true wealth is being able to shut off the monkey brain for as long as possible.

2023-09-08 04:34:00

The very first album I ever bought was the Space Jam soundtrack.

While I was making my daughter's lunch this morning, I got this line stuck in my head from the song:

I'm the only bunny that's still goin'

Know what I'm sayin'?

I had no idea what that meant.

For decades now, I've been stumped by one cartoon bunny dissing another one .

2023-09-07 03:48:25

In September last year, a breach at LastPass’ parent company GoTo (formerly LogMeIn) culminated in attackers siphoning out all data from their servers. The criticism from the security community has been massive. This was not so much because of the breach itself, such things happen, but because of the many obvious ways in which LastPass made matters worse: taking months to notify users, failing to provide useful mitigation instructions, downplaying the severity of the attack, ignoring technical issues which have been publicized years ago and made the attackers’ job much easier. The list goes on.

Now this has been almost a year ago. LastPass promised to improve, both as far as their communication goes and on the technical side of things. So let’s take a look at whether they managed to deliver.

TL;DR: They didn’t. So far I failed to find evidence of any improvements whatsoever.

If you aren’t using a password manager, the likelihood of every single one of your online accounts getting hacked is extremely high.

If you’re using a bad password manager, I guess it’s just as high? 😬

2023-09-07 03:39:00

More than everything, my increasing personal reliance on these tools for legitimate problem solving convinces me that there is significant substance beneath the hype.

And that is what is worrying; the prospect of us starting to depend indiscriminately on poorly understood blackboxes, currently offered by megacorps, that actually work shockingly well.

I keep oscillating between fear and excitement around AI.

If you saw my recent post where I used ChatGPT to build a feature for my website, you’ll recall how trivial it was for me to get it built.

I think I keep falling back on this tenet: AI, like all our tech, are tools.

When we get better tools, we can solve bigger problems.

Systemic racism and prejudice, climate change, political division, health care, education, political organization… all of these broad scale issues that have plagued humanity for ages are on the table to be addressed by solutions powered by AI.

Of course there are gonna be jabronis who weaponize AI for their selfish gain. Nothing we can really do about that.

I’d rather focus on the folks who will choose to use AI for the benefit of us all.

2023-09-04 06:26:00

If you're trying to pass the class, then pass it with minimum effort. Anything else is wasted motion.

If you're trying to ace the class, then ace it with minimum effort. Anything else is wasted motion.

If you're trying to learn the material to the fullest, then mine the assignment for all its knowledge, and don't fret about your grade. Anything else is wasted motion.

If you're trying to do achieve some combination of good grades (for signalling purposes), respect (for social reasons), and knowledge (for various effects), then pinpoint the minimum quality target that gets a good grade, impresses the teacher, and allows you to learn the material, and hit that as efficiently as you can. Anything more is wasted motion.

Ah, an engineer’s approach to optimizing life.

There is a good section in here as well about how to deal with the associated guilt when you take this approach.

2023-09-02 00:06:00

The main page of my personal website features a couple of lists of data that are important or interesting to me.

The "recent posts" section shows my five most recent blog entries. Rails makes that list easy to cobble together.

The "recent listens" section shows my five most recent songs that were streamed to Last.fm. This was a little more complex to add, but after a couple of hours of back and forth with ChatGPT, I was able to put together a pretty hacky solution that looks like this:

1. Check to see if your browser checked in with last.fm within the last 30 seconds. a. If so, just show the same thing I showed you less than 30 seconds ago.
2. Make a call to my server to check the recent last.fm plays.
3. My server reaches out to last.fm, grabs my most recent tracks, and returns the results.

Pretty straight forward integration. I could probably do some more work to make sure I'm not spamming their API[^1], but otherwise, it was a feature that took a trivial amount of time to build and helps make my website feel a little more personal.

Meanwhile, I've been ramping up my time on my bike. I'm hoping to do something like Ragbrai or a century ride next year, so I'm trying to building as much base as I can at the moment.

Every one of my workouts gets sent up to Strava, so that got me thinking: wouldn't it be cool to see my most recent workouts on my main page?

How the heck do I get this data into my app?

Look, I've got a confession to make: I hate reading API documentation.

I've consumed hundreds of APIs over the years, and the documentation varies widely from "so robust that it makes my mind bleed" to "so desolate that it makes my mind bleed".

Strava's API struck me as closer to the former. As I was planning my strategy for using it, I actually read about a page and a half before I just said "ah, nuts to this."

Knowing my prejudice against reading documentation, this seemed like the perfect sort of feature to build hand-in-hand with a large language model. I can clearly define my output and I can ensure that the API was built before GPT-4's training data cutoff of September 2021, meaning ChatGPT is at least aware of this API even if some parts of it have changed since then.

So how did I go about doing this?

A brief but necessary interlude

In order to explain why my first attempt at this integration was a failure, I need to explain this other thing I built for myself.

I've been tracking every beer I've consumed since 2012 in an app called Untappd.

Untappd has an API[^2] which allows you to see the details about each checkin. I take those checkins and save them in a local database. With that, I was able to build a Timehop-esque interface that shows the beers I've had on this day in history.

I have a scheduled job that hits the Untappd API a handful of times per day to check for new entries.[^3] If it finds any new checkins, I save the associated metadata to my local database.

Now, all of the code that powers this clunky job is embarrassing. It's probably riddled with security vulnerabilities, and it's inelegant to the point that it is something I'd never want to show the world. But hey, it works, and it brings me a great deal of joy every morning that I check it.

As I started approaching my Strava integration, I did the same thing I do every time I start a new software project: vow to be less lazy and build a neatly-architected, well-considered feature.

Attempt number one: get lazy and give up.

My first attempt at doing this happened about a month ago. I went to Strava's developer page, read through the documents, saw the trigger word OAuth, and quickly noped my way out of there.

...

It's not like I've never consumed an API which requires authenticating with OAuth before. Actually, I think it's pretty nifty that we've got this protocol that allows us to pass back and forth tokens rather than plaintext passwords.

But as a lazy person who is writing a hacky little thing to show my workouts, I didn't want to go through all the effort to write a token refresh method for this seemingly trivial thing.

I decided to give up and shelve the project for a while.

Attempt number two: Thanks, ChatGPT.

After a couple of weeks of doing much more productive things like polishing up my upcoming TEDx talk, I decided I needed a little change of context, so I picked this project back up.

Knowing that ChatGPT has my back, I decided to write a prompt to get things going. It went something like this:

You are an expert Ruby on Rails developer with extensive knowledge on interacting with Strava's API. I am working within a Rails 5.2 app. I would like to create a scheduled job which periodically grabs any new activities for a specific user and saves some of the activity's metadata to a local database. Your task is to help me create a development plan which fulfills the stated goal. Do not write any code at this time. Please ask any clarifying questions before proceeding.

I've found this style of prompt yields the best results when working on a feature like this one. Let me break it down line by line:

You are an expert Ruby on Rails developer with extensive knowledge on interacting with Strava's API.

Here, I'm setting the initial context for the GPT model. I like to think of interacting with ChatGPT like I'm able to summon the exact perfect human in the world that could solve the problem I'm facing. In this case, an expert Ruby on Rails developer who has actually worked with the Strava API should be able to knock out my problem in no time.

I am working within a Rails 5.2 app.

Yeah, I know... I really should upgrade the Rails app that powers this site. A different problem for a different blog post.

Telling ChatGPT to hone its answers down on the specific framework will provide me with a better answer.

I would like to create a scheduled job which periodically grabs any new activities for a specific user and saves some of the activity's metadata to a local database.

Here, I'm describing what should result after a successful back and forth. A senior Rails developer would know what job means in this context, but if you aren't familiar with Rails, a job is a function that can get scheduled to run on a background process.

All I should need to do is say, "go run this job", and then everything needed to reach out to Strava for new activities and save them to the database is encapsulated entirely in that job.

I can then take that job and run it on whatever schedule I'd like!

Your task is to help me create a development plan which fulfills the stated goal.

Here, I'm telling ChatGPT that I don't want it to write code. I want it to think through[^4] and clearly reason out a development plan that will get to me to the final result.

Do not write any code at this time.

The most effective way I've used ChatGPT is to first ask it to start high level (give me the project plan), then dig into lower levels as needed (generate code). I don't want it to waste its reasoning power on code at this time; I'd rather finesse the project plan first.

Please ask any clarifying questions before proceeding.

I toss this in after most of my prompts because I've found that ChatGPT often asks me some reasonable questions that challenge my assumptions.

Now, after a nice back and forth with ChatGPT, I was able to start down a path that was similar to my Untappd polling script.

As I was approaching the point where I could first test my example, I went to go read the documentation and came across an entire section that discussed webhooks.

[cue record scratch]

Wait up... webhooks?!

A sojourn into webhooks

If you've made it this far into the article, I'm assuming you're a little bit technical, but in the interest of not making assumptions, I'll briefly explain the concept of webhooks.

If you look at how I'm integrating with the Untappd API, you can see I'm periodically reaching out to their API to see if there's any new checkin activity. This method is called polling.

Webhooks are kind of the opposite: when I complete an activity within Strava, Strava can reach out to my app and say, "there's a new activity for you." Once I get that notification, I can reach out to their API to fetch the new activity details.

For my Strava app, this is a much better[^5] way of doing things. I no longer need to poll for new information; I can just wait for Strava to tell me when action needs to be taken.

But, of course, when I first told ChatGPT to help me with this solution, it didn't mention webhooks. And why would it? I never told it "give me the best solution for this problem." I said "here's my problem and a proposed solution, go ahead and give me the path forward."

I'm a bit frustrated that I didn't see the webhook option initially. I'm even more frustrated that ChatGPT only mentioned it well after we started down this path, and only after I asked it point blank:

Does Strava offer a web hook API?

Yes, Strava does offer a webhook API. Webhooks allow you to receive real-time updates about athlete activities, which can be more efficient than periodically polling for new data. Here's a brief overview of how to set up and use Strava webhooks:

[brief outline complete with things to consider with this approach]

Attempt number three: finally.

While considering my original prompt, I gave it this new one:

Okay, I'd like to incorporate webhooks into this workflow. Here's what I'd like to have happen:

1. Let's add the infrastructure in place to subscribe to webhook notifications within my Rails 5.2 app.
2. When a webhook is sent to my server, I'd like to either:
    a. make a call to Strava's API to fetch that activity's information and save that information in my local database, or;
    b. use the updates field to update the locally saved information to reflect the changes

Knowing this simple walkthrough, first create me a detailed development plan for setting my app to be able to fully handle webhook notifications from Strava.

What resulted here was a detailed walkthrough of how to get webhooks incorporated into my original dev plan.

As I walked through the plan, I asked ChatGPT to go into more detail, providing code snippets to fulfill each step.

There were a few bumps in the road, to be sure. ChatGPT was happy to suggest code to reach out to the Strava API, but it had me place it within the job instead of the model. If I later want to reuse the "fetch activities" call in some other part of my app, or I want to incorporate a different API call, it makes sense to have that all sitting in one abstracted part of my app.

But eventually, after an hour or so of debugging, I ended up with this:

Lessons learned

I would never consider myself to be an A+ developer or a ninja rock star on the keyboard. I see software as a means to an end: code exists solely so I can have computers do stuff for me.

If I'm being honest, if ChatGPT didn't write most of the code for this feature, I probably wouldn't have built it at all.

At the end of the day, once I was able to clearly articulate what I wanted, ChatGPT was able to deliver it.

I don't think most of my takeaways are all that interesting:

• I needed to ask ChatGPT to make fixes to parts of code that I knew just wouldn't work (or I'd just begrudgingly fix them myself).
• Occasionally, ChatGPT would lose its context and I'd have to remind it who it was[^6] and what its task is.
• I would not trust ChatGPT to write a whole app unsupervised.

If I were a developer who only took orders from someone else and wrote code without having the big picture in mind, I'd be terrified of this technology.

But I just don't see LLMs like ChatGPT ever fully replacing human software engineers.

If I were a non-technical person who wanted to bust out a proof of concept, or was otherwise unbothered by slightly buggy software that doesn't fully do what I want it to do, then this tech is good as-is.

I mean, we already have no-code and low-code solutions out there that serve a similar purpose, and I'm not here to demean or denigrate those; they can be the ideal solution to prove out a concept and even outright solve a business need.

But the thing I keep noticing when using LLMs is that they're only ever good at spitting out the past. They're just inferring patterns against things that have already existed. They rarely generate something truly novel.

The thing they spit out serves as a stepping stone to the novel idea.

Maybe that's the thing that distinguishes us from our technology and tools. After all, everything is a remix, but humans are just so much better at making things that appeal to other humans.

Computers and AI and technology still serve an incredibly important purpose, though. I am so grateful that this technology exists. As I was writing this blog post, OpenAI suffered a major outage, and I found myself feeling a bit stranded. We've only had ChatGPT for, like, 9 months now, but it already is an indispensable part of my workflow.

If you aren't embracing this technology in your life yet, I encourage you to watch some YouTube videos and figure out the best way to do so.

It's like having an overconfident child that actually knows everything about everything that happened prior to Sept. 2021 as an assistant. You won't be able to just say "take my car and swing over to the liquor store for me", but when you figure out that sweet spot of tasks it can accomplish, your output will be so much more fruitful.

I'm really happy with how this turned out. It's already causing me to build a healthy biking habit, and I think it helps reveals an interesting side of myself to those who are visiting my site.

[^1]: Maybe I can cache the data locally like I'm doing for Untappd? I dunno, probably not worth the effort. 😅 [^2]: Their documentation is a little confusing to me and sits closer to the "desolate" end of the spectrum because I'm not able to make requests that I would assume I can make, but hey, I'm just grateful they have one and still keep it operational! [^3]: If we wanna get specific, I ping the Untappd API at the following times every day: 12:03p, 1:04p, 2:12p, 3:06p, 4:03p, 5:03p, 6:02p, 7:01p, 8:02p, 9:03p, 10:04p, and 12:01a. I chose these times because (a) I wanted to be a good API consumer and not ping it more than once an hour, (b) I didn't want to do it at the top of every hour, (c) I don't typically drink beers before 11am or after 11pm, (d) if I didn't check it hourly during my standard drinking time, then during the times I attend a beer festival, I found I was missing some of the checkins because the API only returns 10 beers at a time and I got lazy and didn't build in some sort of recursive check for previous beers. [^4]: Please don't get it twisted; LLMs do not actually think. But they can reason. I've found that if you make an LLM explain itself before it attempts a complex task like this, it is much more likely to be successful. [^5]: [^6]:

2023-08-29 22:58:00

Why is this bridge here?

This pedestrian bridge crosses I-494 just west of the Minneapolis Airport. It connects Bloomington to Richfield. I drive under it often and I wondered: why is it there? It's not in an area that is particularly walkable, and it doesn't connect any establishments that obviously need to be connected. So why was it built?

I often have curious thoughts like this, but I dismiss most of them because if I answered all of them I would get nothing else done. But one day I was walking out of a Taco Bell and found myself at the base of the bridge.

That only raised MORE questions! Why did the bridge just lead to some grass? Why isn't there a sidewalk? What is the point? It makes no sense!

Those who grew up in the Richfield/Bloomington area in the same era as me must have driven under this bridge thousands of times, and I, myself, have certainly had this thought.

The answer to the question is straight forward, but I will not spoil it for you.

Instead, I urge you to read this entire post, top to bottom, because this post is a journey, not a destination. The author spends months trying to get to the bottom of why this mysterious bridge was erected, and the whole article is masterfully written.

2023-08-27 21:16:00

The reason why a still lake is the archetype for a still mind is because it flows without any intention. The currents softly rise without breaking, and in the instances where it does, it happens without aggression. There’s nothing it’s trying to do; it’s simply going where it needs to go.

But drop a stone into the lake, and the ripples flow out in a way that goes against the state of nature. Even a harsh gust of wind won’t create ripples in the way that a small stone does. That’s what it means to desire more than what you have; to become somebody or to further your place in a community. Your presence may be known, but it may do so at the expense of the stillness around you.

Rest is to take those moments to understand that you’re not defined by what you produce, and to be okay with whatever you are. It’s to allow that emptiness of mind to prolong whenever you see something beautiful, and to understand that this is not an anomaly, but a glimpse into the reality of what truly is.

2023-08-26 23:15:48

Imagine, by analogy, a virtuoso pianist at the peak of her career who looks out at the culture around her and realizes that appreciation for classical music is rapidly fading. She senses a crisis: if things continue, there will soon be no audiences, no careers in music, and no future great performances. She considers the situation so dire that she decides to step away from her instrument, if only for a time, in order to defend classical music nationwide. She gives speeches about composers in grade schools across the country, lobbies Congress for increased support for the arts, and solicits wealthy donors to sponsor classical-music instruction. Her work is noble, but it consumes her; and the crisis is so severe that her task is never done. Thus, she never fully returns to the life of music she enjoyed before. Now, when she has time to play, which is rare, she’s a shadow of her former self. Practice sessions find her distracted. Her music suffers as a result of her effort to save music.

The battle to save music is not itself the practice of music. The two activities are worlds apart. One is an instrumental good, the other intrinsic; one is never complete, the other complete in itself. This paradox occurs across domains: The battle to preserve a space for Christian worship in an increasingly secular society is not itself Christian worship. The defence of the liberal arts is not the liberal arts. And the war to save our political union from our enemies is not itself political union.

A pretty heavy article that makes a few great points about nihilism, politics, friendships, and meaning.

My only quibble is that the article makes an unnecessary leap about not being able to be complete without a relationship with God, but hey, maybe the longer I live and partake in intrinsic activities, those experiences will help change my opinion about why we’re here and what set this world into motion.

2023-08-26 22:51:17

The information processing (IP) metaphor of human intelligence now dominates human thinking, both on the street and in the sciences. There is virtually no form of discourse about intelligent human behaviour that proceeds without employing this metaphor, just as no form of discourse about intelligent human behaviour could proceed in certain eras and cultures without reference to a spirit or deity. The validity of the IP metaphor in today’s world is generally assumed without question.

But the IP metaphor is, after all, just another metaphor – a story we tell to make sense of something we don’t actually understand. And like all the metaphors that preceded it, it will certainly be cast aside at some point – either replaced by another metaphor or, in the end, replaced by actual knowledge.

As someone who makes a living (in part) by deploying metaphors to explain complex ideas, it is both harrowing and inspiring to learn how flawed the “your brain is a computer” metaphor actually is.

Despite the despair, this essay does a great job explaining why it is no longer a useful metaphor, and leaves you with the curiosity needed to explore and find a new, more helpful metaphor (or, as the pull quote says, “actual knowledge”).

2023-08-21 01:38:43

People feel like something intimate, something definitional about their city, has been taken away. So they look for intention. Maybe it's for a holiday? Maybe it's a conspiracy? It has to mean something. Because if it doesn't, that's even scarier. Streetlights and street lighting are a city's deep infrastructure. If they can break in such a weird and unexpected way, so can everything else.

I’ve recently noticed some street lights in Apple Valley turning purple. I thought it looked intentional and kinda cool, to be honest, especially here in Prince/Vikings country.

But the part that I pull quoted is something on my mind a lot lately.

We all take tech for granted, yet the thing we appreciate least of all is how much we don’t know regarding how all this stuff comes to be.

It reminds me of the essay about how nobody actually knows how a pencil gets made. You’ve got separate manufacturers who know how to assemble the individual parts (erasers, lead, wood, etc.), but all of those folks rely on other sources for raw materials.

The further you go down, the more you realize civilization really does hinge on a bunch of trusting handshakes presumably done over Zoom these days. And that’s a sentiment that is equal parts romantic and terrifying.

2023-08-18 01:27:37

I’d like to offer a tool to put in your emergency kit for shifting self-sabotage to self-care and going from overcommitted to well-resourced. And that is managing for whole capacity—rather than simply time or money. In other words, don’t ask, “Can I squeeze this in?” when presented with an opportunity. Ask, “Do I have what I need to do this well?”

2023-08-09 01:22:00

I saw this TikTok from Chelsea Fagan shared on a Slack community I'm part of, and I thought it was worth transcribing the whole thing and leaving it here for future reference.

So one thing about me is that I never have impostor syndrome, and it's not because I automatically think I'm great at anything I try... it's more that I realized that basically every industry is full of idiots.

I genuinely think that a lot of people who haven't been in the corporate world or exposed to it too much don't realize just how many successful people are mediocre at best at what they do.

And it makes sense when you consider all the factors that are usually required for people to reach a high level at a given industry. Things like having connections, having enough generational wealth to go to college and get an advanced degree, nepotism, networking, and all of those other things. Not to mention all of the other white, cis, male privileges that often go into success.

But by the time you reach the highest levels of most industries, you're often working with people who can barely put together an email.

Or you'll be on an email thread with 17 different people, none of whom seem to actually have a job.

Half of the executives have administrative assistants who do the vast majority of their actual work.

And this is true of a lot of creative industries... think of how many famous people are out there who have almost no discernible talent.

A driving force in my life is looking at something and being like "I could absolutely do better than that", and then I give myself permission to do it.

And just being the kind of person who is conscientious enough about the work you're doing to even consider having impostor syndrome, or think about whether or not you're good enough to be doing it, you're probably already better than most of the people there.

Related: this quote from Sarah Hagi:

Lord, grant me the confidence of a mediocre white man.

2023-08-08 22:12:00

My last handful of posts were a bit depressing... so I thought I'd share this one that was in my Instapaper queue for some reason.

I love the idea that someone at Stereogum is reviewing every single number one hit since 1958, and it brings me a great deal of joy that they needed to write a piece about this song.

The summary nails it here:

As a band, Crazy Town were fucking godawful, and they were the kind of godawful that’s easy to mock. But “Butterfly”? I’ve never been mad at “Butterfly.” It’s the kind of silly bullshit hit song that makes the world just slightly more fun. Rap-rock faded away in the rearview a long time ago, but “Butterfly” will always evoke a very particular moment. That moment was short, just as it should’ve been. Butterflies aren’t built to live forever.

A recent revelation of mine is that I've kind of been a music snob for most of my life. I basically turned my nose up at the entire emo/punk genre sometime in middle school and never took the time to re-evaluate that position.

Now that I'm in my mid-thirties, I've been letting go of those unnecessary positions, and I probably don't need to be the one to tell you this, but there's a lot of good pop-punk and emo stuff out there.

I've also found myself lately drawn toward music that reminds me of my middle/high school years. Rap rock is a defining genre of that time for me, and Butterfly is one of those songs that will forever transport me to a time when I would load 5 incredibly compressed MP3s onto my 16MB (that's megabyte, not gigabyte) Cybiko MP3 player and bike up to the middle school for football practice.

2023-08-06 19:10:32

If “Everyone’s entitled to their opinion” just means no-one has the right to stop people thinking and saying whatever they want, then the statement is true, but fairly trivial. No one can stop you saying that vaccines cause autism, no matter how many times that claim has been disproven.

But if ‘entitled to an opinion’ means ‘entitled to have your views treated as serious candidates for the truth’ then it’s pretty clearly false. And this too is a distinction that tends to get blurred.

2023-08-01 21:42:25

Whatever comes next must take responsibility for that legacy, while also articulating something new and perhaps even bolder than what came before. There is a useful lesson drably concealed in the MTA’s maintenance facility in Queens: What we inherit comes with responsibility. Vintage machines are owed our best efforts, and our ingenuity in keeping them running should at least be equal to our ingenuity in forging them. 

The work of maintenance is ultimately a way of parsing and knowing a thing and deciding, over and over, what it’s worth. “Maintenance should be seen as a noble craft,” said Rossmann, the boot-strapping repair man who learned the secrets of the iPhone’s circuits. “It should be seen as something that teaches people not just how to repair, but how to think.”

This article reinforced one of my core tenets of software engineering: the simpler, the better.

It also supplies an important distinction between repair and maintenance. Repair is when you fix something that’s broken. Maintenance is about making something last.

The article calls for finding a way to better incentivize acts of maintenance in our economic system, and the more I reflect on that, the more I find it reasonable.

Building new stuff is cool and often necessary, but finding a way to make our old stuff last longer is equally cool.

Not just with our bridges and train cars and iPhones, but with our elderly too.

2023-08-01 21:18:51

In 2019, after years of effort, the I.E.T.F. released a standard for Network Time Security, a mechanism which adds capabilities atop N.T.P. in an attempt to make it more secure. (Time underlies much of the Internet’s cryptography infrastructure.) The expanding Internet of Things will only contribute to the ever-growing need for synchronization. Sharon Goldberg, a computer scientist at Boston University who worked on the Network Time Security effort, told me that she thinks time synchronization should have a cryptocurrency-like buzz around it (ideally with less controversy)—coders who contribute to it, she said, should feel proud enough to declare, “Everyone uses the software, it’s in everything, and I wrote it!” It’s striking how few people know Mills’s name, given how many know the pseudonym of whoever created Bitcoin.

It’s amazing how fragile our fancy pants civilization actually is, and this story is a wonderful case study into how hard it is to build a thing that can satisfy all the needs of our species.

It also serves as yet another reminder of how much it sucks dealing with time. Giving credit where credit is due: “leap smear” is a brilliant phrase.

2023-07-31 20:59:20

This is preposterously nerdy stuff, but if you are into understanding how you could run Windows software on a Linux machine, this article is for you!

2023-07-29 01:51:21

I have a habit of listening to podcasts and jotting down reminders to check out stuff that the hosts recommend, and then never ultimately getting back to consume that content.

I stumbled upon this video today while spelunking through my reminders app, and I felt like it was fitting considering (a) an upcoming thing that I’m really excited to share soon, and (b) it helps tie together the two most recent posts on this blog.

The part that made me go “ah, damn” was when she mentioned that most people who go through this exercise end up with some form of communication as their climate action.

After completing the exercise, the two things I wrote down were:

1. Do the podcast idea, build your network of “doers” in various climate fields, leverage the network to institute policy change and inspire others into action.

2. Do the podcast idea, discover a company doing something cool in climate (terrible pun), join that company.

The other thing Ayana warns in this video is to not start with your solution in mind, but dang, that’s just not fair, is it?

Either way, going through this venn diagram exercise gave me a lot to think about, and I’m quite curious to hear what you think if you end up doing this as well.

2023-07-28 23:25:00

Rebecca Solnit, writing for The Guardian:

I keep saying I respect despair as an emotion, but not as an analysis. You can feel absolutely devastated about the situation and not assume this predicts outcome; you can have your feelings and can still chase down facts from reliable sources, and the facts tell us that the general public is not the problem; the fossil fuel industry and other vested interests are; that we have the solutions, that we know what to do, and that the obstacles are political; that when we fight we sometimes win; and that we are deciding the future now.

Another great friend sent me this last night after reading my Shatner post, and his comment was “it’s too easy and too unsatisfying to give up entirely.”

This article gave me the shot in the arm I’ve been needing. Maybe I need to start saying “okay, doomer.”

At the tail end of my full time involvement with JMG, I was pushing into the idea of climate work within mobile app development. As I was thinking of my next side hustle, climate work was the first thing that came to mind.

But as I started to consider where I wanted to go with focus, I started getting overwhelmed. There is so much that is being done in climate, and in addition to feeling unapproachable, it also felt like “what’s the point?”

My big idea was to start a podcast where I chatted with folks in the climate industry to hear the stories of what work is being done to clean up our planet.

Some companies I’d want to start with would be Ecosia (who is building a sustainable search engine), Treecard (which is a debit card that plants trees), and The Ocean Cleanup (which uses this dope-looking boat to get plastic out of the ocean).

This is supremely cool shit that’s being done, yet thanks to doomerism, I’ve felt paralyzed from starting.

Maybe this article will be the shot in the arm I need to start helping in just about the only way I know how: helping others make sense of the work that’s being done to solve this seemingly insolvable problem.

2023-07-28 04:06:54

I learned later that I was not alone in this feeling. It is called the “Overview Effect” and is not uncommon among astronauts, including Yuri Gagarin, Michael Collins, Sally Ride, and many others.

Essentially, when someone travels to space and views Earth from orbit, a sense of the planet’s fragility takes hold in an ineffable, instinctive manner. Author Frank White first coined the term in 1987: “There are no borders or boundaries on our planet except those that we create in our minds or through human behaviors. All the ideas and concepts that divide us when we are on the surface begin to fade from orbit and the moon. The result is a shift in worldview, and in identity.”

It can change the way we look at the planet but also other things like countries, ethnicities, religions; it can prompt an instant reevaluation of our shared harmony and a shift in focus to all the wonderful things we have in common instead of what makes us different. It reinforced tenfold my own view on the power of our beautiful, mysterious collective human entanglement, and eventually, it returned a feeling of hope to my heart.

In this insignificance we share, we have one gift that other species perhaps do not: we are aware—not only of our insignificance, but the grandeur around us that makes us insignificant. That allows us perhaps a chance to rededicate ourselves to our planet, to each other, to life and love all around us. If we seize that chance.

I had a chance to grab some drinks recently with a good friend of mine who I consider to be the absolute smartest person I’ve ever met.

As is often the case, our chat devolved into a brutal critique of the current state of affairs: the real threat of nuclear war in Europe, dealing with the ramifications of climate change, the weaponization of artificial intelligence, and so forth.

As we were wrapping up our chat, I got the sense that both of us were looking to each other for a glimmer of hope. Something that would allow us to go to bed thinking, “yeah, the world sucks right now, but we’ll figure it out.”

Wiliam Shatner’s observation about our species’ ability to be aware of such things might be the thing that we could have potentially used.

Our awareness is what gives us such existential dread in a moment in history that is otherwise the undisputed best time to be a human.

We need to balance our innate ability of detecting danger with our other innate abilities of strategizing and inventing.

After all, what’s the point of stressing about the future if there is no hope? What’s the point of fixing the future if we can’t also appreciate the present?

2023-07-26 11:43:00

Seidel went to Eugene in late June, during the U.S. Outdoor Track and Field Championships, for what is known as team processing, an administrative session to prepare athletes for international competition. They fill out paperwork and get sized for uniforms. And, new in 2021, athletes undergo a mental health screening.

Seidel answered the questions on the screener honestly—and her responses raised red flags. The U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC) doctors, who administer the screening, referred her for treatment.

A USOPC spokesperson wrote in an email to Runner’s World that the test screens for anxiety, depression, eating disorders, drug and alcohol abuse, and sleep disorders, among other things. The results athletes provide are then flagged for follow up by a USOPC licensed mental health provider. From there, the athletes are connected to mental health resources.

“The screenings are not intended to screen athletes out of competition or off Team USA, but are a part of a broad approach to intervene and provide support to athletes who struggle with mental health, so they are able to achieve their goals,” the spokesperson wrote.

Seidel said she was connected with a new team of specialists, many in Salt Lake City. “USOPC set up everything for me and they’re continuing treatment for me,” she said. “Honestly it was so much easier being able to have them take the reins on it. And feel very much like, ‘Okay, they’re going to help me out on this.’”

I recall sitting with my therapist for the first time during my big depressive episode in 2021. I hadn’t said a word yet, and I started welling up almost immediately.

“I have no idea why I’m crying,” I said to her. I hadn’t even explained why I was there.

“It’s probably because you are feeling relief,” she said.

She was completely right. I hadn’t really appreciated the need to unload your trauma and to allow someone to help you unpack and sort through your anxieties.

I’d still say that 99% of the tears I’ve shed in the past three years came after being vulnerable and letting others help me.

I felt those same tears well up when reading this piece about Molly Siedel, particularly the section in the pull quote above.

Say what you will about our Olympic committee: this policy is a walk off home run. Kudos to them for offering help, and mega kudos to Molly for being strong enough to take it.

I’ve had the fortune of getting to hang around several Olympians, and hearing them share stories of the pressures they face is incredible. I’m glad they have an opportunity to get relief when they need it.

2023-07-24 10:59:31

Moving your body, even a bit, has enormous benefits – again to almost all people towards reducing the probability and severity of almost all diseases. So can you imagine the benefit of moving your body for several hours per day in a natural environment, and including heavy load bearing and bits of extreme exertion?

These things are not speculative pieces of alternative medicine. They are known, easily and reproducibly tested, and proven to be the most effective things we can possibly do with our time.

So why, the actual fuck, are people still sitting inside, watching Netflix, driving to work, and then driving to the doctor’s office to get deeper and deeper analysis of a neverending series of exotic and mysterious and unsolvable problems with their physical and mental health?

Okay, okay, this got me to put the book on hold at the library.

2023-07-20 00:38:00

What I find is that those who lean too much into this logic of optimization are the ones that suffer from a (literal) maddening degree of alienation.

It’s an easy trap to fall into as it is so very sensible: Why would you spend six hours cleaning (doing a chore you hate and doing it badly) if you could just work an additional hour and outsource that? So you hire a cleaner. And a cook, a personal shopper, an interior designer and a nanny. But if you don’t watch out, all your little self worth eggs, so to speak, are kept in the same work basket – and, step by step, you start to live the life of a stranger. You eat the food of someone else, wear the clothes of not-you, in an apartment that might as well be a hotel room, with kids that are more attached to their nanny than to you. Your vacations are glamorous, but there’s little connection to anyone or anything in them.

At this point you might start to feel a little unease. You might start to wonder why you’re unfulfilled and try to treat yourself better – so you double down. You get a PA because dealing with a schedule is annoying, you get a personal trainer because mens sana in corpore sano and while you’re at it, you also start therapy, where you learn techniques that help somewhat and where you analyze childhood events. But what somehow is kept at bay, in a fish-not-having-a-word-for-water-way, is that you identify with your job of optimizing processes to maximum efficiency to a degree that you treat yourself like any work project.

Boy, this pull quote within the bigger article here really struck a nerve.

Fortunately, I’ve been trying hard to not always make the optimaly decision lately. It’s tough to break the habit, but “good enough” often is just that.

2023-07-18 11:12:48

"You become more resilient, and your body learns that the anxiety and stress isn't needed because there is no threat to losing anything when there's always more ways to gain what you want or need," says Papetti. "The only thing that's certain in life is uncertainty, so embodying an abundance mindset that trusts you'll be safe in the uncertainty is the secret to living a life of greater gratitude, ease, and satisfaction." 

Great advice in here for helping you to adjust your mindset. The journaling tip and the celebrating the wins of others tip are resonating with me as of late.

2023-07-18 05:42:03

Style Guide Liberalism is only loosely connected to progressive politics. Really, it’s an expression of the worst kind of cynicism—the notion that we don’t really need to reform society or power structures but merely slap new labels on things. It’s a dodge, a pathetic sop to the left from corporations and other powerful institutions who at bottom don’t give a shit about any of this but assume that invoking on-trend progressive words and phrases will make up for all the injustice and misery they cause. As with any use of language, context is key.

2023-07-15 19:37:56

Imagine it’s 1990, and you’re building a big industrial machine of one kind or another. You design it to last 50 years and you’d want to use the best technology available. At the time this was a 3.5-inch floppy disk.

Take the airline industry for example. Probably half of the air fleet in the world today is more than 20 years old and still uses floppy disks in some of the avionics. That’s a huge consumer.

There’s also medical equipment, which requires floppy disks to get the information in and out of medical devices.

The biggest customer of all is probably the embroidery business though. Thousands and thousands of machines that use floppy disks were made for this, and they still use these.

There are even some industrial companies that still use Sony Mavica cameras to take photographs.

I found some floppy disks at my parents house a few years back and was able to get nearly all the data off of them.

One included photographs taken by a Sony Mavica.

This whole article made me appreciate the impermanence of our digital lives, and is also making me consider getting some photo books printed.

2023-07-14 22:25:47

The most complicated reasoning programs in the world can be defined as a textual I/O stream to a leviathan living on some technology company’s servers. Engineers can work on improving the quality and cost of these programs. They can be modular, recombined, and, unlike typical UNIX shell programs, are able to recover from user errors. Like shell programs living on through the ages and becoming more powerful as underlying hardware gets better, prompted models become smarter and more on task as the underlying language model becomes smarter. It’s possible that in the near future all computer interfaces that require bespoke negotiations will pay a small tax to the gatekeeper of a large language model for the sheer leverage it gives an operator: a new bicycle for the mind.

I have a fairly lengthy backlog of Instapaper articles that I’m combing through, and I prefer to consume them in reverse chronological order.

This article is roughly 10 months old, and it’s funny how out of date it already feels (remember when GPT-3 was state of the art?).

But more importantly, the conceit of the article is still spot on. The internet (hell, pretty much all computers) are built on thousands of tiny programs, each programmed to do one specific task extremely well, interoperating together to do something big.

It’s like an orchestra. A superstar violinist really shines when they are accompanied by the multi-faceted tones of equally competent bassoonists, cellists, and timpanists.

2023-07-12 11:49:43

What I came to realise was that these men are actually the losers. The billionaires who called me out to the desert to evaluate their bunker strategies are not the victors of the economic game so much as the victims of its perversely limited rules. More than anything, they have succumbed to a mindset where “winning” means earning enough money to insulate themselves from the damage they are creating by earning money in that way. It’s as if they want to build a car that goes fast enough to escape from its own exhaust.

Yet this Silicon Valley escapism – let’s call it The Mindset – encourages its adherents to believe that the winners can somehow leave the rest of us behind.

Humans got to where we are by a mix of individuals driven by a bootstrapper mentality and groups driven by a sense of cooperation.

I’d rather take my chances in gen pop than go at it alone in solitary confinement… but to each their own.

2023-07-08 21:09:25

We choose the most convenient arguments to preach our convictions but demand bulletproof facts before we will rethink them.

It’s not just due to confirmation bias – the tendency to seize ideas that validate our views, while dismissing information that challenges them. It’s also because of distance. We’re often too close to our own arguments to evaluate them critically. To recognise our blind spots, we need other people to hold up a mirror.

I love arguing. I think it might drive my wife up a wall sometimes, but I often can’t help myself.

I love seeing all sides of an argument. I love learning new things and having my worldview shifted ever so slightly.

One of the people I enjoy arguing with the most is my father-in-law. Despite our many disagreements about people and how the world works, we always end each one on friendly terms, and more often than not, we each walk away with something new to chew on.

2023-07-07 23:36:37

In his best selling book, “Range”, author David Epstein profiled a chess match between chess-master Gary Casparov and IBM’s Supercomputer Deep Blue in 1997. After losing to Deep Blue, Casparov responded reticently that,

“Anything we can do, machines will do it better. If we can codify it and pass it to computers, they will do it better”.

However, after studying the match more deeply, Casparov became convinced that something else was at play. In short, he turned to “Moravec’s Paradox”, which makes the case that,

“Machines and humans have opposite strengths and weaknesses. Therefore, the optimal scenario might be one in which the two work in tandem.”

In chess, it boils down to tactics vs. strategy. While tactics are short combinations of moves used to get an immediate advantage, strategy refers to the bigger picture planning needed to win the game. The key is that while machines are tactically flawless, they are much less capable of strategizing because strategy involves creativity.

Casparov determined through a series of chess scenarios that the optimal chess player was not Big Blue or an even more powerful machine. Instead, it came in the form of a human “coaching” multiple computers. The coach would first instruct a computer on what to examine. Then, the coach would synthesize this information in order to form an overall strategy and execute on it. These combo human/computer teams proved to be far superior, earning the nickname “centaurs”.

How?

By taking care of the tactics, computers enabled the humans to do what they do best — strategize.

I’m working on an upcoming talk, and this here essentially serves as the thesis of it.

For as long as we’ve had tools, we’ve had heated arguments around whether each tool will help us or kill us.

And the answer is always “both.”

2023-07-06 11:45:00

When she feels as if she is running on shards of glass, when her legs feel like they are about to split open, when she thinks she can’t possibly run one more mile, Courtney Dauwalter starts visualizing the pain cave. It’s a place she constructs in her mind with elaborate detail. She conjures every crevice of the cave’s architecture: a large space with different tunnels inside. The cavernous paths in her mind can be wide or narrow, depending on the length and duration of the race. But with Courtney, they’re usually impossibly long.

Dauwalter, 37, is considered the world’s best female ultramarathon runner. She might just be the greatest ultrarunner of all time, period. She races astonishing distances of 100- and 200-plus miles, even once attempting a 486-mile course. She is often on her feet for a mind-bending 24 or 48 straight hours, in the harshest environments imaginable, from steep terrain and high elevation to extreme weather.

Each race, she intends to go into the pain cave. She almost craves it. She warns herself, standing at the start line right before the gun goes off, that she is about to embark on another uncomfortable journey to the cave. “It’s not always going to feel great,” she tells herself. “But that’s going to make us better. We’re going to get better from visiting it.”

I got to meet Courtney while recording an episode of C Tolle Run, and I can confirm that she is incredibly nice and wonderful to be around.

Her attitude here towards approaching uncomfortable situations is the one I want to have when I grow up.

This whole article is insanely inspiring. Courtney serves as one of those people who seem to understand how to live your best life: push yourself to do your best, explore the world around you, appreciate every little thing, and use all your tools to help you get better (even tools like negative thoughts and pain).

There is nothing quite like running super long distances, and reading this article makes me think I need to set myself up with another challenge.

(Not running-related, though. I think I’ve gone as far as I can realistically go with that sport. Tomorrow morning, I’m gonna pick up my bike and start building there.)

2023-06-28 20:22:00

Saying “use the right tool for the job” is easy, but actually selecting the right tool for the job is anything but. Good tools are hard to find, hard to evaluate, hard to learn. We have constraints, we have biases, we have shortcomings.

But that’s all part of the work.

And if you “just use Go” or “just use React” or “just use Postgres” for every problem that crosses your keyboard, you’re just not putting in the work.

I’ve only worked in agencies my entire professional career, and that work has honed two important traits of a good engineer: curiousity and agility.

Being curious gives you the ability to explore new tools and understand how they work.

Being agile (not in the project management sense, but the “moving freely and quickly” sense) gives you the ability to deploy those tools to solve increasingly complex problems.

It’s not that I don’t have a standard set of tools I reach for when solving a wide swatch of problems (Rails, Postgres, etc.), but as I get older, I’m finding that I am more willing to engage with newer tech.

I come from a background of writing Javascript by hand, but I'm starting to play more with Vue and React, and I can see why people like these tools.

Same thing with CI/CD pipelines. I always thought they were more fiddle-y and brittle than they were worth, but that's because I've generally been a lone wolf. In a team context, they are extremely useful.

If you keep hearing noise about a new technology, it's probably worth taking a look over the fence to see how that tool could be used.

2023-06-28 18:49:00

The idea of an "evil laugh" for a villainous character is much older, and the idea that laughter can be a sign of moral failings is even older still!

In "Social Signals and Antisocial Essences: The Function of Evil Laughter in Popular Culture", Jens Kjeldgaard-Christiansen traces negative attitudes about laughter all the way back to Plato. In The Republic, Plato says that laughter is a malignant, violent paroxysm that seizes its subject by force, signalling the unfortunate triumph of passion over rationality.

The AskHistorians subreddit is my go-to example of the internet done right.

Every day, normal people ask bizarre, inane questions that are then answered by serious academics.

This is a prime example of the kind of topic you never imagined could be interesting, yet once you read the answer, you walk away amused, educated, and grateful that someone took the time to give an extremely detailed answer to such a question.

The internet is often filled with garbage, but this subreddit serves as a golden example of the cool stuff people can build when they give a damn.

2023-06-27 11:31:08

ROGEN: What’s horrifying is a comment I get a lot where cops come up to me and say, “I became a cop because of Superbad.” That has been said to me on numerous occasions. And when they say that to me, I say, “That is fucked up. You did not understand the movie.”

This movie had a profound impact on me when it came out. I probably watched it 50 times on DVD.

I think I should go watch it again.

2023-06-25 12:06:20

Happiness often follows a U-curve in which middle age is uniquely stressful, with a heavy dose of responsibilities. That’s all the more reason to seek out atelic activites when the midlife blues hit: meditation, music, running, or almost anything that brings inner peace. But self-reported happiness does increase later in life.

Oddly, as Setiya observes, many of the most consequential choices we make occur in our 20s and early 30s: careers, partners, families, and more. The midlife crisis is a delayed reaction, hitting when we feel more weighted down by those choices. So the challenge is not necessarily to change everything, he says, but to ask, “How do I appreciate properly what I now am doing?”

My daughter turns 7 tomorrow. I’m feeling like I’m finally hitting a point with that relationship where I am not needed as heavily, and I’ll soon be able to indulge in atelic activities more frequently.

The beautiful thing is that I’m now able to enjoy some of these activities with my kids as they get older.

I think that’s the part of parenting I was looking forward to the most: getting to do cool stuff (like go on rides and play Pokémon) with two really cool little people.

2023-06-24 21:04:15

Let the mastering engineers do their thing, using whatever technology they find best. Get the reproduced music however you can. And focus on the analog component you are going to have to add to the chain in the end, no matter what: your ears.

A while back, NPR had a test that allowed you to tell whether you could tell the difference between various levels of audio compression.

Even though I did decent on that test, I’ve still never really been able to discern the difference listening to an album on vinyl versus a 320kbps MP3 rip.

That could be because I’m not listening to it on amazing headphones or speakers, but I think the main reason I enjoy listening to vinyl records is that it forces me to focus.

Having a majority of the music ever recorded at our fingertips is incredible, but taking time to really listen to an artist’s work from front to back feels like a luxury. The ceremony of selecting a record, setting it on the table, and dropping the needle feels more special than shouting into the air for Siri to start it.

(Shouting into the air to summon music is also supremely dope, though… don’t get me wrong.)

2023-06-23 18:53:04

A solitary figure, a microphone and a stool. Those are the primary images of stand-up comedy — as reliable and ubiquitous as a book’s cover, spine and chapter titles.

But there is another element in the iconography, and it’s the most revealing: The water bottle.

2023-06-23 10:23:09

More specifically, it will always end up frustrating very large segments of the population and will always fail to accurately represent the “proper” level of moderation of anyone.

The argument made in this theorem that you can be 99.9% right and still be a colossal failure at scale is beautiful.

2023-06-23 02:27:00

Get me a print of this, stat.

2023-06-22 21:41:14

For most companies, accessibility isn’t a priority, or worse, something that they pay lip service to while doing the bare minimum to meet regulatory compliance. Ojala’s pet peeve is people thinking that accessibility is a feature, a nice-to-have addition to your product. When they tack on accessibility later, without thinking about it from the very beginning, Ojala can tell — it feels haphazard. (Imagine first creating a product with a colorless UI, then to add colors later as an afterthought, only to use the wrong color combination.)

I heard long ago that the reason developers should start testing software with accessibility in mind is that everyone, at some point in their life, will benefit from accessible technology.

At a minimum, as your eyesight gets older with age, an increase in font size will make it more comfortable to read things.

Any story that revolves around a few people banding together to solve an actual problem, and how that solution literally changed people’s lives, is so inspiring to me.

It’s what I yearn for at this point in my life. I don’t mind making money and building apps which drive business value. The stability of my job has done wonders for my mental health, and I am supremely grateful that I have it.

But boy, wouldn’t it be fun to get to work on something that has an outsized positive impact on people’s ability to live productive lives?

2023-06-21 01:29:20

There is one person I can say objectively that I am smarter than, and it is me four years ago.

He knew all of the things I currently know except less.

He had all the life experiences that I currently have except fewer.

So why do I have an obligation to a guy who is not only dumber than me, but literally does not exist?

This talk is nearly ten years old, and it slaps in all the right ways.

I feel a tremendous debt to myself and my goals and aspirations, but some of those goals and aspirations are just... not me anymore.

I can't run like I used to, lest I want to have a knee replacement in five years.

I don't think I'll ever end up getting to all the breweries in the state, even though I run an app devoted to that purpose.

It's okay to let the dreams of your past self go in favor of newer, more relevant dreams.

By the way: I saw a follow up to this talk yesterday where he ended up concluding:

I do not have no obligation to my former self.

I have the obligation to my former self that I want to have.

And I want to have some.

Which means I should save my knees for a marathon with my kids.

(If that's what their dream is, of course.)

2023-06-17 21:48:00

To hear him tell it, he doesn’t usually have much control over what he decides to focus on in those three hours. For a few months in the spring of 2019, all he did was read.

“Which means I didn’t do any work,” Huh said. “So that’s kind of a problem.” (He’s since made peace with this constraint, though. “I used to try to resist … but I finally learned to give up to those temptations.” As a consequence, “I became better and better at ignoring deadlines.”)

He finds that forcing himself to do something or defining a specific goal — even for something he enjoys — never works. It’s particularly difficult for him to move his attention from one thing to another. “I think intention and willpower … are highly overrated,” he said. “You rarely achieve anything with those things.”

This was a great biography about one person’s path towards discovering what they are passionate about.

I find a lot of parallels in my work. Agency life can be a grind, and it’s tough to say “deliver this work by this date” and feel motivated to deliver on it, especially when that work is not particularly novel or challenging.

I much prefer being still for a little bit, finding something to be curious about, and working towards discovering everything I can about that thing.

On a related note: I recently had a great talk with a coworker about the game I want to build. Our talk transformed that idea into one that now is making me motivated to learn more about AIs that generate visual components and how one could incorporate them into a dynamically-built world.

Kinda cool stuff, no?

2023-06-17 10:02:00

There was a lot I learned from The Simpsons, right from the start. Did I learn that people get “MOTHER” tattoos from the first episode? Maybe! How about the Atilla the Hun reference Bart makes in the credits at the end? Did I know who Atilla the Hun was yet? Did I “get” the reference at some point from elsewhere? I don’t know! Eat my shorts!

But there are people that I know are real entirely because of The Simpsons. One person towers over them all, even though he is only 5-foot-3 in real life: Ray Jay Johnson. He’s mentioned in the classic episode “Krusty Gets Kancelled.” When Krusty does, indeed, get kancelled, he says he’s never done a bad show—except for the week Raymond J. Johnson Jr. guest-hosted.

This was everything I could’ve hoped for in a piece about this reference from The Simpsons which I always found obscure.

And I couldn’t agree more with the author’s assessment of learning about the world of pop culture through The Simpsons. Many of the models by which I view the world were sculpted in part through references from that show.

2023-06-16 02:46:00

I anticipated navigating other challenges, like how to deal with the cognitive dissonance of working for big tech. Could someone who worked for big tech use a flip phone? Yet I liked the idea, argued by Hari, Williams, and Newport, that we need to be aware of technology’s designs and ensure that tech is working for us rather than against us. I didn’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to technical innovations, but I grew increasingly skeptical that my smartphone was working for me.

This whole article combines many disparate sources (like Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism and Rolf Dobelli's Stop Reading the News) into a cohesive manifesto for why we should stand up and reclaim our collective attention spans.

It actually motivated me to take some action.

Last night, I went through every app on my phone and deleted the ones I no longer use. I wasn't too picky though; if I had even a slight inkling that I might need it in the future, I kept it.

I went from 314 apps to 133.

133 still seems like too much to me, but just imagine the cognitive and infrastructural burden that 181 apps was inflicting on me and my phone!

All that wasted bandwidth to download updates.

All those wasted notifications attempting to get me to come back in.

My home screen went from this:

to this:

It's step one of being intentional with my technology, which is subsequently the first step towards getting my attention back.

Comparing these two screen shots is making me excited to make more cuts. Some of these apps will go away after we wrap up with a client project in the next couple weeks (like Teams and Protect) or when I finish up physical therapy (like Medbridge Go).

Others (like Untappd or MN Beer) are ones that don't really need a front page billing all the time in my life.

More cuts to come in the weeks ahead, to be sure!

2023-06-14 12:06:00

The core point of this article (incremental progress is vastly underestimated and compound growth is hard to fathom) is solid, but it’s this part that stuck with me:

If you view progress as being driven by the genius of individuals, of course it’s hard to imagine a future where things are dramatically better, because no individual is orders of magnitudes smarter than average.

But when you view it as one person coming up with a small idea, another person copying that idea and tweaking it a little, another taking that insight and manipulating it a bit, another yet taking that product and combining it with something else – incremental, tiny bits, little ideas mixing, joining, blending, mutating, and compounding together – it’s suddenly much more conceivable.

This must be why I’ve been so drawn to finding a community lately.

I find it exhausting and boring being stuck all by myself, chugging through a coding problem with no one to talk to.

Mutating and remixing ideas is what gives me energy. Taking someone’s thought and tweaking it to make it better in some meaningful way. It’s the part of my job I love the most.

2023-06-13 22:59:00

Studies now show that dopamine primarily generates another feeling: desire. "Dopamine makes you want things," says neuroscientist Anne-Noël Samaha. A surge of dopamine in your brain makes you seek out something, she explains. Or continue doing what you're doing. It's all about motivation.

And it goes even further: Dopamine tells your brain to pay particular attention to whatever triggers the surge.

It's alerting you to something important, Samaha says. "So you should stay here, close to this thing, because there's something here for you to learn. That's what dopamine does."

And here's the surprising part: You might not even like the activity that triggers the dopamine surge. It might not be pleasurable. "That's relatively irrelevant to dopamine," Samaha says.

When I was a kid, dopamine was the "happiness molecule".

These findings (which position dopamine as a mechanism which forces you to pay attention to things) cause much of our lifestyles to make more sense.

You keep doom scrolling not because you like it. You do it because your brain keeps telling you "this is important stuff, you should pay attention."

It's not an excuse, to be certain... but as the 20th century laureate G.I. Joe said: "knowing is half the battle."

2023-05-26 18:56:00

Expectations are like a debt that must be repaid before you get any joy out of what you’re doing.

2023-05-15 07:13:00

While travel does expand and stretch the horizons of what we know about the world, it is not the answer we’re looking for in times of unrest. To strengthen the health of the mind, the venue to do that in is the one we are in now.

It is location-independent, and always will be.

The key is not to discard The Box of Daily Experience and find a new one — it’s to warmly embrace the one that we have now — with its joys, its flaws, and everything in between.

I’ve definitely fallen prey to the use of vacation as a substitute for facing my own problems.

This article (complete with cute illustrations) serves as a great reminder that value can be derived from the monotony of our daily lives.

2023-05-12 22:33:00

The first time I opened ChatGPT, I had no idea what I was doing or how I was supposed to work with it.

After many hours of watching videos, playing with many variations of the suggestions included in 20 MIND-BLOWING CHATGPT PROMPTS YOU MUST TRY OR ELSE clickbait articles, and just noodling around on my own, I came up with this talk that explains prompt engineering to anyone.

Ah, what is prompt engineering, you may be asking yourself? Prompt engineering is the process of optimizing how we ask questions or give tasks to AI models like ChatGPT to get better results.

This is the result of a talk that I gave at the 2023 AppliedAI Conference in Minneapolis, MN. You can find the slides for this talk here.

Regardless of your skill level, by the end of this blog post, you will be read to write advanced-level prompts. My background is in explaining complex technical topics in easy-to-understand terms, so if you are already a PhD in working with large language models, this may not be the blog post for you.

Okay, let's get started!

I know nothing about prompt engineering.

That's just fine! Let's get a couple definitions out of the way.

Large language model (LLM)

Imagine you have a really smart friend who knows a lot about words and can talk to you about anything you want. This friend has read thousands and thousands of books, articles, and stories from all around the world. They have learned so much about how people talk and write.

This smart friend is like a large language model. It is a computer program that has been trained on a lot of text to understand language and help people with their questions and tasks. It's like having a very knowledgeable robot friend who can give you information and have conversations with you.

While it may seem like a magic trick, it's actually a result of extensive programming and training on massive amounts of text data.

What LLMs are essentially doing is, one word at a time, picking the most likely word that would appear next in that sentence.

Read that last again.

It's just guessing one word at a time at what the next word will be.

That's a lot of words, Tim. Give me a demonstration!

Let's say we feed in a prompt like this:

I'm going to the store to pick up a gallon of [blank]

You might have an idea of what the next best word is. Here's what GPT-4 would say is the next most likely word to appear:

• Milk (50%)
• Water (20%)
• Ice cream (15%)
• Gas (10%)
• Paint (5%)

I would've said "milk," personally... but all those other words make sense as well, don't they?

What would happen if we add one word to that prompt?

I'm going to the hardware store to pick up a gallon of [blank]

I bet a different word comes to mind to fill in that blank. Here's what the next word is likely to be according to GPT-4:

• Paint (60%)
• Gasoline (20%)
• Cleaning solution (10%)
• Glue (5%)
• Water (5%)

All of those percentages are based on what the AI has learned from training on a massive amount of text data. It doesn't have opinions or preferences; it's just guessing based on patterns it has observed.

Prompt Engineering

You know how we changed one word in our prompt to get a different set of answers? That's prompt engineering!

A textbook definition might look like this:

Prompt engineering is optimizing an AI prompt for an accurate, relevant, and actionable response.

A less geeky definition might look like this:

Prompt engineering is getting really good at telling an AI what we want so it can give us back the best possible response.

A prompt engineer also understands the underlying patterns in how the AI works. Now that you have made it this far, you are ready to actually tackle those underlying patters!

I understand the concept.

Wonderful! You're well on your way to becoming a prompt engineer. Let's get a little more in depth.

When it comes to prompt engineering, you will want to keep four big points in mind:

1. Write clear and specific instructions
2. Give the model time to reason
3. Understand the limitations of the technology
4. Always be iterating

Let's tackle all of these one at a time.

Write clear and specific instructions

My years of training at the prestigious University of Minnesota's journalism school taught me the importance of writing clearly when writing news articles.

Yet unlike optimizing your words for a small column in a newspaper, when it comes to large language models: clear does not mean short.

Here's a few tips for making your prompts clear and specific:

Tip 1: Flattery is everything

Let's start with this prompt:

Give me three marketing campaign ideas.

Here's what you might get back:

Sure, here are three marketing campaign ideas:

1. Social Media Influencer Campaign: Collaborate with popular social media influencers who have a large following in your target market to promote your product or service. This campaign could include sponsored posts, product reviews, or influencer takeovers of your social media accounts.

2. Cause Marketing Campaign: Create a campaign that ties your product or service to a cause that aligns with your brand values. For example, if you sell eco-friendly products, you could partner with an environmental nonprofit and donate a portion of your profits to their cause. This type of campaign can help you connect with socially conscious consumers and build brand loyalty.

3. Interactive Digital Campaign: Create an interactive digital experience that engages your target audience in a fun and unique way. For example, you could create a game or quiz that ties into your product or service, or a virtual reality experience that showcases your brand's values or products. This type of campaign can help you stand out from your competitors and generate buzz on social media.

I think we could do better. These tips are quite generic and obvious to anyone who spent twenty minutes googling "marketing campaign ideas."

What about a prompt like this?

You are an expert in B2B marketing with a special focus on custom homebuilders who construct multi-million dollar homes. Give me three marketing campaign ideas.

Here's what you might get back:

Sure, here are three marketing campaign ideas for custom homebuilders who construct multi-million dollar homes:

1. Luxury Lifestyle Content Campaign: Create a content marketing campaign that focuses on the luxury lifestyle that your homes offer. This could include blog posts, videos, and social media posts that showcase the unique features and amenities of your homes, as well as the surrounding communities. You could also partner with luxury lifestyle publications and influencers to reach a wider audience.

2. Custom Home Showcase Event: Host a custom home showcase event to give potential buyers an up-close look at the quality and craftsmanship of your homes. This could include a tour of a recently completed home, a meet-and-greet with the builders and designers, and a networking event with other high-end vendors such as interior designers, luxury car dealerships, and private jet companies.

3. Personalized Direct Mail Campaign: Create a personalized direct mail campaign to reach out to high-net-worth individuals in your target market. This could include sending a custom-designed brochure that highlights your unique selling propositions, as well as a personalized letter that speaks to their specific needs and desires. You could also consider sending luxury gift boxes with branded items such as champagne flutes or gourmet chocolates to make a lasting impression.

These ideas are so much better because you placed the large language model in a specific role. This allows it to be specific with its feedback.

LLMs (especially ChatGPT) are great at role playing like this. You can have it pretend to be virtually anything... have it be a grandmaster chess player and critique your strategy!

However, it's important to be realistic with your flattery. Remember: LLMs are trained on stuff that actual humans wrote. If you say something like "pretend you're an alien with an IQ of 9000," it will hallucinate an answer (more on hallucinations in a bit).

The reason our marketing example worked so well is because marketing people have big egos and love to write blog posts to share what they've learned. (Hey, wait a minute...)

Tip 2: Provide additional context

Remember how we specified hardware store and got more contextually-appropriate answers?

Let's see how that plays out with another prompt:

Tell me about climate change.

Here's what you might get back:

Climate change refers to the long-term changes in the Earth's climate, including changes in temperature, precipitation patterns, and weather events, that have been observed over the past century and are projected to continue into the future.

The primary cause of climate change is the increase in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHGs), such as carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. These gases trap heat in the Earth's atmosphere, leading to an overall warming of the planet. The burning of fossil fuels for energy is the main source of GHG emissions, but deforestation, agriculture, and industrial processes also contribute to the problem.

Again, that's not entirely useless information, but I think we could do better.

What if you were specifically interested in how climate change impacts global sea levels?

Can you discuss the impact of climate change on global sea levels?

Here's what you might get back:

Climate change has contributed to the rising of global sea levels, primarily through the melting of glaciers and ice caps and the thermal expansion of seawater. As the planet warms, glaciers and ice caps around the world are melting at an accelerated rate, which is adding more water to the oceans. Additionally, as seawater warms, it expands and takes up more space, further contributing to sea level rise.

Sea level rise can have significant consequences for coastal communities and infrastructure. It can lead to flooding, erosion, and storm surges that can damage buildings, roads, and other critical infrastructure. These impacts are expected to become more severe and frequent as sea levels continue to rise.

A more contextually-specific prompt is going to give you a more contextually-specific response.

Tip 3: Ask for structured output

Let's consider this prompt:

Tell me about the solar system

You can probably guess where this is going, but here's what you might get back:

The solar system is the collection of planets, moons, asteroids, comets, and other celestial objects that orbit around a central star, the Sun. It is located in the Milky Way galaxy, about 25,000 light-years from the galactic center. The solar system is about 4.6 billion years old, and it formed from a rotating cloud of gas and dust called the solar nebula.

The eight planets of the solar system are Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. The four inner planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars) are rocky and relatively small, while the four outer planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune) are much larger and made mostly of gas and ice.

The solar system also contains numerous moons, with each planet having its own set of natural satellites. Some of the most famous moons include the Earth's Moon, Jupiter's Europa and Ganymede, and Saturn's Titan.

In addition to the planets and moons, the solar system contains a large number of smaller objects, such as asteroids and comets. Asteroids are rocky objects that orbit the Sun, while comets are made of ice and dust and have a characteristic tail when they pass near the Sun.

The solar system is held together by gravity, with the Sun being the most massive object and therefore exerting the strongest gravitational pull. The movements of the planets and other objects in the solar system are governed by the laws of physics, particularly gravity and orbital mechanics.

The study of the solar system is an important area of research in astronomy and planetary science, as it helps us understand the origins and evolution of our own planet and the universe as a whole.

Again, this isn't awful... in fact, we could take a moment to be impressed with such a robust reply to such a basic prompt.

But I think we can do better!

What if we asked it for a list?

Give me a list of planets in the solar system along with one interesting fact about each planet.

Here's what you might get back:

Sure, here's a list of the eight planets in our solar system along with an interesting fact about each one:

1. Mercury - Mercury is the smallest planet in the solar system and also the closest planet to the Sun. Its surface temperature can reach up to 800 degrees Fahrenheit during the day, but it drops to -290 degrees Fahrenheit at night.

2. Venus - Venus is often called Earth's "sister planet" because it is similar in size and composition, but its atmosphere is incredibly thick and hot, with temperatures that can reach up to 864 degrees Fahrenheit.

3. Earth - Our home planet is the only planet in the solar system known to support life. It has a powerful magnetic field that protects us from the solar wind, and its atmosphere helps regulate the planet's temperature.

4. Mars - Mars is often referred to as the "Red Planet" because of its distinctive rusty color. It is home to the largest volcano in the solar system, Olympus Mons, which stands at over 13 miles high.

5. Jupiter - Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system, with a diameter of over 86,000 miles. It also has the most moons of any planet, with over 79 confirmed satellites.

6. Saturn - Saturn is known for its beautiful rings, which are made up of ice particles ranging in size from dust to small boulders. It is also the least dense planet in the solar system - if there was a big enough bathtub, Saturn would float!

7. Uranus - Uranus is unique in the solar system because it rotates on its side. Its axis is tilted at an angle of 98 degrees, so its poles lie where most other planets have their equators.

8. Neptune - Neptune is the farthest planet from the Sun and is known for its striking blue color. It is also home to the strongest winds in the solar system, with gusts that can reach up to 1,200 miles per hour.

Poor Pluto... Neil DeGrasse Tyson really did a number on it, didn't he?

This is pretty good, but I think we could do one step better. Given I'm a nerd and spend a fair amount of time in JSON-land, here's a very specific prompt:

Provide me with a JSON output of the planets in the solar system with the following structure. When you are presented with square brackets, fill in that data with the correct information about the given planet:

{ planet: "Earth", distancefromsun: "[distance in miles]", fun_fact: "[1 sentence that would be interesting to a 5 year old"] }

Here's what you might get back:

Here's a JSON output of the eight planets in our solar system, using the structure you provided:

[
  {
    "planet": "Mercury",
    "distance_from_sun": "36 million miles",
    "fun_fact": "Mercury is the smallest planet in the solar system, but it's also the fastest!"
  },
  {
    "planet": "Venus",
    "distance_from_sun": "67 million miles",
    "fun_fact": "Venus is the hottest planet in the solar system, even hotter than Mercury!"
  },
  {
    "planet": "Earth",
    "distance_from_sun": "93 million miles",
    "fun_fact": "Earth is the only planet in the solar system that we know has life on it!"
  },
  {
  "planet": "Mars",
  "distance_from_sun": "142 million miles",
  "fun_fact": "Mars has the tallest volcano in the solar system, called Olympus Mons!"
  },
  {
    "planet": "Jupiter",
    "distance_from_sun": "484 million miles",
    "fun_fact": "Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system - you could fit all the other planets inside it!"
  },
  {
    "planet": "Saturn",
    "distance_from_sun": "886 million miles",
    "fun_fact": "Saturn has the most spectacular rings in the solar system - they're made up of ice and rock!"
  },
  {
    "planet": "Uranus",
    "distance_from_sun": "1.8 billion miles",
    "fun_fact": "Uranus is tilted on its side, so its seasons are really weird!"
  },
  {
    "planet": "Neptune",
    "distance_from_sun": "2.8 billion miles",
    "fun_fact": "Neptune is the windiest planet in the solar system - its winds can reach over 1,200 miles per hour!"
  }
]

We provided a sample of the structure we wanted, and it gave us back exactly what we were looking for. Not bad for a magic trick that's just guessing at the next right word, eh?

You don't have to be a nerd to benefit from this structure tip either. Ask for things in CSV format or in a table so you can copy it into Excel.

The key takeaway here is that LLMs really like having a clear structure in which they can provide their response. Structured prompts give the AI a clearer understanding of what's expected in the response, leading to more accurate and relevant answers.

Speaking of this, our next tip will also help in setting your prompts up for success:

Tip 4: One/Few Shot Prompting

This is the fanciest-sounding tip of this section, but I promise it's not conceptually difficult for you to get. In fact, we did it in our previous example!

Let's start with a zero-shot prompt:

Continue the dialogue in a sci-fi movie.

You might get a response like this:

Character 1: "Captain, we have a problem. The warp drive has gone offline and we're stranded in deep space."

Captain: "What's the damage?"

Character 1: "It looks like there was a power surge that overloaded the system. We're lucky we didn't blow out the entire engine room."

Captain: "Can we fix it?"

Character 1: "We'll need to reroute power from the backup systems and replace some of the damaged components. But it's going to take some time."

Character 2: "Captain, we're picking up an unusual energy signature on our long-range sensors. It's coming from a nearby planet." [...]

Once again, this is impressive and not entirely terrible. With zero prompting, we were able to generate some dialogue that feels like it could've come from a sci-fi movie.

Let's get a little more specific with one-shot prompting:

Continue this line from a Star Wars movie: 'Luke, I am your father.'

Darth Vader: "Search your feelings, Luke. You know it to be true."

Luke: "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"

Luke backs away from Darth Vader, unable to believe what he's just heard. The revelation that his father, who he thought was a great Jedi Knight, was actually the villainous Darth Vader is almost too much for him to bear.

Darth Vader: "Join me, and together we can rule the galaxy as father and son."

Luke: "I'll never join you! You killed my father!"

Darth Vader: "I am your father, Luke. And you have much to learn about the ways of the Force."

Much better. We provided some sample information in the form of one-shot ("Luke, I am your father") and despite that exact phrase never appearing in a Star Wars movie (look it up), it does its best to continue the dialogue after that general phrase is spoken.

How could we improve on this? Why, with few-shot prompting, of course!

Here's our few-shot prompt:

Continue this line from a Star Wars movie: 'May the Force be with you.' Response: 'And also with you.'

Continue this line from a Star Wars movie: 'I’ve got a bad feeling about this.' Response: 'You always have a bad feeling about this.'

Now, continue this line from a Star Wars movie: 'Luke, I am your father.

And here's a potential response:

Response: "Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father."

Luke: "He told me enough! He told me you killed him!"

Darth Vader: "No. I am your father."

Luke stares in disbelief at Darth Vader, trying to process the information he has just been given. He had always thought his father was a great Jedi Knight who fought alongside Obi-Wan Kenobi, but now he realizes that his father is actually the man he has been fighting against.

Luke: "No, that's not true! That's impossible!"

Darth Vader: "Search your feelings, you know it to be true."

Luke looks down, realizing the truth of Vader's words. He had always felt a connection to the Force, and now he understands why. He is the son of one of the most powerful Force users in the galaxy. [...]

First thing to note: notice how it used the word Response: in its response? It followed the pattern we established with our sample few-shot prompt. It also provided us a different section of the dialogue.

Few-shot prompting helps give the LLM more insight into the response you are expecting.

Give the model time to reason

Let's pump the brakes for a second and be very clear about what we mean with the word "reason."

LLMs are not human. They are just really good at following a set of instructions to provide the statistically appropriate response to your prompt. In this way, it might be more appropriate to say they simulate reasoning.

Here are a couple ways you can give the model time to reason its way to a more accurate response.

Tip 1: Specify the steps needed to complete a task

Sometimes, life is a little easier when we write down the steps we need to take before jumping in and doing something. LLMs benefit from the same strategy!

Let's come up with some absurd example to illustrate this point using LLMs. Let's say I need to count the number of verbs of a translated summary of Star Wars and return that (as well as the translation) to a JSON object.

If we just threw that into the LLM, it might give us a weird response.

Instead, here's a good prompt that gives the model the steps needed to complete a task:

Perform the following actions:

1. Summarize the following text delimited by triple dashes with 3 ampersands. 2. Translate the summary into German. 3. Count the number of verbs in the German summary. 4. Output a json object that contains the following keys: germansummary, numverbs.

Separate your answers with line breaks.

&&& In a galaxy far, far away, a young farmer named Luke Skywalker discovered his true heritage as a Jedi Knight and embarked on a heroic journey to save Princess Leia, defeat Darth Vader, and restore balance to the Force. &&&

Here's a potential response to that prompt:

Luke Skywalker, a young farmer, discovers he's a Jedi Knight and goes on a journey to save Princess Leia, defeat Darth Vader, and restore balance to the Force in a galaxy far, far away.

Luke Skywalker, ein junger Bauer, entdeckt seine wahre Herkunft als Jedi-Ritter und begibt sich auf eine heroische Reise, um Prinzessin Leia zu retten, Darth Vader zu besiegen und das Gleichgewicht in der Macht wiederherzustellen, in einer weit entfernten Galaxie.

4

{
    "german_summary": "Luke Skywalker, ein junger Bauer, entdeckt seine wahre Herkunft als Jedi-Ritter und begibt sich auf eine heroische Reise, um Prinzessin Leia zu retten, Darth Vader zu besiegen und das Gleichgewicht in der Macht wiederherzustellen, in einer weit entfernten Galaxie.",
    "num_verbs": 4
}

Notice how it performs each step before generating the final JSON object.

Tip 2: Instruct the model to work out its own solution before coming to a conclusion

Imagine I walk up to you and say, "Here's a complex algebra equation. Solve for X. Now."

If I didn't give you a whole lot of time to reason your way through the problem, you are likely to freak out and just throw down the first response you have.

Instead, what if I said "Here's an algebraic equation. Solve for X and show your work?" You are much more likely to give the correct answer.

Here's a prompt we can give to a large language model:

Give me a meal plan without gluten.

And here's a possible response to that:

Here's a sample meal plan for a day without gluten:

Breakfast:
- Gluten-free oatmeal with almond milk, topped with fresh berries and sliced almonds.
- Scrambled eggs with sautéed spinach and sliced avocado.

Snack:
- Fresh fruit (e.g. apple, pear, or banana) with almond butter.

Lunch:
- Grilled chicken breast with roasted sweet potatoes and steamed broccoli.
- Quinoa salad with mixed greens, cherry tomatoes, cucumber, and chickpeas, dressed with olive oil and lemon juice.

Snack:
- Carrots and celery sticks with hummus.

Dinner:
- Baked salmon with roasted asparagus and brown rice.
- Grilled sirloin steak with roasted Brussels sprouts and mashed sweet potatoes.

Dessert:
- Fresh fruit salad with coconut whipped cream.

Remember to always read food labels and double-check ingredients to make sure they are gluten-free, as some products may contain hidden sources of gluten. Additionally, if you have celiac disease or a gluten sensitivity, it's best to consult with a registered dietitian or medical professional for personalized dietary advice.

This is... an answer. I would argue (a) this is not a meal plan because it only represents a single day, and (b) it's not very personalized to my specific needs. It even mentions things like celiac disease in its disclaimer at the bottom, but we aren't sure that this is actually a solid meal plan for us.

Let's try a prompt where we put the LLM in a position to work through its own solution:

Craft a balanced seven-day meal plan for a person with Celiac Disease, considering the following constraints:

1. Each day should include breakfast, lunch, dinner, and two snacks. 2. Meals should be diverse and not repetitive. 3. Each day's meals should meet the recommended daily intake for all essential nutrients. 4. All recipes must be gluten-free due to Celiac Disease.

Start by creating a list of potential gluten-free ingredients and their nutritional values. Then, use this list to generate a diverse selection of meals for each day, ensuring that the nutritional guidelines are met. Lastly, present the meal plan in a structured format, with each day separated and meals clearly labeled.

This actually feels like what an actual dietician would do (or, perhaps, a dietician who is just starting their career). They would first start by creating a list of ingredients and determining their nutritional values. Then, they would work off of that list to create a meal plan that is nutritious and diverse.

Here's a possible response for this prompt:

List of Gluten-Free Ingredients and Their Nutritional Values:

- Quinoa: high in protein, fiber, magnesium, and iron
- Brown rice: high in fiber, magnesium, and selenium
- Sweet potatoes: high in vitamin A, vitamin C, and fiber
- Broccoli: high in vitamin C, vitamin K, and fiber
- Spinach: high in vitamin A, vitamin C, and iron
- Almonds: high in protein, healthy fats, and vitamin E
- Chickpeas: high in protein, fiber, and iron
- Salmon: high in omega-3 fatty acids, protein, and vitamin D
- Eggs: high in protein, vitamin B12, and vitamin D
- Greek yogurt: high in protein and calcium
- Berries: high in fiber and antioxidants
- Avocado: high in healthy fats and fiber

7-Day Gluten-Free Meal Plan:

Day 1:

- Breakfast: Quinoa breakfast bowl with Greek yogurt, berries, and sliced almonds.
- Snack: Apple slices with almond butter.
- Lunch: Broccoli and chicken stir-fry served over brown rice.
- Snack: Carrot sticks with hummus.
- Dinner: Grilled salmon with roasted sweet potatoes and sautéed spinach.

Day 2:

- Breakfast: Spinach and feta omelet with gluten-free toast.
- Snack: Greek yogurt with mixed berries and granola.
- Lunch: Chickpea and quinoa salad with cucumber, cherry tomatoes, and lemon-tahini dressing.
- Snack: Banana with almond butter.
- Dinner: Grilled chicken with roasted Brussels sprouts and mashed sweet potatoes.

Day 3:

- Breakfast: Sweet potato and black bean breakfast burrito with scrambled eggs.
- Snack: Almonds and dried cranberries.
- Lunch: Spinach and salmon salad with avocado and grapefruit segments.
- Snack: Celery sticks with almond butter.
- Dinner: Broiled sirloin steak with roasted asparagus and quinoa.

Day 4:

- Breakfast: Gluten-free oatmeal with almond milk, chopped almonds, and banana slices.
- Snack: Carrot sticks with hummus.
- Lunch: Grilled chicken and vegetable kebabs with quinoa.
- Snack: Greek yogurt with mixed berries.
- Dinner: Baked salmon with roasted sweet potatoes and sautéed spinach.

Day 5:

- Breakfast: Scrambled eggs with gluten-free toast and sliced avocado.
- Snack: Apple slices with almond butter.
- Lunch: Brown rice and vegetable stir-fry with tofu.
- Snack: Almonds and dried apricots.
- Dinner: Grilled chicken with roasted Brussels sprouts and mashed sweet potatoes.

Day 6:

- Breakfast: Gluten-free pancakes with mixed berries and maple syrup.
- Snack: Greek yogurt with mixed berries and granola.
- Lunch: Grilled salmon with mixed greens, cherry tomatoes, and cucumber salad.
- Snack: Banana with almond butter.
- Dinner: Brown rice and vegetable stir-fry with shrimp.

Day 7:

- Breakfast: Quinoa breakfast bowl with Greek yogurt, berries, and sliced almonds.
- Snack: Carrot sticks with hummus.
- Lunch: Broiled sirloin steak with roasted asparagus and mashed sweet potatoes.
- Snack: Almonds and dried cranberries.
- Dinner: Grilled chicken with roasted sweet potatoes and sautéed spinach.

Note: The meal plan is just an example, and it's important to personalize it according to individual nutritional needs and preferences. Also, be sure to check food labels and ingredient lists to ensure that all products used in the recipes are gluten-free.

See? That's a much better response and a much better meal plan.

We gave the model one task to work on at a time, which encouraged the model to provide a more thoughtful, nuanced response. It also gives the model a chance to take into account various factors that could be overlooked with a simpler prompt.

Limitations of large language models

Ahh, the fine print. All this magic is not without flaws.

When working with LLMs, keep these things in mind:

Limitation 1: Inaccurate and incorrect information

LLMs are only as good as their training data (um, yeah... roll with me for a second). If it was trained with inaccurate information, or if an event occurred after its training took place, it might not give you legit information.

Also, these things are trained on the internet. You ever been on the internet? Just look at your family's Facebook accounts to see some of the crap people believe out there. If you just believe everything these LLMs tell you without doing some critical thinking, you're a fool.

Here, take this prompt that I wrote on May 10th, 2023:

What highway did Minnesota dedicate to Prince?

Here's how it responded:

Minnesota dedicated a portion of Highway 5 to Prince in 2018, renaming it "Prince Memorial Highway." The section of Highway 5 runs through the city of Chanhassen, which is where Prince's Paisley Park estate is located.

Well, this is pretty good, all things considered! Except it's not true.

The Minnesota state legislature approved this change two days prior to when I gave it that prompt (so it's 2023, not 2018). It's also named the "Prince Nelson Rogers Memorial Highway".

Again, the rest is actually accurate. It did occur on Highway 5, which runs through Chanhassen, which is where Paisley Park is located.

It was able to reason that much correctly because that would statistically make the most sense. But it got the date and name wrong.

While LLMs can provide incredibly useful and accurate information, it's essential to cross-check with reliable source, particularly for critical or recent information.

Limitation 2: Hallucinations

This concept of making stuff up that sounds right is what we in the biz call a "hallucination."

Here's a prompt that legit caused me to worry:

Tell me about Tim Bornholdt

I'm not an expert on virtually anything... but if anyone could claim to be an expert on Tim Bornholdt, it would be me.

Here's how it responded:

Tim Bornholdt is a software developer and the co-founder of a software development company called The Jed Mahonis Group, which is based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Bornholdt co-founded the company in 2012 with Jedidiah Weller, and the company specializes in mobile app development for iOS and Android platforms.

Bornholdt is a graduate of the University of Minnesota, where he studied computer science. He has been working in the software industry for over a decade, and his expertise includes software development, mobile app development, project management, and business strategy.

In addition to his work at The Jed Mahonis Group, Bornholdt is also a co-host of the podcast "Constant Variables," which explores the world of mobile app development and entrepreneurship. He has also been a guest speaker at various tech and entrepreneurship events, including the Twin Cities Startup Week and the University of Minnesota's Technological Leadership Institute.

This is nearly perfect. Scary, honestly.

Except it's subtly wrong.

I started JMG with Robert Bentley, not Jedidiah Weller.

I didn't study computer science, I studied journalism (but I guess I did minor in computer science, so partial credit).

I would not consider myself a project management expert.

I have not hosted Constant Variables in over a year.

I've also never spoken at the U of M's Technological Leadership Institute.

All of those seem like perfectly reasonable facts, right? It's not absurdly wrong. It's just... subtly wrong.

And that's because these LLMs are not necessarily interested in telling you the truth. They are interested in giving you the statistically most probably answer to a question.

It's not absurd for the algorithm to think I started a business called "Jed Mahonis Group" with someone named "Jedidiah". It's also not absurd to think I studied computer science given my career in technology.

But the beautiful thing about us humans is that while you can usually predict how we'll act within a reasonable degree of accuracy, we are not statistical models. We are flawed, irrational, impulsive beings.

When you are working with large language models, the old Russian proverb reigns supreme: "trust, but verify."

Always be iterating

Your final lesson in this section is all about embracing what LLMs and neural networks do best: iteration.

I consumed around 40 hours of prompt engineering content to build this talk, but only one piece of advice still sticks with me: You will never get your prompt right the first time.

Everyone from YouTube streamers to folks with their PhD in artificial intelligence agreed that they rarely get complex prompts built their first time.

These machines are constantly learning from themselves. They are learning what people actually mean when they ask certain questions. They get better through further training.

You could be the same way! You could take your initial prompt, review the output, and give it a slightly different prompt.

It's why working with LLMs is so much fun. If you were to ask a human the same question five different ways, they would likely be confused at best and upset at worst.

If you were to ask an LLM the same question five different ways, you are likely to get five subtly different responses.

Don't stop on your first crack at a prompt. Keep playing with your order of words, ask it for a different structure, give it different steps to complete a task. You'll find the more you practice, the better you can use this tool to its greatest potential.

I'm pretty advanced.

Hey, well, now look at you! You've graduated Prompt Engineering 101, and you are now ready to take prompting to the next level.

There are four main concepts we want to cover in this section. These terms may look highly technical, and that's because they kind of are. However, just because something is highly technical doesn't mean we can't make it easy to understand! Stick with me here, I promise you'll be able to figure this out.

One final note before we continue: most of these settings are not able to be set within the ChatGPT interface, but if you directly access GPT-4 APIs, you are able to fine tune these settings.

Here's what we'll cover in this final section:

1. Temperature
2. Top-k sampling
3. Max tokens
4. Prompt chaining

Temperature

Remember our "I'm going to the store to pick up a gallon of [blank]" example from above?

We had five possible words, each with a different percentage chance of the LLM choosing it as the next word.

Temperature is a setting that determines how likely the LLM is to pick the most likely word. A value of 0.0 means it will always pick the most likely word. A higher temperature (like 2.0) means it is more likely to pick a less likely word.

That's a little confusing... here's a good prompt that will help make this a little more clear:

Suggest a unique theme for next year’s Applied AI Conference

If we have a temperature of 0.0, here are three different ways for how the LLM might respond to that prompt:

Artificial Intelligence: Transforming the Future

Artificial Intelligence: Transforming the Future

Artificial Intelligence: Transforming the Future

Notice how all of the responses are the same? That's because it's always gonna pick the most likely word.

Let's bump it up a bit to 1.0 (which is the default temperature for GPT-3.5):

AI and the Renaissance of Interdisciplinary Innovation

Unleashing Creativity: The Intersection of AI and Art

The AI Frontier: Ethical Challenges and Opportunities

Nice. Those responses are a little more creative and diverse than the lower temperature.

What if we got extra wild and bumped it up to 2.0?

Alien Mindscapes: AI, Consciousness, and Cosmic Thought

The Quantum Quandary: Dissecting AI's Subatomic Secrets

Chronomancy Chronicles: AI and the Temporal Transformation

These are quite creative responses, and one of them actually taught me a new word (chronomancy, which is the divination of the best time to do something).

As you increase the temperature, you get more creative responses, but you also run the risk of the LLM getting off track.

Top-k sampling

Okay, quickly going back to our "I'm going to the store" prompt... remember how we looked at the next 5 words?

What if we looked at the next 1 word? What if we looked at the next 500 words?

Top-k sampling is a value that lets you decide how many words you want to allow the LLM to look at when determining what the next word could be.

Let's use this prompt to illustrate it:

Explain how a combustion engine works.

If we have a low top-k value (like 5), here's what our responses might look like:

A combustion engine works by ignition, ignition, ignition, and more ignition.

Combustion engine involves fuel, fuel, fuel, and fuel again.

It's all about combustion, combustion, combustion, and combustion.

It's all about combustion, baby!

Notice how those responses are rather repetitive. What happens if we bump it to something like 40?

A combustion engine works by burning fuel in a confined space to create power. This process involves four steps: intake, compression, combustion, and exhaust.

In a combustion engine, fuel is ignited in a combustion chamber, which generates force to move the pistons. This cycle repeats, powering the engine.

The functioning of a combustion engine revolves around the principle of converting fuel into mechanical energy through a series of combustions. This involves intake, compression, power, and exhaust strokes.

That looks better! The responses are no longer repetitive, and seem to be a little more creative.

Now if you're like me, you're probably thinking, "what if we get wacky here and go up to a top-k of 100?"

Well...

When it comes to combustion engines, it's like a dance of mechanical parts and chemical reactions. You have your pistons, valves, and cylinders all choreographed in a ballet of power production.

A combustion engine is a marvel of engineering, where fuel and air meet in a dance of power and precision. Like a thunderstorm contained within a metal shell, it is a testament to the power of human ingenuity.

Imagine a concert, where the orchestra is made of metal parts, and the symphony is played not with musical notes, but with controlled explosions. That's a combustion engine.

These are very creative and diverse responses! The downside is that with a high top-k, you end up with some potentially incoherent responses or, much like myself, the responses can tend to get overly metaphorical.

Max tokens

For the purposes of this talk, I didn't into the concept of a token, but hey, this is a blog post, so we can stretch out a wee bit, eh?

In the world of large language models, a token is a piece of a sentence.

Let's imagine a world where tokens were ingredients in a recipe. Each ingredient, whether it's salt, paprika, chicken, or flour, plays an important role in the final dish.

In this metaphor, the language model is the chef who knows how to use the right mix of ingredients to make a tasty dish.

What if we started limiting the chef to a certain number of ingredients they can use in their dish?

Welcome to the world of max tokens!

Here's a delicious baking metaphor we can use to illustrate the concept as well:

Provide a step-by-step guide on how to make a sourdough starter.

If we limited our LLM to 50 tokens, here's a possible response:

Sourdough starter requires flour, water, and time. Here's a basic process:

1. Mix equal parts flour and water in a jar.
2. Cover loosely and let it sit at room temperature.
3. Feed it daily with equal parts flour and water.
4. After about a week, it should...

Wait... what happens after a week?!

This just won't do. Let's bump up the max token number to 150 tokens:

Making a sourdough starter involves cultivating wild yeast in a flour-water mixture. Here's a simple guide:

1. Combine 1 cup of flour with 1/2 cup of warm water in a glass jar. Stir until smooth.
2. Cover the jar loosely and let it sit in a warm spot for 24 hours.
3. On day 2, you might see a few small bubbles. Discard half of the starter and feed it with 1 cup of flour and 1/2 cup of warm water.
4. Repeat the feeding process over the next 5-7 days. Your starter is ready when it's bubbly and doubles in size within 6-8 hours of feeding.

This is better! What if we gave it more room to spread out with 500 tokens?

Creating a sourdough starter is a simple process that requires only flour, water, and patience. Here's a detailed guide:

1. In a clean jar, combine 1 cup of whole wheat or rye flour with 1/2 cup of lukewarm water. Stir until the mixture is smooth.
2. Cover the jar loosely and leave it in a warm, consistent temperature spot for 24 hours.
3. On the second day, you might see a few bubbles here and there. This is a good sign, indicating that fermentation is happening. Discard half of the starter (about 1/2 cup), and add to the remainder a cup of unbleached all-purpose flour and 1/2 cup lukewarm water. Stir well and loosely cover again.
4. Repeat the feeding process over the next 5-7 days, always discarding half of the starter before feeding it. This is necessary to keep the sourdough starter's growth in check and maintain a good balance of yeast and bacteria.
5. By the end of the week, the sourdough starter should be visibly active, with lots of bubbles on the surface and throughout the culture. It should also smell pleasant and slightly sweet. This means it's ready to be used or stored for future use.
6. Once your starter is mature, you can store it in the refrigerator and feed it once a week. If you plan on baking regularly, you can keep it at room temperature, feeding it once a day.

As you can see, the more tokens you give the LLM to work with, the more detailed answer they can provide.

The downside is that more tokens require more processing time (meaning it's more expensive), and you also run the risk of incoherent responses.

Prompt chaining

Ah yes, the holy grail of prompt engineering.

Prompt chaining is a process for leading an AI through a complex task through multiple prompts. It's sort of the combination of all the things we talked about throughout this talk.

If this blog post is a college class, your final exam would likely just be "how well can you do prompt chaining?"

The best way for me to illustrate this concept is through an actual prompt chain I built to help myself pick out a health insurance plan earlier this year.

I'll just start with the prompt itself:

*Ignore all previous training. You are an expert health plan benefits manager. Your job is to analyze a CSV which contains my previous plan and three new plans. Once I have provided you with the data, your job is to ask me questions in order to determine which plan is right for my needs. *

Additional context: I am a 35 year old male with 3 dependents: a 35 year old female, a 6 year old female, and a 4 year old male. We are all relatively healthy with no chronic health problems. You may feel free to ask questions about myself or the dependents in order to determine our use of the healthcare system. You may also ask additional questions about the plans in order to determine which plan is best for us.

If you understand the prompt and are ready to begin, respond with a "Yes, let's proceed!"

We've got a lot going on here. Let's break it down:

First, "Ignore all previous training" is sort of a tabula rasa trick you can do to help the LLM get focused on what you are going to feed it next.

Second, "You are an expert health plan benefits manager" is flattering the LLM into giving you a response that an expert would give you in this field.

Third, we are giving it step-by-step instructions for how we want it to help us (take a CSV, ask me questions, then use those responses to select a plan)

Fourth, we are providing additional context to help it understand who this plan will affect.

Fifth, within that context, we are further encouraging the LLM to ask questions about myself and my dependents.

Sixth, we are giving it a clear instruction to confirm its new role.

After I copied in my CSV, it began to ask me a series of questions like this:

Thank you for providing the CSV file. I have analyzed the data, and I have some questions to help determine the best plan for you and your family:

1. How often do you and your family members visit primary care physicians and specialists in a year?

2. Do any of you regularly take prescription medications? If so, please specify the type (generic or brand name) and frequency.

3. How frequently do you and your family members require lab tests or imaging services?

4. Have you had any instances in the past where you needed to use out-of-network providers? If so, how often and for what services?

5. Are there any upcoming major medical events or procedures anticipated for any family members (e.g., surgeries, hospitalizations, pregnancies, etc.)?

After I answered those five questions, it asked me a series of follow-up questions based on my responses:

Thank you for providing the additional information. Based on your family's healthcare needs and the provided plan details, I have a few follow-up questions:

1. Does your [dependent's medical thing] and your [specialty doctor] fall under the in-network providers for all the plans being considered?

2. Are the primary care physicians and specialists you and your family members visit in-network for all the plans being considered?

3. Are the imaging and lab services providers you use in-network for all the plans being considered?

These questions will help me understand if the in-network benefits of the plans are applicable to your family's healthcare usage.

After these questions were answered, it gave me the pros and cons of each plan based on my individual circumstance.

Now, again, as I've said a few times in this talk: I didn't just take its response for gospel. I read through the plans myself and I ran some numbers independently in order to verify the model's conclusion.

Ultimately, I ended up going with the health plan that ChatGPT came up with.

Working with large language models can feel like magic, and let's be honest: a lot of this stuff feels like magic.

But when you break it down, talking to a large language model is a lot like talking to an overconfident toddler (as best described by a good friend).

By using these tips and having a rough understanding what these large language models are doing under the hood, you will be able to take many of your mundane tasks and offload them to an extremely smart (yet possibly wrong) friend.

And with that, you are now a prompt engineering expert!

(You might be wondering: "what's the deal with that hero image?" I felt like this blog post was large enough that it needed a hero image, and because my mind is now exhausted, I asked my six-year-old daughter what I should use. She suggested a fluffy baby orange kitten with a fluffy baby puppy on its back in a grassy field with a sunrise in the background. I said "... good enough.")

2023-05-09 12:14:00

We manic worriers need not sarcasm but supportive and intelligent company to give us the love we need to dare to look back at the past – and the insight with which to try to do so. Our feeling of dread is a symptom of an ancient sorrow that hasn’t found its target in the here and now; and our ongoing quest and alarm is a sign that we keep not finding anything in the outer world that answers to the horror of the inner one.

2023-04-17 10:56:00

Rugged individualism is still deeply enmeshed in American culture.

And its myth is one of our biggest exports to the rest of the world.

What could happen if we replaced the philosophy of rugged individualism with a philosophy of rugged cooperation? What if we swapped out the scripts we’ve learned in an individualist culture with the curiosity and care of a collaborative culture?

And how would your business or career shift if you approached it not as your best way to climb to the top in a flawed system but as a laboratory for experimenting with ruggedly cooperative systems?

2023-04-03 11:19:00

I spent 6 hours drawing Pokémon today and it never occurred to me for a second that anyone else might be better or worse.

Even if it had, I would’ve been excited for them, not sad for myself.

Damn, now this is the philosophy I want to have.

2023-04-01 10:49:00

I know, I know… another list.

Really, though, this is a list where I found it hard to choose just one to highlight here. I think I’m gonna go with this one:

When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.

I’ve been doing this with my own kids, and it is forcing me to really take a good look at my values. After all, most arguments come to a point where the disagreement can either be won by finding mutual moral ground, or avoided by realizing you just aren’t even speaking the same language.

2023-03-20 11:16:00

A fantastic takedown of the venture capitalists behind the Silicon Valley Bank collapse, written by the fantastic Molly White (of Web3 is Going Just Great fame).

When it became apparent to this small group of very powerful, very wealthy individuals that Silicon Valley Bank — the bank used by much of the Silicon Valley startup ecosystem — was on shaky footing, they had a choice to make. They could remain calm, urge the founders of companies they’d invested in to do the same, and hope the bank could weather the storm. Or, they could all pull their money out, urge their founders to do so also, and hope that they or their companies were not the ones left standing in the teller line when the liquidity dried up.

Faced with the choice between the more communal, cooperative choice and the self-serving, every-man-for-himself choice destined to end in a bank run, it should be no surprise which option they picked. As the Titanic sank, they were the ones pushing people out of the lifeboats.

As someone heavily involved with startups of all shapes and sizes for the past decade, I’ve been exposed to all sorts of investors.

The ones who make me cringe and run the other direction as fast as possible are those who are in it for a 10x return and nothing more.

This relentless pursuit of profit is the epitome of everything I hate about the startup scene.

It makes people act in such a selfish manner, thinking only of themselves and their own pocketbooks rather than their fellow human being.

In all the ventures I am apart of, I insist that the following criteria are met:

1. The solution that is being worked on solves a problem that will materially and objectively leave the world in a better place.
2. There is a clear market of people willing to pay for this solution, and ideally the people who are paying for it are actually the end user of the product or service.
3. All shareholders are interested in more than just an ROI from the venture.
4. The end user is aware of what data they are giving up (or what data is being derived) from their use of the solution.

If the problem being solved by a team is simply “how can I turn my cash into 10x my cash”, then that team and their investors should feel ashamed.

2023-03-19 20:06:00

Last night, I posted an article here called “Everyone needs to grow up.”

I shared it because I’ve personally felt drawn to “childish” things lately, and I’m personally trying to make sense of it… How do you find a balance between serious adult responsibilities (raising a family, managing a team, etc.) and needing a break from that?

A good friend saw that post and sent me this article, which acts as a great counterpoint. (He may be the only reader of this blog, honestly.)

I’m of the opinion that the only way to be an adult is to be willing to meet people where they are and care for them in the way they want to be cared for. It is about setting healthy boundaries; it is about knowing who you are and what you, yourself, can do and can handle. It is about planning for the long-term.

The concept of knowing who I am is absolutely top of mind lately. My wife and I have been considering our own individual values and discussing how those mesh, mostly as a way to understand what we want to instill in our children, but also to figure out who we are as individuals.

One thing I’ve realized while undergoing this thought experiment is that I feel like I’ve spent a lot of my life suppressing who I am as a way to maintain neutrality and not rock the boat.

An example: I really like using “big words”. I find it hard sometimes to express my thoughts, and it makes me happy when I find a new word which poignantly expresses a thought. But then I often avoid using those words because I don’t want to be seen as aloof or pretentious.

Anyway, I think some people are really in tune with who they are and are unafraid to show that to the world. Being an adult, for me, is finding a way to be comfortable with who I am and not ashamed of it.

I don’t think people are adult babies now, at least not offline. Although I do think it’s maybe harder than ever to be an adult. The traditional markers of transitioning through life-stages are evaporating; basically all that’s left to guide you are bills and literature. The structures that created our modern idea of adulthood have collapsed — which is to say governments aren’t subsidizing things like homeownership like they did after the Second World War — and it’s easy to feel adrift.

Boy, ain’t that the truth. We have a playbook for life all the way up through high school. From there, it’s a boot out of the nest, and it is up to us individually to figure out how to adult.

2023-03-19 12:09:00

In an age where so much agency has been taken away from young adults, when they face futures saddled with debt, unable to access the basic material trappings of adulthood... a retreat into the dubious comforts of a pseudo-childhood will have its pull.

I’m not going to lie and pretend that I didn’t take two hours today with my wife and spend it at the mall browsing through the merchandise at Box Lunch and Hot Topic.

This article makes so many good points about infantilism and it hits at a particularly poignant moment in my life where I’m actually trying to figure out who I am and what I want to be when I grow up.

2023-02-26 12:22:00

I’ve been quite fascinated with math lately (see my video recommendation below about Bézier curves), but one concept in general that is very intriguing is the overall language of math.

For decades now, I’ve been looking at math as more of a “how can I use this tool” mindset. Pythagorean theorem? Fibonacci sequences? Euclidean coordinates? Sure, whatever, I’ll learn that stuff and use it in order to get something done that matters.

But something that has occurred to me only recently is that some of the bigger concepts that connect us to the universe, like how to travel throughout our solar system and how to capture and sequester carbon, are only possible to understand when you can speak the math.

It’s a damn shame how many people don’t consider themselves “a math person” because they didn’t have someone explain this to them at some point early in their life.

Hannah Fry explains the Gale-Shapley matching algorithm, which essentially proves that “If you put yourself out there, start at the top of the list, and work your way down, you’ll always end up with the best possible person who’ll have you. If you sit around and wait for people to talk to you, you’ll end up with the least bad person who approaches you. Regardless of the type of relationship you’re after, it pays to take the initiative.”

The math may be complicated, but the principle isn’t. Your chances of ending up with what you want — say, the guy with the amazing smile or that lab director job in California — dramatically increase if you make the first move. Fry says, “aim high, and aim frequently. The math says so.” Why argue with that?

This is a really cool concept. I’m gonna start taking more shots in life because, hey, why argue with the math?

2023-02-22 12:24:00

There is no reassurance and no final verdict. There might be a next life, there might be a remade world in which none of this matters, but it is also quite possible that such places will have no need for art or philosophy, though I do find it hard to imagine a fleshly paradise without dancing. For us, right here, there’s only the work and the living, and making space for it, or not.

A real bummer for you this evening, and for that, I apologize.

I think a big part of growing up and dealing with anxiety and depression is figuring out how to deal with these simple, indifferent truths.

And I guess this evening, it’s hitting me a little harder than I’d like to admit to you, dear anonymous reader.

But I guess in some ways, it makes me happy to know I’ve made a few people’s lives a little less stressful this week through my work, and I’m planning on spending my next few days (through this 18” snow storm we’re expected to have) with my wife and kids, which also makes me a little more happy too.

2023-02-21 11:24:00

As I’ve mentioned in the past, this website’s redesign was specifically the result of me looking back at, and pining for, my old web days.

It’s a shame (but not entirely a surprise) that search engines and slow internet caused us to lose an entire generation of fun websites.

It would be stupid for me to suggest the youths will start getting into web design like I did when I was a youths. But maybe the idea here is to keep looking for how the young people are finding ways to express themselves despite whatever perceived limitations by which they are encumbered.

Also, does this mean I need to try my hand at a redesign again? Or should I find a new hobby?

2023-02-21 10:53:00

What a whirlwind of a video! I knew I would be captivated by this, but the ending really moved me.

To those of you who bring your all to the random, seemingly minor tasks you accomplish for clients in your day jobs: thank you for everything you do.

2023-02-20 12:14:00

Lest you think I’ve just been watching YouTube all night, here’s a really compelling article about The Simpsons.

This pull quote spoke to me:

“America has certainly turned into Springfield,” says Matt Selman, who is, along with Al Jean, the current showrunner. “I’m gonna generously say: Good people are easily misled. Terrifyingly easily misled. That’s always been in the DNA of the show, but now it’s in the DNA of America. It was a show about American groupthink, and how Americans are tricked—by advertising, by corporations, by religion, by all these other institutions that don’t have the best interests of people at heart.”

I’ve been rewatching clips from the first ten seasons sporadically over the past few months, and I think that’s an astute point that I hadn’t really considered.

The pro wrestling world has a term for fans who know quite a bit about the backstage politics which makes the show possible: a “smart mark” (with “mark” being a carny term for someone who can pull one over on).

But much like internet trolls, the only way you could ever “win” as a pro wrestling fan is by not engaging. By consuming the content, you’re still a mark (even if you are a smart one).

Perhaps the reason so many people are drawn to The Simpsons is similar: you feel like you’re in on the joke, even when you can’t escape the gravitational pull of the society which the show is lampooning.

2023-02-20 11:21:00

A friend recommended this video to me while I was out with Covid a few months back and I just got to watch it.

Now I get to recommend it to you!

If you are a nerd for process, you will love this. Just one small fact to entice you to watch this: did you know Waffle House employs their own meteorological staff?

2023-02-20 09:13:00

The pen tool in Photoshop has long felt extremely inscrutable and unapproachable to me, so in my search to better understand how to use it, I came across this video.

I never realized how lacking my math education was on me in high school and college, but I feel like if I had content like this to help explain it, I would’ve fallen head over heels for math.

2023-02-20 08:49:00

When he said “I do businesses to hunt more insights”, I really felt that. Great little snippet from the great Knowledge Project podcast.

2023-02-15 04:55:00

Most companies don’t get it. Most people don’t get it. To them, problems are a sign of failure. They think that the default state is perfection. They believe that if we just worked hard enough — planned hard enough then there wouldn’t be any problems. The only reason we fall from that perfect state is that someone, somewhere screwed up. But that’s not reality. The default state for our reality is chaos. It is ruin. It is entropy and erosion and human nature. We build things to make a better world, and yeah, part of that is people failing. People fail all the time. That sucks, but you’re not going to change it. So you might as well do a good job living with it.

This is really what we all need to cope with. The times we live in are chaotic, filled with uncertainty, fear, and a sense of impending doom. So much so that even our children are suffering at historic rates.

But as I deal with my own struggles to make sense of things, I continue to fall back on accepting that we've always lived in a world that is rife with turmoil. All we can do is go along for the ride, appreciate what we have, and be grateful for those who we can lean on to help navigate it together.

2023-02-08 12:28:00

There is too much in this article to even grab a single pull quote from. The entire thing is worth reading from top to bottom.

It did make me think a bit about how I can apply some of this knowledge to my own life. I personally struggle with “what will I be when I grow up” from time to time, and I think even simply knowing that this is not abnormal is helpful.

2023-02-03 20:51:00

I think what many people really want from money is the ability to stop thinking about money. To have enough money that they can stop thinking about it and focus on other stuff.

But that ultimate goal can break down when your relationship with money becomes an ingrained part of your personality. You struggle to break away from focusing on money because the focus itself is a big part of who you are.

This, 100%, is me… and if you can relate to that yourself, give this whole article a read.

2023-02-02 12:29:00

Under pressure, our free time – our entertainment time, our recovery time – tends to devolve into mindlessness. You know, scrolling social media. Re-watching the same show repeatedly. Numbing and zoning out. Nobody has the energy to learn how to play Axis & Allies after working for 12 hours.

Similarly, at work, people under pressure tend to simplify. We spend less time engaging socially, having fun, and experimenting. We crack down into Serious Business Mode.

While this can be a reasonable adaptation to get through a rough patch, it’s unsustainable. As we get burnt out, it gets even harder to play, reinforcing the cycle. All work and no play makes Jack something something.

Humans need play.

2023-02-01 12:14:00

This all makes sense when you understand what your brain wants.

It doesn’t want nice cars or big homes.

It wants dopamine.

That’s it.

Your brain just wants dopamine.

2023-01-13 12:42:00

There is a kind of brain fog that feels unique to early parenthood, and yet I know it isn’t. It’s the same sort of disorienting haze that envelopes anyone who finds their time is not really their own, but rather has been sacrificed to another purpose, voluntarily or otherwise. You lose pieces of yourself, little by little, often unnoticed, until one day you begin to emerge from your experience without the faintest idea of who you are, or even who you used to be.

I had this realization when I first got Covid last year, and it’s been gnawing at me a ton lately.

Ever since having knee surgery, I’ve gained weight to the point where I’m almost the biggest I’ve ever been.

My daily routine is just not at all what I want to do. What’s a day in my life, you asked?

I wake up around 6a and immediately grab my phone and doom scroll. Then I wake up and get breakfast prepped for my wife and kids, then I work.

I work from 6:30a until 5p, only taking occasional breaks to interact gruffly with my family and coworkers and stuff unhealthy junk into my body.

The unhealthy stuff has gotten worse over the last few months. I hadn’t had pop in nearly 2 decades. Now I find myself grabbing a Sprite from time to time. I also eat as much sugar as I can bear in as many forms as I can.

After work, I come home and if I’m lucky, I chat with my wife and eat some dinner, then I play with the kids. If I’m not luck and had a particularly tough day (which is the norm as of late), I come home and sit on my phone until it’s time to put the kids to bed.

I do like getting the kids down, it’s a routine I rather enjoy. Vitamins, pajamas, an episode of something, a few books, then tucked in.

After that, I sit on my phone while the tv blares something I’m only half paying attention to in the background. I eat more sugar. Eventually, I move to bed where I continue on my phone until pass out from exhaustion.

A night filled with awkward dreams and uncomfortable sleep greets me at this point (try sleeping with a heavy brace that keeps your knee locked straight). Then, I get to wake up and do it all again.

That routine sucks. It’s no wonder I’m itching for a change. I want to spend meaningful time with my kids and wife. I want to get involved with activities that bring me joy, like working out, tinkering with hardware, or programming new websites. I want to spend time hanging out with friends and folks who give me energy.

I’m heading out of town for an extended business trip here soon. I think I’m gonna budget my life a bit better while I’m there, and when I return, I’m gonna make some changes.

Because life has a way of making you forget who you are.

And when I start to remember the things that used to make me happy, it can only make life better for me and those who have to put up with me.

2023-01-06 12:53:00

Human nature is to put boundaries around the loss, so we know it’s something that happens to other people. We say that they’re in a better place or to just remember the good times, because if we spoke the truth – that tragedy comes for us all, that sometimes life is random and cruel and painful and beyond comprehension – I mean, how would we even function?

Death has been on my mind a lot lately. Both of my kids continually ask about it, and a coworker of mine is grieving a very recent death in their family.

This is the conclusion I inevitably come to: death does come for us all, randomly and painfully and mercilessly.

The only way I’ve found to cope with the concept of death is to be grateful to be born in the first place. What a stroke of luck we have to even be alive.

In the words of Jeff Mangum: “How strange it is to be anything at all.”

2022-12-27 07:44:00

…but this year will be different!

2022-12-24 13:10:00

Anytime you try to control or reverse disorder, you introduce tension. This is true on a sociological level, where any attempt to organize people inevitably leads to rebellion. But more relevantly, it’s also true at the individual level, and is particularly poignant in our desire to control time.

This same thought (trying to control disorder) has been going through my head a lot lately, but I’ve only ever applied it to political discourse or workplace drama. I’ve never once thought to apply it to time.

Burnout is often associated with working too much, but the real reason it happens is because you have defined yourself by what you produce. It’s not just the exertion of energy spent during your working hours, but the exertion of thought spent during the time you’re not working. It lives in the moment where you’re physically with your family, but mentally planning out what you need to do next. Or when you keep looking at the time when you should just be enjoying lunch.

Again, as a recovering entrepreneur, I’m only now becoming aware of how awful my compulsive need to check in on my team had become.

I’m striving in 2023 to better utilize time as an ally, and to build back the healthy habits that I’ve surrendered in the name of maximum productivity and profitability. Those habits include things I actually used to do (5K run or 2.5mi walk every morning, journaling) and things I keep telling myself I want to do (yoga, biking, playing with my kids, dating my wife).

2022-12-22 20:33:00

I wanted to recapture the excitement I used to feel over finding out something that not very many people knew — the satisfaction I used to get from wrestling with things, spinning them around and trying to see the different angles. Before it all got buried beneath analytics and followers and “impact” and gimmicks and waiting for the next round of layoffs.

Not knowing how to say any of this out loud, I didn’t tell anyone. I just slowed down — backed off of pitching editors, stopped picking up late night phone calls from sources. I shifted my focus to editing other people’s work, which is less stressful and also pays better. I wrote some personal essays and took some college classes and sat on my kitchen floor trying to imagine what my Twitter bio would say if it didn’t start with “Freelance journalist.”

When I left JMG in March, this exact sort of identity crisis was a huge marble that wouldn’t stop rattling around my brain.

In the past nine months, I’ve become more comfortable letting go of my identities. Besides, what good are identities anyway?

My interests, my career path, my marital and paternal status, being a “runner”, being “the guy who always gets his steps in”, being “the guy who runs an app development company”… those are all tiny parts that add up to the whole.

My third grade teacher used to make us listen to a song every day that had a chorus which said “I can be the best I can be.”

And I think at this point in my life, that’s all I need to be.

(Thanks, Ms. Salute. ❤️)

2022-12-11 10:47:00

The ultimate lesson, then, is to remind yourself that no, your current life is not normal.

It’s super weird and super specific, and you can completely change the damned thing in as many ways as you like and you absolutely will adapt and be able to handle it.

2022-12-06 20:48:00

Coscarelli told me that, over the years, many wonderful and generous women had come to her clinic, and some of them had died very quickly. Yikes. I had to come clean: Not only was I un-wonderful. I was also kind of a bitch.

God love her, she came through with exactly what I needed to hear: “I’ve seen some of the biggest bitches come in, and they’re still alive.”

And that, my friends, was when I had my very first positive thought. I imagined all those bitches getting healthy, and I said to myself, I think I’m going to beat this thing.

This whole article is good advice for those of us who have never had cancer.

Hell, this is good advice for life in general. Everyone deals with different situations in life, and how they persevere is just as unique.

It’s more important to learn how to show up for those you care about than it is to push your opinions on them.

2022-12-06 09:54:00

We arduously convince young children to believe in Santa, and they do. Testimony dictates religious beliefs, too. For example, psychologist Rebekah Richert has found that if you frame a fantastical story as a religious story, children raised in religious households will believe it. If you don't frame it religiously, they'll call your bluff.

When we get to college, however, cultural testimony changes. An analytical, scientific view reigns, and there's little room for God. We staggered home from parties pontificating on the pointless evil of Western religion. We made friends by cynically confessing our doubt. College is "very likely to challenge the more conservative belief systems we have in our brains," Grafman says. It deflates our adolescent faith.

2022-12-05 05:52:00

Montreal averages almost 210 cm (82 inches) of snow every winter. We get less sunlight, 20% more precipitation, and have winter temperatures that are on average 4° C (7° F) colder than Toronto. And yet soon after a moderate snowfall, Montreal is bustling: sidewalks, bike paths, and streets are all cleared in a snow removal effort (le déneigement, en français) that is choreographed and masterful.

Add another item to my bucket list: I’d love to see these pits where they drop the snow.

2022-12-04 21:52:00

Don't tell me you haven't wondered this yourself. What a clever piece of technology that we all take for granted.

2022-12-03 12:50:00

Historian Christina Kotchemidova argues that people were motivated mainly by cultural forces, not practical considerations. “Etiquette codes of the past demanded that the mouth be carefully controlled; beauty standards likewise called for a small mouth,” she says in her 2005 paper on the history of smiling in photographs.

Though photography was still relatively new in the 1850s, portraiture was not, and tradition said that proper people should not grin or bare their teeth in their pictures. Big smiles were considered silly, childish, or downright wicked.

When we were in Ireland, we met up with a friend and took a few pictures. While snapping pictures, I realized this person decide not to smile in any of the pictures I took of them.

At one point, I went on to jokingly tease them about this, because in my opinion, I find pictures to be more authentic when people show their smiles.

In retrospect, that was pretty selfish of me to do. Beauty is subjective, and how someone chooses to pose themselves in a photo is frankly none of my business.

Maybe that's why we collectively choose to opt for a "silly photo" after taking a serious one. It gives us all a chance to take one that's socially appropriate for the holiday card, and one that is socially appropriate for Instagram.

Anyway, I'm gonna try not to force my kids into smiling for pics anymore. I'll still prompt them, but if they want to smile, then cool. If they don't, then cool.

2022-12-03 12:39:00

Articles like these, which outline the eating habits of other cultures, make me excited to challenge my own.

My eating routine is atrocious right now. I don't eat breakfast at all, but I end up usually eating a decent-sized lunch, snacks, dinner, and then about 1500 calories of junk after the kids go down.

If you would travel back 300 years ago and share my diet with any common person, they might assume I was a king. Hell, if you shared it with the king they would probably think I had the wealth and resources to pose a direct threat to their rule.

Now that I'm not able to walk for a month, I'm thinking of trying out OMAD (One Meal A Day). The gist is essentially a 20 hour fast with a 4 hour window to eat.

I think I could really do well for myself in this. My only concern is that my job is mentally taxing, and trying to think on an empty stomach is challenging.

Maybe I should start packing carrots or celery or something similar as a mid-day snack in order to stave off the hunger pains.

But yeah, while I'm indeed improving my mental health in many ways (see the most recent post), I'm still pretty judgmental of myself when it comes to my weight.

If you take BMI at face value, I would need to drop 30 pounds to be considered at the very top of the "normal" range for a person of my height.

I suppose that's a fair goal! Getting a better relationship with eating is a key step towards getting there, as is finding a form of exercise that makes me happy.

2022-12-03 12:32:00

The American ski racer Alice Merryweather sat out the 2020-21 season while confronting an eating disorder. She had gone to a training camp in September, hating the workouts and the time on the mountain, wondering where her love of skiing had gone. A doctor diagnosed her anorexia.

“I just kept pushing and I kept telling myself, ‘You’re supposed to love this, what’s wrong with you?’” Merryweather said. “I’m just trying to be the best athlete that I can be.”

Merryweather said that she began to open up to friends and teammates. Most knew someone else who had gone through a similar experience. “I realized, why do we not talk about this more?” Merryweather said. “I am not alone in this.”

The more I deal with my own pressure and anxieties, I wonder this same question myself.

Why don't we talk about this more?

Why is stoicism the preferred method for dealing with mental health struggles?

Why do we pretend that the things we want at the end of the day are different from most any other human?

And when will we learn that the only truly sustainable way to really get the things that you want (and the things that truly matter) is through cooperation?

2022-11-28 12:21:00

People will call those cheat days, but I don’t like to use that term because that means you’re not accountable. I call it living. You have to be able to do that, especially if you like food and you get satisfaction from that. I view food as a vehicle for company and conversation, so I don’t want to rob myself of that. I don’t want to be the guy bringing food in Tupperware and eating the same stale food all the time.

Just as I’m working on changing my own narrative around money and exercise, I would like to apply this philosophy to my own narrative around eating.

2022-11-25 21:33:00

In his 2006 essay, ‘Roger Federer as Religious Experience’, the late, great American writer David Foster Wallace wrote that “beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty”.

“It might be called kinetic beauty,” he added. “Its power and appeal are universal.”

Watch Kipchoge run, and you’ll see his point. It’s difficult to find a sportsperson so impossibly suited to his craft, as if his entire reason for being is to coast over the ground at 4:40 per mile, a pace that for most would feel like a sprint.

But when Kipchoge does it, his head has virtually no vertical motion, his face so relaxed that he looks bored. His arms hang loose, swinging casually, his fingers in a gentle tuck, as if holding an invisible stick. His feet don’t so much hit the ground as stroke it, his toes pushing off the road with the elegant, balletic grace of a dancer.

Kipchoge is to marathon running as Jordan is to basketball, Williams is to tennis, and Gretzky is to hockey: an absolute monster, unquestioned in their supremacy.

Have you ever run a mile in four minutes and forty seconds? How about 26.2 of them back to back?

2022-11-22 20:01:00

This profile in the New York Times about the former Army major who happened to be at the drag show where a gunman showed up and opened fire, killing 5 people, is just heartbreaking:

As he held the man down and slammed the pistol down on his skull, Mr. Fierro started barking orders. He yelled for another club patron, using a string of expletives, to grab the rifle then told the patron to start kicking the gunman in the face. A drag dancer was passing by, and Mr. Fierro said he ordered her to stomp the attacker with her high heels. The whole time, Mr. Fierro said, he kept pummeling the shooter with the pistol while screaming obscenities.

The man is certainly a hero, I’ll tell you that for free.

But to the bigger picture here, yeah, thoughts and prayers. Nothing could have prevented this. Let’s put burly, ex-army guys in every classroom. Don’t tread on me and all that.

2022-11-17 10:20:00

You may be thinking: “there is nothing I ever wanted to know about semiconductors.”

I assure you: there is.

This video, created by the excellent Farnam Street, dropped my jaw several times around a topic that is crucial to our way of life, yet is virtually invisible to the vast majority of us.

Take an hour and watch it. It may put many things (including the geopolitical tensions around Taiwan) into better perspective for you.

2022-11-16 11:46:00

The world trends towards equilibrium. The world trends towards proof of work. It’s rare for fortunes to be created so effortlessly. Therefore, if you see easy money being made, it’s one of the strongest signals that something’s not right. Of course, some people will hit the lottery or be born into wealth. They are the lucky ones. But, most of us aren’t. Most of us have to work for it. We have to show the proof.

It’s taken me eleven years to feel like I am even close to seeing a somewhat realistic path towards wealth (and to be clear, I'm only seeing the path... I'm nowhere down it yet).

The overall message in this article is immensely helpful in dealing with my anxieties around money.

2022-11-08 19:48:00

At some point you have to accept that other people’s perceptions of you are as valid as (and probably a lot more objective than) your own.

This may mean letting go of a false or outdated self-image, including some cherished illusions of unique unlovability.

I recently had a talk with Shannon that was eerily similar to the central conceit of this article.

We don’t get to pick how we show up in other people’s interpretation of ourselves. The author’s story about his dad sleeping at the movie theater next to him is a great example.

2022-11-07 12:19:00

Well, this completely ruined the magic of trails for me.

But I suppose it also makes me happy that people think about this stuff in order to make our experiences with nature feel more organic and authentic.

2022-11-03 11:42:00

Penn Jillette, writing about his then-recently deceased friend Bob Saget:

I want to teach my children what was beautiful about Bob Saget, but I also want to learn from them. Maybe trust and kindness are getting a little too scarce. We might need more unnuanced, unartistic, simple respect. I’m happy my children care so much about how we treat one another.

But I hope their generation, which is pushing to have speech be more careful, can understand that artists like Bob were never trading in hate. He loved the world, and I loved him.

I find myself continually challenged by Penn’s writing, usually in a positive way. I may sometimes disagree with his conclusions, but his reasoning is clearly well considered and articulated poignantly.

I remember watching Bob Saget’s scene in The Aristocrats back in college and not really getting why he was able to be so vulgar.

As I’ve gotten older, the points Penn makes in this short but touching eulogy resonate with me.

I’m a bit older than Penn’s kids, but I feel like subsequent generations are finding a way to appreciate the difference between hate speech and nuanced, subversive political discourse.

2022-10-30 05:44:00

In all the texts, emails, and Slack messages I’ve sent in my life, I can’t begin to count how many times I’ve apologized for my delay. But looking back, I can say that only once did I truly mean it: I was a full four months late in responding to a long and thoughtful email I had received from a reader. But here in this public forum, I would like to retract all of my other previous apologies. I am not sorry for my delay, and I don’t expect you to be either.

I’ve been getting better about not apologizing for delays in my messages, but after reading this post (and especially after reading the last paragraph I shared above), I’m going to stop apologizing for delays altogether.

2022-10-27 11:55:00

One extremely common phenomenon when discussing issues surrounding blockchain-based technologies is that proponents will often switch between discussing the theoretical implementations of these ecosystems and discussing the ecosystems we have today as it suits their argument.

For example, if you bring up the question of whether the major centralized exchanges could each decide based on instructions from an oppressive government to freeze exchange of tokens belonging to a dissident, you’ll be told that that’s no problem in their theoretical world where a Bitcoin is a Bitcoin and if an exchange won’t accept yours, you can easily find an exchange that will.

But then if you bring up the question of how these ecosystems will handle someone who decides they want to make an NFT out of child sexual abuse material, they will usually point to solutions predicated on the enormously centralized nature of NFT marketplaces that we’ve ended up with in practice: delist the NFT from OpenSea or a handful of other exchanges so that the vast majority of people trading NFTs never see it, and maybe send a takedown request if there is a centralized service like AWS that is hosting the actual file.

I wanted to link to this article because I find it applicable on two levels.

First, if you take it at face value, there are a ton of great points (like the one I quoted above) which illustrate the often hypocritical problems associated with a blockchain-powered world.

But what’s more interesting to me is how many of these arguments can apply to any of our broader systems at large. Politics, capitalism, globalism, religion… the list could go on and on, and all entries on that list could be tried against the spirit of all the arguments in this post.

What I like about blockchain? It’s the next evolution of building a just and equitable system for all. It’s just funny to me how we can analyze that system in real time to point out the ancient flaws that were unintentionally baked into it.

2022-10-19 07:55:00

This video sparked a few thoughts in me:

First, I had never heard of Bartkira or the genre Simpsonswave, but I’m excited to explore those two extensions of the fandom I grew up with.

Second, as someone who built a Ralph Wiggum website as a kid, I can relate to so much of what this YouTuber expresses in his video.

It certainly isn’t my nature to create “art” (in the traditional sense, like painting, drawing, sculpting, etc.). However, I’ve made it a goal to better understand art and the process artists go through to express themselves.

How beautiful is it that our generation has this program, which was intended as a subversive commentary on America in the 1990s, which we can subvert to make own own commentary about America in the 2020s?

2022-10-06 01:44:00

You can scoff at linking the rise of Trump to income inequality alone. And you should. These things are always layers of complexity deep. But it’s a key part of what drives people to think, “I don’t live in the world I expected. That pisses me off. So screw this. And screw you! I’m going to fight for something totally different, because this – whatever it is – isn’t working.”

Take that mentality and raise it to the power of Facebook, Instagram, and cable news – where people are more keenly aware of how other people live than ever before.

A compelling theory of how we got to where we are (economically-speaking), and a great reminder that no matter how much we think we’re better than [insert subgroup here], we’re all basically the same.

2022-10-05 03:42:00

Any time we scrounge away from work is to be filled with efficient blasts of high-intensity exercise, or other improving activities, such as meditation or prepping nutritionally balanced meals. Our hobbies are monetised side hustles; our homes informal hotels; our cars are repurposed for ride-sharing apps. We holiday with the solemn purpose of returning recharged, ready for ever-more punishing overwork. Doing nothing – simply savouring the miracle of our existence in this world – is a luxury afforded only to the respectably retired, or children.

Oof. As someone currently on vacation, this hit particularly hard.

2022-09-30 17:06:00

The history of American housework suggests that both sides have a point. Americans tend to use new productivity and technology to buy a better life rather than to enjoy more downtime in inferior conditions. And when material concerns are mostly met, Americans fixate on their status and class, and that of their children, and work tirelessly to preserve and grow it.

But most Americans don’t have the economic or political power to negotiate a better deal for themselves. Their working hours and income are shaped by higher powers, like bosses, federal laws, and societal expectations.

To solve the problems of overwork and time starvation, we have to recognize both that individuals have the agency to make small changes to improve their lives and that, without broader changes to our laws and norms and social expectations, no amount of overwork will ever be enough.

2022-09-30 04:06:00

Two parts of this article really spoke to me:

The more capitalism wants us to feel scrambled so that we are isolated, automatonized, and susceptible to replacing our own needs with the needs of capital, the more quickly capitalism needs to sell us an ever-wider array of identities to feel secure and logical within.

It does feel tough, as a millennial with a school-aged child, to navigate all of the various identities that “youths” cling onto these days.

“A successful contemporary politics has stakes in defining the rhythmic flow between schizophrenic and identificatory impulses,” he writes. “Hopefully, alternative rhythms can challenge, or at least syncopate, the accelerating rhythm of late capitalism.”

What he’s saying is that we need to stop taking the stripping of our identities and the selling of new ones to us as a given, and start to create our own, at our own pace, in our own way.

I went for a walk around Lough Eske this afternoon, and I was thinking about the identity I want to create for myself.

Identity has been something that is of keen interest to me lately, especially after leaving JMG.

I feel like since taking a step back from the persona of “app developer / entrepreneur”, I’ve been able to be more curious and exploratory.

It’s why my headline on LinkedIn is “anecdotalist.” It’s a touch douchey, for sure, but it feels like the closest I can get to how I feel.

Anyway, read this article and think about how it applies to the beliefs that you hold most closely. Whether that’s Christian, an intellectual, a parent, or whatever. Take some time to reflect on why you feel like you have to be ”something”.

2022-09-27 12:12:00

The best science writers learn that science is not a procession of facts and breakthroughs, but an erratic stumble toward gradually diminished uncertainty; that peer-reviewed publications are not gospel and even prestigious journals are polluted by nonsense; and that the scientific endeavor is plagued by all-too-human failings such as hubris.

All of these qualities should have been invaluable in the midst of a global calamity, where clear explanations were needed, misinformation was rife, and answers were in high demand but short supply.

Much of what this article discusses is how I’ve felt over the last couple of years.

If you like living at the intersection of reality, people, and discovery, then you’ll also like this piece.

2022-09-25 06:59:00

Managers: If your job ladder doesn’t require that your senior people have glue work skills, think about how you were expecting that work to get done.

Glue people: Push back on requests to do more than your fair share of non-promotable work, and put your effort into something you want to get good at.

Our skills aren’t fixed in place. You can be good and lots of things. You can do anything.

2022-09-18 18:30:00

Doing the work required to hold an opinion means you can argue against yourself better than others can. Only then can you say, “I can hold this view because I can’t find anyone else who can argue better against my view.”

2022-09-18 00:26:00

What starts as an exploration into bird physiology gradually shifts into an easy-to-follow explanation of climate change. I found myself saying “wow” fairly often while reading this.

2022-09-13 12:29:00

Politics isn’t a per se bad. It’s a process. Making politics more productive and substantial make society better. Having people “nope” out of society whenever they get uncomfortable doesn’t help with any of the hard work politics does for things like allocating scarce resources, justice, or equity.

Poignant. I love this web comic.

2022-09-12 20:16:00

According to the website 80,000 Hours, the typical career is just that: 80,000 hours long. That’s an almost unfathomable amount of time. But life is long too. The typical person is alive for slightly more than 4,000 weeks, and awake and conscious for the equivalent of 3,000 weeks. When you do the basic math on 80,000 hours, you discover that the average career is roughly the equivalent of 480 sleepless weeks of labor. A little bit more math, and you realize that the typical person has five waking hours of not working for every one hour of their career.

Work is too big a thing to not take seriously. But it is too small a thing to take too seriously. Your work is one-sixth of your waking existence. Your career is not your life. Behave accordingly.

I also liked Derek Thompson's advice about chasing the job you want, not the title you want to tell people you have.

2022-09-06 00:01:00

The system work as follows:

1. Choose a schedule of work hours that you think provides the ideal balance of effort and relaxation.
2. Do whatever it takes to avoid violating this schedule.

This sounds simple. But think about it for a moment. Satisfying rule 2 is not easy. If you took your current projects, obligations, and work habits, you’d probably fall well short of satisfying your ideal work schedule. Here’s a simple truth: to stick to your ideal schedule will require some drastic actions.

I often turn to Cal Newport for glimpses of maintaining sanity while being bombarded with responsibilities.

I revisited this blog post recently and it is fascinating to see how his theory from 2008 about staying productive evolved into full books like Deep Work.

I’ve really gotta start saying “no” to more things.

2022-09-01 17:33:00

This is not meant to be a happy story about the need to get out of the bubble of like-minded coastal elites; I think it’s totally OK, recommended even, to stay far far away from people who think you are going to hell. But I guess I think it’s also OK to touch the hot stove occasionally if you want to, to pretend that this time you won’t let it hurt you.

2022-09-01 08:29:00

Instead of crowding your attention with what’s already going viral on the intertubes, focus on the weird stuff. Hunt down the idiosyncratic posts and videos that people are publishing, oftentimes to tiny and niche audiences. It’s decidedly unviral culture — but it’s more likely to plant in your mind the seed of a rare, new idea.

Examples of idiosyncratic communities in which I’ve been trying to increase my participation:

• an offshoot of a online community I was very into back in the early 2000s
• a YouTube series where a guy rewatches old episodes of Monday Night Raw and Monday Nitro and compares them head-to-head, deciding who won each week of the Monday night wars
• a Reddit community who cares deeply about dates being expressed in the ISO-8601 date format
• another Reddit community that posts highlights from a mobile app football game that I am really into

2022-08-19 11:47:00

Ursula Franklin wrote, “Central to any new technology is the concept of justice.”

We can commit to developing the technologies and building out new infrastructural systems that are flexible and sustainable, but we have the same urgency and unparalleled opportunity to transform our ultrastructure, the social systems that surround and shape them.

Every human being has a body with similar needs, embedded in the material world at a specific place in the landscape. This requires a different relationship with each other, one in which we acknowledge and act on how we are connected to each other through our bodies in the landscapes where we find ourselves.

We need to have a conception of infrastructural citizenship that includes a responsibility to look after each other, in perpetuity.

And with that, we can begin to transform our technological systems into systems of compassion, care, and resource-sharing at all scales, from the individual level, through the level of cities and nations, all the way up to the global.

2022-07-26 18:41:00

My children will live a story that I cannot write and cannot control. It will be their story. To become a parent is to feel, every day, the weight and hope and terror of that fact. I can’t tell you whether it’s the right choice for you, but no climate model can, either.

2022-07-14 12:27:00

If you, like me, have seen those initial pictures from the Webb telescope and thought, “Well, those are really cool looking but I'm not nerdy enough to get why they're such a big deal”, then this is the article for you!

2022-07-14 12:04:00

YouTube’s algorithm brought this video to me and my wife’s attention tonight.

For as many faults as you can place on Google and their algorithms, I sure am grateful they surfaced this.

Two observations:

First, the stunning artistry, my god. The song “Green Eyes” is like listening to an emotional onion being peeled. You start with denial, which fades into anger, which fades into loneliness/lust/regret. What an amazing commentary on heart break.

Second, I never appreciated recorded concerts much until now. I always thought the in-person factor made more of a difference for experiencing music than what could be accomplished via a recorded medium.

It must be what it felt like to listen to a vinyl record in the sixties, or an orchestra in the 1800s, or a gospel chant in the 1400s. Simply an ethereal experience that makes you happy to be alive.

2022-06-27 09:45:00

I found this article to be so delightful. Someone made a detailed observational post about all the various modes of transportation that help people move throughout Japan. Well worth your time.

2022-06-17 20:10:00

I know, I know, it’s another 10 Reasons Why list… but dang nabbit, there are some solid pieces of financial advice in here!

My personal favorite:

When someone gives you two reasons or excuses for not doing something, neither one of them is true and both are invalid. You haven’t gotten to the truth yet. Imagine asking a friend to go to a baseball game and he says “I can’t, my in-laws are coming over tonight.” Then you tell him it’s actually a day game. “Oh, I’m also sick. Not feeling well.” His in-laws aren’t coming over and he’s not sick either. There’s something else going on. If you understand this aspect of human nature, you are equipped to talk to investors.

2022-06-05 20:05:00

With greater access to news on social media and the internet, Americans are more deluged than they used to be by depressing stories. (And the news cycle really can be pretty depressing!)

This is leading to a kind of perma-gloom about the state of the world, even as we maintain a certain resilience about the things that we have the most control over.

Beyond the diverse array of daily challenges that Americans face, many of us seem to be suffering from something related to the German concept of weltschmerz, or world-sadness. It’s mediaschmerz—a sadness about the news cycle and news media, which is distinct from the experience of our everyday life.

I’m really not sure how my journalism friends maintain their sanity.

I’m also not sure how to interpret this theory other than “this is what I’ve been trying to articulate for two years now, but with some data.”

Turn off the news, delete your social media accounts. Your weltschmerz and mediaschmerz will thank you for it.

2022-06-03 18:59:00

If women are “bitches” and “cunts” and “whores” and the people we’re killing are “gooks” and “japs” and “rag heads” then they aren’t really people, are they? It makes them easier to erase. Easier to kill. To disregard. To un-see.

But the moment we re-imagine the world as a buzzing hive of individuals with a variety of genders and complicated sexes and unique, passionate narratives that have yet to be told – it makes them harder to ignore. They are no longer, “women and cattle and slaves” but active players in their own stories.

And ours.

2022-05-21 12:21:00

Competition legitimizes the winners. A job candidate chosen after interviewing and testing 1000 candidates is considered more legitimate and assumed to be more qualified than someone who was hired without an elaborate and intense process.

But that's not how it works, according to two studies from researchers at Oxford and The University of Gothenburg. In Does the cream rise to the top?, Thomas Noe and Dawei Fang try to determine whether the winners of highly competitive, high-stakes contests are talented or merely lucky.

My high school football coach always said that luck is when preparation meets opportunity.

If that’s the case, putting yourself in a position to get more opportunities is really the best way to win in a remote market.

2022-05-11 19:58:00

You can't buy these colors for your house. But Pixar does have a prototype of what that TV might be like. It's in a room next to the screening room. I convince Glynn to show it to me in action, and when he fires it up to maximum brightness, it's actually painful to look at. The light leaves an afterimage like one caused by staring at the sun.

:Steve Buscemi voice: Man, I gotta get me one of those.

2022-05-05 11:47:00

I always get suckered in by these types of posts (certainly they’ve been sprinkled throughout the archives of this blog).

This one is exceptionally well done. There are simply too many to choose a pull quote from, but I’ll share the two reasons why I wanted to post about this article.

First, it’s heavy on the minimalism. It’s hard to participate in our society and not strive to be a maximalist. Capitalism is all about growth, after all, and if you aren’t expanding your footprint on this planet, what’s the point, right?

I’ve been working on being content lately. That contentment comes in several forms, like being content to spend time with my kids, being content to live in a smaller house than my neighbors, being content to drive an older car.

This post gives a lot of good snippets to keep in mind while maintaining the pursuit to think through what truly matters and what truly makes you happy.

Which leads me to my second reason: labeling my spiritual beliefs. This post contains a lot of axioms which seem to gel nicely with Buddhism.

I would not call myself a Buddhist. Frankly, I’m not sure what I’d call myself. But lately, the tenets of Buddhism have been appealing to me, and again, there are a lot of thoughts around how to deal with pain and suffering within this collection.

2022-05-02 08:12:00

I remember seeing this movie once as a kid and I have very few memories of it. Anyone who knows me knows that’s a startling admission because nearly 75% of what I say originated from media I consumed as a kid.

I love these “oral history” articles, and when I saw this one, I almost dismissed it because of my vague recollection of the movie.

Reading it, however, caused me to want to rewatch it. I’m so glad I did, because while this movie is definitely not for children, it’s quite enjoyable to watch as an adult.

It is layered with subtext, and for a society who is currently vilifying Disney for a lot of things, I think the way they re-tell the Victor Hugo story should be agreeable to someone who insists on modest decorum.

If you are like me and have no recollection of this movie, do yourself a favor and spend an evening reading this article and then watching it. You’ll have a ton of appreciation for how this movie advanced animation forward.

You should also check out this video mentioned towards the end of this article of pandemic-produced cover of “The Bells of Notre Dame.” Just sent shivers up my spine.

2022-04-26 09:56:00

Anyone who's spoken with me over the past eighteen months knows that I've been contemplating what to do with my life.

I think one area that I want to explore is helping normal people understand how technology works.

Digital privacy is one of those areas that people vaguely agree with but also dismiss as something that is not that a big deal.

Whenever I hear that argument from here on out, I'm gonna use this comic book as a way to change their minds. It's an easy to understand explanation for how Chrome tracks everything about you.

There's an old adage in tech that goes "if you are not paying for something, you are the product." I think it's only fair that people understand what it is they're actually selling.

2022-04-24 22:01:00

My wife sent me this poem written by Mark Twain. It was originally written as a reflex of outrage surrounding the Philippine-American War of 1899, but wasn’t published until the beginning of the First World War.

The intent of it is to call out the unspoken part of prayer, the part that calls everything into balance. If you wish for your own victory, that means you wish for the defeat of someone else.

It is a great reminder that there are always two sides to every story. Life is subjective. Your experiences are just one data point. It doesn’t mean your feelings are invalid; it just means everyone experiences life in different ways.

2022-04-16 19:34:00

1. Do I have the time?

2. Do I have the mental space?

3. Is this project aligned with my values and the change I want to create in the world?

4. Will it energize me?

I posted these questions here for a quick reminder to my future self, but you should read the whole thing to get clarity around how to answer these questions.

2022-04-12 19:41:00

Capitalism did not create clock time or vice versa, but the scientific and religious division of time into identical units established a useful infrastructure for capitalism to coordinate the exploitation and conversion of bodies, labor and goods into value.

Clock time, the British sociologist Barbara Adam has argued, connected time to money. “Time could become commodified, compressed and controlled,” she wrote in her book “Time.” “These economic practices could then be globalized and imposed as the norm the world over.”

One thing that often bothered me while working at JMG was our tendency to boil down what we do to basically selling other people’s time (developers, designers, and so forth).

I suppose that’s what capitalism actually is at the end of the day, but it doesn’t mean I feel real good about doing it.

2022-04-12 12:04:00

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal:

Why do we want a liberal education? Because everyone in the modern university is living in its opposite, and it sucks.

Oof, this was a great one. Makes me wonder what would make for a better collegiate experience. Perhaps not charging an insane amount for it, making it more accessible for a diverse set of students, allowing more people to participate in the free flow of idea exchange?

2022-03-28 11:11:00

For example, I had avoided working for big companies. But if you'd asked why, I'd have said it was because they were bogus, or bureaucratic. Or just yuck. I never understood how much of my dislike of big companies was due to the fact that you win by hacking bad tests.

I've always considered curiosity to be my biggest asset, using it to really understand how things worked.

I never put two-and-two together, though, that the reason I wanted to understand how things worked was to "win" at it.

Paul Graham's theory here is just one revelation after another for me.

Here is another juicy nugget:

Instead of looking at all the different kinds of work people do and thinking of them vaguely as more or less appealing, you can now ask a very specific question that will sort them in an interesting way: to what extent do you win at this kind of work by hacking bad tests?

2022-03-27 20:43:00

This is an article from nine months ago, but it’s still mind-blowing how much better the M1 chip is than anything else out there at the moment.

I can’t wait to get an M1 MacBook Pro and really stretch it.

2022-03-20 12:50:00

Rule 2: Edit regularly

Cliche as it might be, clothes are a canvas upon which we project our identity and image we want to show the world. However, just like personal growth, our wardrobes aren’t stagnant and what we like and feel comfortable wearing evolves and changes – and I think there’s something beautiful about that. I love investing in timeless pieces that I wear for years but the reality is that clothes do eventually reach the end of their lifetime, we are sometimes gifted things or buy things that don’t quite work for us, or our bodies and everyday needs change.

I don’t feel that we should keep these pieces “just because”. For me when I edit out the pieces I don’t, for whatever reason, wear, I find it much easier to style and get more use out of the remaining pieces in my wardrobe. I also think that clothes that I don’t wear (if in good condition) are more likely to go to good homes if I re-purpose them earlier as opposed to years down the track.

I have been more curious about fashion in general lately (thanks to a Covid-induced binging of RuPaul’s Drag Race), so this whole article is really informative, but I felt like this rule was particularly good to hear.

2022-03-20 12:40:00

The next time you’re falling short of a goal, look to high-achieving peers for answers. If you’d like to get more sleep, a well-rested friend with a similar lifestyle may be able to help. If you’d like to commute on public transit, don’t just look up the train schedules—talk to a neighbor who’s already abandoned her car. You’re likely to go further faster if you find the person who’s already achieving what you want to achieve and copy and paste their tactics than if you simply let social forces influence you through osmosis.

This is one of those posts where I think to myself, “I wish I had come up with this myself many, many years ago and saved myself a ton of needless hard work.”

I’ve been getting a chance to (unintentionally) put this into practice at my new job. We hired a Ruby on Rails developer who is just incredible at what he does, and I had the chance to work alongside him a couple days this past week.

Seeing him work Vim, for example, already makes me want to start exploring it. And that’s a piece of tech that has intimidated me for two decades now.

2022-03-12 21:47:00

Being a beginner can be hard at any age, but it gets harder as you get older. Children’s brains and bodies are built for doing, failing, and doing again. We applaud virtually anything they do, because they are trying.

With adults, it’s more complicated. The phrase “adult beginner” has an air of gentle pity. It reeks of obligatory retraining seminars and uncomfortable chairs. It implies the learning of something that you should have perhaps already learned.

I’ve been trying to learn soldering, kung fu, and basic home repair this year. Learning kicks ass, and we should all stop being hard on each other for trying.

2022-03-09 11:30:00

As a very competitive person who does not want to alienate those around me, trivia is a perfect outlet for this energy, since, as with chess, climbing, or running, you are really only competing against yourself. This is not true in a technical sense as regards to trivia (or, for that matter, chess), but if you get every question right (or always make the right move), nobody’s going to beat you.

Much like the author of this article, I’ve more or less had trivia as a staple in my life since college. I’ve strengthened my friendships by using these questions as a way to learn more about their lives.

Now that I host trivia, it’s honestly a privilege to enable others to have these same experiences. I love having regulars who come back with the same teams week after week, eager to be beaten up with a fresh set of irritatingly complex questions.

2022-03-06 23:38:00

Whenever I mentioned to people that I was working on a story about friendship in midlife, questions about envy invariably followed. It’s an irresistible subject, this thing that Socrates called “the ulcer of the soul.” Paul Bloom, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto, told me that many years ago, he taught a seminar at Yale about the seven deadly sins. “Envy,” he said dryly, “was the one sin students never boasted about.”

He’s right. With the exception of envy, all of the deadly sins can be pleasurable in some way. Rage can be righteous; lust can be thrilling; greed gets you all the good toys. But nothing feels good about envy, nor is there any clear way to slake it. You can work out anger with boxing gloves, sate your gluttony by feasting on a cake, boast your way through cocktail hour, or sleep your way through lunch. But envy—what are you to do with that?

Die of it, as the expression goes. No one ever says they’re dying of pride or sloth.

This is one of those articles that is hard to pull one single quote from, because it’s just so damn good.

The whole piece hits me right in the chest, and I’m sure you, dear reader, have someone you should be reaching out to after reading this too.

2022-03-03 12:58:00

Nearby, chunky steel boxes, each about the size of a toaster oven, are lined up on long tables. They’re the currency vaults from the MetroCard machines, and they arrive from the stations locked. “When you pull them out of the machine, they self-seal, and the only key exists here.” A couple of clerks are methodically opening them up, stacking the bills into little plastic racks and then feeding them into a bank of huge bulk counting machines. “Eighty thousand notes per hour,” Putre says. “It’s going to authenticate, then count, then sort, then strap, all in one step. What four people can do in this room used to take 12 people before we had this machine. Before the pandemic, we’d run two, three machines every single day. Now we run a couple of days a week.” It’s satisfying to encounter the mechanical whir of it all, especially this year: bills and coins, paper and metal, notes and specie instead of ones and zeroes.

This was a delightful look at the operation required to count all the money that flows through New York’s public transit system.

2022-02-25 07:21:00

The elite special agents assigned to the ISB—the National Park Service’s homegrown equivalent to the FBI—are charged with investigating the most complex crimes committed on the more than 85 million acres of national parks, monuments, historical sites, and preserves administered by the National Park Service, from Alaska’s Noatak National Preserve to Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park.

Three are exactly 33 brave women and men who are part of the Investigative Services Branch, tasked with protecting our national parks.

2022-02-20 10:26:00

I'm a sucker for learning how things are made, and this video certainly changed my impression of how ski lifts are installed.

Which, admittedly, made me realize that I even had an impression of of how ski lifts are installed.

Anyway, the ingenuity of this whole operation just made me smile. It made me think of Gus and Charlee working with those new Lego blocks at the Children's Museum last weekend. We humans really like building things, don't we?

2022-02-20 09:56:00

This is an incredible piece of storytelling.

Professionally speaking, the use of parallax and "scrolljacking" generally irritates me. In this instance, the techniques are really well implemented and meaningfully improve the story's impact.

Personally speaking, the mental health struggles Alenka overcame are inspiring. Her zen-like approach to both free diving and life in general is one worthy of adapting.

Load this one on your laptop. I promise it'll be worth it.

2022-02-05 21:12:00

In the best case scenario, we create routines to hypnotize ourselves into repetition. We have loved ones and mentors who tell us to keep going, and help us figure out when we’re on the wrong track. We look for signs that we’re getting better, but we also understand that the process of getting really, really good at something sometimes just feels like a incoherent slog. If we’re lucky and resourceful and creative, we’ll eventually break through the membrane and find ourselves on the other side we’ve been clawing towards for so long.

2022-02-05 21:01:00

None of this, he said, is about ever running again for public office. “Elderly statesman” is how he describes his role now.

“When you leave office, you realize — well, I realized — that I just couldn’t cut it off like that,” he said. “Just because I’m finished with this job that is only kind of a temporary job, does it mean that I have interest only in a temporary way? No! It’s like sports, with the follow-through.”

A tremendously well-written profile on one of my lifelong idols.

My hunch is that Arnold’s enduring popularity lies somewhere in the mixture of his incredible work ethic, his proclivity to address societal problems with “common sense”, his unique upbringing, his charismatic personality, and his boundless ambition.

Is Arnold perfect? Of course not. But he’s the voice that the right wing of politics deserves. Get back to focusing on solving problems, not winning at all costs.

2022-02-05 20:52:00

Good decision makers understand a simple truth: you can’t make good decisions without good thinking and good thinking requires time.

Good decisions make the future easier, giving you more time and less stress.

2022-02-04 20:56:00

Many of my favorite Simpsons episodes of all time, including “Homer at the Bat” and “Bart Gets an Elephant”, were written by John Swartzwelder.

This article is a rare interview with a notoriously reclusive guy, and as someone who was practically raised at the altar of this show, getting a closer look at one of their disciples was a treat.

2022-01-27 20:54:00

We are always falling in love or quarreling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs. If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.

2022-01-27 08:20:00

Consider a man who leaves his menopausal wife and family to start a new family with a younger, fertile woman. Or think of certain high-status, married fathers who spend considerable time and money on girlfriends, mistresses and even prostitutes. Yet, many other men choose to forego these pursuits. They override impulses that evolution has programmed into their brains, impulses that evolved because they enhanced the reproductive success of their ancestors. They do so out of love and respect for their partners and their children, and out of respect for social and cultural norms. But how do they do what males of other species seem incapable of?

The answer, I believe, is that they rely on the crowning achievement of human brain evolution: the prefrontal cortex. Not only is the human brain three times larger than the brain of our closest living primate relatives, the great apes, but the human prefrontal cortex is also larger than expected for our brain size. Our prefrontal cortex is what allows us to override ancient, evolved impulses in the service of honouring commitments, abiding by social norms, and exercising our moral responsibilities. We are privileged to have this remarkable organ, and we fathers would all do well to make use of it.

2022-01-25 05:41:00

I grew up in a place, and a time, where hobbies — activities that had no place on your resume, no function in getting you into a better school — were still commonplace. Amongst the bourgeois American middle class, it’s becoming increasingly clear that Old Millennials were the last to experience this attitude towards activities and leisure. My partner spent his junior high and high school years at a competitive prep school on the Main Line in Philly, and has only recently come to realize that he had no hobbies, and no sense of what he actually liked to do, just what he needed to do in order to shape himself for school, then college, then work. Every hobby, for him, is an adult hobby — and thus all the more difficult to discover and adopt.

Hobbies are tough, especially hobbies that take up large chunks of a day (such as training for a marathon) or an actual entire day (such as getting season tickets to a sporting event).

I've got a few things that I'm thinking of getting into this year. First, tinkering with physical things. I am gonna try to restore some of my older broken tech that is laying dormant in my basement.

Second, flying. I want to get a discovery flight and possibly get my pilot's license.

Both of these things will take up "time", but frankly, after giving up most of my social media, I have a lot of free time in the evenings that gets eaten up with television. I'm ready to start trying some new things and being curious again.

2022-01-24 03:14:00

Who couldn’t love a story like this? Two people biked across America with a mission to pack out as much trash as they could.

A beautifully told story that compels one to really take stock on what matters in life.

2022-01-24 02:42:00

In a lot of ways, this video is boring, useless, and a colossal waste of time.

In many other ways, however, this is compelling to the point of fascination.

A Swedish carpenter discovers giant 13 meter rafter supports inside an 800 year old church. He thinks to himself, “I wonder how they were able to use such beautiful wood in order to create this.”

What does he do? He enlists the help of 3 fellow master carpenters, who in turn locate a suitably similar tree, discuss their hypothesis around the tools and techniques used, and then execute those ideas.

This video is emblematic of a style of YouTube video I’ve been obsessed with lately: how do things work? Not just old tech, but extremely old tech.

I’ve never thought to myself, “how did people used to build big buildings?”, but I’m sure glad somebody else not only had that thought, but decided to document it for others to learn from.

2022-01-23 02:26:00

This episode of the excellent By All Means podcast demanded to be shared for two reasons:

First, Allison Kaplan is painfully good at her job. I say painful because, as a podcast host myself, I know it’s not easy to (a) identify good stories and (b) lead a guest comfortably through an interview. She was incredible as a host in this episode, and anyone looking for tips on how to conduct a long-form interview aught to follow Ali’s work.

Second, the story told in this episode is undeniably compelling. Chris Montana’s story is filled with ups and downs, he’s a guy you just can’t help but want to root for.

I lived a couple miles from Du Nord when it first opened, and my wife and I quickly found it to be our favorite local spot. Even now, I can close my eyes and remember exactly how I felt sipping a gin cocktail in his lounge. I’ve never met Chris before, but after hearing his story in full, I can tell that my experience at Du Nord was carefully considered and designed, and I appreciate it all that much more.

There’s grief and pain tied in with the Du Nord story, to be sure… but also lots of success and optimism for the future. It’s stories like these that we all need to hear, learn from, and share voraciously with others.

2022-01-19 20:44:00

I’ve heard many interviews with Angela Ducksworth over the past few years, and I’ve always felt bad after each one.

Grit, as a trait, is something I feel like I possess relatively little of.

Maybe reading this article is just feeding into my own confirmation bias a bit, but the reason I wanted to share it is because it introduced a different measure to me: conscientious.

Conscientiousness is a component of the popular “OCEAN” model of personality, according to which we all have “big five” rather self-explanatory measurable traits: openness (to experience), conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. This model has left a large mark on personality psychology, in part because it raises useful questions that researchers have subsequently investigated, ranging from the extent to which variation in these traits is caused by nature versus nurture—one 2015 meta-analysis estimated the answer is about 40 percent genetics, 60 percent environment3—to whether and to what extent various traits correlate with success in work, relationships, and other settings.

Again, maybe I’m just hearing what I want to hear, but I’m very interested in learning more about the OCEAN model of personality.

Update: I just spent nearly 90 minutes convincing my kids to each eat half a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Maybe I do have some grit after all...

2022-01-17 19:16:00

“I think I still feel the same way about it that I did in the very beginning,” Whibley says. “The day that I get sick of playing a song that everyone knows and everyone goes crazy when we play it, and everyone starts jumping around and everyone sings it, I should just quit because I’m so fucking jaded. It’s the greatest feeling in the world. I’ve never understood that. I don’t get Radiohead, even though I love Radiohead, why they don’t play their big songs.”

I respect the hell out of that pull quote, it’s how more of us should feel about things that make other people happy.

It’s hard to express what this song meant to me back in 2001 as an impressionable sixth grader. I’m definitely not an edgy, punk skater kid (nor have I ever been), but this song is still in my regular rotation because it gives me so much life.

2022-01-12 20:32:00

I often think about what makes me dislike the “sales” part of being an entrepreneur, and this article outlines exactly why.

The article is a summary of Robert Cialdini’s book “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion”, and gives six examples of how people can convince you into thinking, acting, and consuming a certain way.

2022-01-10 02:44:00

Wisdom isn't found in certainty. Wisdom is knowing that while you might know a lot, there's also a lot you don't know.

Wisdom is trying to find out what is right rather than trying to be right.

Wisdom is realizing when you're wrong, and backing down graciously.

2022-01-10 02:40:00

Of all the mysteries and injustices of the McDonald’s ice cream machine, the one that Jeremy O’Sullivan insists you understand first is its secret passcode.

Press the cone icon on the screen of the Taylor C602 digital ice cream machine, he explains, then tap the buttons that show a snowflake and a milkshake to set the digits on the screen to 5, then 2, then 3, then 1. After that precise series of no fewer than 16 button presses, a menu magically unlocks. Only with this cheat code can you access the machine’s vital signs: everything from the viscosity setting for its milk and sugar ingredients to the temperature of the glycol flowing through its heating element to the meanings of its many sphinxlike error messages.

2022-01-09 05:39:00

To me, there’s no option but to give the money back. Being a tech worker is not like banking, where you know you’re not doing good for society. A lot of tech workers delude themselves into thinking they’re being “mission oriented.” I was never quite delusional enough to believe that. I was just hoping I didn’t do net harm, which in itself is hard to avoid in this industry. I want to spend and donate as much as I can in my lifetime, and if I’m able to have the money create meaning, that’d be good. I haven’t decided what I’m going to do with it yet, though.

2021-12-31 23:43:00

Powering through is often passive.

What you're doing is avoiding the harder thing, which is confronting the uncertainty of change. You're protecting yourself from the fear of regret.

Worse, by continuing to barrel through towards an inevitable dead end, you're cheating yourself out of all the opportunities quitting might bring.

2021-12-25 12:26:00

For the families of soldiers missing in action in Vietnam that Boss studied early in her career, or the family members of victims of plane crashes where the bodies aren’t recovered, this type of thinking means thinking: “He is both living and maybe not. She is probably dead but maybe not.”

“If you stay in the rational when nothing else is rational, like right now, then you’ll just stress yourself more,” she says. “What I say with ambiguous loss is the situation is crazy, not the person. The situation is pathological, not the person.”

An analogous approach during the pandemic might be, “This is terrible and many people are dying, and this is also a time for our families to come closer together,” Boss says. On a more personal level, “I’m highly competent, and right now I’m flowing with the tide day-to-day.”

2021-12-05 13:49:00

The Wright brothers won every patent case they fought, and it did them absolutely no good. The prospect of a fortune wasn't what motivated them to build an airplane, but ironically enough they could have made a fortune had they just passed on the litigation.

The use of the Wright Brothers’ tale as a pivot into what’s happening in today’s world of software patents is what makes this article a must read.

2021-11-06 12:20:00

I gained a lot of appreciation for people who make things, and lost a lot of tolerance for people who only pontificate. I found myself especially frustrated with my past self, whose default was to complain and/or comment, then wonder why things didn’t magically get better.

2021-11-01 04:19:00

Ok, I know posting another Tim Ferriss episode is going to make me look like a fanboy, but I don't care. This episode was flat out exactly what I needed in my life right now.

Dr. Conti and Tim discuss how trauma leads to all kinds of mental disorders like anxiety and depression. They also go over a few ways of addressing trauma.

If you're struggling with your mental health these days, give this episode a listen. I've got the book on my list as well.

2021-10-17 22:46:00

The shortest distance between two points is reliably a straight line. If your dreams are apparent to you, pursue them. Creating optionality and buying lottery tickets are not way stations on the road to pursuing your dreamy outcomes. They are dangerous diversions that will change you.

By emphasizing optionality, these students ignore the most important life lesson from finance: the pursuit of alpha. Alpha is the macho finance shorthand for an exemplary life. It is the excess return earned beyond the return required given risks assumed. It is finance nirvana.

But what do we know about alpha? In short, it is very hard to attain in a sustainable way and the only path to alpha is hard work and a disciplined dedication to a core set of beliefs. Given the ambiguity over the correct risk-adjusted benchmark, one never even knows if one has attained alpha. It is the golden ring just beyond your reach—and, one must enjoy the pursuit of alpha, given its fleeting and distant nature.

Ultimately, finding a pursuit that can sustain that illusion of alpha is all we can ask for in a life’s work.

2021-10-02 22:08:00

The first emphasis in Make Fewer Things Matter is “make.” Things don’t stop mattering on their own. You don’t just ignore them. You do something to make them not matter.

The next emphasis is “fewer.” Some things will still matter, but you reduce the number of them. Make a big list of things you think are important. Look at each item and look for ways to make it not matter.

After you go through everything and you try to make them not matter, you’re left with a few things that truly matter.

2021-09-07 04:38:00

Instead of checking items off a list, the Buddha suggests shining a light on yourself and others. “Dwell as a lamp unto yourself,” he advised his disciple Ananda. He meant that happiness comes from the illumination of your greatest virtues, thus showing the way for other people, and making visible to yourself your true purpose.

2021-09-06 07:41:00

Here’s a secret that might sound obvious but can actually transform the way you work: you can’t force yourself to think faster. Our brains just don’t work that way. The rate at which you make mental discernments is fixed.

2021-08-31 12:08:00

Notice also that many of these examples will have negative feedback built into them as well: I get a bad grade, my habit app streak ends, I feel embarrassed that my friends know I haven’t exercised for a week, my task list is neverending and makes me feel overwhelmed, my coach might criticize what I did today, I forgot to do the language lesson and feel bad about it.

So if most systems have both positive and negative feedback built in … what can we do?

We have to design a better system.

Essentially, you should start rewarding yourself when things are going well, and have compassion for yourself when they are not. Then, the next day, give yourself a micro-task to accomplish. Reward yourself accordingly and get back on track.

2021-08-31 12:04:00

Tasks you’re avoiding never leave your consciousness for long. They hang there like clouds, some distance away, watching you.

They’re big and looming, but they don’t move very quickly, so you can always just move a bit further away. You still feel their presence though, and it feels bad.

This metaphor is super helpful for me right now.

2021-08-27 20:08:00

Extend forgiveness to your idiot friends; extend forgiveness to your idiot self. Make it a practice. Come to rest in actuality.

2021-08-09 11:33:00

The thing is when you focus all of your attention on the worst thing that could possibly happen – your body listens.

When you’re pulled out of your comfort zone your hands shake, your voice quivers, not because anything, in particular, IS going wrong, but because you believe it will.

Because if you tell yourself that the world is coming to an end and everything is a disaster, your body doesn’t know the difference.

But what if instead of always mentally preparing for what could go wrong, you focus on what could go right instead?

2021-08-07 09:23:00

Human beings are capable of worry and rumination: we can take a minor thing, blow it up in our heads, run through it over and over, and drive ourselves crazy until we feel like that minor thing is the biggest thing that ever happened.

In a sense, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Frame adversity as a challenge, and you become more flexible and able to deal with it, move on, learn from it, and grow.

2021-07-30 02:01:00

John Ehrlichman, the co-conspirator behind Watergate:

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

Criminey. I didn't even make it past the first two paragraphs before thinking this article was an instant share, just for that quote alone.

2021-07-25 21:34:00

30) Existential angst is part of life. It is particularly noticeable around major life events or just after major career milestones. It seems to particularly affect smart, ambitious people. I think one of the reasons some people work so hard is so they don’t have to spend too much time thinking about this. Nothing is wrong with you for feeling this way; you are not alone.

Lots of advice that hit the right way in this post.

2021-07-09 11:07:00

Redefine Failure.

Know Your Worst-Case Scenario.

Stay Relevant.

Work Towards The Fear.

This post made me feel seen and understood. Time to get going.

2021-06-28 10:56:00

Then comes the tip, and for this, Popovich is renowned. In 2017, he reportedly left a $5,000 tip on a bill of $815.73 at a restaurant in Memphis, Tennessee, but one restaurant owner who's served Popovich many times reports that he'll often tip $10,000 on a "nothing meal," order bottles of wine for the kitchen staff and, upon leaving the restaurant, pull out a thick wad of cash and ask that it be delivered directly to said staff.

How much, in all, does Popovich spend annually on food and wine? That's hard to say. But he reportedly earns $11 million a year, the highest salary in the league for a head coach. Considering the offerings from his private wine label and that he holds thousands of bottles in his cellar, plots out dozens of high-end dinners per year at some of the country's most high-end restaurants, drops $20,000 on wine alone at some dinners, and routinely leaves exorbitant tips -- well, it's not a stretch to suggest that Popovich might ultimately drop a seven-figure annual investment on food and wine.

When I become wealthy, this is the kind of wealthy I want to be.

2021-06-18 11:41:00

No. 2: Focus on the Fundamentals

Technology constantly changes, but some fundamental approaches to software development transcend these trends. Here are six fundamentals that will continue to be relevant for a long time.

• Teamwork — Great teams build great software. Don’t take teamwork for granted.
• Trust — Teams move at the speed of trust. Be the kind of dependable person you would want to work with.
• Communication — Communicate honestly and proactively. Avoid the curse of knowledge.
• Seek Consensus — Take the time to bring your whole team along. Let discussion and disagreement bring you to the best solution.
• Automated Testing — Well-tested code allows your team to move fast with confidence.
• Clean, understandable, and navigable code and design — Think of the next engineer that will take over your code as your customer. Build code that your successor won’t have any trouble reading, maintaining, and updating.

Super astute observations, many of which seemed to be hard-earned.

2021-06-13 04:04:00

Perhaps one of the paradoxical benefits of the internet, in the long term, is shifting the way we think about peer relationships from “opt-out”, which it’s been since pretty much forever, towards “opt-in.”

In an opt-out peer set relationship, we default towards needing to look good in front of people; towards caring what people think, towards being embarrassed about aspects of ourselves, almost automatically – regardless of who the other person is. Not caring about what other people think has to be this deliberate act of bravery that’s hard to do.

But in an opt-in peer set relationship, we only people in as peers and role models selectively and deliberately; not caring about what most people think comes naturally, because it’s on by default.

I’ve personally been struggling with this concept for the last few weeks, and this article really helped set some things in perspective for me.

2021-05-11 04:57:00

Like many jazz students, I grew up learning the standards, and despite not being an amazing jazz musician, I still came across a Real Book or two in my time.

The story behind the Fake Book and the Real Book is so enjoyable, and I think its impact on music is hard to overstate.

This 99% Invisible podcast episode on its origins and the attempt to uncover the identities of its authors is a great listen, especially if you enjoy the cross-section of jazz music and intellectual property rights like myself.

2021-04-06 11:38:00

No one's nostalgic for the Dinkytown McD's. But some of us are nostalgic for who they were when they went there.

I think the author of this article laid it on pretty thick.

But to be fair, they were of an older generation of U of M alums, born to complain about the corporate raising of our beloved Dinkytown.

I have many fond memories of that McDonald’s. Back when I ate there, it certainly was a chance to, as they say in the article, “soak up the suds.”

My fondest memory there was right after Blarney’s closed the night I met my wife. I remember enjoying a burger and continuing our discussion on which animals would win in a fight.

The pull quote I chose for this piece, though, is right. I don’t care about McDonald’s. I just miss simpler times.

And maybe they’re simpler because they were manufactured in a way. My life isn’t manufactured much at all these days, leaving me in a constant state of anxiety and fear of what’s to come.

Maybe the closing of that McDonald’s aught to symbolize the start of something better. For myself, and for the next generation of alumni who pine for things to just stay the same for just a little longer.

2021-04-05 12:07:00

We need more discussions where no one is demonized, shamed and both sides are open to changing their mind. Not only is it more pleasant, but that harsh stuff doesn’t actually work. It just makes enemies more vicious. Yes, some topics will always be controversial and things won’t always go smoothly, but they don’t have to go badly.

Now it would be great if someone had taken the time to pull all the insights from peer-reviewed research, professional negotiations, cult exiting and applied epistemology into one book… Oh wait, someone has.

2021-04-04 12:26:00

We’ve been led into a culture that has been engineered to leave us tired, hungry for indulgence, willing to pay a lot for convenience and entertainment, and most importantly, vaguely dissatisfied with our lives so that we continue wanting things we don’t have. We buy so much because it always seems like something is still missing.

2021-03-28 22:53:00

This was a wonderfully written account of life inside the NBA’s bubble that was formed during the COVID outbreak.

There are a ton of great stories, but this one actually made me laugh out loud:

Once, I played Heads Up! (the charades-like game where you hold your phone up to your forehead) with Kemba Walker of the Boston Celtics at the end of an interview. The answer on the screen was “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone,” and the clue he gave me was “They be flying on brooms and shit.”

2021-03-26 12:03:00

There’s a reason Iowans get so worked up about their gas station pizza. It’s good. Not just cheap-pizza good, but actually, genuinely good. Casey’s pizza dough is soft and airy, creating a crust that’s the perfect blend of bubbles and bread, much closer to homemade dough than you’ll find in most pizzerias.

2021-03-19 12:25:00

Here are the secret rules of the internet: five minutes after you open a web browser for the first time, a kid in Russia has your social security number. Did you sign up for something? A computer at the NSA now automatically tracks your physical location for the rest of your life. Sent an email? Your email address just went up on a billboard in Nigeria.

These things aren’t true because we don’t care and don’t try to stop them, they’re true because everything is broken because there’s no good code and everybody’s just trying to keep it running. That’s your job if you work with the internet: hoping the last thing you wrote is good enough to survive for a few hours so you can eat dinner and catch a nap.

As poignant, true, and depressing as it was back when it was 2014.

2021-03-15 11:17:00

It turns out that conversations with friends are not so different. Even when you think you know somebody, you never have all the information; something always gets lost in translation. Sometimes you strip away unnecessary banality but, often, something essential is cut. Friends might avoid the truth because they are afraid of being judged. They might be unable to put their thoughts into words, or they might be held back by motives or concerns they don’t even fully understand themselves. Or they might be expressing themselves perfectly well to you, but you twist their words because you are superimposing your own models of the world onto them. To varying degrees, there is an uncrossable chasm between you and everybody you care about.

2021-03-04 12:50:00

At the end of January, I had an epiphany.

Kim and I were sitting in the living room one evening, relaxed in our easy chairs, both reading books. All four of our beasts were nestled nearby. The house was quiet. For the first time in forever, I felt completely content.

For maybe twenty minutes, I paused what I was doing and simply savored the moment. I stopped. I looked around. I made time to be present in the Now.

This article is really helping me cope with my anxiety as of late.

I think the expectations I place on myself are too high.

2021-01-24 13:19:00

Planning for forever is essentially impossible, which can actually be freeing: It brings you back into the present. How long will this pandemic last? Right now, that’s irrelevant; what matters is eating a nourishing meal, telling someone you love them, walking your dog, getting enough sleep. What matters is that, to the degree you can, you make your own life sustainable every day.

2020-12-06 14:05:00

Now that many of us are working from home, we’re walking in order to fill up space … to clear our minds … to cry … to talk on the phone … to entertain our kids … to do nothing … but walk.

This podcast is best enjoyed sitting down.

(The internet sarcasm is thick in my tone, in case you were wondering.)

2020-11-19 13:18:00

His teammates aren’t interested in talking about what he can do to make his strikes more solid, though, or even tonight’s mildly competitive league game. They’re still discussing a night two years ago. They mention it every week, without fail. In fact, all you have to do is say the words “That Night” and everyone at the Plano Super Bowl knows what you’re talking about. They also refer to it as “The Incident” or “That Incredible Series.” It’s the only time anyone can remember a local recreational bowler making the sports section of the Dallas Morning News. One man, an opponent of Fong’s that evening, calls it “the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen in a bowling alley.”

Bill Fong needs no reminders, of course. He thinks about that moment—those hours—every single day of his life.

A truly incredible story, artfully written and filled with many unexpected turns.

2020-11-13 23:48:00

While it’s easy to assume that anyone who willingly becomes a butler must harbor a notion of his own inferiority, none of the butlers I met were slavish doormats or even particularly humble. From Ford, who thought Claudia Schiffer’s lifestyle beneath him, to Govender, the self-described "ultimate servant," to Bonell, who’s bringing five-star service to the newly moneyed East, all have healthy egos buttressed by a belief that their way is the best possible way. A happy butler is a Buddhist monk in tails, taking pleasure in the duty itself. Serving, but never servile.

2020-11-10 21:23:00

Jones began her career with the two-beats-and-a-punch-line sitcoms of the nineteen-eighties, but, in working with Feig and the director Judd Apatow, she was required to try something revolutionary: find comedic actors who, more than just delivering jokes, could improvise and riff on their lines, creating something altogether different from what was on the page.

I’ve seen Allison Jones’ name in the credits of so many of my favorite shows for years. This bio rounds out the picture a little bit for me on who this incredible person is.

2020-11-05 12:44:00

Cal Newport:

I don’t normally spend much time reading information online, so I definitely noticed this morning the unusual degree to which I was distracted by breaking election news. This points to an interesting question that I’ve seen discussed in some articles in recent days: what’s the best way to keep getting things done on truly distracting days?

My answer: don’t.

2020-09-21 22:46:00

At around 7 am on a quiet Wednesday in August 2017, Marcus Hutchins walked out the front door of the Airbnb mansion in Las Vegas where he had been partying for the past week and a half. A gangly, 6'4", 23-year-old hacker with an explosion of blond-brown curls, Hutchins had emerged to retrieve his order of a Big Mac and fries from an Uber Eats deliveryman. But as he stood barefoot on the mansion's driveway wearing only a T-shirt and jeans, Hutchins noticed a black SUV parked on the street—one that looked very much like an FBI stakeout.

Journalism students should study this as a quintessential way to write a profile piece. I find computer security a fascinating topic, but it's hard to present it to non-nerds as a compelling story. Andy Greenberg did this story justice.

2020-09-18 11:17:00

I remember first watching Wonder Showzen during a band trip to Ireland in 2005. I thought it was the weirdest and coolest thing I’ve ever seen.

This retrospective was really fun to read (if you were a fan like me), and it made me want to go back and watch the whole series.

2020-09-06 01:06:00

Arnold Schwarzenegger:

This, to me, is not a political issue. It is a patriotic issue. When Thomas Jefferson wrote that “all men are created equal,” our country certainly didn’t live up to that promise. But generations since have pushed the boundaries, bringing equality closer and closer to reality. That is the American story, and we must remember that it’s a painful story for anyone left out of the promise.

Pretty pathetic that this can’t be the message shared by the leaders of our nation.

2020-09-03 20:06:00

If you examine your life, you’ll find that you do a lot of things to simply manage stress. In fact, I believe that for most of us, that’s all that we do.

It’s been a tough year on many fronts, and I know the general crux of this article is very important, but I thought this point about stress was very poignant.

Self-control and stress are inextricably linked. If you feel like life is out of control, once you are placed in a stressful situation, you’ll do bad things to alleviate that stress.

2020-08-15 04:30:00

Can I go faster in my next marathon? I don't know, but I'll certainly try. All three of my kids, though, are realistic about what it means to try to get faster as the body gets weaker every day. They are excited about what they'll feel like at 18 or 28. They're climbing up the mountain as I'm walking down.

2020-08-15 03:59:00

I don’t know when it will be safe to return to singing arm in arm at the top of our lungs, hearts racing, bodies moving, souls bursting with life. But I do know that we will do it again, because we have to. It’s not a choice.

We’re human. We need moments that reassure us that we are not alone. That we are understood. That we are imperfect. And, most important, that we need each other.

The coronavirus has upended our lives, and we are all collectively looking forward to the day when it is safe to embrace a stranger again.

That collective optimism is what gives me hope that it actually will happen.

2020-08-07 20:40:00

Carl Sagan:

If we teach everybody, let’s say high school students, the habit of being skeptical, perhaps they will not restrict their skepticism to aspirin commercials and 35,000-year-old channelers (or channelees). Maybe they’ll start asking awkward questions about economic, or social, or political, or religious institutions. Then where will we be?

Skepticism is dangerous. That’s exactly its function, in my view. It is the business of skepticism to be dangerous. And that’s why there is a great reluctance to teach it in the schools. That’s why you don’t find a general fluency in skepticism in the media. On the other hand, how will we negotiate a very perilous future if we don’t have the elementary intellectual tools to ask searching questions of those nominally in charge, especially in a democracy?

2020-08-05 11:49:00

On and on this pattern goes. A curve with a sweet spot in the middle. The optimal amount of calories to consume in a day. The volume at which you will enjoy your music most. The right brightness of light to illuminate a room. The number of friends with whom you can have a meaningful relationship.

Great points in here about finding the right balance in many areas of your life. I particularly found the running curve apt.

2020-08-03 08:19:00

Nothing is ever finally safe. Every important battle is fought and re-fought. We need to develop a resilient, indomitable morale that enables us to face those realities and still strive with every ounce of energy to prevail.

You may wonder if such a struggle -- endless and of uncertain outcome -- isn't more than humans can bear. But all of history suggests that the human spirit is well fitted to cope with just that kind of world.

It was very hard to pull a single quote out of this speech. If you’re struggling in life right now, reading this will help.

Edit from the future: I just realized I shared this twice in, like, two weeks haha! Here's the pull quote I used from the other sharing. I guess this is just a sign that this speech really is amazing.

If we are conscious of the danger of going to seed, we can resort to countervailing measures. At almost any age. You don’t need to run down like an unwound clock. And if your clock is unwound, you can wind it up again. You can stay alive in every sense of the word until you fail physically. I know some pretty successful people who feel that that just isn’t possible for them, that life has trapped them. But they don’t really know that. Life takes unexpected turns.

2020-07-27 20:07:00

If you engage engineers, you don’t know what you are going to get. You may be unlucky and get nothing. Or their solution may be so outlandish that it is hard to compare with other competing solutions. On average, though, what you get will be more valuable than the gains produced by some tedious restructuring enshrined in a fat PowerPoint deck.

2020-07-15 11:53:00

The end result will be a better, more resilient and richer world than ever. Yes, that will also eventually mean more money in your retirement account, but more importantly it means better and happier living conditions for every living thing on Earth.

I sure hope so.

2020-07-13 22:12:00

Michael Schur, the creator of “The Good Place” and co-creator of “Parks and Recreation,” remembers the force of Weird Al’s 1992 parody of Nirvana.

“ ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ comes out, and it’s like the perfect voice for all the simmering anger of an entire generation of kids,” Schur said. “That song is vicious and angry and aggressive but also laconic and disaffected and scary. And it was immediately a gigantic thing in American culture. Then Weird Al does ‘Smells Like Nirvana’ and completely deflates it — the importance and seriousness and angst. That’s a service he has always provided: to remind people that rock is about grittiness and authenticity and finding your voice and relating to an audience, but it’s also fundamentally absurd. Being a rock star is stupid. We as a culture are genuflecting at the altar of these rock stars, and Weird Al comes out with this crazy curly hair and an accordion, and he just blows it all into smithereens by singing about Spam. It’s wonderful.”

Schur paused. He said there were heated debates, sometimes, in comedy writing rooms, about the merits of Weird Al’s work — some cynics argue that his jokes aren’t actually great, that people overrate them because they’re nostalgic for their childhoods. But Schur insisted that, regardless of what you think about this lyric or that lyric, Weird Al represented the deep egalitarian spirit of our culture.

“It’s a truly American thing, to be like: Get over yourself,” Schur said. “Everybody get over yourselves. Madonna, get over yourself. Kurt Cobain, get over yourself. Eminem, get over yourself. No one gets to be that important in America.”

This whole piece is a must-read, especially if, like me, you grew up listening to (and subsequently memorizing) Weird Al's entire discography.

2020-05-25 21:50:00

If we are conscious of the danger of going to seed, we can resort to countervailing measures. At almost any age. You don’t need to run down like an unwound clock. And if your clock is unwound, you can wind it up again. You can stay alive in every sense of the word until you fail physically. I know some pretty successful people who feel that that just isn’t possible for them, that life has trapped them. But they don’t really know that. Life takes unexpected turns.

2020-03-21 16:58:00

Stewart Butterfield expanded on this idea when he discussed what he called the “Three Levels of Wealth.” My colleague, Ben Carlson, beautifully summarized the three levels of wealth as:

• Level 1. I’m not stressed out about debt: People who no longer have to worry about their credit card debt or student loans.
• Level 2. I don’t care what stuff costs in restaurants: How much you spend on a particular meal isn’t impacted by your finances.
• Level 3. I don’t care what a vacation costs: People who don’t care how expensive the hotel is or which flight they go on.

I heard Stewart Butterfield describe this idea on a podcast and was fascinated by it. Nick Maggiulli took it a step further in this article, complete with a Jay-Z reference.

2020-02-25 22:47:00

I found this site on a Reddit post about websites that few people know about but should. You can download tons of old computer games from the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s.

They even have Chex Quest!

2020-02-17 11:43:00

Of course most people are not car mechanics or airline pilots. Most people have jobs where being a "moral idiot," as Crocker puts it, won't kill anyone. Should we really demand that the guy who checks ticket stubs at the movie theater hones his craft?

Well, yes. No job is too low to not warrant care, because no job exists in isolation. Carelessness ripples. It adds friction to the working of the world. To phone it in or run out the clock, regardless of how alone and impotent you might feel in your work, is to commit an especially tragic -- for being so preventable -- brand of public sin.

2020-01-14 13:04:00

When a botanist looks at a forest they may focus on the ecosystem, an environmentalist sees the impact of climate change, a forestry engineer the state of the tree growth, a business person the value of the land. None are wrong, but neither are any of them able to describe the full scope of the forest. Sharing knowledge, or learning the basics of the other disciplines, would lead to a more well-rounded understanding that would allow for better initial decisions about managing the forest.

I think I first learned about the concept of mental models a couple years ago from John Siracusa, and I had it tucked back in my brain to one day find a list of mental models that I could study.

Fast forward to this article which was resurfaced recently in the excellent Farnam Street email newsletter.

I think I’ll be reading and re-reading this post several times in the years to come.

2020-01-06 11:53:00

Nathan Barry of ConvertKit fame shared this post on Reddit a few weeks back, and I have read it a half dozen times since then.

If you are at all interested in taking the leap into being an entrepreneur, read this. It’s more insightful and inspiring than 90% of the business books I’ve ever read.

2019-12-30 00:26:00

It's well understood by good parents that life should only get so exciting for a baby.

After friends have come around and brought presents and made animated faces, after there's been some cake and some cuddles, after there've been a lot of bright lights and perhaps some songs too, enough is enough.

The baby will start to look stern, and then burst into tears, and the wise parents knows that nothing is particularly wrong, though the baby may by now be wailing.

It's just time for a nap.

The brain needs to process, digest, and divide up the wealth of experiences that have been ingested.

Boy, this hit home. It's a short video, but I kept finding myself saying "hmm, that sure makes an awful lot of sense."

I particularly liked the bit about needing to have 10 minutes to digest an hours worth of activity. I think that's why I love going on walks so much.

2019-12-25 06:00:00

Speed in software is probably the most valuable, least valued asset. To me, speedy software is the difference between an application smoothly integrating into your life, and one called upon with great reluctance.

I’ve tried articulating this notion to my clients, but now I’m just gonna send them this article.

If you manage a software project, or are interested in software development, Craig’s thoughts are a must read.

2019-11-28 02:24:00

First of all, this podcast featuring FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel is one of my favorite shows as of late. The commissioner interviews women in tech, typically somehow involved with policy making or in the public sphere.

I particularly liked this episode with Senator Tina Smith, not just because she's my senator, but because they got into a good conversation about rural broadband.

My wife and I keep talking about moving out to rural Wisconsin to be closer to her family, so this topic of making sure all Americans have access to high speed internet is particularly important to me.

2019-11-19 19:47:00

Never did I once contemplate the fate of the man who wrote “The Monster Mash.”

The Memory Palace is an incredible podcast, and they did a wonderful job telling this man’s story.

2019-10-31 11:29:00

And the thing about surfers? They don’t seem to regret all that time they don’t spend standing on boards and riding waves. Not only are they surfers all the time, they are, it seems to me, happy all the time.

2019-09-27 11:58:00

Friends came for dinner. A public-interest lawyer, noticing I was bigger, asked what I’d been up to.

“I'm really into lifting weights right now,” I said. “Trying to get strong.”

The lawyer’s wife, a marathoner and family therapist, appeared startled, as if concerned about my emotional state. She looked me in the eye and said, “Why?”

I’ve been trying to motivate myself to join a gym lately. My goal is to get a six pack. I’m aware that this is typically accomplished through diet, but lifting weights would make me look well rounded, not malnourished.

This article spoke to me as someone who has identified as a marathoner for the past 10 years (and continues to do so). While I may secretly want to look like a professional wrestler, I also don’t need to gain 50 pounds of muscle.

Just like basically everything else in life, there is a spectrum between cardiovascularly fit yet scrawny, and strong beyond belief yet can’t run around the block.

2019-09-13 21:05:00

In total, Winegard estimates that mosquitoes have killed more people than any other single cause—fifty-two billion of us, nearly half of all humans who have ever lived. He calls them “our apex predator,” “the destroyer of worlds,” and “the ultimate agent of historical change.”

When our troop would go to a week-long Scout Camp in northern Minnesota, we always chose to stay in the Voyageur side of the campground. It was the most rugged of the offerings, where we had to cook our own food and sleep in military-style, open flap tents.

These green mesh tents were essentially a giant World War 2-era parachute string across a structure of three connected pieces of wood.

Part of our responsibility as scouts was to bring mosquito netting.

I spent many summers in my early youth across the lake at Family Camp with my mom, sister, and cousins. One year, though, I was just about old enough to stay with the scouts, so my parents had me back a bag for an overnight excursion.

I grabbed whatever supplies I could find in our camping closet, including the mosquito netting, and embarked for the trip.

As I was in the camp ground setting things up, I pulled apart the netting and realized that it was full of holes. They weren’t too big, I assumed, noting that they ranged in size from quarter-shape to softball-shape.

That night was one of the worst nights of my life.

In the silence of night, all I could hear were mosquitoes buzzing in my ears. Tormenting me. Biting me.

I must’ve spent half the night swatting at the air in vein, desperately trying to fall asleep and get some relief from all the bites.

It got so bad that I opted to climb under my tent mate’s netting and sleep on the tarp rather than my cot with a mattress and sleeping bag.

I say this with zero hyperbole: I hate mosquitoes more than anything on this planet. Even more than people who flick their cigarettes out of their car window.

2019-09-01 11:47:00

My mindset has always been that life is a series of things you Have To Get Right or face the consequences of being a Big Failure. That has led me to put immense pressure myself and on many of my individual decisions, including minor ones. As a consequence, I ended up with unreasonably high expectations for myself and others.

My neck hurts from nodding along so aggressively with this self-analysis.

This article has some solid advice if your neck hurts too.

2019-08-16 21:51:00

Until very recently, Dropbox had a technical strategy on mobile of sharing code between iOS and Android via C++. The idea behind this strategy was simple—write the code once in C++ instead of twice in Java and Objective C. We adopted this C++ strategy back in 2013, when our mobile engineering team was relatively small and needed to support a fast growing mobile roadmap. We needed to find a way to leverage this small team to quickly ship lots of code on both Android and iOS.

We have now completely backed off from this strategy in favor of using each platforms’ native languages (primarily Swift and Kotlin, which didn’t exist when we started out). This decision was due to the (not so) hidden cost associated with code sharing. Here are some of the things we learned as a company on what it costs to effectively share code. And they all stem from the same basic issue:

By writing code in a non-standard fashion, we took on overhead that we would have not had to worry about had we stayed with the widely used platform defaults. This overhead ended up being more expensive than just writing the code twice.

Say it with me: "write once, run everywhere" is a terrible long-term approach for building mobile apps.

One of the biggest reasons we lose leads is because people are swayed by the promise of having a single codebase that runs on iOS, Android, and the web. Solutions like Xamarin, Flutter, and React Native are touted as these golden solutions that will save you time and money.

These solutions, however, introduce a layer of overhead that end up making it more expensive than it would have been if you did it the right way from the start.

If you are looking to build custom mobile software for your business, learn from Dropbox's example and build your apps using native frameworks from day one.

2019-08-07 00:12:00

Oakland resident Dan Stevenson was never the type to call the cops on drug dealers or prostitutes in his neighborhood. He took a lot of technically criminal behavior in stride, but he drew the line at piles of garbage people that kept dumping across from his house. When the city installed a permanent traffic-diverting median at the intersection next door, no amount of signage seemed able to keep litterers from dumping all kinds of waste on this new raised concrete divider.

So Dan Stevenson and his wife Lu discussed options and decided to try something unusual: they would install a statue of the Buddha. When asked why they chose this particular religious figure, Dan explained simply: “He’s neutral.”

Unlike most 99PI episodes which I find can be cynical and dark in tone, this episode was quirky, unexpected, and gives you a bit of hope in a world that often feels dark and cynical.

2019-08-05 10:01:00

If you are not already making $500,000 compensation in your job, there are five steps to getting you there.

Summary:

(1) Do everything you say you are going to do.

(2) Manage your boss and colleagues — don't make them spend time managing you.

(3) Proactively help the organization.

(4) Be positive (don't complain). Be a “yes, and” person.

(5) Report to someone making over $500k.

The summary is helpful for reference, but Auren Hoffman’s entire reply is quite useful if you would like to make more money doing what you do.

2019-08-02 04:06:00

Inventor William Cubitt subscribed to the “no pain, no gain” philosophy. His “Tread-Wheel,” which was described in the 1822 edition of Rules for the Government of Gaols, Houses of Correction, and Penitentiaries, was presented as a way for prisoners to put in an honest day’s labor. Prisoners used treadmills in groups, with up to two dozen convicts working a single machine, usually grinding grain or pumping water, sometimes for as long as eight hours at a stretch. They’d do so “by means of steps … the gang of prisoners ascend[ing] at one end … their combined weight acting upon every successive stepping board, precisely as a stream upon the float-boards of a water wheel.”

Given a treadmill workout and nothing, I sadly choose nothing all too often.

However, it is fantastic that we have the option, and I’m glad the technology is evolving to make treadmill runs feel more like “real” runs.

I do wish, however, I had one of those treadmill desks. I could see myself easily getting 30,000 steps a day if I had one of those bad boys.

2019-07-26 11:42:00

I spent the past year telling myself I’d make changes. I told myself that I’d rather be in a much larger body and competing healthy, than in a smaller body and be broken standing on the sidelines. That “looking the part” of an athlete doesn’t mean shit if you are too injured to even get to the start line. I knew these things. And at times, I thought I was succeeding in changing things.

But with the fourth stress fracture two weeks before Barkley this year, I hit bottom. With sport taken from me, I looked around at all the things that had propped up my “management” of the eating disorder, and realized my disorder was all I had left.

I’ve been fortunate enough to never have to deal with something like anorexia or bulimia, but I find myself constantly struggling with my body image and eating habits.

I know logically that people don’t look at me and judge me as fat or pudgy... in fact, I would venture to guess most people don’t give my appearance a second thought.

But as someone who deals with me and my body every single day, it is hard to sometimes silence that voice in your head who tells you that you have to eat those 8 cookies, and then turns around and tells you that you’re getting fat again.

Anyway, I’ve looked up to Amelia Boone ever since I heard her on the Tim Ferris Show, and we were lucky enough to have her on C Tolle Run as well. Her performances speak for themselves, but the vulnerability she displays in this post makes me respect her even more.

If you’re struggling with an eating problem, talk about it with someone.

2019-07-06 11:47:00

I am an unabashed fan of thoughtbot, and I have long felt like I'll have "made it" if I woke up one day and had an agency that was like theirs.

This podcast gave me the reassurance that I am on the right path.

If thoughtbot can make $20 million a year, then JMG can definitely get to $10 million.

2019-07-06 11:42:00

There is one thing that you’re better at than other people: being you. This is the only game you can really win.

When you start with this mindset the world starts to look better again. No longer are you focused on where you stand relative to others. Instead, your focus and energy is placed on what you’re capable of now and how you can improve yourself.

Life becomes about being a better version of yourself. And when that happens, your effort and energy go toward upgrading your personal operating system every day, not worrying about what your coworkers are doing. You become happier, free from the shackles of false comparisons and focused on the present moment.

I think this blog is quickly turning into a spot where I can look when I need some internal motivation, and this is a perfect post for that future time.

2019-06-24 18:21:00

This is a tremendous piece of reporting by Jody Rosen. I have never had many kind words for the big record labels, but this just takes my distain to a whole new level.

As mentioned in the article, I understand how costly it is to maintain an archive of content as large as this. It’s not economical, and it is likely never to be a profit center.

But one could argue that if your entire business model is to leech the intellectual property of artists, you would at least have a moral imperative to keep that IP in as pristine of a condition that you could.

Of course, though, we are talking about the music industry. Why do something altruistic and beneficial to society with the gobs and gobs of money they make when, instead, they can hire more lawyers?

Here’s a small list of artists mentioned in the article, just to leave you with a taste of what we, as a society, have collectively lost:

Virtually all of Buddy Holly’s masters were lost in the fire. Most of John Coltrane’s Impulse masters were lost, as were masters for treasured Impulse releases by Ellington, Count Basie, Coleman Hawkins, Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, Art Blakey, Sonny Rollins, Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, Alice Coltrane, Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders and other jazz greats. Also apparently destroyed were the masters for dozens of canonical hit singles, including Bill Haley and His Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock,” Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats’ “Rocket 88,” Bo Diddley’s “Bo Diddley/I’m A Man,” Etta James’s “At Last,” the Kingsmen’s “Louie Louie” and the Impressions’ “People Get Ready.”

The list of destroyed single and album masters takes in titles by dozens of legendary artists, a genre-spanning who’s who of 20th- and 21st-century popular music. It includes recordings by Benny Goodman, Cab Calloway, the Andrews Sisters, the Ink Spots, the Mills Brothers, Lionel Hampton, Ray Charles, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Clara Ward, Sammy Davis Jr., Les Paul, Fats Domino, Big Mama Thornton, Burl Ives, the Weavers, Kitty Wells, Ernest Tubb, Lefty Frizzell, Loretta Lynn, George Jones, Merle Haggard, Bobby (Blue) Bland, B.B. King, Ike Turner, the Four Tops, Quincy Jones, Burt Bacharach, Joan Baez, Neil Diamond, Sonny and Cher, the Mamas and the Papas, Joni Mitchell, Captain Beefheart, Cat Stevens, the Carpenters, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Al Green, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Elton John, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Buffett, the Eagles, Don Henley, Aerosmith, Steely Dan, Iggy Pop, Rufus and Chaka Khan, Barry White, Patti LaBelle, Yoko Ono, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, the Police, Sting, George Strait, Steve Earle, R.E.M., Janet Jackson, Eric B. and Rakim, New Edition, Bobby Brown, Guns N’ Roses, Queen Latifah, Mary J. Blige, Sonic Youth, No Doubt, Nine Inch Nails, Snoop Dogg, Nirvana, Soundgarden, Hole, Beck, Sheryl Crow, Tupac Shakur, Eminem, 50 Cent and the Roots.

2019-06-07 02:10:00

I've never heard any of DHH's RailsConf keynote speeches before, so I guess I kind of expected it to be more about the state of Rails and where things are going.

In a way, I suppose this is that. But really, it's a personal manifesto about the intrinsic value of software, human worth, and capitalism.

This was mind bending and well worth the watch.

2019-05-13 05:53:00

The bittersweet consequence of YouTube’s incredible growth is that so many stories will be lost underneath all of the layers of new paint. This is why I wanted to tell the story of how, ten years ago, a small team of web developers conspired to kill IE6 from inside YouTube and got away with it.

As someone who got started developing websites on IE2, IE6 continues to haunt my nightmares to this day. This story made me feel some semblance of vengeance. Kudos to these unsung heroes of the internet.

2019-05-06 05:12:00

“Everyone does it.”

These were the words from my college-aged daughter when I caught her lounging on our couch, streaming Friends with 24-point closed captioning on. She has no hearing impairment, and I wanted to know what she was up to.

Does “everyone” do it? My wife and I turned to Facebook and a private, nationwide group for parents with near-adult children. “Anyone else’s college student (without a hearing disability) watch TV with the closed captioning on and insist that everyone does it?” my wife posted. Seven hundred responses (and counting) later, we had our answer.

I remember when I got my first TV in my bedroom. I was in fifth grade, and for my birthday, I received a 19” tube TV.

After opening the box and plugging it in, I spent an hour reading the instruction manual, learning everything I possibly could about this amazing machine.

One thing that stood out to me was “closed captioning.” I had never heard of this before, so of course, I enabled it, then closed the menu to see what it did.

I was absolutely blown away. How was this TV able to understand the words that were spoken on the screen and type them out to read?

As I got older, I started to understand why this technology existed and how it actually worked. At the same time, I never turned off that setting on my tube TV.

My friends thought I was weird for having it on, but there was something about seeing the words along with hearing them that helped me process the information a little bit easier.

My wife and I now permanently have closed captions on our TVs. It really comes in handy as we watch Game of Thrones late at night, but even as we are binging The Office for the eightieth time, the captions only enhance the situation.

One thing I appreciate about captions are how different content providers approach them. Some caption the words verbatim, while some (especially, but not exclusively, live events) take liberties with the words they caption.

It’s interesting to see how they are able to take someone’s stream of consciousness from their head and summarize the essence of it for someone to read on one or two lines.

Anyway, I’m a huge fan of captions, and I appreciate the hard work that goes into generating them.

2019-04-13 20:25:00

Curry’s popcorn devotion has grown so deep that over the past year he has proclaimed in multiple interviews that he maintained his own “power rankings” of the offerings at all 29 N.B.A. arenas. Asked by The New York Times earlier this season if he was prepared to officially compile a 1-to-29 ladder for publication, Curry not only agreed but also suggested scoring five factors on a scale of 1 to 5 to support the rankings: freshness, saltiness, crunchiness, butter and presentation.

Steph Curry is my kind of nerd.

2019-04-13 20:10:00

I swear, this blog isn't just going to become a link to every single Tim Ferriss episode. The problem is that most of his recent interviews are too good not to share.

This particular interview with Shopify's Tobi Lütke is great for a few reasons, but here were my big takeaways:

• Life should be about going on a journey, surrounded by friends, doing hard things.
• It's critical to have a growth mindset. You should be able to be thrown into a job that you have no qualifications for, accept that it will be challenging, and ultimately figure out how to succeed.
• Failing at a project is very difficult if you optimize for two things: first, find the human relationship(s) in the project and aim to make them the best they can possibly be. Second, aim for proficiency in the underlying skill it takes to complete the task. If you make a solid relationship with someone and sharpen a dull skill, then the project isn't a failure in the grand scheme.

2019-04-12 15:27:00

I came across this episode of The Knowledge Project the other day, and I instantly downloaded this episode with Jason Fried.

The more I read and listen to interviews with Jason and his co-founder, David Heinemeier Hansson, the more I want to model JMG after them.

Some takeaways from this episode:

• The businesses Jason admires are not big name ones that everyone has heard of (except for Stripe). He admires businesses who have been around for 5+ years, such as his local grocer.
• The expectation of himself is to do the right thing day after day. That’s an admirable goal, and one that makes more sense to me than straight up making billions of dollars.
• He said he tries to understand what “enough” is. That really is what owning a business should be about, right? If we have enough, then anything beyond that is greed, no?
• He spoke about how, at one point, Basecamp set numbers and metrics and then aimed to hit them. Ultimately, that led them to doing things that “weren’t them”, such as giving money to Facebook for ads. If your company is profitable and making you and your customers happy (again, returning to the “enough” point made above), why do we set pointless goals for ourselves? Can’t we find satisfaction in something more tangible (like how something feels) as opposed to hitting a made up number?

I would love JMG to be as “successful” of a company as Basecamp in every sense of the word. As our company grows and continues to find success, I am proud of our ability to stay true to our roots and build a business that does things the right way.

2019-02-24 08:28:00

I read Good to Great a few years ago, but I admittedly never finished it. After hearing this interview though, you'd better believe I'm gonna go back and pour over it.

This interview with Jim Collins was absolutely awe-inspiring. Among the nuggets I took away from this episode:

• You should strive to be a "Level 5 Leader", which means you are simultaneously headstrong and humble. You have to put your organization before any personal gain.

• Jim organizes his time according to the 50/30/20 rule, which means he spends 50% of his time in a given 365 day period on creative activities, 30% of his time teaching, and 20% of his time on everything else.

• On that same vein, Jim has a spreadsheet where he tracks how many hours a day he gets creative pursuits, and in any given 365 day period, he has to have over 1000 total hours. He also tracks what he did on a given day, as well as a rating from +2 to -2 for how he felt on that day. I've been trying to do something similar with tracking the big three things I need to get done each day, and I think I should expand that out a little bit to include these variables.

• You should not do what you’re good at, but do what you’re coded for. This really struck a chord with me, because I think I'm pretty good at developing, but I'm pretty sure I'm coded to be a leader.

• There was a lot mentioned around the flywheel principle, and I think this is something we're just starting to see happen with our own business pursuits.

There's a ton in this episode, so I'm going to stop writing in order to let you start listening.

2019-02-04 21:05:00

We had just gotten back from a weekend in Wisconsin celebrating Shannon's grandpa's 83rd birthday. Charlee was quite a whiner... just like she had been all week long.

Well, the last several weeks, actually. She requires a lot of attention, and she is very bossy in the way she requires it. You have to play with the toy she wants you to play with (usually Goofy but sometimes Mickey or Pete), and you have to act the same way you acted the first time you did this game months ago, and god forbid you try to talk to anyone else (such as your wife) while you do it.

It was 5pm, and the Super Bowl was about to kick off in a half hour, and thanks to the day spent in the car, I still needed around 7,000 steps for the day to continue my 153 day streak of getting 10,000 steps.

I thought I should get a quick walk in while it was still bright out (and so I could enjoy the 70 degree swing in temperature from earlier in the week, when it went from -30 to 40 degrees).

Charlee, who I was playing with while I had that thought, wanted nothing to do with that idea. She insisted I stay and pretend I was Pete and that I needed to help Little Minnie get tucked in for bed.

Since my throat was a little sore, I grew weary of the Pete voice and said, "Charlee, you can either stay here with mom and play, or you can go on a walk with me."

Charlee sobbed and said she wanted to stay home, so I put my jacket on, loaded up a podcast, and started out the door.

I didn't even get 3 houses down the street when I get a call from my wife. Charlee changed her mind and wanted to go on a walk with me.

Annoyed, I turned around and came back home. By the time I got in, mom already helped Charlee into her boots. I helped her into her coat and hat and we set out the door.

Before we got out of the garage, I noticed she had two stuffed animals with her. One, her beloved Bumba. Two, a stuffed lion holding a heart that says "Love" that her mother won from an arcade game earlier that day.

I figured she might drop one of them, and due to the sloshy roads, I didn't want her to risk dropping Bumba, which would've required giving him a "bath." I told my daughter she could only bring one stuffed animal on the walk. She sobbed when I took her best friend out of her hands, but after a few steps down the road, she was just fine.

We started out painfully slowly. Again, I was slightly irritated that my brisk walk devolved into a turtle's pace, but these are the cards you are dealt sometimes as a parent.

We made our way out of our subdivision and towards the fire station.

Now, a few months ago, I took Charlee to an open house at the other fire station in town. She, as with most new experiences, wanted nothing to do with it. I showed her every possible thing you can see in that station, but she just wanted to go home.

In a last ditch effort, I forced her to go up into an empty fire truck. After she wiped the tears from her eyes, she looked around and was mesmerized. She immediately started pretending she was driving to a fire to help someone out. About 10 minutes later, the tears reemerged, but this time, they were caused by not wanting to leave this new experience.

As we strolled by the fire station on our walk, she asked me (as she has every day since the open house) if we could go inside. I told her not until they have an open house.

She then said, "Daddy, I want to be a fighter fighter."

"Do you mean 'fire fighter?' I asked.

"No, a fighter fighter,” she insisted.

Right then and there, my whole mood shifted. I looked down at her with the biggest smile I've ever smiled in my life. The rest of the walk, we had an amazing conversation. We talked about her new stuffed animal (who developed quite a personality). We talked about senses and which body parts help gather those senses. We held hands for the entire walk. We both laughed incredibly hard. She kept insisting that when she grows up, she's going to be a fighter (fire) fighter.

As we rounded the corner to complete the loop around our neighborhood, Charlee said "I want to do another one!"

I looked down at my watch. It was now 5:30, and the game was starting. But instead of fighting with a screaming toddler, I thought I should give in and let her keep walking. Besides, we both were stuck in a car for 6 hours, we might as well both burn off some energy.

The conversation continued to be lively and stimulating. Seriously. She might only be 2.5, but she has a lot of interesting thoughts rolling around that head of hers. Our pace began to quicken, even though we were both scared of slipping. We had held hands almost the entire 1.8 miles.

About three quarters of the way through the second loop, my watch buzzed. It was a notification from my buddies making fun of something that happened at the game.

I again thought about myself, missing out on this game. I was quickly brought back to reality when my little girl pulled on my hand and asked to do a third lap.

At that moment, my mind fast forwarded to the future. A future where my daughter was 16 and wanted nothing to do with me or the Super Bowl. A future where she was 28 and she stopped by in the morning to say hello, but ultimately went to go watch the game with her friends. A future where I was 83 and too weak to walk for a mile.

I stopped, pulled out my phone, and took a picture of my little girl. I asked her to look up at me and smile.

As you can see, this is a blurry, ill-composed photograph.

But in that future I imagined, I'm gonna look back at this picture and remember that for one brief, fleeting moment in my life, my little girl just wanted to spend another half hour walking through the sloppy, dark twilight with her daddy and her $1 vending machine lion.

Instead of another lap, we ultimately decided to go inside and take a bath.

But you can bet that in the morning, I know I'll have a walking buddy all set to hit the pavement with me.

2019-02-02 08:14:00

I had to laugh out loud when Ryan said, "Oh shoot, I'm giving away my entire playbook here," to which Kurt replied, "Don't worry, nobody listens to this show."

This episode of The Schmidt List (which you aught to subscribe to, by the way) was particularly timely as we are working to hire our first full-time employee at The Jed Mahonis Group that wasn't already a good friend of ours.

Some of the key interview questions I will (shamelessly) borrow and use in our upcoming interviews include:

What gets you excited to go to work every day?

You're looking for something other than "co-workers". Something related to the job itself is ideal.

What do you think of automated testing?

As Kurt put it, this is essentially an updated "tabs vs. spaces" question. The aim is to get the developer to walk you through their reasoning for one thing or the other, and regardless of their answer, the big takeaway is whether they can justify their position.

What are you excited about in tech?

This is in lieu of the classic "what is your current side project" question, which I've never really been a fan of for the reasons they mention in the episode. Instead, this question allows you to see if they are keeping up with the industry and have thoughts on its direction.

In addition to these hiring nuggets of wisdom, the rest of the episode is a fantastic resource for anyone who is going to be moving into a role of managing developers. Two thoughts I took away:

1) Empathy, above all else, is what makes a team flow. A manager needs to be empathetic to the struggles that an employee may be going through (including changing requirements, stresses outside of work, etc.). Equally important is ensuring team members are empathetic to the struggles that their manager may be going through (including changing requirements, stresses outside of work, etc.).

2) Giving negative feedback to reports is important, and it's time to stop being Minnesota Nice about it. Not giving negative feedback is simply narcissistic and selfish.

2019-01-25 20:38:00

Jason Fried is always a fascinating and insightful person to listen to, and this interview is no exception. He has a lot to say about how awful work can be (but doesn't have to). I'm definitely going to read his new book as a result of listening to this podcast.

However, what really got me thinking after hearing this podcast was the way that Jason uses his strong, personal convictions to run his software company, willfully eschewing the conventional wisdom that comes out of Silicon Valley.

I've long held the opinion that raising large amounts of money confuses me. I've always thought it was because I didn't truly understand how investing and finance works, or maybe it was because I bootstrapped all of my businesses and wasn't aware of a different way.

But after listening to the way Jason justifies the decisions he makes with his company (not having a bunch of benefits that keep people at work, paying for people to go on vacation, etc.), it made me smile and think about some of the decisions we've made at the JMG, and how the vision of the company I want to run does not need to fit the mold of the typical software company.

When running a company, it's crucial that you listen to your own gut and to skate to where you think the puck will be.

After all, isn't that what entrepreneurship is all about?

2019-01-13 04:23:00

My longest friend recommended Sam Harris' podcast to me about a year ago, and I've been hooked ever since. Some episodes are easier to get into than others, but this one is definitely worth a listen.

We've got a lot of work to do as a nation to address the implications and aftermath of Russia's use of social media during the 2016 election, but as an app developer, it gives me all the more reason to help steer people towards building software that makes society an objectively better place.

(By "objectively better", I mean taking a look at the pros and cons of social media and ubiquitous internet connectivity and see if its use makes us wealthier/healthier/happier, or if it's only making a handful of people those things.)

2019-01-13 04:16:00

I really like how Steli and Hiten challenge the inner dialogue that we all have around asking other people for help. If you do your homework in advance and ask for considered advice or feedback, more often than not, people will be glad to offer it.

I heard on a different podcast a few weeks ago that people love to be asked for their advice and assistance, and in doing so, you're honoring them by making them feel valued and needed.

We can all use help from time to time, and if there's ever anything I can do to help you, dear reader, then please don't hesitate to ask.

2019-01-10 02:18:00

Quite a fun episode of my favorite Minnesota beer podcast, especially since they're profiling the brewery my wife works at.

I think it's interesting to see how a brewery like Badger Hill can continue to thrive in a market with such intense competition. However, as they allude to in this episode, there is no industry quite like the craft brewing industry as it relates to sharing resources between competitors.

While it's not quite as open, I think folks inside the app development consultancy space are similarly amicable towards their competitors. I've had many lunches over the past year with folks that I am actively competing again, but we are both willing to share advice and give nudges over difficult barriers.

It goes to show that while many situations are framed in black or white, truth or lie, Sith or Jedi, the world almost always operates on a spectrum between the two.

2018-11-27 05:00:00

There were a ton of valuable takeaways from this episode of The Tim Ferriss Show featuring an interview with Seth Godin.

• That concept of "be a professional, not authentic" was quite eye opening. I had orthopedic surgery not too long ago, and it truly would've been a bummer if she decided she didn't feel like cutting my knee open that day.

• I've had my own existential qualms about selling apps because, at the end of the day, does anyone really need an app? However, much like scope creep, you can find a way to spin it into a positive for everyone involved. It’s okay to sell people something you think they don’t actually need, because they actually do need it. Be empathetic and sell to what people think they need.

• You get better by serving your smallest viable audience. If you keep trying to make things work for folks who don't fit that niche, you are just doing a disservice to those who do fit your niche.

If you run a company, this is required listening.

2018-11-01 22:14:00

I'm 25 pounds heavier than I was this time last year.

I could blame it on a ton of things, including a lack of motivation to run after the ultramarathon, my knee surgery in June, and work-related stress.

Instead of playing the blame game though, I've decided I'm gonna do something about it.

After reading The 4 Hour Body earlier this year, I took a few big points away that I've been adopting in my life. One of those points is to find small changes you can make to your life that will yield big gains.

I think those of you who know me would say that one of my biggest vices in life are sweets. I'll easily pound a quart of ice cream in a single sitting if I can. At weddings, I'll grab two edge pieces (and hopefully, one of those is a corner piece). My wife's freshly-baked batch of three dozen cookies will not last a full week.

Another trait I know about myself is that I need to set audacious goals for myself, if for no other reason than to prove that I can do it.

With those points in mind, I've decided that November 2018 is going to be "No Sweets November" for me.

What are the rules, you ask? Here goes:

• Sweets includes any food product with a ton of artificial sugar. For me, this would include ice cream, cookies, brownies, cake, candy, muffins, breath mints, and donuts.
• Naturally-occurring sweets will not be eliminated, so I can still do things like apples and grapes.
• From midnight on November 1st until 11:59pm on November 30th, I will not consume any sweet.

Some will say that this month is probably the worst month for doing this. After all, my birthday is on the last day of this challenge, not to mention Thanksgiving and two weddings.

I would argue that those reasons alone make it the perfect month to abstain from sweets. After all, the point of this self-imposed restriction is to lose weight. I'll be much happier with myself if I can end the month 3 pounds lighter than if I were the same weight and ate sweets all month.

I'm already off to a good start. While going for a walk this morning, I found a full sized, unopened bag of M&Ms laying on the sidewalk. I picked it up and thought about tearing right into it, but after remembering the challenge, I handed it to my friend instead.

See you in December!

2018-10-29 20:17:00

Steli Efti: I do think that most people maybe haven’t answered the question truthfully and are suffering the consequences from it. That’s my instant and initial response when you say, how do you figure out who you are? My first thoughts are that you have to ask the question again and really make sure that you have answered it correctly versus just being attached and stuck in an answer that you might have picked out when you were really young a really long time ago.

This was exactly the podcast episode I needed this weekend, and I want to store it somewhere that I can come back to it in a few years.

If you're stuck in an endless loop of unhealthy and unproductive patterns, give this short episode a listen.

2018-10-26 19:41:00

Edmonds: Nintendo’s legal department also got worried about lawsuits from various gun manufacturers if we used real gun names. We had to change them to made up ones, which was disappointing.

Hilton: So the whole team just started making up names that sounded appropriate for the guns — except for the Klobb, which we named after Ken Lobb, who was one of the most senior guys at Nintendo at the time and was a big supporter of the game within Nintendo.

I mean, is there anyone my age who didn't grow up on this game? The story of how multiplayer came to exist is particularly interesting as someone who is used to working in an industry where the best ideas come late in the game.

2018-08-11 02:36:00

I consider myself to be a podcast enthusiast, but I will be the first to admit that I have not listened to many of the most popular podcasts.

I've been a fan of Joe Rogan ever since NewsRadio, and I've seen some clips here and there of The Joe Rogan Experience, but I've never sat down and listened to an entire episode of his podcast. I had a feeling that his political views were more libertarian, but beyond knowing that he's a proponent of weed, I didn't know much about him on a personal level.

With that in mind, I went through the most recent episodes of his podcast to see if there was an episode that would help me learn what he was all about.

I can't be the only one in the world who thinks the political scene in 2018 is incredibly draining and makes me feel ultimately powerless. As soon as I saw that Ted Nugent was on an episode, my initial reaction was, "ugh, why the hell would I listen to this crap and subject myself to more of that same feeling?"

Before listening to this episode, here was the sum total knowledge of facts that I knew about Ted Nugent:

• He was a musician of some sort
• He wasn't popular in my Twitter bubble
• He tends to speak in brash, general, and oversimplified statements

In an effort to remove myself from my bubble, I thought, "you know what? A lot of folks seem to love Ted Nugent, so I'm gonna listen with an open mind and see what it's all about."

The episode was pretty long (over three hours), but if you've got the time, I highly encourage you to give it a listen. A few things I took away:

• I didn't realize Ted was all about hunting, and I noticed myself nodding my head in agreement during the discussions around being responsible with nature and treating the circle of life with respect.
• The discussion around the vegan lifestyle was also illuminating. I know a few folks who try to do the vegan thing, and it's interesting to look at it from the perspective of "look at the number of animals and plants you need to kill with pesticides in order to keep them off your land so your tofu can grow."
• The first hour or so is mostly Ted and Joe talking about how misunderstood hunters are. Of primary note is a part where Ted says that people think hunters are all fat, sloppy rednecks who go out and hunt down hundreds of animals at a time. He says that if non-hunters would actually talk to a hunter and see the world from their perspective, it would really make things better. I thought this was a profound point, which was made completely ironic by the next observation:
• No fewer than 50 times in this episode does Ted identify a group of people (liberals, politicians, the DNR, bureaucrats, anti-gun folks, illegal immigrants), caricaturize them, and berate them for their "ignorance."

Joe spent a lot of the episode silent, because Ted just would get on a rant and keep going. However, I think Joe did do a great job of holding Ted's feet to the fire a bit over some of his statements.

My favorite part of the episode was when Ted went to the bathroom, Joe monologued about how messed up the gun situation is in our country and that he doesn't have any answers for it. It was refreshing to hear that, since everyone seems to have an answer that wouldn't work in practice.

Like I said above, the episode was long, but I found it to be absolutely illuminating, and I will be seeking out more podcasts like this in order to make sure my perspective on life isn't being persuaded by only one type of voice.

If anything, the biggest takeaway from this episode for me was that what we need right now as a country is to find a way to come back to the table together. Social networks seem to thrive off of exploiting the worst in us as humans, and even though the first word in that phrase is "social", it has made us anything but.

2018-07-13 00:17:00

Back in 2011 when I started this blog, I wrote a post that outlined some short and long-term goals that I had for myself.

I came across that post while re-doing this blog, and I thought that establishing some new goals was a worthwhile task.

For the past few years, I've been using an analogy for setting goals that I like to call "the swimmer's approach", which I came up with while watching triathletes swim during a race.

When you're swimming a fairly long distance, there are times where you need to put your head down and swim hard, and there are times where you need to lift your head out of the water and make a plan to head in a certain direction.

The key here is to combine both as efficiently as possible. If you're just heads down swimming hard all the time, you'll likely start veering off course considerably. Conversely, if you are spending all your time looking off into the distance, you'll never get there.

So today, I'm focusing on getting some new goals. Here's what I've got:

Short Term Goals (by August 15)

• Completely unplug for a week and enjoy time with my wife
• Take Charlee to a place she's never been before (like a new splash pad or the science museum)
• Come up with a sales strategy around our long-term support plan for JMG
• Finish the Siri integration with my weight tracking app
• Watch 3 movies on my Plex server
• Walk around the block without crutches (0.5 miles)
• Write another blog post for this site

Medium Term Goals (by December 31)

• Set a budget for marketing at JMG and launch a campaign
• Close a large sale
• Merge Rob's project management app (Triangle) with my sales and marketing app (Gil) and give it an awful name (like Trian-Gil)
• Get the average subscriber count for Constant Variables up to 100 per episode
• Get version 1.1 of mncraft.beer released
• Watch 30 movies on my Plex server
• Go for a 1 mile run
• Brew my first batch of beer

Long Term Goals (by July 1, 2023)

• Run another marathon
• Build up a 6 month emergency fund for the JMG
• Move to Wisconsin
• Have an event with one of our businesses
• Have another kid
• Finish watching all the movies on my Plex server (currently, I'm at 600+)

Now, it's time to start swimming.

2018-07-05 02:50:00

A few weeks ago, I got an email from Google saying that I had an "unusual number of 404 errors" on my site. I looked into it, and a very helpful script kiddy exploited my Wordpress site and took over the admin account.

It didn't look like there was much in there in terms of damage done, but they basically changed my admin password, bricked my template, and moved on.

After years of neglecting this blog (yet again) and after years of dealing with an annoying CMS, I had the same thought that every web developer has: "Nuts to this, I'm just gonna build this site myself from scratch."

So here we are: timbornholdt.com version whatever!

After reading back from my old posts in 2012, I realized that I really should start blogging again. I really enjoy seeing how much has changed in the past 6 years, and I know that if I start blogging about my life now that I'll look back in another 6 years and have the same feelings.

So without further ado, welcome to the blog, and we'll see you in another 6 years!

2018-06-21 12:09:00

As I'll explain in a future post, I had an old Wordpress blog that I got sick of maintaining and updating, so I did what any red-blooded developer would do: build my own blog engine.

In doing so, however, I needed to import all my old posts from Wordpress over to my own Rails form. This worked nearly flawlessly, with the exception of my YouTube videos, which looked something like this (without the space inside the tag):

[youtube]nFZZxOHHZlo[/youtube ]

Because I am using the Redcarpet gem, I thought I'd extend its parsing capabilities to detect anything like this and wrap it in a responsive frame.

Here's how I did it (with extreme thanks to this SO post):

Step 1: Create a folder called app/services, and then create a file called custom_markdown.rb:

class CustomMarkdown < Redcarpet::Render::HTML
  def preprocess(text)
    format_youtube(text)
  end

  def format_youtube(text)
    text.gsub! /\[youtube](.*?)\[\/youtube]/ do
      "<div class='embed-container'><iframe src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/#{$1}' frameborder='0' allowfullscreen></iframe></div>"
    end
    text
  end

end

This code will perform a regular expression to find anything wrapped in [youtube] tags and replace it with a <div> that we can now style with CSS.

Step 2: Add the following SCSS somewhere in your project where it makes sense:

.embed-container { 
  position: relative; 
  padding-bottom: 56.25%; 
  height: 0; 
  overflow: hidden; 
  max-width: 100%; 
  iframe, object, embed { 
    position: absolute; 
    top: 0; 
    left: 0; 
    width: 100%; 
    height: 100%; 
  }
} 

Step 3: Use the custom parser when including Redcarpet in your project:

require './app/services/custom_markdown.rb' # This was necessary for me, might not be necessary for you
@blogs = Blog.all.order("published_at desc")
renderer = CustomMarkdown.new()
@markdown = Redcarpet::Markdown.new(renderer, extensions = {})

Now, anywhere you use those [youtube] tags, you'll get this fancy rendering instead:

2017-03-13 23:06:00

Like all tried and true iOS developers, I love using the excellent Charles Proxy. However, I've been running into issues where the proxy is running while the iPhone is attached to my Mac.

Whenever I would have Charles closed and my phone plugged in, I was getting this helpful message:

Safari can't open the page https://facebook.com because Safari can't connect to the server https://facebook.com

Usually, you can fix this on Wi-Fi by going into Network > Wi-Fi > Advanced Settings > Proxies, and disabling Web Proxy (HTTP) and Secure Web Proxy (HTTPS).

Unhelpfully, however, you'll note that the iPhone USB network interface does not include an "Advanced Settings" button.

No problem! Head to your Terminal and type in the following two lines of code:

sudo networksetup -setsecurewebproxystate "iPhone USB" off
sudo networksetup -setwebproxystate "iPhone USB" off

This disables both the secure proxy and the unsecure proxy.

2017-03-04 05:20:00

In 2017, the C Tolle Run team decided to switch over to an audio-only podcast format. Instead of doing a traditional interview-style show over Skype, we came up with the idea to record Carrie and a guest while they went for a run. As a runner myself, I know the kinds of crazy, deep, personal, and often crazy conversations that occur during the course of a 10 mile run.

As the guy responsible for capturing the audio on one of these runs, however, I was a little worried. Even if we were recording people walking, we'd have issues with wind. What are we supposed to do with people running? All of that movement is a recipe for poor audio quality.

Another issue we have is that we haven't quite hit the jackpot with sponsors yet, so I needed to find a suitable solution while running on a tight budget.

If you're reading this, you're probably looking for a good solution for a similar set of circumstances. Let me save you the time and show you what I came up with!

What didn't work

In order to get to a point where we were capturing usable audio, we experimented quite a bit. Here was our first setup:

Take 1 included our guests using a Sony lavalier microphone with a standard, flimsy wind guard attached to it.

We quickly discovered that the Auray Fuzzy Windbuster wind guards provided a night and day difference in ability to block out wind. However, the guards did not stay attached to the microphones all that well, which is obvious if you listen to our episode with Gabe Grunewald.

In addition, because of all the movement that occurs from running, we would frequently hear rhythmic bumping and rubbing due to the cords pulling in odd places on the runners.

What does work

Transmitting the signal

Our primary goal was to get the highest quality signal we can get with the most minimal amount of equipment possible. We figured that the easiest way to do that is to switch to headset microphones.

We now use the Sony ECM322BMP Professional Headset Microphone. In our most recent on the run episode with Kirk DeWindt, both Kirk and Carrie found the headsets to be relatively comfortable, and after a couple minutes, they didn't even notice they were wearing them.

One word of warning: make sure whatever headset mic you purchase is compatible with your wireless system. I can't give a direct Amazon link to our wireless system since we bought it 7 years ago, but the modern comparison would be the Sony UWPD11/30 Lavalier Microphone, Bodypack TX and Portable RX Wireless System. We went through 3 different headset mics before just giving in and dropping the money for the mic that was compatible with our "ancient" system.

Regardless of which headset mic you get, the key piece to cutting down on wind noise is the Auray Fuzzy Windbuster wind guards. Buy at least 6 of these little guys, they are worth every penny. (Pro tip: we went through 2 of these buggers before we got smart and put some gaffer's tape around the base of the wind guard to keep it attached to the neck of the mic.)

The position of the transmitter pack seems to not really be an issue for us, so long as:

• The antenna has a good line of sight to the receiver
• The cable connecting the headset and transmitter gets a little slack
• They don't place the transmitter in the same pocket as a phone

We purchased wireless microphone belts to hold our packs, mostly so we didn't have to fuss with people wondering where the transmitter should go, but those are totally optional.

Receiving the signal

Ideally, we are working to get the receiving end down to a point where Carrie can strap it onto herself and record as she travels around the world.

Currently, the receiving rig is powered by yours truly, following the guests on a bike roughly 10-20 feet back The receivers for the wireless mics are plugged into a Zoom H4n recorder. All three components are strapped into a repurposed water bottle holder (pictured above, which doubles as a great indicator to my personal fashion sense).

Once I turn on the recorder, I immediately hit record and lock it before even plugging in the microphones. My biggest fear is losing audio, and since these things can record hundreds of hours at a time, I'd rather scrub through the audio in post than risk forgetting to hit "go" once the runners are ready.

Next Steps

Currently, our rig is limited to the two inputs of the H4n. The next two things I'd love to tackle are live streaming the audio to my phone so I can do a Facebook Live stream, and recording more than two people at once.

If you have any ideas how I can stream the audio off of a Zoom H4n into an iPhone, or how I can best record multiple people at once, let me know on Twitter and I'll give it a shot!

Also, I'll keep this blog post updated as we refine this system. If you have any suggestions on how I can improve it, give me a shout on Twitter.

One last note: those links above are Amazon Affiliate links. Feel free to strip that code off if you are offended by those types of things.

2017-02-17 11:07:04

Like most red-blooded Ruby on Rails developers, I make copious use of the Paperclip gem.

Paperclip (and basically, every developer on the internet) seems to encourage you to use a service like Amazon S3 or some other 3rd party service to store your files.

However, I find that for simple projects, I'm just fine storing the images locally on my Linux server and using good ol' Apache to serve them up.

By default, Paperclip saves these images in your public/system folder, and assigns the same permissions as your Rails app to those images.

The problem I run into is that frequently, it doesn't use the right permissions. I'd be able to upload and save the image, but when I'd load the image, I'd get a 403 error.

In order to solve that issue, you need to set the correct permissions for your public/system/[model] directory.

Here's how to quickly solve that:

1) SSH into your public/system/[model] directory 2) Run "umask 002". This will allow your Linux group to write into this directory. 3) Run "chgrp [your-systems-group] .". In my case, that's www-data. This will change the ownership of the folder to your group.

Now, all the files in your folders (and all subsequently created files) will belong to the correct group, and you won't see any more nasty 403 errors!

2015-10-16 01:39:00

Our first anniversary weekend kicked off on Friday afternoon with a trip to the grand opening of Bad Weather Brewing off of West 7th in St. Paul. It was absolutely packed in there. A nice couple gave us their spot at this rock structure, so we gratefully took it. The brews were decent, and the tap room itself was fairly impressive.

After the brewery, we took the light rail downtown. We grabbed a quick bite at a nice little Panera-esque restaurant in the IDS, and then we walked over to the Orpheum to see The Little Mermaid. Shannon ended up winning some contest where she got to pay $25 for any remaining seat in the house. We ended up sitting in row U on the main floor. The show itself was decent. There were quite a few technical glitches (mics cutting in and out, light cues not hitting right), and we sat next to an obnoxious group of drunk people who needed to impress the crowd with their versions of Under the Sea. We were quite impressed, however, with the use of the fly system to emulate "swimming". Quite a nifty stage trick.

The next day, Shannon and I woke up early to drop off bagels for her work, and then we drove up to Taylors Falls. We stopped at an awesome bakery in Lundstrom off Highway 8 and had some delicious donuts. Once we got to Taylors Falls, we hiked along the river. Despite some light traffic noise and an unseasonably hot day, it was a gorgeous hike. The fall colors were absolutely breathtaking.

On the way home from Taylors Falls, we figured we were close enough to Stillwater, so we drove down to Lift Bridge Brewery and tried a few of their brews. (from left to right: Mini Donut Beer, Citra Kellerbier, Oktoberfest, Harvestör Fresh Hop Ale) All four beers were pretty decent, but man, that Mini Donut Beer was out of this world good. What can I say: I'm a sucker for the novelty beers. Shannon and I tried to purchase a growler of it, but that wasn't in the cards. Dang.

After we had our fill of Mini Donut Beer, we decided lunch was in order, and it wouldn't be a complete anniversary weekend without a trip to Leeann Chin. I also got my haircut at Great Clips. We're a Great Clips family now, by the way. More on that to come in the next couple of weeks (I hope!)

With a freshly full belly and a neatly trimmed set of hair, we decided to detour on our way home to Big Wood Brewing Company in White Bear Lake. (from left to right, top to bottom: Bark Bite IPA, Board #4, Fork, Oktimberfest, Lil' Red Riding Wood) I think we were both a little full from all the Chin and Mini Donut Beer, so maybe we shouldn't have done the heavy flight... but on the whole, the brews there were pretty good. Their Bark Bite is definitely deserving of "flagship status". We left Big Wood and wandered around White Bear Lake a little bit, and then we finally headed home.

One of our other friends mentioned that for a fancy date night one time, they did their own surf and turf at home. That sounded like an affordable way to have a fancy dinner on our anniversary, and since we spent all of our money on beer and Little Mermaid tickets, we figured we could do things ourselves. (I have to admit, it was a little weird eating lobster after seeing The Little Mermaid.) The meal was phenomenal. We bought a pre-cooked lobster and steamed it in a pot, and we bought a steak that was big enough for the both of us. We accompanied it with some sweet potato fries and a little salad. My wife had to be extra sweet to me and sauté a bunch of mushrooms (which she hates, but knows I love). We capped it off with some homemade chocolate cake and berries. I got to dust the powered sugar myself. Once we demolished this excellent deserts, we watched the latest episode of Empire and fell asleep early.

On Sunday (our actual anniversary), I rolled out of bed around 8am and got my 10 mile run in (prep work for the Seattle Marathon in a few weeks). After that, we got all gussied up and drove down to St. Anthony Main for a Sunday brunch at the Nicollet Island Inn. We had the 5 course meal, which included:

A pastry basket. That bread (not pictured) was so moist and delicious.

Angel Food French Toast.

Lobster bruschetta with avocado.

Mushroom Gnocchi. Oh my goodness, that was incredible. I'm definitely a gnocchi fan.

Chocolate mousse.

Overall, the experience and the food were incredible; if you're looking for a top-notch place to bring your significant other on a fancy Sunday morning brunch, look no further than the Nicollet Island Inn.

The rest of our Sunday was pretty much a normal Sunday. We got back home and watched the Packers barely edge one out over the Rams (hah), and then we tried to avoid the unseasonable 80 degree heatwave. We did end up getting over to my parent's house to help my mom prepare for her knee replacement surgery later that week, but besides that, it was quite uneventful.

They say that the first year of marriage is the most difficult. If that's the case, then the rest of our lives should be smooth sailing. I'm so lucky to have found the perfect woman for me, and I am looking forward to many, many more anniversaries together.

2014-02-26 20:32:02

There was quite a bit of drama surrounding Gabe's dominant victory in the 3000m this past weekend, but now that the dust has settled and the proper rulings have been made, Gabe can finally call herself a National Champion.

Gabe is easily one of the nicest people I've ever had the pleasure of meeting. We've only met three times, but when we got to her place to interview her, she greeted us with hugs and genuinely seemed interested in how we were doing. I couldn't be happier for Gabe, and best of luck in Poland! (And if you ever figure out the secret sauce to your ridiculous kick, please let us all know.)

2013-12-28 23:14:00

Here's what my home screen looks like as of December 2013:

Besides the standard apps (Messages, Photos, Camera, etc.), here's a breakdown of the other apps I use:

• Fantastical: Natural language input makes this app throughly indispensable. Being able to just tap the mic icon and speak my appointment makes me really feel like I'm living in the future.
• Runmeter: Any run I do outdoors, I log with Runmeter. I've been using it for years, and it's the most accurate and robust running app I've ever used. I just recently got a heart rate monitor that pairs with it, so I'm excited to see how that integration will aid my training.
• Check the Weater: The simplicity of this app combined with its Dark Sky integration make it the only weather app I need to try. Plus, David Smith is an awesome developer (and human being).
• Google Maps: I'll occasionally use Apple Maps, and while it's definitely improving, it's still bit me too many times to trust on a day-to-day basis.
• Instapaper: All long-form articles go in here for future reading. If you're not using a read it later type service, you're missing out on a much more satisfying reading experience.
• Untappd: I've become much more of a beer enthusiast in the past year, and that's almost entirely due to this app. Untappd lets you log beers you've tried and suggests new ones to try. It has certainly turned beer discovery into a fun game.
• Scanner Pro: Apple recently made this app free for a week, and for great reason. I switched over to this app to log my business receipts about a year ago, and it's ability to auto-detect borders and quickly upload to Dropbox have made this app worth every penny I've paid for it.
• Day One: I made it a goal part-way through 2013 to start journaling once a week, and Day One is, bar none, the best journaling app on the App Store. Every Friday, I crank this bad boy open and review my week's progress. Every entry gets a picture as well, so that has encouraged me to keep photographing the exciting (or mundane) parts of my life.
• Twitterrific: I haven't tried Tweetbot, and thanks to this app, I really see no reason to. This app helps me manage my Twitter accounts very easily, and it looks gorgeous to boot. I also really enjoy the cool egg "pull-to-refresh" animation.
• Reeder: There's no better way to manage your RSS feeds than Reeder (combined with Feed Wrangler). The only thing I wish it did was allow you to send links to Reminders as a new reminder. But besides that, this is a fantastic example of an iOS 7 app, complete with gestures and the like.
• Castro: Speaking of amazing apps designed with iOS 7 in mind, Castro is a new podcast app that is crazy beautiful. The app is lacking in a couple of key features, like OPML import support and continuous play (and I also miss the gesture-based 30 second skip that Downcast uses), but it's pretty certain that those features will be added in time.

2013-12-28 02:27:15

It was around this same time last year that I updated timbornholdt.com, and I figured I was due for a bit of a redesign as well.

This time, I went a bit more simplistic: just one page with a short biography and links to some choice projects.

I'd love to hear what you think. Holler at me on Twitter.

2013-11-14 02:14:00

Sometimes, the simplest videos are the best. All we needed was Carrie and 6 minutes of tape to make what will ultimately become one of our most-watched episodes.

I love this ab workout as well. Carrie said she typically doubles each workout so it ends up being 1 minute per exercise instead of 30 seconds. I'm proud to say I can keep up with most of the extended version; I actually love doing old-school crunches. It's Katie's maintenance routine filled with planks and bridges that kill me.

2013-10-09 19:20:00

I'm so proud of Carrie for finishing her first marathon. Documenting the entire process was fun in and of itself, but being able to bike the entire course to watch her along the way was really something.

My job on race day was to bike around the course and get Carrie at key points. I ended up biking just under 50 miles that day. I didn't start to hurt until I crossed into St. Paul on Lake Street, but the real pain kicked in when the rain began to pour in the afternoon. Shannon ended up having to pick me up about 2 miles from home because I was so tired and covered in sand.

2013-09-18 17:27:45

I had the pleasure of switching roles and being in front of the camera this time. I can honestly say that I have, at one point, used all of these apps to become a better athlete, and I actually use two of them (Runmeter and Check The Weather) on a daily basis.

It was also nice to get a little plug in for the Jed Mahonis Group as well.

2013-09-04 22:31:04

I think this is C Tolle Run at its best: short, informative videos that present valuable information in a unique way. I love filming and editing these pieces together, and I hope we get the chance to do more of them in the future.

Stay tuned for the abundance of high-quality bloopers at the end.

2013-07-25 03:01:08

As everyone knows, people's attention spans these days are quite small. Bearing that in mind, we usually try to keep episodes under 4 minutes. In this case, however, it seemed like the length of the episode didn't really matter much. Kirk and Carrie have great chemistry in front of the camera, which you can really catch at the end of the outtake we show at the end of the episode.

Plus, the content in this episode is great for anyone training for a marathon, half marathon, or even 5k. Strengthening your hips and core is unbelievably important for staying injury-free.

2013-07-11 02:39:40

It's funny how these "day in the life" type episodes shake out; we usually go into it with no idea what we're gonna do, and come out of it with a polished episode that gives a great look into Carrie's life.

Even if you're not interested specifically in Carrie's progress toward her first ever marathon, you'll love the back-and-forth banter she has with her husband, Charlie. Seriously funny stuff.

2013-05-12 03:17:00

We finally launched the new version of the Jed Mahonis Group's website. I've actually been working on this for a few months now, figuring that we needed something more complex than our last single-page design.

The biggest feature of our new site is a responsive layout. This lets us show an optimized layout for any screen resolution (whether it's on a 27" desktop monitor or an iPhone). In addition, we're now able to better explain our app development philosophy and showcase our apps.

I also really like how the site really lets our personality shine through. Just look at the about page to see what I'm talking about.

2013-05-01 21:56:51

The Get in Gear Races were the first we attempted to cover when we started C Tolle Run. The reason we merely "attempted" to cover it was because the rain was pouring so hard that year, we didn't want to risk ruining our camera.

I missed out on last year's Get in Gear, but I'm really glad they brought us back this year. This was the first warm day we've had in Minnesota since October 2012, and it was awesome to be able to play out in the sun for a while. I think most of the participants we interviewed would agree; the vast majority of people around the finish line had huge smiles on their faces.

I really enjoyed cutting the first part of the episode. It's always nice to try out new techniques. The one regret I had from this episode was not keeping a consistant white balance. If you watch very closely, there are a few clips that look a little "cool" (meaning there is a bluish/purplish tint). Oh well, even after 123 episodes, we're still not perfect.

But, like Carrie said, "C Tolle Run fans don't judge."

2013-04-18 03:48:00

The Jed Mahonis Group launched its second app today: the Half Staff App.

We decided a few months ago that in order to build our portfolio up, we should focus on core app technologies that companies would like to have in their own apps. Coincidentally, for Christmas this year, my girlfriend bought me an American flag.

After some simple Googling, I found a few websites that offered a service like this, but they mostly a) served to sell flags and b) looked like garbage. In addition, none of them offered direct push notifications (although there were a couple that offered e-mail and Twitter notifications).

The biggest challenge in this app was implementing the server API. After monkeying with tools like RestKit, I just opted to use some standard Apple methods to send a basic POST command to my API.

Besides that, it's a relatively simple app: we have a custom CMS that we can add new days in, then push the changes to a static JSON file. On launch, the app loads that JSON file and migrates changes into an internal SQL database.

There are a few changes I'd like to make (specifically, I'd like to combine the push token call and the database call into a single call), and we are working on a way to implement state-level notifications, but for now, I'm very proud of the way this app turned out.

It's only 99¢ on the App Store, so get it today and let me know what you think.

2013-04-03 23:05:37

Let's be honest: any video where Ruby says she wants a "baby daddy" instead of a "baby brother" or "baby sister" is gonna be pretty solid.

I love doing these "day in the life" segments, and I'm pretty sure our audience loves them too. I set the video to automatically publish at 8am, and due to technical issues, I didn't get to post it to ctollerun.com until 10am. By the time we went live on our website, we already had 20 views and a like.

I hope we start branching into more segments like this with other high-profile athletes. I bet it'd be a huge draw.

2013-03-27 21:43:17

This episode was shot in under a half hour and edited in under 90 minutes. We're really getting in a rhythm with this show. It's partly due to time constraints that we're all facing (me with my app development company, Julie with her freelance theatre directing and Carrie with her upcoming second child and other media appearances), but I mostly attribute it to our solid chemistry as a team. Carrie is nailing her lines in 1 take, Julie is writing solid copy and I'm cutting episodes together very efficiently. It's a cool experience when you can be a part of something so superb and efficient.

2013-03-21 04:20:00

This very well could be the most thrilling post on my site to date. I can't remember exactly which blog I saw this on, but somebody posted the contents of their wallet for posterity not too long ago. I thought, "well, that's kind of a cool idea", so I'm going to share with you my pockets:

My pockets contain:

• A business card holder, containing cards for both my video production services as well as my Jed Mahonis Group company card.
• A wallet. I used to carry a serious George Costanza wallet, but have since pared it down to the essentials.
• A key ring. I used to think it was really cool to carry a ton of keys, but I've cut back on a substantial amount of my collection. Right now, I've got my Hawkeye Point keychain and my Summit bottle opener attached. I don't know why I still have my Gopher lanyard connecter still connected... Perhaps that'll be cut by the time I do Part 2 of this thrilling series.
• An iPhone 4S. This will almost certainly be upgraded to the iPhone 5S or whatever comes out this year.
• Some $20 Sony Headphones. I treat my pocket headphones with a decent amount of respect, but I seem to churn through these things like hotcakes. Some day, I'll have a solid pair of desk headphones.

2013-03-14 22:35:00

Although we got off to a rough start with some technical difficulties, our Skype interview with Kate was a rousing success. For those who want a little more technical behind-the-scenes for how to record a video Skype call, we use Ecamm's excellent Call Recorder for Skype to record both streams to a single file.

We use an all-Apple Intermediate Codec workflow when editing our shows. We could keep the recorded Skype call in the same H.264-compressed MPEG-4 container, but two problems arise:

1) You can't watch the file in Safe RT; you have to roll with Unlimited RT. 2) The audio doesn't even render, making the whole thing useless anyway.

In order to just save headaches, I convert our MPEG-4 file to AIC with the infinitely-useful MPEG Streamclip. If you're a professional video editor using a Mac and don't have this as part of your tool chain, you're nuts.

Like I said before, Call Recorder for Skype places both streams side-by-side in a single file. That's pretty much what you see when both Carrie and Kate are on screen at the same time:

For those curious as to how we turn that into a single-clip, we just crop the video to the full width and height of Kate and drop it on a second track. In order to do the multi-track switching, I just cut the parts of Track 2 where I want to see both of them:

2013-03-13 20:00:00

Thanks to the help of our stellar Android developer, the Jed Mahonis Group is happy to announce its first app on Google Play! The Android version of the Random Celebrity Generator comes in two flavors: Free and Pro. The free one comes with ads, naturally.

In addition, we updated the iOS version to 1.1 and added 300 celebrities to the mix. Get it today at randomcelebritygenerator.com!

2013-03-13 00:27:24

Apparently, I am a terrible judge of determining which episodes will be successful and which will be total flops. I thought that an episode where we shot zero b-roll, failed to mic one of the participants and lasted for more than 8 minutes would surely be a flop. Fortunately, this is one of the most successful episodes we've aired this year based on social interaction. People have gone out of their way to tell us how helpful this episode was. While I'm sincerely proud of my work and glad I can help people out, I'm still just unable to see why this episode did so well, while other episodes I would assume would be popular just aren't.

Anyway, we've been hoping to have Katie as a featured guest since day one, and I'm really glad we were able to talk her into walking us through her post-workout routine. We actually had to cut a few good parts of the show because we only have two lav mics. We make do with what we have, but it's times like these I wish we had another lav mic and a field mixer. And a quad-copter.

2013-02-14 22:30:55

Sometimes, the best episodes are the ones that get cut together in 10 minutes. When an episode comes together that quickly, that means all of us were on our game. Julie had a great script in place, Carrie was top-notch with her delivery and I was able to luck out with the lighting in the room. I laughed out loud several times while editing this one, and it's only a couple minutes long, so definitely check it out.

2013-01-26 01:14:43

Andrew is a really fun guy to interview, and he and Carrie have a great chat about the cancellation of the NYC Marathon and his unreal performances at the Olympic Trials and the Houston Marathon.

But just in case you're not all that interested in elite athlete recovery, feel free to jump to 4:25, where Carrie says she wants to take a tour of Andrew's apartment. This was, perhaps, one of my favorite spots I've cut for C Tolle Run so far.

2013-01-16 22:42:30

Another cooking episode. I didn't have time to grab our normal tripod, so I had to shoot this with the tripod Dale "found" at the middle school he works at. No wonder they were throwing that thing out.

Also, our wireless lav mics were giving me a lot of problems. I'm almost certain it's interference, which means I need to start getting good at setting the frequencies on those puppies.

On a lighter note, my favorite part of this episode was getting to sample some Midnight Ryder from Indeed Brewing. Some seriously great beer.

2013-01-12 01:56:18

It took me about 3 hours of research and pulling my hair out to try and implement a UIScrollView that just scrolls a bunch of text vertically.

Turns out UIScrollView is for images, and UITextView is for text.

Talk about your ultimate face palm.

2013-01-04 06:59:00

A new year calls for new opening credits. We tried to do something different this year, so we garnered inspiration from The Mindy Project and tried to make things a little more funky. Since it can be overplayed, I was a little worried about doing an episode on New Year's Resolutions. I think that we executed quite well, thanks in no small part to Carrie's personality and the good people who recorded resolutions for us.

2012-12-19 22:52:00

Because the host of our show is pregnant, we thought it would be a perfect opportunity to do a series of episodes that would help mothers-to-be to stay fit and healthy during their pregnancies.

Even if you're not a pregnant woman, you will still really enjoy this episode.

Reason 1: this episode features show-favorite Bill Welle of Welle Fast. Carrie and Bill have a fantastic rapport that absolutely shines on film. The episode actually gets more funny as it goes, so be sure to watch through the end.

Reason 2: even though the exercises are modified to account for her condition, anyone can apply the principles preached in this segment to their own routines.

I really like Bill's approach of throwing additional stabilization moves in with "regular" lifts (e.g. Single-Legged Bicep Curls or Stability Ball Bench Press).

2012-12-14 00:24:12

As someone with enough tech savvy to run an iOS development company, you'd think installing an Xfinity cable box wouldn't be an issue for me, right?

Well, after 2 days of pain, frustration and brainstorming, I finally was able to activate my own cable box without needing to pay the extra $60 to have someone come out to my house to show me how to plug in a coaxial cable.

And, in an effort to save you, the intrepid Googler, some time and energy, I figured I could provide a quick tip for getting your box to work as well.

Here's the problem I was facing: I plugged the box in, hooked in the cables and powered it up. What would happen is the following sequence:

• The data light would hold solid for a few seconds
• The remote light would hold solid for a few secounds
• The power light would hold solid for a few seconds
• The power light would then blink off and on, roughly 14 times
• The power light would then shut off, with apparently no action being taken by the box

Because the physical coaxial cable that runs into our living room is simply awful[1. The cable goes out the window from the basement and through the window in our living room. Yes, the windows are both shut. Yes, the cable looks like a flattened pancake. No, I don't understand why our landlord doesn't just drill a hole through the ceiling and run the cable through that.], I tried plugging the box directly into the line that connects to our cable drop. This resulted in a similar sequence of events.

Frustrated, I started smashing buttons on the remote control provided by Xfinity. I ended up getting into the diagnostic/settings menu, which showed that I wasn't getting any connection to the cable company.

Before giving up and dropping TV from Xfinity, I decided to see what would happen if I utilized the ethernet port provided on the back.

And what do you know? It worked!

So, if you're having problems receiving a signal to your Cisco RNG 100, try running an ethernet cable between your box and your router. After 2 minutes of waiting, the box showed the "Not Authorized" message and I was on my way.

Now, I can finally enjoy standard definition cable on my 46" Sony XBR6[2. Yeah, I should probably upgrade my box to HD. But since I'm probably not going to be watching much cable, and my girlfriend doesn't care, I think I'd be happer with the $10/m]. Horray!

Update (12/18/12): I've noticed that if you disconnect the power to this box and plug it back in, it takes a very long time to boot. It makes no sense to me why Cisco couldn't implement some sort of "loading" screen during boot, but regardless: if your box appears unresponsive, you really should give it a good 10 minutes before freaking out and punching a hole in your drywall.

2012-11-14 05:17:00

This week, we launched version 3 of CTolleRun.com. It's the result of several months of planning, organizing and development, and I thought I would take a few moments to share exactly what we've changed and the process behind it.

Our last redesign of the webpage was earlier this year. Truthfully, the site was rushed out in a hurry because we needed to have something live, so I pushed it out with the intention of upgrading it piece-by-piece down the line. Of course, we never got around to actually upgrading anything, and ultimately, we decided that time would be better spent on re-building from the ground-up.

The biggest conceptual change on the site was to give each episode its own page. This would give us a chance to better showcase our content, as well as drive our SEO. In order to implement this, however, required implementing a more robust, custom CMS¹. Before this redesign, we were able to input the basic information: episode name, description, YouTube link, etc. Now, we are able to add several elements which make each page unique and more appealing for our viewers:

Links Almost every podcast I admire includes a list of links with each episode. This makes it easy to give viewers the chance to dive deeper into a specific topic, as well as share links we've mentioned in the episode. It also allows us to drive more traffic to the photo albums we've uploaded to Facebook.

Featured Guests We have the luxury of having some pretty awesome people on our show. Unfortunately, many of the guests we've had on our show aren't yet household names. Many people know who Kara Goucher is, but not a lot of people recognize Hassan Mead. If a viewer doesn't recognize who they're about to watch, it doesn't give them a lot of incentive to watch the episode.

To combat this, we included a short biography of each guest. We figured it's a simple way to boost viewership of those episodes as well as rank them higher on Google. In the future, I'm hoping to add links to these guest's social media accounts, as well as personal blogs or team pages.

Sponsors Before I became an avid podcast consumer (and creator), I loathed advertising. I ran ad-blockers on all my computers and I skipped over every sponsorship spot I possibly could.

It's really a shame, though, because a lot of the advertisers who throw money at podcasts like ours really seem to get it. They just want to put their product or race in the hands of people who maybe would've never even heard of it otherwise.

It's understandable that you don't want ads shoved down your face, though, which is why we've presented our ads in the ways we have. Each episode with a sponsor gets mentioned at the top of the show, and each sponsor gets an ad permanently embedded on the episode's page. We also have two "title sponsor" spots that are prominently displayed on the main page. That's it.

We think this is win-win-win: we are able to get you in touch with our sponsors, our sponsors are able to get permanent placements of their product and you are able to find out about some cool products, services and races without being hassled.

Social Media A huge focus for this redesign was to better integrate the site with social media. Here's what we did to optimize for our key three networks:

Facebook: If you're a developer, and you're not using Open Graph tags, you're missing out. By using Open Graph tags, we were able to turn our bland-looking links into this:

An added bonus: if you specify the OG tags for og:video and og:video-type, Facebook will embed the YouTube video in-line! Here's the code I used for that: <meta property="og:video" content="http://www.youtube.com/v/<? echo $youtubeID; ?>?version=3&autohide=1" /> <meta property="og:video:type" content="application/x-shockwave-flash" /> Twitter: If you're not simply sharing an article or some photos, Twitter's new Cards functionality is a bit more complex than simply adding OG tags. In order to make a functioning Player Card, Twitter wants you to build a page that gets embedded in an IFRAME. In a similar vein to what we're doing with Facebook, we're standing on the shoulders of giants and simply embedding YouTube's Player Card with our episode ID passed through: <meta name="twitter:card" content="player" /> <meta name="twitter:site" content="@CTolleRun" /> <meta name="twitter:player" content="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ echo $youtubeID; ?>" /> <meta name="twitter:player:width" content="640" /> <meta name="twitter:player:height" content="360" />

And out comes this:

Note that the Twitter Card API requires the use of twitter:title, twitter:description, twitter:image and so forth. Thankfully, if you're already using og:title, og:description, og:image and so forth, you don't need to re-include them.

Pinterest: Unfortunately, Pinterest doesn't have a public-facing API yet. Essentially, all we can do is include a "Pin It" button for each episode. We'd really like to get a bigger presence on Pinterest, however, because it seems like a good portion of our target audience is there. Here's hoping for that API soon!

A note about Google+, App.net, etc.: I think it's important to not get too crazy with social networks. Sure, it's easy enough to drop a +1 button on each page, as well as a hundred other buttons. However, for each service you include, you're not only adding more visual clutter to your page; you're increasing the page's load time by executing a hundred different pieces of remote Javascript code.

If we get a huge demand to add another service to our site, or if Facebook loses a million followers, we'll go there. We're not dummies, but we're also not in the business of predicting which services will be the best. Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest seem to be our best options today. We'll adapt as time goes on.

More Robust RSS Feeds Our RSS feeds (video and audio) aren't the most popular way to get our episodes², but it's my personal favorite, so I made an effort to optimize this experience as well. Each item in the feed includes the linked list as well as the episode's sponsors. We also include the file size and run time of each episode, which means the fancy podcast clients will be able to show that information without any big-city processing on their end.

MailChimp We converted our mailing list over to the incomparable MailChimp. It's everything you could possibly want in a mailing list provider, but for free. My only gripe with them thus far is that the templates aren't 100% customizable, but it's just about the only fault I can find with them. Seriously, if you do mailing lists, you should be doing them through MailChimp.

Front Page Slide Show Whenever a client requests a rotating slide show, my go-to choice has always been Nivo Slider. For this project, however, I needed a solution that allowed me to use two <div> tags for a caption (one on top, one on bottom). With Nivo Slider, the solution I came up with was to put two smaller <div>'s into 1 giant <div>. Unfortunately, that meant the image wasn't clickable, which defeated the purpose of the slider.

I tried a few different sliders and ultimately settled on Camera by Pixedelic. This awesome slider allowed me to place as many <div>'s (or any other kind of crazy mark-up) on top of the image while maintaining its clickablilty. My only gripe is that the slideshow doesn't work as well in IE, which is, of course, no surprise to anyone.

Internet Explorer Fixes Speaking of every web developer's best friend, Internet Explorer provided the majority of trouble for this redesign. I kept getting alignment issues with IE while using Nathan Smith's excellent 960 Grid System, so instead of learning a whole new system (like the Responsive Grid System which I'm highly considering for future projects), I just added the <meta> tag which forces IE to render everything as if its IE7 (even if you're on a newer version):

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" />

Of course, this is a very inelegant solution, but I'm just sick of wasting so much time making sites look good in IE when every other browser (even Opera) gives me less guff.

Embedded Tweets in the Footer It's all about keeping your site fresh and up to date, right? I thought the best way to do this was to write a script that cached our latest Tweet server-side. I'm not sure if it fully complies with the infamous Rules of the Road, but since our use doesn't really allow for tons of Branding®©™, I think we'll be okay.

I ended up using WebcodingEasy.com's fantastic Convert twitter created_at time format to ago format script to make our time appear like Twitter's "12 minutes ago" format, as well as another open source script (which I, embarrassingly, can't find right now) to convert all tweeted links into clickable links.

The toughest part was writing the Tweet caching script. Essentially, my script reads a Tweet which was saved onto the sever from the Twitter API. When it's saved, I append a variable called cached_Tweet_Time along with the current server time. When someone loads the footer, it will read the cached Tweet and check the time. If it's less than a minute old, the script returns the Tweet from the server. If it's more than a minute old, it fetches a Tweet from Twitter. If anyone is interested in the source code, let me know and I'll post it here.

In the future, I'd like to append the script so it only returns Tweets which aren't "at-replies".

In Conclusion This has been one of the most ambitious site designs I've ever completed³, and I am quite pleased with how it has turned out. Front-end design has never been my strong suit; in fact, most of my designs end up looking the same. This time, however, I forced myself to look outside of my wheelhouse and try something new. I hope you guys like it, and if you have any questions, let me know.

2012-10-31 00:23:55

It's always a treat when event directors bring us out to document their race. This is the third time we've been out to the Columbus Marathon, and every time I go, it makes me want to race it. I've never seen so many people run across the finish line with smiles on their faces.

2012-10-17 22:13:14

I really enjoyed myself at this race. My girlfriend assisted on this shoot by running the entire course with a GoPro strapped to her head (thanks honey). The only horror-themed piece I've ever done was back in high school, so it was fun to try something different. If I had more time, I think I would've re-done the graphics package to be red instead of green, and I would've done an organ/halloween-style remix to the theme song to play over the closing credits, but all-in-all, I think this was a fun piece.

2012-10-01 10:12:26

KARE 11 used some of my b-roll from last year's Bolder Options 5k on their Run with KARE segment this past Friday. The footage begins around 2:30.

I'm very happy that I'm able to work for such a worthy organization. If you're looking for a fun 5k next September, you should definitely check it out.

2012-08-30 07:29:00

What a fantastic race to film. Besides having a 1:1 ratio of volunteers to participants, driving awareness to endurance sports in rural America and simply outstanding weather, the race was organized by a college sophomore. Not many races I've filmed have gone off with this ease, and I think that's a testament to Luke's skill as a race director.

Be sure to watch all the way to the end, as Ruby shows off, yet again, why she's poised to take over as host once Carrie retires from her broadcasting career.

2012-08-10 00:59:59

We launched the Jed Mahonis Group's company webpage yesterday. I still have some work that I want to do on it, primarily in the copy-editing and photography portions, but I think it's a great start.

And frankly, it looks much better than the old splash page we used.

2012-08-08 23:59:54

Peak training is my personal favorite phase of marathon training. I loved being able to see the results of running all the hills and fartleks during the power phase.

If you're looking to run a marathon, you should watch this series of videos. It's a good overview of what you should be doing in the 16 weeks leading up to your big day.

2012-08-08 05:20:52

We filmed Kara and Adam during Grandma's Marathon this year, and let me tell you, it wasn't a fun trip. I had both mono and pink eye the entire trip, so any time I wasn't behind the camera, I was passed out on the hotel bed.

But I really enjoyed the opportunity to meet the Gouchers. I did my best to stay out of their way; the last thing Kara needed before running in the Olympics was mono or pink eye. I did, however, get to chat with Adam for a couple of minutes about knee problems. He has such a positive outlook on his life after running, especially when his career was as riddled with injuries as mine.

I hope you enjoy this interview and if you're in the market for an inspirational running book (and who isn't?), definitely give Run the Edge a read.

2012-07-27 00:50:00

Speaking with a bit of authority, I'd say this is a pretty good coverage of Ralph's best moments. Although personally, I think they could've replaced anything after season 10 with something a bit more wrigley.

2012-07-25 05:45:00

Heart-wrenching documentary by AT&T on the importance of not texting while driving. I first saw this a few months ago and I immediately changed my driving habits. I hope you all do as well.

2012-07-23 21:09:27

When it comes to gun control, I think this point by Jason Alexander is certainly valid to the knee-jerk reaction of "If X kills people, why don't we ban that?"

I'm hoping that right after they hit send, they take a deep breath and realize that those arguments are completely specious. I believe tomatoes and cars have purposes other than killing. What purpose does an AR-15 serve to a sportsman that a more standard hunting rifle does not serve? Let's see - does it fire more rounds without reload? Yes. Does it fire farther and more accurately? Yes. Does it accommodate a more lethal payload? Yes. So basically, the purpose of an assault style weapon is to kill more stuff, more fully, faster and from further away. To achieve maximum lethality. Hardly the primary purpose of tomatoes and sports cars.

I don't think there should be a permaban on all weapons. Obviously, there are good reasons the militia clause is in the constitution. I just really fail to see why anybody should be allowed to easily purchase assault rifles of that caliber.

2012-07-23 19:49:32

To photojournalism purists, it was pure blasphemy: a prestigious prize, third place for photo of the year, granted to a New York Times photographer who’d used not a 35mm to document U.S. soldiers in Iraq, but simply, his iPhone — and an app called Hipstamatic. Immediately, traditionalists went berserk: “What we knew as photojournalism at its purest form is over,” one photojournalist lamented. Using Hipstamatic in a news report, another commentator proclaimed, was “cheating us all.”

I struggled trying to decide whether or not to put some iPhone photos in my portfolio. I decided that it was worth including them because 2012, as it has always been, the best camera is the one you have with you. I don't always need to use my SLR to capture photos that are meaningful to me and (hopefully) captivating to someone else.

2012-07-23 19:40:41

The post which inspired the blog. I've been very into building a savings and preparing for the future, and this site combined with Mint have been indispensable in that quest.

If you want to buy a house, travel the world, pay off loans or retire some day, read this post, subscribe to the website, get Mint and start today.

2012-07-23 19:34:02

Where does Neutral Milk Hotel fit on this spectrum?

Artists whose fans are most correlated to Republican

1. Kenny Chesney
2. George Strait
3. Reba McEntire
4. Tim McGraw
5. Jason Aldean
6. Blake Shelton
7. Shania Twain
8. Kelly Clarkson
9. Pink Floyd
10. Elvis Presley

Artists whose fans are most correlated to Democrat

1. Rihanna
2. Jay-Z
3. Madonna
4. Lady Gaga
5. Katy Perry
6. Snoop Dogg
7. Chris Brown
8. Usher
9. Eminem
10. Bob Marley

2012-07-23 19:30:44

Some great behind-the-scenes insight behind the last year of Netflix.

It's interesting that 2 years ago, everybody absolutely had to have a Netflix subscription. Now, with rival services like Hulu Plus and Amazon Prime catching up to their instant watch selection, Netflix isn't as crucial anymore.

Jonathan Friedland, the new vice president of global corporate communications who had joined Netflix just a few months earlier, asked whether customers on tight incomes might object to the price hike, according to people at Hastings' meeting. Hastings argued that Netflix was a great bargain. He said he knew that some customers would complain but that the number would be small and the anger would quickly fade.

Hastings was wrong. The price hike and the later, aborted attempt to spin off the company's DVD operations enraged Netflix customers. The company lost 800,000 subscribers, its stock price dropped 77 percent in four months, and management's reputation was battered. Hastings went from Fortune magazine's Businessperson of the Year to the target of Saturday Night Live satire.

2012-07-13 21:33:00

About a year and a half ago, on a trip to California with the boys of Koo Koo Kanga Roo, the duo and their manager were discussing podcasts.

Of course, I knew what a podcast was[1. And not just because I make one.]. I just really didn't understand the appeal of audio podcasts. I figured it was like talk radio: only old fogeys who don't like music listen to them.

But reluctantly, I downloaded a few episodes of The Nerdist and from there, the Music app on my iPhone was being used less and less compared to Instacast.

If you don't like talk radio but you enjoy getting into hour-long discussions on very nerdy topics like the intricacies of various calendar apps, the real cost of traveling to Mars and why the LIBOR scandal could get ugly quickly, then you are only fooling yourself: you actually like podcasts, but just don't know it yet.

In an attempt to make it easier for others to get into podcasts, here are a few of my favorite podcasts and why you would like them.

Build and Analyze Software Development, Self-Employment, Coffee, Babies A show for iOS developers hosted by Marco Arment, the creator of Instapaper and Tumblr, and Dan Benjamin, the creator of 5by5. Dan and Marco frame most of their discussions through the lens of Instapaper and 5by5, which is incredibly helpful for other developers or entrepreneurs in general. Show Website

StarTalk Radio Astrophysics Neil DeGrasse-Tyson, an astrophysicist and incredibly well-spoken man, teams up with guests to talk about everything related to the universe. Typically, the show features a co-host comedian, like Chuck Nice or Eugene Mirman, and a slew of experts in whatever field is being discussed, like astronaut Mike Massimino. Show Website

The Talk Show Apple, Technology The Talk Show, in its current iteration, features John Gruber of Daring Fireball with a different guest each episode. After a rough transition from its previous iteration (hosted by John and Dan Benjamin), the show is really starting to hit its stride. If you're a fan of Daring Fireball, there's no reason not to be listening to this show every week. Show Website

Planet Money Finance I've never really been interested in finance and how money works, but this show does a great job of presenting drab topics in a highly-engaging format. The episodes are quite easy to digest as well, most being around 15 minutes. Show Website

Running From the Law Endurance Sports, Small Business Law Combining two things that seemingly don't go together, Running From the Law splits their shows in half, giving equal footing to both of their main topics. The show is hosted by Erika Hall, co-founder of Mule Design Studio, and Gabe Levine, business lawyer. Show Website

Home Work Working from Home, Entrepreneur A relatively new show, Aaron Mahnke and Dave Caolo talk about the joys and agonies of being self-employed. The show goes beyond simply suggesting how to be more productive from home; they also discuss topics such as staying fit at home, staying educated in your field and communicating with the "real" world. Show Website

Freakonomics Radio Economics, Finance Hosted by the authors of the book, Freakonomics Radio picks up from where the book left off, where the authors use economics to show that what we consider "common sense" is sometimes anything but. Show Website

You Look Nice Today General Tomfoolery YLNT is the epitome of the general perception of the early days of podcasting: three guys sitting around microphones late at night, drinking and making stuff up. The difference? They actually do it well. Very well. Show Website

If you have any suggestions for me of shows to check out (especially any shows about video production), please drop me a line.

2012-07-09 21:53:21

The photos that the special effects company posted to Facebook are just adorable.

2012-07-07 01:31:26

The great part about this article isn't just the old guys spiting the "man"; the great part is the amount of detail going into these recordings:

"You just don't go in and say, 'Hey guys, let's record it,' and it's done in three minutes," [frontman Joe] Elliott notes. "We had to study those songs, I mean down to the umpteenth degree of detail, and make complete forgeries of them."

2012-07-07 01:28:00

This was when I was roughly 4, and yet I very vividly remember the buzz surrounding the 1992 Dream Team. This article is a great biography of the team and offers a ton of insider stories. According to the article, the Dream Team (consisting of the greats of that era, including Jordan, Bird, Barkley, Malone, Ewing, etc.) faced off for the first time together against a bunch of college players (consisting of future stars like Penny Hardaway and Chris Webber). In that game, the college guys upset the greats in the 4th quarter. A few days later, they had a rematch:

Charles Barkley: We sent them a little message.

Chris Webber: We didn't score a point. Not one point. Not a point on a free throw, not a point in the game. We were the perfect wake-up call for them, and they were the perfect reality check for us.

2012-07-07 01:20:52

Like Omar Sharif materializing out of the shimmering desert as a man on a camel in “Lawrence of Arabia,” the elusive boson has been coming slowly into view since last winter, as the first signals of its existence grew until they practically jumped off the chart.

This is major, major news. If you don't know what the Higgs boson is, this article gives a great summary of what it is and the history of its discovery.

2012-07-04 05:10:00

I don't think I'd ever have the chutzpah[1. Perhaps not the right word choice for a story about the Hezbollah...] to do this. A great piece by Mitchell Prothero.

We figured they’d cheat; they were Hezbollah, after all. But none of us—a team of four Western journalists—thought we’d be dodging military-grade flash bangs when we initiated this “friendly” paintball match.

The battle takes place underground in a grungy, bunker-like basement underneath a Beirut strip mall. When the grenades go off it’s like being caught out in a ferocious thunderstorm: blinding flashes of hot white light, blasts of sound that reverberate deep inside my ears.

As my eyesight returns and readjusts to the dim arena light, I poke out from my position behind a low cinder-block wall. Two large men in green jumpsuits are bearing down on me. I have them right in my sights, but they seem unfazed—even as I open fire from close range, peppering each with several clear, obvious hits. I expect them to freeze, maybe even acknowledge that this softie American journalist handily overcame their flash-bang trickery and knocked them out of the game. Perhaps they’ll even smile and pat me on the back as they walk off the playing field in a display of good sportsmanship (after cheating, of course).

Instead, they shoot me three times, point-blank, right in the groin.

2012-07-02 03:56:54

An American man, with no legs, has reached the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro by walking to the top on his hands.

Inspirational.

2012-07-02 03:50:00

MP3s are so natural to the Internet now that it’s almost hard to imagine a time before high-quality compressed music. But there was such a time—and even after "MP3" entered the mainstream, organizing, ripping, and playing back one's music collection remained a clunky and frustrating experience.

Enter Winamp, the skin-able, customizable MP3 player that "really whips the llama's ass." In the late 1990s, every music geek had a copy; llama-whipping had gone global, and the big-money acquisition offers quickly followed. AOL famously acquired the company in June 1999 for $80-$100 million—and Winamp almost immediately lost its innovative edge.

Winamp's 15-year anniversary is now upon us, with little fanfare. It’s almost as if the Internet has forgotten about the upstart with the odd slogan that looked at one time like it would be the company to revolutionize digital music. It certainly had the opportunity.

Who among us didn't use WinAMP before we all had iPods? I remember carefully editing my ID3 tags, crafting playlists for my Cybiko and, of course, building my own skins.¹ This is a must-read article by Cyrus Farivar at Ars Technica for three reasons. First, it's a happy tale of an entrepreneur building something for themselves, really sweating the details to make it perfect and becoming a huge success for it. Second, it's a sad tale of how Nullsoft's decline correlated with that of AOL.² Third, and most importantly, the story ends with a reminder of just how powerful the international markets can be. Any developer building something that's intended for the mass market needs to be building support for other languages and cultures into their apps.

2012-07-02 03:34:00

I'm currently on a lifetime abstention from McDonalds, but even I must admit my stomach growled a little bit after watching them craft that burger. My favorite part is ever-so-slight injection of ketchup and mustard into the front of the burger.

2012-05-06 12:04:00

I like to keep a copy of every photo I've taken with an iPhone synced to my phone, mostly because there have been multiple times when I want to show somebody something I've taken with my camera phone and I've been bit in the butt because it's not on there. I do this by making smart folders that correspond to each phone, so I have folder for iPhone 2G Photos, one for iPhone 3GS photos and one for iPhone 4S photos. After a recent trip to Europe, I glanced at the photo count in each of those folders, and, well, look for yourself:

• iPhone 2G Pictures: 893
• iPhone 3GS Pictures: 955
• iPhone 4GS Pictures: 1,173
  

For a little fun, why don't we break it down by average photos per day:

• iPhone 2G: 893 photos / 801 days = 1.11 photos per day
• iPhone 3GS: 955 photos / 778 days = 1.23 photos per day
• iPhone 4GS: 1162 photos / 194 days = 5.99 photos per day
  

To be fair, I've used my camera a lot more in the last few months due to multiple factors that may not have existed while owning my other phones (trips to Jamaica/Europe, social media requirements for my job, etc.) But I consider myself to be a camera nerd and I would not be using this camera for those purposes if I didn't think they took adequate-looking photos (which, let's face it, the definition of adequate is a lot different for me than it is for your average iPhone user).

2012-04-10 04:02:22

"We are not saying we want to be given anything," says resident Kathy Goss. "We found our own potential solutions and we are willing to pay what it takes to get the hardware installed."

If the target audience for your app/video/network/website is "everybody", then you have to keep people like this in mind. Just because they live in the middle on nowhere doesn't mean they are A) stupid or B) poor. They, very simply, might just lack the resources to have a high-speed internet connection.

It wasn't too long ago that we all were trapped by 56k connections. Hell, it was only 2006 that I had to leave my computer on overnight to download a CD, and that was a paltry 50 megabyte download. Today, you have websites serving up 150 megabyte video downloads or serving all their graphics as 3 megabyte JPEGs.

I try to remember those days as best I can while designing websites today. Get your users to the content as fast as humanly possible. Then go ahead and add all your HTML5 gobbledy-goo.

2012-04-04 23:13:00

Here’s something no one has stopped to consider: Maybe making movies is too damn expensive. Or rather, far more expensive than it needs to be.

After SOPA and PIPA, Hollywood now looks like a dinosaur, and as out of touch as someone trying to kill the radio or home video cassettes. Venture capital firms are actually now actively looking to fund companies with the aim of dismantling the industry, as the current model of movie making seems outdated. The internet is producing a talented crop of filmmakers working on shoestring budgets, hungry to get themselves noticed.

Perhaps A-list actors do not need multi-multi-million dollar salaries when there are thousands of hardworking amateurs trying to get noticed. Perhaps not every graphic novel and board game needs $100M or $200M thrown at it in order to become a feature film when there are hundreds of creative, original screenplays that get tossed in the trash. Perhaps you don’t need to spend an additional $100M marketing a movie when everyone is fast-forwarding through commercials and has AdBlock on their browsers.

The most baffling thing about the entertainment industry today is that by being so scared of totally collapsing, they are just standing still while the ground under their feet collapses.

2012-03-10 00:17:21

It's almost election season, and I'm hoping that the ads this year will be up to the ... caliber ... of the following spots: