About Tim Bornholdt

2024-11-21 12:30:00

I've been wanting to make a blog post that I keep updated with what albums I'm currently bumping, and then I saw this website get linked the other day and figured it would actually force me to do this.

For now, head over to Album Whale if you wanna see what albums I'd recommend you check out. Many of these are from 2024, so go ahead and call it my "best of" list even if it includes Dookie and Nevermind lmao

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-11-18 23:29:20

It's very, very rare that I see people calling for peace in any meaningful way.

For a long time, I thought it was because war was seen as a separate issue to sustainability, which is probably true to some extent, but I'm increasingly getting the sense that people are actually afraid to talk about it. In an increasingly polarised world, caring people are often harshly criticised for saying anything that goes against the prevailing state propaganda, or for even suggesting that there is propaganda.

I'm here to make the case that us sustainability folk should stop ignoring the uncomfortable topic of war and look at it through the lens of people and planet. When we do so, it quickly becomes apparent that no matter what your political views, peace is a fundamental requirement of a sustainable world.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-11-16 21:10:00

My family and I love going to Barnes and Noble whenever we stop at the Mall of America.

For the first several years of their lives, whenever we'd enter the doors of that prime Rotunda location, the kids and I would make a beeline to the train table situated all the way to the back.

It felt a natural path, a re-routing of the natural path I used to take whenever I'd enter the Borders bookstore that no longer exists by my own parent's house.

At Borders, I'd make a beeline for the tech books. I remember peeking at every single one, from A+ certification manuals to Web Pages That Suck (a book that I checked out from the library half a dozen times). To me, there might as well have been no other sections in the store.

As I get older, I'm finding myself questioning these paths that I take. The well-worn path worked great for an era of my life, but sometimes, it's fun to venture onto something new.

My kids are older now, but they still run into Barnes and Noble with the same gusto they've had for years. The difference is that they're old enough to run ahead of me.

This means I can take my time, which I use to slowly scan over all the books displayed in stacks on tables in the aisle.

A few weeks ago, I noticed a book called What My Mother and I Don't Talk About. It's a collection of essays from 15 different writers about their relationships with their mothers.

This style of book perfectly meshes with my preferred approach of reading: instead of one theme carried across 300 pages, each chapter is its own contained, complete thought. It really felt like I was burning through my Instapaper queue.

And of course, the stories told in these essays were tragic, beautiful, and every feeling in between.

It's hard not to read these stories and reflect on my relationship with my own mother. At a minimum, I am grateful that I don't have an especially painful or abusive relationship like several expressed. Maybe someday, I'll pen my own essay and share it with my mom before she passes.

But until then, I'll have to bask in the wisdom shared in this book.

Some of the highlights:

I really enjoyed Kiese Laymon's "While These Things / Feel American To Me", with this timely evaluation of life in this country:

The problem in this country is not that we fail to "get along" with people, parties, and politics with which we disagree. The problem is that we are horrific at justly loving the people, places, and politics we purport to love.

As someone grappling with letting go of my own traumas, this quote from Brandon Taylor's "All About My Mother" is a helpful observation:

It's strange, really, that to grasp that which has hurt you, you must trust it not to hurt you when you let it inhabit you.

And finally, two observations from the final essay in the book, Leslie Jamison's "I Met Fear On The Hill". First, on love:

This pride comes from the same internal place as the delusion I spent much of my young adulthood believing: that it is better to be the one desired more, rather than the one doing more desiring. As if love were a contest; as if desire were fixed, or absolute; as if either position could insulate you from being harmed or causing harm; as if being in control could insulate you from anything.

And finally, on the importance of telling your truth:

We get so used to the stories we tell about ourselves. This is why we sometimes need to find ourselves in the stories of others.

I highly recommend reading this book, and then if you're lucky enough, go give your mom a hug.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-11-16 12:27:00

I’m in the midst of a media cleanse. This started before the election when I canceled my Washington Post subscription. Jeff Bezos can do whatever he wants with the Washington Post, and he’s 100% correct that I don’t trust large media organizations.

After the election, I removed all news sources from Feedly except the Atlantic because I find their writing informative and compelling.

A friend calls this turtling. Pulling your head inside your shell and hiding. It’s quite comfortable here. With most of my free time, I’m leveling a dragon Holy Priest in World of Warcraft. #ama

I’ve slowly retreated from all social media with the exception of LinkedIn since around the time of the first Trump presidency.

Today, my only social presence is on LinkedIn, and even there, I’m not nearly as active as I used to be.

I think it’s mainly because when I would share an article like this one with my thoughts, I’d get next to no replies to it. There’s very little incentive for me to want to share things if I’m all but guaranteed no one will see it.

On here, though? I’ll at least get an occasional message from someone who liked an article I shared. In fact, it’s way more meaningful when I do, because it always leads to a deeper conversation.

Reading blog entries and books and long-form essays like those shared on The Atlantic are like eating salad compared to the fast food that people keep trying to cram down our throats in the form of incendiary attacks on people who are different from us.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-11-14 10:42:00

Interestingly, most of the people who’ve heard me say this over the last year or so think that I’m complaining or lamenting the situation, but I’m actually excited about it. That malaise by the big players in tech a generation ago yielded an exciting and inspiring new wave of innovations. While much of the money in big tech was chasing distractions back in 2004, many communities of small, independent creators on the open web were making the new pillars of web culture — many of which are still standing to this day.

Every year, the batteries in the iPhone get bigger and more capable. Instead of giving those gains back to us, as users, they instead take more and more advantage of the gains so the relative battery life stays the same (about 10 hours).

If you look at the payloads of any major website (let’s pick on the New York Times), you’ll likely see that less than 1% of the bandwidth goes to the actual text of the article. The rest goes toward ad tracking crap and all kinds of JavaScript nonsense.

The difference between 2004 and 2024 is that we have large amounts of insanely powerful, compact computers spread across the entire planet.

That, combined with more powerful servers and cheap hosting, should really allow us to build the cool stuff people are looking for again.

Which, at a time when it feels like the world around us is imploding, gives me a lot of hope.

We built Geocities pages on IE 4 back then. We can do a lot of good with Rails 8.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-11-13 02:12:06

If I walked into the Dakota Jazz Club and heard this, I’m not sure how I’d be able to go about living the next day.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-11-12 22:11:27

I started a new job as a software engineer last month.

It’s the first job I’ve ever had where all I need to do is write code. I don’t need to worry about finding customers, protecting the company from lawsuits, ensuring the product is the correct product to build, or making payroll.

All I need to do is write code.

This is the first time in my career where I can actually focus on the art of writing good code.

I came across this article from Simon Willison’s blog, and boy, there are a lot of great pieces of advice for folks in my position here.

As a junior engineer, there's simply no substitute for getting the first 100K lines of code under your belt. The "start over each day" method will help get you to those 100K lines faster.

You might think covering the same ground multiple times isn't as valuable as getting 100K diverse lines of code. I disagree. Solving the same problem repeatedly is actually really beneficial for retaining knowledge of patterns you figure out.

You only need 5K perfect lines to see all the major patterns once. The other 95K lines are repetition to rewire your neurons.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-11-12 21:21:41

For a miracle to happen in your life all that is needed is your belief that the universe has acted on your behalf and for your welfare.

So, begin by keeping a journal where you note down all such instances in your life. This is stuff that you previously dismissed as a coincidence or perhaps did not notice at all.

For example, you remember an old friend you have lost touch with and determine to call him. And you receive an email from him later the same day. You forgot to make a reservation for the dinner with your husband’s boss and it turns out that he had an emergency, and the dinner has to be rescheduled. You go to your favorite restaurant and the dish you like is not available. The waiter suggests a substitute and you love it.

Constantly look, look, look for signs that the universe is dancing with you. You see a rainbow after a rain squall and your spirit lifts. You are trying to enter a busy highway and a driver slows down and flashes his light to let you know you can merge in. The latch on your screen door is not working and you make a mental note to get it fixed. The next day it is functioning perfectly again.

Record all of this in your journal. You will have a dozen or more examples each day.

For the last decade or so, I’ve operated under the assumption that the universe was indifferent.¹

I like this reframe a lot. Maybe the universe is indifferent, but that’s all the more reason to be grateful when things work out in your favor.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-11-11 01:26:09

It is possible to be empowered to work how you want (Autonomy), to be leveraging your skills and expertise (Mastery), and to be proud of your role in a cause (Purpose / Why), and yet still dislike every day of your existence. More than contentment (ikigai), you need Joy.

Not only is this possible, it is common. There’s the classic example of the startup founder who wakes up six years into the journey, realizing she’s been surreptitiously brought to a boil, burned out, dreading each day, drinking too much “to turn my brain off so I can sleep” but actually because she’s deeply unhappy.

What I enjoyed about this article was the Venn diagram showing you need to find something at the intersection of joy, skill, and need. If you only intersect two of the three, you will fall into a specific trap.

For instance, if you have joy and need but not skill, you are falling for “indulgent failure”. Or if you want the recipe for classic burn out, take skill and need but leave out joy.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-11-09 11:45:22

Many of us have looked back on historic events where people have bravely stood up against powerful adversaries and wondered, “what would I have done?” Now is your chance to find out. It did not just start with this election; it has been that time for a long time. If you’re just realizing it now, get your ass in gear. Make yourself proud.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-11-03 01:34:00

Friends, I encourage you to publish more, indirectly meaning you should write more and then share it.

It’d be best to publish your work in some evergreen space where you control the domain and URL. Then publish on masto-sky-formerly-known-as-linked-don and any place you share and comment on.

You don’t have to change the world with every post. You might publish a quick thought or two that helps encourage someone else to try something new, listen to a new song, or binge-watch a new series.

It’s a real gift to see my friends post stuff online. Go post more!

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-11-02 08:28:00

I got a message from my group chat with my boys. I looked at the Apple Intelligence-generated summary and it said:

(3) Flying too close to the sun, experiencing AI chaos.

I think this is my current favorite implementation of AI because it makes the messaging experience completely unpredictable.

Like, what could that summary actually be about?

What series of three messages could that unravel to?

Apple Intelligence (and most generative AI tools) work really well when the text is predictable. Business cases are perfect for these summarizations, because business talk is relatively predictable (what with its “action items” and “agendas” and whatnot).

A group chat filled with inside jokes is not gonna make sense to an AI unless it’s been trained to do so.

Which has led to one of the best messaging experiences I’ve experienced in decades: trying to guess from the AI-generated summary what the individual texts will actually say.

Some examples:

(3) Tired and wants candy before 8:45am, stuck on a song.

(3) Item unavailable due to legal holding period for used goods.

(9) Kirk on 8th, guest room set up, Sam may forgive Pat, Aldi groceries ordered.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-11-01 23:34:00

• It's amazing how fast my mental health torpedoes when I get a terrible night of sleep.

• One parenting tip that's helped me cope with big emotions: reframe the situation from "you versus me" to "us versus the problem." It's not "why did you clog the toilet and let poop water overflow over the edge," it's "how can we make it so our toilet doesn't get clogged with an entire roll of toilet paper anymore?" Ask me how I came up with that specific scenario!

• Focus remains a challenge for me. I would love nothing more than to be able to set a schedule and stick to it, but when I go to sit down and honor the schedule, my body does everything in its power to stop me in my tracks. I can't tell why... maybe there's something more wrong with me, maybe I'm not disciplined enough. Maybe it's something else.

• Much of my 2024 experience involved adding a new entry to the list of questions that cycle in my inner monologue: "are these feelings just a part of the human experience, or is there a way to better way to process and cope with these feelings?"

• There's a quote by Yohji Yamamoto that goes, "Start copying what you love. Copy, copy, copy, copy. And at the end of the copy, you will find yourself." I wrote that down nearly two decades ago, and it's only in the last few months that I've started to understand what it means.

• My inability to manage tasks is what likely led to me getting sick going into my anniversary trip to New York. Everything is a choice, and sometimes, you gotta be okay with the consequences of the choices you make. I decided to spend an entire afternoon shopping and playing pull tabs at our old neighborhood bar with my wife instead of building graphics for a show I worked on. Then I had to stay up until 11pm building those graphics. Was it worth it? ...absolutely.

• If you ever want to see a masterclass in problem solving, go sit in the booth during a live television broadcast.

• Of all the terrifying places on earth, the one which still frightens me the most is sleeping in an unfamiliar bed.

• I'd like to further explore the intersection of fear and confidence.

• I spent a few days in New York, and it was fascinating to see the role that selfishness plays in that culture. In the midwest, cooperativeness is a necessity... if you were a dick to your neighbor in the summer, he might not wanna lend you firewood when you're freezing to death in the winter. In New York, everyone's selfishness stands in as a proxy for respect. People are curt not out of hostility, but as if to say "I won't take up any more of your time than I need to."

• I've known my wife for nearly 14 years now, and it took all this time to feel like I understand her. And now that I do, I love her even more, and I'm so lucky to have been married to her for a decade.

• I watched the entire "Mr. McMahon" docu-series on Netflix in a couple days (thanks Covid lol), and there was a moment in there where Shawn Michaels was talking about the kickback they were receiving from parents in the late 90s. His philosophy at the time was "if you don't like it, be a parent and ban your kids from watching it." Now that he has kids, he's realizing that you can't exactly do that. We can't shelter our kids from the realities of our society. There's so much good and so much bad that we are exposed to in our lives, and it's our job as parents not to shelter our kids from it, but help them learn how to navigate it.

• That being said: I loved the attitude era. I loved the campy stories of irreverent punks beating up their bosses, sticking up for themselves, meting out their own brand of vigilante justice. It is (and was) also super messed up. It can be both of those things.

• In the past, starting something new meant I should make huge, sweeping changes to my entire life. New job? That must also mean new exercise routine, new meal habits, and new hobbies. 36 year old Tim realizes that I can only bite off so much, and it would be more sustainable to focus on doing well at my new job, and then taking on new challenges once I am settled in.

• I like to think that if the famous writers throughout history had the same tech as us, they'd have their own RSS feeds and publish their own thoughts frequently on their blogs.

• There was a moment last week where I was grilling wings and watching my wife try to get our new moped running, my son argue about being outside (it was gorgeous out and I made him get off of Minecraft to enjoy it lol), and my daughter raise hell with the neighbor kids. I was listening to a new album, and reflecting on how much fun I had at work learning new stuff all week. That's when it dawned on me: "I've made it."

• I don't think my parents and teachers growing up were wrong to focus on teaching us skills we need to survive in this world. I just wish they'd also have taught us how to enjoy things, too.

• Dreamworks is more than capable of serving as stiff competition to the Disney empire. The Wild Robot was really good! I wish there were more studios cranking out enjoyable, emotionally-charged stories catered toward a family audience in animated form.

• RuPaul often says, "if you can't love yourself, how in the hell are you gonna love someone else?" I find it difficult to love myself. All the techniques I've used to address my debilitating impostor syndrome involve some variant of tough love, and believe it or not: that never really helped me much. What's working for me currently is talking to myself the way I talk to my kids. Be positive. Focus on what you can change. Be humble and admit when you need help. And be there for others when they need you, too.

• I've struggled most of my life with feeling art. I look at a painting and can only see it at a purely technical level, as if knowing why an artist used a specific brand of acrylic paint explains the motivation behind the work. I've typically been more fascinated with how people do things rather than what message they're trying to convey. All this to say: I watched Jumanji again for the first time in years last week. I've seen that movie at least two dozen times, and I was legitimately spooked by it. Mid-20s Tim would watch that movie and think "I wonder how they pulled off that stampede shot inside the house?" Early-30s Tim would watch that movie and think, "were people in the 60s so into themselves that they didn't notice a child wandering into an active construction site and retrieving a treasure chest that was there in plain sight?" This time, I just felt myself as each of the characters. How it would feel to lose my parents in a car accident. How it would feel as a busy aunt who suddenly has to deal with two children. How it would feel to be a hunter whose only motivation is to murder the person who rolled the dice.

• I was raised to understand that love is showing someone how to avoid mistakes. As I reflect on that, I'd amend that belief to say that love is helping someone learn from their own mistakes and being there for them with firm support when they do screw up.

• Alexi Pappas once said, "Whenever you’re chasing a big dream, you’re supposed to feel good a third of the time, okay a third of the time, and crappy or not great a third of the time, and if you feel roughly in those ratios, it means you are in fact chasing a dream." I've been slowly working my way back into running shape, and I can confirm that I feel that way in those ratios.

• Running at 5:30a means I get to wander through my neighborhood and see everyone’s festive and spooky Halloween decorations instead of everyone’s political signs.

• One of the hardest aspects of being a software engineer is that the implementation details of your job change all the time. Did you know that in Ruby, if you pass variables into a method with the same name as the method is expecting (like a_method(property_1: property_1, foo: foo)), you can shorthand it to be like a_method(property_1:, foo:)? I learned that this week!

• If art is finding a way to express what is rattling around in your head to others, then maybe writing code is actually my artistic expression.

• When it comes to empathy, I've never struggled with the "getting into someone's mind" part. What I've struggle with is accepting that the other person's point of view is valid. And I'm still working on that.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-11-01 18:48:00

System of a Down holds a very special place in my heart.

I was in seventh grade when Toxicity was released. I remember sitting in church on Good Friday a few months later and hearing the story of Jesus' execution on the cross. When my pastor, who was reading from the scriptures, got to the part where he shouts, "Father, why have you forsaken me?", my sister and I looked at each other and shared a knowing realization: "oh man, that's from the bible?"

I've been drawn to System mostly because of the instrumentals. Lyrics have not traditionally captured my attention when listening to music.

It took me a few years to discover that all the members of the band were Armenian-Americans. Until reading this book, I didn't give Armenia much thought. The last time I recall giving much consideration to the Middle East in general was in tenth grade world history class. I couldn't have picked out Armenia on a map if you had asked me.

Serj Tankian (the lead singer of System) recently released his memoir, and the title adeptly appends "of sorts" to that noun.

Yes, there are plenty of great stories in this book about Serj's experience with System of a Down, but I'd argue more than 25% of the book serves as a history lesson about Armenia for ignorant Westerners like me.

Even though I'm not much of a lyrics guy, it's hard to miss the humanitarian messages when they're shouted at you by Serj.

Like in "P.L.U.C.K.", from their debut self-titled album¹:

Revolution, the only solution,
The armed response of an entire nation,
Revolution, the only solution,
We've taken all your shit, now it's time for restitution.

Or "Cigaro" from Mezmerize²:

We're the regulators that de-regulate
We're the animators that de-animate
We're the propagators of all genocide
Burning through the world's resources
Then we turn and hide

Reading this book made so many of these songs come to life in a new way for me, especially reading of the horrible atrocities committed by the Turkish government. Serj really opens up about some deep, painful generational trauma that explains his drive for justice.

I also loved his reflection on what System means to him today. The closing chapter of the book talks about the 2023 Sad, Sick World show in Las Vegas. He went into the show feeling like System was nothing more than a cover band at this point, but came out of it feeling joy.³ I sure hope I can see them perform live one day.

If you're a System fan like me, I could not recommend this book any more highly. If it weren't for the fact that it's currently 6:15am, I would be blasting them in my house right now.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-10-31 00:48:00

Collective action problem is the term political scientists use to describe any situation where a large group of people would do better for themselves if they worked together, but it’s easier for everyone to pursue their own interests. The essential work of every government is making laws that balance the tradeoffs between shared benefits and acceptable restrictions on individual or corporate freedoms to solve this dilemma, and the reason people hate the government is that not being able to do whatever you want all the time is a huge bummer. Speed limits help make our neighborhoods safer, but they also mean you aren’t supposed to put the hammer down and peel out at every stoplight, which isn’t any fun at all.

Every Verge reader is intimately familiar with collective action problems because they’re everywhere in tech. We cover them all the time: making everything charge via USB-C was a collective action problem that took European regulation to finally resolve, just as getting EV makers to adopt the NACS charging standard took regulatory effort from the Biden administration. Content moderation on social networks is a collective action problem; so are the regular fights over encryption. The single greatest webcomic in tech history describes a collective action problem.

The problem is that getting people to set aside their own selfishness and work together is generally impossible even if the benefits are obvious, a political reality so universal it’s a famous Tumblr meme. 

In general, I don’t like to discuss politics on here. I figure if you’re reading my blog, you probably have a vague idea of what my political beliefs are.

But this endorsement of Kamala Harris isn’t just an endorsement of her and her politics. In fact, there is hardly any mention of her in here.

In fact, this endorsement is an endorsement for the concept of democracy.

The key part about Kamala is toward the end, which sums up why I’m gonna vote for her:

In many ways, the ecstatic reaction to Harris is simply a reflection of the fact that she is so clearly trying. She is trying to govern America the way it’s designed to be governed, with consensus and conversation and effort. With data and accountability, ideas and persuasion. Legislatures and courts are not deterministic systems with predictable outputs based on a set of inputs — you have to guide the process of lawmaking all the way to the outcomes, over and over again, each time, and Harris seems not only aware of that reality but energized by it. More than anything, that is the change a Harris administration will bring to a country exhausted by decades of fights about whether government can or should do anything at all.

People love to say “the government is broken”, but often fail to ask any follow-up questions. You know, like "why is it broken" and "how can we fix it?"

When I see something broken, my first instinct is to figure out how it got broken in the first place. "Broken", by definition, implies there is a state of "functioning." If we want to "fix" it, we need to agree on what "functioning" means.¹

If we agree that our country is broken, then we need to agree on a vision for what a functioning country is.

When building software, there are plenty of excuses we could make as to why our system is broken. A junior engineer might blame the users. They're dumb, they're using it wrong, they don't understand the elegance of the solution we've built for them.

As you get more senior, you start to realize just how reductive and silly those arguments are. We can't control our users, and we will likely never understand them. But we can perform user testing and spend time with our customers. We learn how they actually use the software. We dig to uncover other problems they have so we can adjust our software to meet those needs.

I think what bothers me about our current political climate is that we are quick to jump to these reductive ideas which are proven to be ineffective. We have to work together and keep trying new things.

We're better than this. We all need each other, often more than we are willing to admit.

It’s a lesson I’m trying to impart on my kids. They constantly fight with each other, their feelings pouring out of them like a fire hydrant when they don’t get what they want.

I get it. It’s like The Rolling Stones said: “you can’t always get what you want, but if you try, you’ll find you’ll get what you need.”

We need America. We need to come together and curb our natural tendency toward hostility against anything that is different.

But even if you’re apolitical, I encourage you to read this excellent essay. It makes me proud to be an American at a time where it feels dangerous to be proud.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-10-29 11:04:00

A need to “prove oneself” to internalized authority figures leads to things like climbing conventional status ladders, or staying in an unhappy marriage, or piling up as much money as possible to preserve the appearance of having “made it”.

What motivated Esther to do things like take a receptionist job at a film company, pick up her life and move to San Francisco, and risk her savings on her startup was something far more personal and idiosyncratic: a conception of the interests she wanted to explore, the people she wanted to meet, the products she wanted to create, the life she envisioned and wanted to build for herself—and, yes, the proof that she really could count on herself to do it.

This is super inspiring on so many levels.

It seems like life becomes a little more palatable once you figure out who you are and start leaning into that.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-10-27 20:27:00

I work in a climate tech startup, and although I don’t directly manipulate geospatial data in my role (at least not at the moment), I’m very interested in this aspect of our work. I came across a seemingly innocuous message on Slack about how we had less information for a particular carbon offset project because of the China GPS shift problem.

This naturally piqued my interest — I didn’t know Chinese geospatial data would be any different from the rest of the world. Hadn’t this been one of the few areas where we all agreed about the right way to do things?

The more I delved into this topic, the more interesting stuff I found, and the more it made sense from a Chinese perspective.

I know I’ve historically railed on the frustrations engineers face when dealing with time zones, so tickle me surprised when I saw Naz link to this post giving me a new esoteric cause to rail on: GPS shift!

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-10-26 06:08:00

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-10-25 22:28:00

More than 100 million individuals had their private health information stolen during the ransomware attack on Change Healthcare in February, a cyberattack that caused months of unprecedented outages and widespread disruption across the U.S. healthcare sector.

This is the first time that UnitedHealth Group (UHG), the U.S. health insurance provider that owns the health tech company, has put a number of affected individuals to the data breach, after previously saying it anticipated the breach to include data on a “substantial proportion of people in America.”

Really, really hard to feel any sympathy for this organization when you read this a few paragraphs down in the article:

According to its 2023 full-year earnings report, UHG made $22 billion in profit on revenues of $371 billion. [Andrew Witty, CEO of UHC] made $23.5 million in executive compensation the same year.

Let’s say you invest in state-of-the-art workforce development programs, advance threat detection solutions, zero trust and identity management solutions, resilience infrastructure, and throw in some R&D.

Let’s even give UHC the benefit of the doubt and assume they have done all of this.

How are you able to walk away with $22 billion after you’ve allowed the PII of nearly a third of Americans (myself included) to walk out the door and into the hands of cybercriminals?

Nobody else is angry that this news isn’t blasted all over this election cycle?

Nobody else thinks we should be holding this conglomerate’s feet to the fire for this breach?

I’m not here to minimize the importance of other issues like border security and women’s reproductive rights, but I haven’t heard any politician make noise about our horribly inefficient healthcare system at all during this election cycle.

Why can’t we stop picking fights with each other and focus on addressing the systemic issues which lead to companies selling us all out in the name of shareholder value?

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-10-25 20:23:00

“Mom, look at THIS!” said her son (age 6) producing a balled-up fist in the air. Then, as if peeling a banana, he pulled out a tiny middle finger. There it was. In the upright and locked position.

“THIS” was none other than the oh-so-satisfying one finger salute.

🖕

“So, what did you do to him?!?” I asked my Jacksonville neighbor Louise between chuckles.

“I wanted to laugh. But, I remained calm. Validated his frustration at not getting a third popsicle. And explained why THIS wasn’t a good expression of anger.”

Louise then shared her belief that kids need to be a little weird and wild at home. That it’s okay for them to get their “crazy out” at home so they can be (slightly higher) functioning individuals out in the world. Kids, she said, need to trust that they will be safe and loved no matter what. That doesn’t mean she doesn’t discipline, she just doesn’t lose her cool over it.

Sounds like some Dr. Becky-style parenting skills in action here.

Lauren goes on to explain how crucial it is for us to have a space where we can retreat to and be ourselves.

When my daughter stomps her foot and growls at me like a cartoon character when I ask her to brush her teeth, I can’t help but chuckle and say, “you know kid, I wanna do that all the time, too.”

When my son screams in my face because I make him, uh, get dressed in his Halloween costume to go to his school’s Halloween party, I can’t help but chuckle and say, “I get it, man. It sucks to be told what to do.”

One thing that’s been massively helpful in keeping my anxiety and depression in check is to give myself space to be myself. The full version of myself who doesn’t have to censor his out-there thought process for fear of being misunderstood and ridiculed.

My journal is my number one place for this freedom. This blog is my second.

I just finished up my second week in a job. I emphasize the word “job” because I haven’t really had a job in nearly fifteen years. Being in charge of a business is totally different than working for a business.

Working for a business requires conformity by definition. You can’t be cowboying off and doing you own thing if you want to build a system with repeatable success. I get it.

One way I hope to grow at my new job is to figure out how to maintain my individuality and uniqueness while making meaningful contributions to the collective effort.

In other words: how can I be happy and “myself” being the guy rowing an oar in the bottom of the boat rather than being the guy who pounds on the timpani?

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-10-24 11:00:44

Tradeoffs exist; improving one aspect of a system can make other aspects worse. As projects grow, our control over them shrinks. Ugly truths abound, and beauty is a luxury we can rarely afford.

Knowing this, however, does not mean accepting it. Confronted with this dissonance, this ugliness, we inevitably gesture towards a better future. We talk about better design, better practices, better processes. We await better abstractions. We imagine a world in which we cannot help but make something beautiful.

This belief in the future, in an unending ascent towards perfection, is a belief in progress. The flaws in this belief — its internal tensions, the fact that it is closer to a theology than a theory — have been pointed out for centuries. It is, nevertheless, an inescapable part of the software industry. Everything we do, whether design or implementation, is oriented towards an imagined future.

This is a beautiful sentiment about software systems which could easily apply to most any system (like, our political and social systems, for example).

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-10-20 12:27:35

If you’re thinking, “Figure out the kinds of sequences that generate good responses,” you’re still looking for essences. You’re seeking a list of words that can make someone excited.

Instead, the process of making something that people want is the process of learning, through experiment and error, to be the kind of person who can generate needs, wants, and jobs in other people. 

This kind of person is one who notices that a new restaurant in their neighborhood has a line out the door. Instead of walking by, they walk in. 

They stop to notice the soft, earthy color palette of its interior decoration, one that evokes a coastal Mediterranean village. They see the way its menu layers in unexpected ingredients like za’atar, cinnamon, and chile as subtle references to other cultures and traditions. They notice the feelings that this sequence of experience evokes in them, the way it feels familiar and also pleasantly surprising. They know that if they linger on these feelings, they’ll be able to evoke them later—for themselves and for others—in a logo design or an article.

I’ve been trying to be more aware of things happening to me lately.

I know I can be in my head, a million miles away from reality unfolding before me. I feel more comfortable there, if I’m honest. Reality can be uncomfortable, not quite right for me.

As it turns out, when you retreat from reality too often, you start to forget that while it can be uncomfortable sometimes, its contents can be incredible.

I’m finding that the moments I am aware of what’s happening around me are when I am the happiest.

And it turns out, paying attention to reality with your own unique perspective can really make a difference for others.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-10-19 08:36:41

I was afraid I had become too cynical to find excitement in technology again. It wasn’t true.

While I’ve grown more cynical about much of tech, movements like the Indieweb and the Fediverse remind me that the ideals I once loved, and that spirit of the early web, aren’t lost. They’re evolving, just like everything else.

One thing that excites me about the web is our ability to communicate effortlessly with other people across the world.

It still feels like magic every time I get an instant message from my friend in Uruguay.

Hell, I spent several hours on video chat with my coworker from Brazil today. How insanely cool is that?

I think I just want to find interesting problems to solve using that tech, which feels a bit like “I have a hammer and I’m looking for nails.”

I’m just grateful that people want to pay me to play with computers all day.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-10-19 08:11:00

Productivity is a topic you have probably searched for on Google. There are thousands of gurus trying to sell you the idea of the ultimate system when, in reality, it is simpler than that.

Don’t be fooled; productivity is not about complex systems or automating everything. Productivity is about knowing when to push and when to stop, understanding what to do and what not to do. Above all, it’s about thinking long-term and pursuing things that genuinely interest you.

What follows is a solid list of simple tips which help keep you focused and productive.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-10-16 11:06:00

We don’t relax when we can trust the people around us. Maybe we can relax when we prove ourselves worthy of trust. At least in the small things.

We can do the small things. We can live in small moments. We can find hope and love in the people around us. We can stand watch for them, and in turn, they will stand watch for us.

This past year continues to be one where I am peppered by realizations that are only obvious by taking the time to, um, realize them.

One of them is that I take for granted all of the various chores that my wife does around the house.

I’m a lazy person, I’ll admit it. I’d rather spend 100 energy units thinking up a way out of doing a chore than the 3 energy units it actually takes to just do the chore.

And it’s awful to have realizations like this one because, unless you’re an unempathetic jabroni, you feel instantly guilty for being such an untrustworthy person.

I’ve been trying extra hard to build up better habits around my chores. But I think this quote from Mike Monteiro hits me hard because I feel such strong anxiety when I’m procrastinating.

Maybe I need this in my quote rotation as a reminder that beating that particular form of anxiety is the easiest one to defeat. All you gotta do is do something.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-10-16 10:51:00

I was listening to a podcast episode the other day while I was driving and in there there was a thought that stuck with me: the idea that the web is moving from a creator economy to a curator economy. With a web flooded with AI generated slop and the platforms themselves encouraging it, the role of curators is gonna become more and more important. Who knows, maybe with a digital world filled with low-quality garbage we’ll find refuge in old-school printed magazines.

I would love that!

I recently watched the Dogtown and Z-Boys documentary, and one point they made clear was that so much of early skateboarding culture was shaped by misfits around the country reading the same skateboarding magazines and being inspired by the same people.

Shared culture is something I find myself missing these days. Unless you and your friends are watching the same stuff, you quickly run out of things to talk about.

It’s great I have a place to talk with people about the indie web or large language models or The Simpsons, but I miss the larger, more generic topics that we can all bond over more easily together.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-10-13 21:00:00

I’d share screenshots of these things, but one of the primary reasons I’ve been enjoying myself so much while making them is because they are literally only for me to see or use. I’ve gone through creative periods where I’m coding outside of work but in the end it has always been shared to some kind of audience - whether that be the designing and coding of this site or my CodePens. This is different.

Robin Sloan coined these type of apps as home-cooked. Following his analogy, technically I am a professional chef but at home I’m creating dishes that no one else has to like. All the stuff I have to care about at work - UX best practices, what our Community wants, or even the preferences of my bosses and colleagues re: code style and organisation can be left behind. I’m free to make my own messed-up version of an apricot chicken toasted sandwich, and it’s delicious.

I’ve been doing the same lately, largely driven by how easy it is to get these home-cooked apps off the ground using LLMs.

My favorite one so far is a tool for helping me manage my sound and public address duties for our local high school’s soccer games. I whipped up a form which lets me set some variables (opposing team name, referees, etc.) and it spits out the script I need to read.

It also contains a mini sound board to easily play stuff like the school’s fight song when they score.

I hope nobody else ever needs to use this thing because it’s certainly janky as all hell, but it works exceedingly well for me.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-10-13 05:33:33

I’m sure most people are aware of how expensive it is to go out and see shows, but I’m not sure if most people are aware of why.

This video does a great job of explaining how the Ticketmaster + Livenation monopoly works.

We’re quickly approaching election season here in the US. Growing up, the importance of an informed electorate was driven into my brain.

This is the kind of stuff more voters need to be aware of. How do monopolies form? What market conditions lead to consolidation of power, and how do we hold those in power accountable?

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-10-12 03:52:32

Glen Weldon, who hosts NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour, said Dropout isn't trying to create shows to please everyone – its content is niche, and that's ok. The show's cast makes the content feel casual and personal to him.

"The reason you show up every week is to see them in this kind of unguarded mode trying to figure things out on the fly," Weldon says. "You are in the room with them, and they're inviting you into their world for just a hang."

This nails what is so exciting about the Dropout experiment. You are rooting for the simultaneous success of the show and the concept. It’s fun to feel like you’re a small part of the creative process.

We’ve gotta be getting close to a new season of Game Changer!

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-10-11 16:57:00

That’s because what really sucks about the web these days, what has us feeling despair and anger, has everything to do with the industry that has formed around the web, but not the web itself. The web is still just a substrate on which anything can be built. Most importantly, the web is the people who use it, not the companies that have established themselves around it.

And the widespread disillusionment that we’re seeing may actually be a good thing. More people than ever have realized that the utopian dreams of a web that could only bring about positive and wonderful things might have been misguided. That tech companies maybe don’t always have our best interests in mind. And that slogans like "don’t be evil" might be more about marketing than about truth.

Once again, Molly White explains how to make the internet fun again in an admirably eloquent way.

Related: I bought a domain with the intention of creating a list of artists who Donald Trump can’t use in his campaign functions. I lost motivation after finding basically what I wanted to assemble on Wikipedia, but reading this article makes me want to give it a go.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-10-11 15:39:00

Fifteen or 20 years ago, this would not have even been a conversation,” said Ms. Lorre, who has often discussed the benefits of silent walks, most recently on her podcast and on TikTok. But silent walking feels relevant right now because many of us have become tethered to our devices, she added.

The question then becomes: “How do we counteract that?” Ms. Lorre said.

Walking is a well-established balm for the mind and body. Research has shown that walking for as little as 10 extra minutes a day may lead to a longer life. And a 2020 study in The Journal of Environmental Psychology found that a 30-minute walk in an urban park reduced the amount of time that people dwelled on negative thoughts. Walking has also been shown to improve creativity and help fend off depression.

A few months ago, I started turning my walking habit into a silent walking habit.

Sure, some days I’ll throw on an album or podcast, but more often than not, I’m finding myself putting my headphones in, reaching the end of my street, and then pocketing them.

It takes some practice to know what to do with your thoughts, which is a surprising effect of living a digital life. Most thoughts are ephemeral, dismissed as effortlessly as it entered.

Some thoughts are journalible. That’s easy to quickly pull out your phone, wrote them down, and reflect on it later.

Some are scary. Negative. Nasty. Those ones are tough to let go of, but if you acknowledge the thought and permit out to exist, the endorphins will eventually help you move on from it.

I could not encourage you more to get out for a 15 minute silent walk today. Make space for it. You’ll be glad you did.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-10-10 12:26:05

Engineers are not fans of technologies.

They are also, of course, not dispassionate Vulcans who get every assessment perfectly rationally correct at all times, trivially proved by how much even relatively rational engineers can disagree with each other.

But engineers should never be fans.

There was a moment not too long ago where I closely followed every single Apple rumor, watched every single keynote, and could tell you the names of every single executive.

It’s mid-October and I’m still not exactly sure when Apple intelligence is coming to my iPhone 15.

Maybe part of growing up is being less fanatical about tools and more fanatical about solving problems.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-10-08 21:08:39

As a self-declared Poet, I can confidently describe the Police because it is a job requirement that develops strong working relationships with these essential humans. I need them because the Police do the challenging work of keeping the trains on time. This isn’t simply holding conductors to a schedule but also maintaining the trains, taking care of the track, and ensuring we have a qualified staff of humans to do all this work. Oh, and how about a budget? How are we going to afford all of this? Someone needs to build a credible business plan for this train company so we can afford to keep the trains on time.

As a self-declared Poet, we also need to understand the aspirational goals of this train company. I also understand the importance of consistently sharing this vision with everyone. I know we need to listen because we need to understand how the company feels. I’m adept at organizing teams of humans with differing ideas and skills. It’s an endless puzzle that I enjoy attempting to solve. I love celebrating our victories. I feel our failures deeply, but I know that with the Police, we will learn from these failures.

I’ve spent a lot of my life thinking my personality is Police, but I think it’s because I’ve been ashamed to admit I’m actually a Poet.

My kids used to watch Daniel Tiger, and there was a song on there that went, “Everyone’s job is important, we all help in different ways.”

Our society needs Police equally as much as we need Poets.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-10-08 20:38:03

I left that conversation admiring his conviction, as well as feeling overwhelming self-consciousness that I was—I dunno, too acquiescent? Hearing him speak so confidently—his assuredness ignited envy within me. Embers that smolder to this day. The older I get, the less confident I feel about anything. The less I want to fight. The less I want to debate. I used to burn so hot. I could argue online for hours. Now, the thought of it makes my skin crawl. It's not that I don't feel strongly, but I don't feel so strongly that I want to spend my days mired in anxiety and rage trying to make people see reason.

But Sam, the older he got, the more he seemed to dig in. Why was he so willing to fight? Why wasn't I?

A heart wrenching story about two cousins who slowly drift apart due to our ever-increasing disability to have civilized, polite disagreements with one another.

Getting older brings a certain sadness with realizing the things you once thought were true and unimpeachable were actually broken all along.

And while that may be a truism, it’s how we accept and appreciate the things we have while we have them which makes life beautiful and bearable.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-09-26 22:31:00

I think that in any new medium in technology, there are the concepts around fair use and where the boundary is between what you have control over. When you put something out in the world, to what degree do you still get to control it and own it and license it? I think that all these things are basically going to need to get relitigated and rediscussed in the AI era.

When I downloaded Llama 3.2 yesterday, I had to agree to a rather lengthy licensing agreement which constrained how I could use it.

When you sign up for a Instagram or Facebook account, you have to agree to lengthy terms and conditions in which you give up your rights around the content you create.

If you want to push my buttons, all you need to do is something deeply hypocritical. Like, for example, the kind of insipid, hand-wavy remark that billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg make when they want "rules for thee, not for me" treatment.¹

There’s another pull quote here which deeply offends me:

“Look, we’re a big company,” he said. “We pay for content when it’s valuable to people. We’re just not going to pay for content when it’s not valuable to people. I think that you’ll probably see a similar dynamic with AI.”

Seriously, the gall of this guy to say “your content isn’t valuable” while raking in billions of dollars serving ads against it.

I keep getting the urge to join Facebook so I can sell some unneeded treasures on marketplace, but this article serves as a reminder that Meta is helmed by an individual who has a truly warped definition of the word “value.”

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-09-26 06:23:27

Many of these kinds of retrospectives contain graphs of views over time or the most popular posts; but I’m not showing it to you because I can’t—I don’t keep any statistics whatsoever.

I don’t really care—and I don’t want to care—about how many readers I have or what posts are and aren’t popular. I worry that if I add statistics to the blog it’ll change from an activity I perform for the activity’s sake, to an exercise in hunting clicks where I write for others instead of for myself.

If I were chasing views I would certainly not have continued to blog for as long as I have, and I’d have missed out on the many benefits I’ve gotten from the blog.

I couldn’t agree more with this sentiment.

I do thoroughly enjoy when people reach out and tell me they read the blog, but I don’t share things here for the social clout.

I share things on here because the act of curating thoughts through the writing process brings me so much joy and clarity.

I’ve been meaning to write something longer form on here for a while, but all my good long thoughts have been sent to Monkey Wrench.

But this post made me reflect on my own blogging journey. I started blogging in a LiveJournal at some point in the early 2000s. I bought my own domain and moved my thoughts over there in 2004. I blogged from a pseudonym starting in 2006 up through college. I bought this domain while sitting in a TV production class my senior year of college and started a fresh blog.

It’s been a while since I burned the stack to the ground and started fresh, but ever since I started building websites for a living, it stopped being fun to do it in my free time.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-09-26 04:44:00

Businesspeople, governments, and politicians aren’t looking to solve problems; they’re looking to win arguments. And the way you win an argument is by pretending that what should be an open-ended question with many possible right answers isn’t one. Make it enjoyable, have free booze on the train, put Wi-Fi on the train, have a ball pit on the train for kids—these are the Disney answers. Those are multiple and involve what you might call human judgment. You can’t win an argument with those.

What you do is pretend this is a high school math problem with a single right answer, you solve for the right answer using high school math, and then nobody can argue with you because apparently you haven’t made a decision. You’ve simply followed the data.

This is a massive problem in decision-making. We try to close down the solution space of any problem in order to arrive at a single right answer that is difficult to argue with.

Shout out to my buddy Chris who shared this with me. This whole article is so great, one that was difficult to pull only a single quote from.

I do like the author’s conclusion as well, which talks about the notion of “slow AI.” Maybe not every problem needs to be solved instantaneously.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-09-24 21:30:00

To step into the stream of any social network, to become immersed in the news, reactions, rage and hopes, the marketing and psyops, the funny jokes and clever memes, the earnest requests for mutual aid, for sign ups, for jobs, the clap backs and the call outs, the warnings and invitations—it can feel like a kind of madness. It’s unsettling, in the way that sediment is unsettled by water, lifted up and tossed around, scattered about. A pebble goes wherever the river sends it, worn down and smoothed day after day until all that’s left is sand.

At some point I became acutely aware of a sense of scattering or separation whenever I glanced at the socials. As if some part of me, or some pattern or vision that I cupped tenderly in my hands, was washed away, wrenched from my grasp before I quite realized what it was.

This brilliant post is essentially four narratives weaved into one.

We are still reeling as a society from the impact of the internet. Being able to summon and mobilize our collective attention is not something we evolved to be able to handle.

My generation is the last one who remembers a time before it, but even that memory is slipping away amongst the daily grind of paying attention to the internet.

The early days of the internet felt a little easier to understand. It wasn’t like everybody was on it in the late nineties; in fact, it was usually the dorks and nerds that were on it.

Any community could be represented so long as there was someone nerdy enough to set up a message board and dorky enough to pay for the hosting costs.

And those early days felt like an escape. It didn’t feel like the internet dominated my mind the way it does today.

Today, though, is completely different. The internet doesn’t offer the same sort of escape that it used to. Now, it feels like a compulsion. Something I wish I could stop but can’t easily without resorting to drastic measures like ditching my iPhone.

And so I remain at an unresolvable juncture: the intersection of the very strong belief that we must experiment with new modes and systems of communication, and the certain knowledge that every time I so much as glance at anything shaped like a social feed, my brain smoothes out, the web of connections and ideas I’m weaving is washed away, and I tumble downstream, only to have to pick myself up and trudge heavily through the mud back to where I belong.

It’s exhausting. It is, at this point in my life, unsustainable. I cannot dip into the stream, even briefly, and also maintain the awareness and focus needed to do my own work, the work that is uniquely mine. I cannot wade through the water and still protect this fragile thing in my hands. And perhaps I owe to my continued senescence the knowledge that I do not have time for this anymore.

This is the same conclusion I came to after I did, in fact, ditch my iPhone this summer.¹

I find myself pulling my phone out at night and just sort of staring at it.

Whatever world I’d been building in my mind to that point is completely washed away.

And more often than not, I find myself jumping into the water feet first dozens of times a day, hoping to find meaning, instead emerging each time covered with a viscous layer of grime that leaves me feeling guilty and ashamed.

This realization is possibly one of my most important ones to come out of this sincerely horrifying year.

All of those sleepless nights where my anxiety-raddled brain conjured up infinite scenarios in a vain attempt to derive meaning in a place where none can be found.

It’s time to get out of the water for a while.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-09-19 03:55:33

The problem with software is that it's too powerful. It creates so much wealth so fast that it's virtually impossible to not distribute it.

Think about it: sure, it takes a while to make useful software. But then you make it, and then it's done. It keeps working with no maintenance whatsoever, and just a trickle of electricity to run it.

Immediately, this poses a problem: how can a small number of people keep all that wealth for themselves, and not let it escape in the dirty, dirty fingers of the general populace?

Such a great article explaining why we can’t have nice things when it comes to software.

There is a good comparison in here between blockchain and LLMs, specifically saying both technologies are the sort of software that never gets completed or perfected.

I think it’s hard to ascribe a quality like “completed” to virtually anything humans build. Homes are always a work in progress. So are highbrow social constructs like self-improvement and interpersonal relationships.

I think it’s less interesting to me to try and determine what makes a technology good or bad. The key question is: does it solve someone’s problem?

You could argue that the blockchain solves problems for guaranteeing the authenticity of an item for a large multinational or something, sure. But I’m yet to be convinced of its ability to instill a better layer of trust in our economy.

LLMs, on the other hand, are showing tremendous value and solving many problems for me, personally.

What we should be focusing on is how to sustainably utilize our technology such that it benefits the most people possible.

And we all have a role to play with that notion in the work we do.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-09-19 03:44:00

Although he was nominated for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series, Tadanobu Asano lost the award to Billy Crudup. While Crudup's performance as Cory Ellison on The Morning Show is a grounding presence for the outright insane leaps of logic the series can take, I feel that Asano was worthy of a win based on his multilayered performance as Kashigi Yabushige, the servant to Sanada's Lord Toranaga.

Spoilers in this link if you haven’t seen Shōgun yet, but holy cow, yes, Asano 100% should’ve won an Emmy for his performance.

I tend to avoid shows that are incredibly hyped, and I think I’ve had a good track record for doing so. I still haven’t seen a single episode of Lost, and I only reluctantly watched Game of Thrones because the final season was airing when our youngest was born, and it was a good way to kill time while snuggling.

I jumped in with both feet on Shōgun, however, and I believe it absolutely deserves the acclaim. Set aside a few days and binge it.

Specifically, I think Asano's performance as Yabushige was the most entertaining thing I've seen in years. "Multilayered" is a great word to describe it; he communicated mostly in grunts and facial expressions, and even though he constantly stepped on his own foot, you couldn't help but root for the guy.

I look forward to seeing more of Tadanobu Asano in the years to come.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-09-16 03:56:00

Disposable vape pens are incredibly unsustainable. I’m glad people are finding clever ways like this to recycle them.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-09-12 10:58:00

In these latter days everybody is familiar with concepts like the carbon footprint, sustainability, and the like. Measures of the ecological cost of the things we do. One of the most irksome problems bedeviling Earth's biosphere at present is the outrageous cost of many aspects of many human lifestyles. Society is gradually and too late awakening to, for example, the reality that there is an inexcusable, untenable cost to shipping coffee beans all around the world from the relatively narrow belt in which they grow so that everybody can have a hot cup o' joe every morning. Or that the planet is being heated and poisoned by people's expectation of cheap steaks and year-round tomatoes and a new iPhone every year, and that as a consequence its water-cycle and weather systems are unraveling. Smearing the natural world flat and pouring toxic waste across it so that every American can drive a huge car from their too-large air-conditioned freestanding single-family home to every single other place they might choose to go turns out to be incompatible with the needs of basically all the other life we've ever detected in the observable universe. Whoops!

This article really lays into Elon at the end, which honestly, as I’m getting older, I feel okay with.

Also: one of my main values in life is balance, which is essentially the goal of sustainability. How can we balance our needs with the needs of our planet?

Like any parasite, our species needs to achieve some sort of symbiosis with our host. You can’t extract so much that you kill it, but you need to live at the same time, so how do you reach that balance?

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-09-10 11:02:00

I finished this video and felt the same way I felt reading Hope and Help for your Nerves: seen.

When I talk to myself, there are times that I say unpleasant things to myself. I’ve spent the better part of 20 years trying to completely silence those thoughts.

When I started listening to them and welcoming them, my depression and anxiety improved almost immediately.

If you feel like you say mean crap to yourself and are looking for a way to stop, start with the advice that Karen Faith gives in this TEDx talk. It’s pretty much spot on, with what I’ve experienced.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-09-10 07:59:00

I make a lot of small simple websites, I have approximately 0 maintenance energy for any of them, and I change them very infrequently.

My goal is that if I have a site that I made 3 or 5 years ago, I’d like to be able to, in 20 minutes:

• get the source from github on a new computer
• make some changes
• put it on the internet

But my experience with build systems (not just Javascript build systems!), is that if you have a 5-year-old site, often it’s a huge pain to get the site built again.

I have websites that I made in middle school that I’m able to get up and running in roughly as much time as it takes to find the old folders.

I also have websites that I am unable to run on my new laptop because the dependencies are too out of date and now supported on my new architecture.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-09-05 08:48:00

The last vial contains a flame within. It tells you to wake up each day with the bright eyes of the child you still are, even if he is hidden somewhere inside you. To do things with love. To live believing that everything is possible, even though deep down you know the odds are against you. To keep playing and to keep doing new things, because there is nothing braver than doing something a thousand times, even if you do it wrong a thousand and one times.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-09-04 11:20:11

So yes, you can build yourself a life like Sam Hinkie’s; or you can doggedly pursue your passion for a single idea, like Kati Kariko; or you can follow your curiosity where it leads and then “connect the dots in retrospect,” like Steve Jobs; or you can master a complex skillset that allows you to provide for a vital human need, be it via medicine or accounting or sports or food preparation or software development; or you can be an artist, or a craftsman, or a homemaker, or a Renaissance (wo)man, or a community-builder, or any of the countless forms and combinations of well-lived lives that have been and have yet to be conceived. 

Choose with the knowledge that almost any choice is better than a default on choosing, and that most choices (with some obvious exceptions) are two-way doors. 

But choose with full awareness that what you’re choosing, what you’re building, is a life; your life. It’s never just “this moment,” or “this job”, or “this relationship”; it’s a point on your timeline, an inextricable part of this one precious, singular span of existence you get to design. So if you find yourself conflicted between “present you” and “future you”, the solution is not to sacrifice either one to the other; it’s to solve the underlying design problem.

Pairs nicely with this line from Rush’s “Freewill” which often drops into my head:

If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-09-03 22:37:00

In summary:

• Facebook is a [redacted] company with a terrible web interface.
• React is a technology created at Facebook to administer its interface.
• React enables you to build web applications and their interfaces the way Facebook does.
• I am not calling Facebook "Meta"
• JavaScript-first interfaces built on ecosystems like React’s are cumbersome and under-performing.
• React prevails because its evangelical proponents and apologists have convinced developers that Facebook’s success can be attributed to technological quality and not aggressive capitalism.

Over the past fifteen years, I feel like I’ve had a pretty good track record of knowing which technologies to pay attention to and which technologies to confidently let pass by me.

When React first dropped, I thought the setup process seemed so onerous and filled with so many dependencies that I slowly backed away and haven't really needed to look back.

It would be irresponsible of me to have zero experience in React, so of course I've inherited projects that others have started on top of it. But every time I jump into a React project, I feel like I’m Homer jumping into his unchlorinated pool.¹

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-09-01 19:23:00

Perhaps we can define “junior developer” this way: it’s somebody who needs human supervision to accomplish the things a full-fledged member of the technical staff should be able to do using only AI assistance.

If we can’t make room in our taxonomy of technical work for someone who still needs human training, we are just doing the same old thing IT has been doing for decades: borrowing from our future to cash in on the current hype. AI, “chat-oriented programming”, whatever tomorrow’s buzzword is—they’re fascinating, they may be productivity enhancers, but they won’t remove the need for experienced human generalists in the loop.

And every experienced generalist starts out inexperienced. They start as a junior developer. That’s not where software engineering dies: it’s where it’s born.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-08-31 08:11:00

One interesting detail The Information mentioned about Strawberry is that it “can solve math problems it hasn't seen before—something today's chatbots cannot reliably do.”

This runs counter to my point last week about a language model being “like having 10,000 Ph.D.’s available at your fingertips.” I argued that LLMs are very good at transmitting the sum total of knowledge they’ve encountered during training, but less good at solving problems or answering questions they haven’t seen before.

I’m curious to get my hands on Strawberry. Based on what I’m seeing, I’m quite sure it’s more powerful and less likely to hallucinate. But novel problem solving is a big deal. It would upend everything we know about the promise and capabilities of language models.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-08-28 03:27:30

The other day, I was sitting in a McDonald’s play place with my kids and my nephew and niece. Every other parent there was sitting on their phone, no doubt trying to enjoy a short reprieve from their responsibilities as a parent.

The urge to pull out my phone was strong, believe me. But instead, I just watched all the kids play together. I felt content, proud of my choice, curious about what’s happening in the world around me.

I get the same feeling when I opt for an apple at night instead of a fistful of boring candy that my kids scooped up from a parade.

And I think the desire to chase that feeling is the biggest gift I received from my experiment with the Light Phone.

I don’t think I’ve shared many of my newsletter posts on here before, but I wanted to make sure I shared this one to button up the Light Phone experiment.

It’s been a really great month from a mental health perspective, by the way. I think I’ve finally got my head back on straight, and more importantly, I have some good tools for those moments where I start to backslide a bit.

One of the biggest contributions to my positive headspace? Not being on my phone so much.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-08-21 21:09:00

I’m sure Apple will continue to be very successful for many years to come and I expect to buy many products in the future as well (after all, Microsoft and Google don’t feel much better). I’ll surely even give some of those products glowing reviews on this very blog. And yet, I do wonder if the Apple enthusiast crowd as we know is in permanent decline.

You don’t need Daring Fireball, Panic, ATP, Birchtree, or anyone else like us to be massively financially successful (just look at Microsoft and Samsung), but I do find it a bit sad to see Apple stroll down the road to being a totally heartless mega corp like the rest. Why does Apple feel it’s worth trashing their relationship with creators and developers so that they can take 30% of the money I pay an up-and-coming creator who is trying to make rent in time each month?

If Homer was trying to start an internet business today, Tim Cook would be the one smashing up his home office and declaring he didn’t get rich by writing a lot of checks¹.

I’ve all but checked out on the Apple community these days. I still follow a few choice folks like David Smith and John Siracusa, but the overall tone of most Apple pundits today feels like that of a kid who was bullied in high school and became the bully’s boss.

Here’s my problem: Apple makes the best products out there today, and they know it. They deserve to be rewarded financially for this, but the problem is that they don’t know when to stop.

That mindset tends to be a problem in humans in general. People who are great at saving money tend to be unsure how to spend it when they retire.

I’ve been an Apple supporter since I got my first iPod back in 2003. Whenever I need to get a new electronic item, my first instinct is to grab whatever Apple made and be done with it.

At first, that instinct was pursued with enthusiasm. Now, after twenty years of selfish financial moves, I’m starting to follow that instinct with a funky taste in my mouth, like when you drink a can of pop after not having one in years.

Even if Apple wanted to change their behavior, I’m not sure they even know how to. Just look at how they’ve responded to all the regulations that have been thrown their way.

When they’re told they must allow apps to link to external payment sources, they require you to pay a 5% “Initial Acquisition Fee”.

When they’re told they need to allow for alternative app stores on their platform, they respond with instituting a Core Technology Fee so developers can “utilize the capabilities that we have introduced, including the ability to direct app users to the web to complete purchases at a very competitive rate”.²

Even with a market cap of 3.44 trillion dollars, they still feel the need to charge exceptionally high fees for access to their platforms.³

I guess maybe this is inevitable? Call it enshittification, call it the natural order of things, but I can’t help feeling like we’ve reached peak Apple fandom.

Heh, I suppose this whole blog post could be summarized by this excellent Adam Mastroianni quote:

Notice that, while lots of people are happy to tell you about Golden Ages, nobody ever seems to think one is happening right now. Maybe that’s because the only place a Golden Age can ever happen is in our memory.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-08-19 21:52:00

This talk helped me articulate a few key arguments that I can use to counter myself when in the throes of impostor syndrome-related attacks from my inner monologue.

Basically, a “staff-plus engineer” is anyone in a technical role that is higher than a senior engineer. These are sometimes referred to as principal engineers, staff engineers, etc.

The big difference between staff-plus and individual contributor path is that an IC role is one you go down when you truly want to contribute as an individual, often acquiring such an expertise in a specific domain that you just do your thing alone.

A staff-plus role requires collaboration, often leading teams, but always being the lynchpin which helps be the voice of technical leadership across multiple teams.

The responsibilities of a staff-plus role include (probably) writing and (definitely) reviewing code, providing technical direction, mentoring and sponsoring other engineers, providing engineering context to non-technical people, and being involved in strategic projects which aren’t shiny but are critical to the success of an organization.

I think I came across this talk at a timely point in my career. I have been tasked with doing staff-plus engineering work ever since starting my first company, and it’s honestly the stuff I love the most.

I’m not a developer who loves to write code. I love writing code because it results in a tool that makes someone’s life easier. What brings me joy is in doing the discovery work needed to clearly articulate the problem and charting a course that’ll lead us to a solution.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-08-16 23:36:28

Of course you’re having problems keeping up with everything that’s happening in web dev. Of course!

You’re expected to follow half-a-dozen different specialities, each relatively fast-paced and complex in its own right, and you’re supposed to do it without cutting into the hours where you do actual paid web development.

Worse yet, you’re not actually expected to use any of it directly. Instead you’re also supposed to follow the developments of framework abstractions that are layered on top of the foundation specialities, at least doubling the number of complex fields a web dev has to follow and understand, right out of the gate.

This is immense – an expectation so mind-boggling that we need to acknowledge just how remarkable it is that each of us has managed as well as we have.

This entire article is an excellent summary of the state of the software development industry from the perspective of a web developer. I think Baldur hit the nail on the head several times here.

I first learned Javascript from a book I got from the library somewhere around 1999. This predated XMLHttpRequest, debuting with IE5 in 2001, which literally enables every single subsequent Javascript framework out there.

In just the last ten years alone, I’ve worked with React, Typescript, Coffeescript, Vue, Angular, Backbone.js, Ember.js, Next.js, ES6, and maybe another dozen Javascript variants that I can’t recall right now… but I wouldn’t consider myself an expert in any of them.

Like Baldur says in this article, “framework knowledge is perishable.” I don’t want to spend all my time learning a framework which, if history is any indicator, will be obsolete in a few years.

The underlying Javascript knowledge, though, is not ephemeral. I can dig up webpages I built in fifth grade and render them in moments with ease on my modern day Macbook, whereas dashboards built on React from only five years ago can only be brought up if I spend an entire day setting up an environment with a billion dependencies.

I can do that because the vanilla Javascript that worked in IE5 still works great in any modern browser.

I do have to be a realist, though… the jobs out there today do require you to use these frameworks because the software pipeline is way more complex than it was in 2000. Frameworks provide a standarized way of building software within this modern landscape. For the record, I have no problem picking one up in the course of my work and figuring it out.

I wish more organizations would simpilfy rather than move towards increasingly complex ways of writing and delivering software. I feel like so much more value could be realized by paring back the staggering amounts of dependencies that these frameworks use. Codebases would be much thinner, deploy times would be faster, your footprint for potential security threats would be smaller, etc. etc.

Anyway, I also think the way he wraps up this article is grimly astute:

The tech industry will never be a genuinely free market as long as big tech companies are allowed to be as big as they are today.

What we have today is a centrally-planned economy by MBA sociopaths, operated as a looting ground for the rich.

It will never function on normal competitive, supply-and-demand market principles.

Because, even though a healthier market is the only thing that has a hope of a return to the fast-growing tech industry of prior decades, it would also require big tech companies to accept a smaller slice of the overall pie and allow new competitors to grow.

Why do that when you can strangle the market and keep the entire corpse for yourself?

Literally laughed out loud at “centrally-planned economy by MBA sociopaths.”

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-08-14 20:50:00

Anthony Williams stepped off his bicycle late Saturday morning and let out a soft groan as he sank into a red folding camp chair on the side of a gravel road. A fine layer of brown dust covered him, from his pink helmet all the way down to his patched, black leggings.

Someone handed him a paper plate with two tortillas filled with peanut butter and honey. He slowly took several bites then paused, too exhausted to notice the honey dripping onto his lap.

“I’m having a really hard time staying awake,” he said.

The 25-year-old St. Paul man had just bicycled 124 miles in roughly nine hours — but he was only halfway to the finish of The Day Across Minnesota, a 242-mile ultra-endurance cycling race known as “The DAMn.”

The goal is pretty straightforward: Push off at midnight from Gary, S.D., a hamlet on Minnesota’s western border, and pedal to Hager City, Wis., just across the Mississippi River from Red Wing, Minn., before midnight strikes again. 

This sounds so awesome. Adding it to my bucket list.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-08-11 22:34:00

My brother-in-law is unabashedly into marching band competitions.

Last night, while playing cards at my house, he had the DCI World Championships playing on his phone in the background.

Competitive marching is his "thing".

He and my sister attend various competitions throughout the summer, and their goal is to make it to the finals in Indianapolis one year to witness the presentation of the Founders Trophy in person.

As a young kid, I used to have a ton of "things."

In the early 90s, it was the Minnesota Twins. In the late 90s, it was the Minnesota Vikings. Peppered throughout that decade, it included Animorphs, Power Rangers, Harry Potter, the Simpsons, Pokémon, and music.

As a high schooler, I became all too aware of people who had a "thing". When all your friends tease people because of their love for Texas Hold 'Em or pro wrestling or The Sims, you start to get self conscious.

What is my "thing" that everyone is teasing me about behind my back?

I made a choice somewhere around that time to never allow myself to be pinned down as someone who has a "thing".

In my late 30s, I occasionally find myself in this exasperating situation where I don't know what to do with my idle time.

I've been getting into small electronics repair, teaching myself soldering and fixing my old iPod. I've been playing guitar more often.

But my problem is that I don't have much idle time, because I have two small kids and a wife who I really, really enjoy being around.

And collectively, we don't have a "thing".

Growing up, our family's "thing" was attending each other's activities.

I remember being bribed by my parents with Pokémon cards so I didn't throw an absolute fit when my sister competed with her dance team at Williams Arena.

I remember getting together with the boys in the far corner of the stadium, playing 500 while my brother played a real game of football on the turf.

Every band concert, every theatre production, every softball game... that's what we did as a family.

But I don't recall having a "thing" that wasn't something we participated in.

We weren't huddled around a TV watching sports. We didn't go see shows together.

We mostly just supported each other.

That was our "thing."

The Olympics provided a great testing ground for various "things" we might adopt.

Every night for the past couple weeks, I've forced the kids to watch nearly every single sport with me.

The Olympics is a hot bed of weird, esoteric "things" that somehow get even more esoteric as the years wane on.

That's not a read, by the way: I am 100% here for competitive surfing, break dancing, underwater acrobatics, and dressage.

I can't say that we found a "thing" outright from watching the Olympics with the kids, but I learned that my son enjoys archery and my daughter enjoys hand-to-hand combat sports and track. Both of them enjoy gymnastics and soccer.

I want to find a "thing" that we, as a family, can all rally behind.

I used to assume that "things" become "things" organically, without much intentionality behind it.

As I'm getting older, I'm realizing that "things" only become "things" when someone decides to expose themselves to a new experience.

I'm unsure whether our "thing" will take the form of a sports team, or something in nature, or a TV show, or a book series, or something completely unexpected.

It could be something that's dorky like competitive marching¹ or more mainstream like professional football, it doesn't really matter to me.

All I know is that I need to start actively placing my family into situations where we can experience a "thing" together.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-08-08 23:44:15

Despite the wealth of research and clinical insight that psychologists have accumulated over the past century, there is still no unified theory of how, when, or why therapy works. Instead, the field's knowledge is scattered across hundreds of particular "schools of therapy" that largely talk past each other, despite their many common elements.

Among other issues, this makes it frustratingly hard to know what to look for in a therapy or therapist, or what strategies to use when undertaking one's own self-improvement.

To address this problem, psychotherapy researchers have been working to distill the principles of change found across many therapeutic approaches. Partly building on their work, and partly bringing my own philosophical lens to it, I've proposed that we can go a step further and articulate two fundamental assumptions implicitly shared by every effective therapy:

1. that therapy’s core aim is to help people exercise more agency over their lives;
2. that people exercise agency primarily through the pursuit and application of working knowledge.

This was one of those articles I had to read through a couple of times so I could breathe it all in.

As someone trying to do the hard work myself, I can say that it took knowledge from multiple different sources to begin to grasp the concepts that I needed to get through my own struggles.

This appears to be a fairly standard human experience. My daughter is going into third grade now, and it's fascinating to see what her math assignments look like. It's a lot easier to get a grasp on addition when you are given a bevy of different tricks and techniques to ultimately internalize the concept.

Can't wait for Dr. Gorlin's book to come out!

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-08-08 09:33:00

yt-dlp is a great tool that lets you download personal copies of videos from many sites on the internet. It’s a wonderful tool with good use cases, but it also made it possible for NVIDIA to acquire YouTube data in a way they simply could not have without it. I bring this up because one of the arguments I hear from Team “LLMs Should Not Exist” is that because LLMs can be used to do bad things, they should not be used at all.

I personally feel the same about yt-dlp as I do about LLMs in this regard: they can be used to do things that aren’t okay, but they are also benevolently used to do things that are useful. See also torrents, emulators, file sharing sites, Photoshop, social media, and just like…the internet itself. I’m not saying LLMs are perfect by any means, but this angle of attack doesn’t do much for me, personally.

They’re all exceptionally powerful tools.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-08-07 21:04:00

So we’re not the frickin’ Foo Fighters here, yeah? We’re not goddamn Kings of Leon here either, packing stadiums, sharing their songs of perilous lust with thousands of people all hopped up on Corona Extra, making goddamn bank to support their beard oil side hustles, right? We’re just five 30-something Minneapolitan schlubs trying to play a little rock ‘n’ roll across the United States of America, mostly ‘cause we’re getting a little bored of playing the Eagles Club every month, OK?

Touring, for bands of our stature, is more like an existential vacation that’s intended to make memories and build connections while serving as a psychological endurance experiment, one that tests the limits of our social and moral boundaries. And hey, if we make a little cheddar along the way, peddling our new record and slingin’ our T-shirts? If that subsidizes the gas and keeps the light blue American Spirits puffin’, then that’s a big ol’ Al Pacino “HOO-AH!” for us.

I have nothing but respect for musicians who hit the road, especially when they aren’t “the frickin’ Foo Fighters.”

I enjoyed this piece about a band I’ve never heard of, but certainly will give their album a stream later today.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-08-05 23:49:00

One of the best parts of YouTube Premium is being able to run audio in the background while your screen is turned off.

I utilized this feature heavily this past weekend as I drove back from a long weekend of camping. I got sick shortly before we left, so I drove separately and met my family the next day.

On the drive back, I threw on this video and couldn’t wait to tell my wife about it when we met up down the road at a McDonalds.

If you are completely uninterested in large language models, artificial intelligence, generative AI, or complex statistical modeling, then this video is perfect to throw on if you’re struggling with insomnia.

If you have even a passing interest in LLMs, though, you have to check this presentation out by Andrej Karpathy, a co-founder of OpenAI.

Using quite approchable language, he explains how you build and tune an LLM, why it’s so expensive, how they can improve, and where these tools are vulnerable to attacks such as jailbreaking and prompt injection.

I’ve played with LLMs for a few years now and this video greatly improved the mental model I’ve developed around how these tools work.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-08-02 09:40:00

I’ve consumed a few pieces of content recently which all seem to converge around a central theme.

A good friend recommended I read the book Hope and Help for your Nerves, a book originally written in the 1960s by Dr. Claire Weekes, because it provides a simple framework for beating the cycle of anxiety once and for all.

I found myself occasionally wincing at some of its dated references¹, but mostly, I found myself unable to put the book down.

Every time she starts a new chapter, she introduces a new character who is undergoing some form of nervous breakdown, and I find myself completely captivated because I can 100% see myself in the vast majority of these people.²

So what is this simple framework for taming anxiety once and for all?

1. Facing (confronting anxiety instead of avoiding it)
2. Accepting (being okay with the situation without adding resistance)
3. Floating (pretending you’re on a cloud, allowing feelings and sensations to come and go without resistance)
4. Letting Time Pass (understanding that recovery takes time)

Today, I’m supposed to be camping with my family, but I woke up feeling horrible, so I stayed back while my wife and kids took off.

After taking a nap, I decided that it was the perfect day to work through my YouTube “Watch Later” backlog.

Near the top of my list was a TEDx talk from Olympian Deena Kastor where she shared her technique for introducing joy into the things we dread the most.

This was the "chaser" to the "shot" provided by Dr. Weekes.

I used to find it easy to introduce joy into my life. I loved running my own business and deciding that we’d spend every single lunch playing Super Smash Bros. for the N64.

It saddens me to admit that for the last few years, I’ve found it increasingly difficult to do stuff like that. Being silly feels challenging, even when it involves playing a game at the playground with my kids. If I’m being honest, it sometimes feels like I’m not worthy of feeling joy or happiness.

Deena shared how she used to hate her Sunday morning long runs because, well, have you ever had to get up at 4am to run 15 miles with a group of people who are physiologically already faster than you?³

She later realized that by giving into the dread, she was admitting defeat even before taking the first step of the run.

After she decided to put on her favorite outfit, eat her favorite breakfast, and find other ways to inject joy into the situation, those long runs became her favorite part of her job. And it made her realize that she could infuse joy into all areas of her life, which ultimately made her life more filled with joy.

Another video on my Watch Later list was from Cal Newport about dopamine sickness.

Cal invents a lot of terms, but I do not want him to stop because these terms seem to always click with me.

One of those terms is “dopamine sickness”, which is when your brain is unable to focus for long periods of time because you’ve spent so much time feeding it quick hits of dopamine whenever you’re bored.

He also coined “deep procrastination”, which is when you are physically unable to do your job, even when you’re under deadlines or other types of pressure.

I said in my original link to this video that his solutions to these problems are “infuriatingly simple”, because to be honest, all of the advice that I’m seeing in all of these pieces is blindingly obvious with the gift of hindsight.

It all seems to boil down to “be an adult.”

And I define “being an adult” as “have a vision for what it is you want to do, and then focus all your efforts on achieving that vision.”

So between those three pieces of media, I feel like I’ve got a good strategy for finally making solid progress on my anxiety and depression issues.

First, I need to be crystal clear on my vision. Who do I want to be? What do I want to do?

When I’m clear on that, I need to figure out what aspects of that vision give me fear. Then, I need to find trusted advisors to help me devise a game plan to address those fears. And when some of those fears inevitably materialize, I need to have confidence that I’ll be able to work through them.

I need to be more rigid about building systems for myself and sticking to them. There are an endless amount of productivity hacks out there, but I need to start simple: time box my calendar at the beginning of the week and hold to those boxes. Include all the boxes necessary to feel like I’m making progress both personally and professionally.

Whenever I get frustrated about a problem, I need to infuse joy into the situation. I need to simplify the problem and take the tiniest of steps towards solving it.

Finally, I need to be more intentional about how I use technology. Intention is tough to define without a vision, which is why I need that vision first. Getting rid of my iPhone is probably a helpful step in defining that direction.

I believe those are the steps I need to take in order to start seeing a decrease in my general anxiety levels and an increase in my happiness with life levels.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-08-02 09:00:00

Leave it to Cal Newport to show up in my algorithm and give terminology to part of the struggle I’ve faced for several years now: deep procrastination.

Deep procrastination is when you’re physically unable to work up the motivation to do work that needs to be done. Even with external pressures like deadlines, your body is unable to find the drive to do the thing.

This is different from depression because deep procrastinators were still able to feel joy in other areas of their lives, but not work.

He also mentions dopamine sickness, an effect from being constantly rewarded by quick hits of dopamine for an extended period of time.

If you are dopamine sick, you are unable to focus for long periods of time because your brain is literally wired for short term wins, not for deep, difficult thinking.

His solutions to both of these problems are infuriatingly simple: use an organizational system to handle doing these tasks, make hard tasks easier, use time boxing, remember your vision for your life and aim your work toward that.

In the video, Cal says, “we appreciate hard things when we know why we’re doing them.” It reminds of the episode of Bluey called “Ragdoll” where Bandit agrees to buy the kids ice cream only if they are able to physically put his body into the car to drive them to the ice cream place.

After a series of mighty struggles, Bluey is finally able to take a lick of an ice cream cone and is instantly greeted with a moment of euphoria, made possible only after all that hard work.

There are several pieces of content that I’ve consumed today which are all colliding into one potential blog post about how I’m deciding to be done with my crippling anxiety. Maybe after this video, I’ll pull out my laptop and start some deeper writing.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-08-02 08:35:00

I love videos like these because it highlights just how few major players there are in Hollywood.

I knew Disney was responsible for a large part of my childhood, but until this video mentioned movies like “Sister Act” and “3 Ninjas”, I didn’t realize the full extent.

🫡 to one of the greats.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-08-02 04:21:00

An internet friend sent this to me when it happened, saying, “this seems like something you’d watch.”

This was so delightful. I love these nerdy, competitive communities who all rally around joy.

This joy was noticeable when Fractal was live streaming his reaction to when Scuti got the crash. He didn’t look mad or disappointed. He looked proud, excited, and happy for his competitor.

Supremely feel good nerdy content right here.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-08-02 03:23:00

I am a big fan of Deena Kastor. She’s an Olympic bronze medalist and former U.S. record holder for the marathon.

Deena shared her approach for injecting joy into miserable situations in her TEDx talk, which is certainly something I can empathize with as a former marathoner myself.

Doing wind sprints up the hill behind Coffman Union doesn’t sound like much fun, but when you’re doing it with others and trying to make each other laugh while you do it, it’s an experience you’ll never forget.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-08-02 03:09:00

I am supposed to be camping with my family today, but I feel like death, so instead, I’m gonna lay on the couch and clear through my watch later queue.

First up, this inside look at Apple’s approach to chip fabrication.

It’s videos like these that make me feel as though hardware is an approachable hobby to get into.

Yeah, maybe I don’t know how to put a billion 6 nanometer transistors onto a piece of silicon… but I don’t think I need to know that in order to make something useful.

Also, this was delightful to experience with the hindsight of 8 months. We now know about Apple Intelligence, and we also know how the Vision Pro rollout went.

I haven’t felt like much of an Apple fanboy lately, but this piece made me appreciate how hard their engineers are working to build super useful products.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-08-01 11:11:00

I personally tried withdrawing cash at three financial institutions in different weight classes, as was told it was absolutely impossible (in size) at all of them, owing to the Falcon issue.

At one, I was told that I couldn’t use the tellers but could use the ATM. Unfortunately, like many customers, I was attempting to take out more cash from the ATM than I ever had before. Fortunately, their system that flags potentially fraudulent behavior will let a customer unflag themselves by responding to an instant communication from the bank. Unfortunately, the subdomain that communication directs them to runs on a server apparently protected by CrowdStrike Falcon.

I have some knowledge of the history of comprehensive failures of financial infrastructure, and so I considered doing the traditional thing when convertibility of deposits is suspended by industry-wide issues: head to the bar.

I’ve ignored the CrowdStrike news primarily because it didn’t directly impact me, and secondarily because I made an assumption that this was yet another example of the joys of late stage capitalism.

I’m glad I read this article, though, because it helped put the crisis in perspective.

While it didn’t impact me, it certainly caused issues for those in my real life. Software truly has reached a point where it can cause massive headaches for large swaths of society.

When a big part of society gets bumped by an outage like this, the ripples of its consequences will surely be felt by everyone at some point down the road.

Second, I gotta stop being so cynical about capitalism. I should stop pretending I’m above it or better than it. Like it or not, it’s the system I have to play in.

It would probably be less stressful for me to accept the game and use it to accomplish my own set of goals.

One of my main goals in life is to build technology that helps make people’s lives better.¹ Say what you will about CrowdStrike, but this article reminded me that it’s because of tools like Falcon that we are provided a society in which we all can live better lives.

So instead of sitting here and (a) ignoring the news and (b) complaining about the existence of bad actors in our system, maybe I should instead do my best to help make our system as stable as I can.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-07-29 21:41:00

We All Want Impossible Things is a novel which follows the journey of a woman whose best friend is in hospice, living out her final days after fighting a tough battle with cancer.

I started this book a couple months ago and got up to about 70% of the way through before putting it aside.

I'm pretty sure I let it sit because I didn't want to see how it ended. Obviously the death was going to come, but I wasn't quite ready to take on someone else's outlet for grief.

That is, until this past week, when I was in search of something to help me process my own grief.

Last week, I learned that a really good friend of mine died unexpectedly from a heart attack, which set me up for one of the worst mental health stretches I've experienced in recent months.

The last 30% of the book provided some much needed catharsis and meaning. Although the main character's experience wasn't directly similar to mine, it gave me some well considered insights into what love and friendship is all about.

If you're also grieving, I highly recommend this book.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-07-25 20:57:00

My kids have been on a kick lately of trying to trick people with this riddle:

Kid: "If the blue man lives in the blue house, and the red man lives in the red house, who lives in the green house?"

Me: "The green man"

Kid: "Who lives in the purple house?"

Me: "The purple man"

Kid: "Who lives in the white house?"

Me: "The white man"

Kid: "Wrong! It's the president!"

This riddle initially reminded me of what it was like to work with large language models.

It's easy, I assumed, to trick these models into outputting virtually whatever you want by presenting them with leading questions. Giving them "few shot" answers like this (e.g. "the blue man lives in the blue house, red man lives in the red house") would certainly result in them getting it wrong like I did, right?

This morning, I thought I'd see what the latest models would actually respond with given this game:

ChatGPT 4o (the latest model):

The President of the United States lives in the White House.

This was the first model I tried, and it straight up was like, "nope, I got this."

Ugh. Maybe it had seen this in its training data before?

The "Who lives in the White House?" game or riddle is a common one that I've encountered multiple times in various forms. It's often used to playfully lead to the punchline that the President of the United States lives in the White House.

Well, damn. Okay, let's try an older model and see what happens.

ChatGPT 4 (the legacy model):

The gardener lives in the greenhouse!

In the spirit of the previous joke, perhaps the grape man lives in the purple house!

The President of the United States lives in the White House.

Even though this is an older model, I like this answer even better.¹

Alright, well, OpenAI is onto my tricks... how about Anthropic?

Claude Sonnet 3.5:

I apologize, but I don't have enough information to determine who lives in the green, purple, and white houses. The puzzle only specifies that the blue man lives in the blue house and the red man lives in the red house. There's no information provided about the occupants of the other colored houses.

To solve this puzzle completely, we would need additional clues or information about the residents of the green, purple, and white houses. Without that, those houses' occupants remain unknown.

This is an even better answer! It's perhaps the least fun answer, but when I'm working with an AI assistant, I think I'd prefer it to err on the side of caution rather than boisterousness.²

When I asked it if it had seen this riddle before, it gave an equally diplomatic response:

I don't have specific information about how many times I've encountered that particular puzzle or game in my training data. As an AI language model, I don't have personal experiences or memories of my training process. My knowledge comes from processing large amounts of text data, but I don't retain or count individual instances of specific puzzles or games.

What I can say is that logic puzzles involving colored houses and their occupants are fairly common in puzzle collections and brain teasers. The most famous version is probably the "Einstein's Riddle" or "Zebra Puzzle," which is more complex and involves five houses of different colors, their occupants, and various other attributes.

The specific version you presented (with just blue and red specified, and asking about green, purple, and white) isn't one I immediately recognize as a standard or famous puzzle. It seems like it might be a simplified version or a variation of the more complex house puzzles.

The main takeaways here? First, just because I'm dumb enough to fall for this elementary school riddle doesn't mean our AI LLMs are, so I shouldn't make assumptions about the usefulness of these tools. Second, every model is different, and you should run little experiments like these in order to see which tools produce the output which is more favorable to you.

I've been using the free version of Claude to run side-by-side comparisons like this lately, and I'm pretty close to getting rid of my paid ChatGPT subscription and moving over to Claude. The answers I get from Claude feel more like what I'd expect an AI assistant to provide.

I think this jives well with Simon Willison's "Vibes Based Development" observation that you need to work with an LLM for a few weeks to get a feel for a model's strengths and weaknesses.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-07-23 21:14:00

As I mentioned in my post about ditching my iPhone, I'm trying to get back into reading books.

One of the hardest parts about getting back into reading is to adjust my mindset about how I read books.

For the last couple decades, I was extremely selective about the books I read. I wouldn't pick up a book unless I was positive that I'd make it through without abandoning it early.

After all, dedicating time to a few hundred pages was a significant investment! I'm a busy man, after all.¹

A couple weeks back, my family walked up to the library together. Usually, it's a time where my wife gets to meander down the aisles, picking out books for herself and the kids, while the rest of us play with the puppets and dinosaurs they've got set up in the kids area.

This time, I decided to walk through the new release section and see if anything caught my eye.The distinctive pink cover of this book caught it right away.

I was slightly embarrassed as I sat down on the couches and started reading a book about a movie geared toward teenaged girls. I didn't realize that fifteen minutes had gone by when my family was asking if I was ready to leave.

I finished the book up yesterday and recommend it if you are into behind-the-scenes stories of how media gets made. The author interviewed all the actors from the movie, including those who only had one or two lines.

I was particularly compelled by the story of Rajiv Surendra, the actor who played Kevin G. He talked about how much effort it took to cultivate the confidence that his character exudes, and how he often channels that character in real life when he needs a boost.

Self confidence is an area I'm actively working on, so I appreciated being able to pull a little inspiration from a book I picked up on a whim from the library.

I'm sure none of this is new information to you all. Libraries have books, books are useful for transmitting new ideas, yadda yadda. Give me a break, I'm trying here!

I'm also working my way through A Hacker's Mind by Bruce Schneier based off a recommendation from my pal Arun.

Not sure if you all knew this, but reading books can be pretty dope.

(My buddy Paul recommended a few graphic novels that I'll reserve from the library next, but I'm still looking for a solid fiction series to get behind, so holler if you have any suggestions! )

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-07-23 19:41:00

Visualize what I am about to share with you. Take a glass beaker with clear water in it. Throw in some gravel and stir vigorously. It becomes cloudy but, in a few minutes, the gravel settles down and the water becomes clear again.

Now put in a handful of sand and stir again. It takes longer but the sand finally settles down and the water becomes clear once more.

Now put in some gooey mud and stir. It could take weeks before that muck gets to the bottom, and you have clear water again.

And what happens if you stir this mixture every day?

You never have clear water in your beaker.

That is the situation we are in. All the stuff we let into our brain clouds and disturbs our mind.

In the old days there were fewer distractions, and we could return fairly easily to a state of relative calm. These days there are many disturbances causing influences and they take forever to settle down. And, we have been brainwashed into liking the gooey mud, so we keep stirring the water and it never becomes clear.

I am very excited to see if I can get my beaker to have clear water when I ditch my iPhone soon.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-07-19 01:35:00

LEE: The president now takes comedic license for the most serious shit imaginable. This attitude of "Hey, who gives a shit? We're going to say what we want but not be held accountable whatsoever because we're just using comedic license,” It’s kind of mind blowing that those tools were taken and now comics are left sitting there like with their dicks and their lady parts hanging out.

We're the ones that are supposed to have a who-gives-a-fuck attitude because what I say doesn't matter! And now the comics are like, "Well, Jesus, if they have no reverence whatsoever, to humanity or ethics or morals or decency or democracy, then yeah, then how interesting is irreverence? I feel like comedy is seems pretty impotent right now. At best it can describe the nightmare, but it certainly can’t influence it.

This article is seven years old, and Wonder Showzen is more than twenty years old. So reading this article helps me put our current times into a different perspective.

When George W. Bush was elected in his second term, I remember feeling a general sense of victory. That’s because my parents were both big Bush supporters, and the muted din of Fox News constantly reverberated through our house.

Now that I’m a little older, it’s useful to have a piece like this which paints that period in a much different hue.

And any excuse to rewatch Wonder Showzen is a good one for me.

But as far as the pull quote I used: I think this is one of the trickiest lines to walk in a democracy and in a society writ large.

We seem to really care about our sacred cows, but when you’re balancing the needs of billions of sacred cows, are any of them really sacred? How do you determine which sacred cows are worth holding onto?

How do you find that right balance which keeps our species moving forward together?

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-07-17 11:03:00

Enbies and gentlefolk of the class of ‘24:

Write websites.

If I could offer you only one tip for the future, coding would be it. The long term benefits of coding websites remains unproved by scientists, however the rest of my advice has a basis in the joy of the indie web community’s experiences.

I love the reference to Wear Sunscreen, one of the great commencement speeches.

There is amazing advice and inspiration for building websites in here. It also reminded me of POSSE, meaning “Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.”

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-07-16 07:15:00

This article is a few months old, lamenting the death of the historic Sports Illustrated brand.

I wanted to share it now because (a) yadda yadda instapaper backlog, and (b) I think it reveals a truth about the future of journalism to which it didn’t intend.

First, from the article:

We will muddle along in a new Dark Ages caused by the constant static of an overwhelming blitz of contradictory and false content that largely only serves the aims of the people and companies that create it, pulling us further and further from one another and our shared interests as a species that should seek the improvement of ever member of its kind. I know this is some pretty hyperbolic stuff to extrapolate from the death of a magazine that published photos of bikini babes, but that’s where I’m at. I wish I had better news. I wish I had a solution for you besides voting for the few political figures who don’t want this to happen and maybe wandering some car parks if that doesn’t work out.

Then, also from the article:

We’re going to try to keep this thing going no matter what happens in the future, and we’re not going to lie to you to serve some weird outside or nefarious interests.

That’s it. That’s the solution.

Journalism, in its modern implementation, is almost always subsidized by billionaires. There’s no profitable business model in telling stories, in speaking truth to power.

Yet we still feel compelled to do journalism. Telling stories, after all, is an integral part of the human experience.

Yes, it sucks that these historic brands are suffering terrible deaths. But that doesn’t mean citizen journalism is dead, and it doesn’t mean we can’t find ways to continue to support our best story tellers as they tell the necessary stories of our time.

I’m glad we are alive at a time where we have the internet which enables anybody to do good journalism. I proudly support my own community-run news organization called Racket, and I encourage everyone out there to support their own.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-07-16 03:57:00

Long time readers of this blog may recall that I've been psyching myself up enough to try switching to the Light Phone.

I’m legit embarrassed to admit just how much I’m addicted to my iPhone.

It happened slowly over the course of the last 15 years. Today, I find myself frequently incapable of putting it down, even when it’s actively making me feel terrible.

The biggest expense of always being virtually connected is never feeling connected to the physical moment happening in front of me.

That wasn’t so much of a problem to me when I was sitting in front of my Compaq desktop in the basement of my parent’s house.

Back in those days, I used to hate being away from my computer. The very first thing I’d do when returning from a family vacation was to jump on the computer and catch up on a week of message board posts.

Here in 2024, though, I don’t subject myself to that experience.

The other day, I was playing a Lego game with my son and while he was explaining an aspect of the game to me, I pulled out my phone and went to turn on music. Mid sentence, he stops and says, “Dad, can you put your phone away? It’s distracting me.”

Oof. That’s not how I want my son to remember me.

I’ve tried all the techniques people say can help limit screen time. Grayscale the screen. Delete apps. Block toxic websites. But because none of those tricks are actually working, it’s time to take more drastic measures.

My plan is to move my phone number onto the Light Phone for a month. Just a month.

I'm going to do this during the month of August. That will give me a couple weeks to prepare for it. I am honestly worried about what I’ll be giving up, and so I'm doing what I can to brace myself for that impact.

I’m mostly excited, really. After more than a decade in the comfortable, walled garden of the Apple ecosystem, I think it will be nice to experiment with new tech tools again.

The Light Phone is designed to be as boring and practical as possible. It can make phone calls, send texts, and give driving directions, among a few other things.

But there are certainly some activities that the Light Phone won’t do very well which I am unwilling to give up. So here are those activities, along with how I'm thinking I'll deal with those activities for the time being:

Taking notes and reminders.

A notepad with a pen. ✅

Next.

Reading.

Sometime in the last couple of decades, I stopped reading books.

I’m not exactly sure why. I used to love reading books when I was a kid. I would go to the library and read every book they had on building websites and computer programs. I’d also read every new edition of Animorphs, Goosebumps, and Harry Potter as soon as my library stocked it.

But beginning in high school, I stopped reading books for fun. Reading felt like a burden, something you were assigned as punishment. I resented reading so much, in fact, that I used to pride myself on not buying books for class in college and finding a way through without them.¹

If I read books these days, I almost only read non-fiction, which is fine… but I miss reading for fun.

Earlier this year, I helped my wife proctor some tests at her school. I wasn’t allowed to be on the internet, so I brought a book along that a friend recommended called What You Are Looking For Is In The Library. I burned through it in a day, and it got me interested in reading fiction once again.

I think I wanna try getting into a fiction series. The last series I read was the Left Behind books in high school, so uh, yeah… I’m a bit out of the loop with what’s good out there.

If anyone has recommendations, let me know!

Taking pictures.

I used to be really into cameras when I was really into making clips². When my oldest was born, we thought it made sense to buy a good SLR, so we picked up a Canon Rebel T6i.

I do still grab it out of storage and bring it along to the occasional soccer game or choir performance, and the shots feel better to me than the ones I get with my iPhone. It helps that I have a decent assortment of lenses, but I think it also speaks to the joy you get from using a tool that was intentionally built to complete a task.

Of course, I can’t realistically carry an SLR with me all the time. I need something more practical.

When I sold cameras at Best Buy³, the camera I recommended the most was the Canon SD800 IS, and it was the camera that documented some of the most fun moments of my life. It was small enough to fit in my pocket alongside my iPod.

Even though it fit, I still didn’t carry it with me every day, which makes the pictures I did take with them feel extra special when I browse through them today.

Maybe having a camera on me all the time is less necessary than I’m worried about. I mean, in a normal day for you, how many situations can you envision where you must take a picture of something and can't flag down someone to take one and send it to you?⁴

So I’m in the market for a camera that’s small like the SD800 was, but perhaps more professional. I remember seeing someone mention the Canon PowerShot G7 X Mark III and I thought the silver one looked kinda dope.

It makes me happy to see Canon keeping these devices up to date. The G7 X can shoot 4k video, and it’s got WiFi and USB-C so it’ll be easy to get media off of it. Most importantly, its size means it can stay in the drawer by the door and leap into service at a moment's notice.

But anyway, what about y’all? Anyone else use something besides their phone to take a picture or a video?

Listening to music.

The whole reason I wanted to make this post is because I wanted to brag about my restoration project with my old fifth generation iPod.

But because of course this is what happens when I brag, I’ve been stuck for a few days trying to debug a hardware failure that is proving exceptionally frustrating to resolve. Chef’s kiss.

So instead of bragging about that, I’ll instead confess that I’m one of those sickos who maintains their own library of MP3s.

I’ve always looked at streaming services with squinty eyes. Maybe it’s because I’m still mad at what they did to our beloved Napster. Maybe it’s because I think it’s important to not give complete control of my cultural history to massive corporations⁵. Maybe it’s because buying an MP3 version of an album from an artist will give them vastly more money than my combined streams would ever account for. Maybe it’s because I am an aging boomer.

Either way, transitioning away from Apple Music will not be too excruciating for me. I’ll still use it because I have HomePods all over my house, but when I’m not home, I want need a way to bring my music with me.

The Light Phone does have some storage and an MP3 player option, but because of the intentional design, you’re limited to a single playlist and 1gb of tunes. That doesn’t work for me, brother.

I’ll keep y’all posted with my progress on the restoration process. I want to get Rockbox installed on it so I can experience what the home brew community is doing with this old hardware.

In the meantime, if anyone knows how to address issues with an iFlash Solo syncing with an M1 Mac mini, holler at your boy.

I’d like to take this opportunity to express how pathetic I feel that I need to take these extreme steps to reclaim some part of me that I feel like I’ve lost ever since going whole ham on the mobile revolution.

I talk at length about the joy that comes with technology, but I should also recognize the negative impact that tech can make.

We went through an era of unfettered growth from Silicon Valley-powered firms who had nearly no supervision and did everything they could to exploit our political and economic systems for their own gain.

And to be clear, their growth did bestow some incredible tools onto us.

But as much as our society derides subgroups like the Luddites and the Amish for their apparent aversion to technology, there is clearly some merit to how they approach technology. You should adopt technology because it’ll help you, not because everyone else is using it.

Every night around 10:30pm, I find myself lying in bed, entering the casino that is my iPhone. Every app is a different section of the game room floor.

My email app is a slot machine, where I hope I’ll hit the big bucks and get an email saying “yay you’re hired!”, but the odds are better that I’ll see an email saying “lol you owe me money still.”

LinkedIn and Reddit are craps tables, where I sometimes roll an 11 and see a post from a friend who had a successful day at work or a post on /r/AskHistorians that teaches me something interesting (like Did President Andrew Garfield ever eat lasagna?). But more often than not, I roll snake eyes and see something which makes me feel like a failure or living in a dumpster fire of a society.

Even my beloved RSS reader app, filled with feeds that I explicitly opted into, can feel like a game of blackjack. Yeah, I often walk away with at least some money, but I still sometimes leave the table feeling unsure why I’m passionate about anything anymore.

I let this happen to myself. And every time I pull my phone out of my pocket during a family dinner, I rob myself of what makes life worth living in the first place.

Like our Silicon Valley overlords like to say, you can’t stop the march of progress. Technology is rapidly improving, and major advances in our collective understanding of the universe are unveiled at an overwhelming pace.

There’s gotta be a way where we can harness the good parts of technology without entirely succumbing to all of its detriments. The first step, I suppose, is defining what I want to get out of life.

And really, it’s pretty simple:

• Play Legos with my son
• Sing karaoke with my wife
• Watch Rocko’s Modern Life with my daughter
• Make music, work out, and learn new things
• Be able to visit the doctor when I’m not feeling well without going bankrupt
• Build something useful for people
• Not make other people’s existences any worse than they already are

If those are the things that are important to me, then why would I burn precious energy spending time on a device which gives me anxiety attacks on a daily basis?

So yeah, come August, I’m signing off from my iPhone for a bit. It’ll feel good to step out of the casino and focus on building legos, taking walks, shredding on the guitar, singing karaoke, hanging out with friends, and listening to music.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-07-14 02:08:00

I saw Simon Willison share this article and thought it was too good not to share it myself.

We respect wildlife in the wilderness because we’re in their house. We don’t fully understand the complexity of most ecosystems, so we seek to minimize our impact on those ecosystems since we can’t always predict what outcomes our interactions with nature might have.

In software, many disastrous mistakes stem from not understanding why a system was built the way it was, but changing it anyway. It’s super common for a new leader to come in, see something they see as “useless”, and get rid of it – without understanding the implications. Good leaders make sure they understand before they mess around.

Or, as the footnote succinctly puts it: “find out, then fuck around.”

This article also taught me about Chesterton’s fence, a principle that says “don’t destroy what you don’t understand”.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-07-12 12:21:45

I’ve known developers who’ve put up with the struggle with the expectation that one day it will go away: one day they’ll be an expert and never have to struggle again. This day never arrives, and so they bail out of the field.

Unfortunately, I don’t think the struggle ever goes away. I’ve been doing this professionally for 14 years now and I still have to deal with the struggle almost every work day.

If you can be comfortable with the struggle and build up your tolerance for it. If you’re able to sit in that moment and be okay without drama or a total crisis of confidence, I’m fairly sure you’re going to do just great.

The Struggle comes in multiple shapes and sizes too. Here is a short list of my experiences with The Struggle from this week alone:

• Impostor syndrome
• Anxiety about breaking a physical connector
• Frustration with unclear objectives
• Being overwhelmed by unfamiliar technologies
• Debugging something and being unable to find an answer

After 12 years of professionally dealing with The Struggle, I’m still able to handle many aspects of it, but my tolerance is quickly diminishing.

Dealing with The Struggle is much easier when you feel like there’s a reward for you at the end of it. Right now, I’m trying to restore my old iPod fifth gen with an SD card, and no matter what I do, I cannot get it to work right.

I’ve been all over forums, digging into the sixth and seventh pages of search results, desperately looking for clues as to why I’m not getting it to restore.

But I can picture myself playing that brick breaking game soon, and that first game is gonna be so much fun after all of this work.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-07-09 22:30:00

Sisyphus is forced to push a heavy boulder up a hill, only for it to roll back down; for all eternity. Camus famously compared Sisyphus’ condition to the human condition. We too are fated to complete mundane, meaningless tasks, to chase desires and achieve goals only for them to be replaced by new desires and goals; always returning back where we started. Ronald Aronson argues it is our awareness, our human self-consciousness, of this condition that makes us superior to it.

I didn't read Camus in college¹, so this concept of imagining Sisyphus happy is brand new to me.

If you also don't have much exposure to philosophy, give this article a try. It's certainly given me motivation to try reading The Myth of Sisyphus for myself.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-07-09 19:18:00

Current generative AI systems like ChatGPT employ user interfaces driven by “prompts” entered by users in prose format. This intent-based outcome specification has excellent benefits, allowing skilled users to arrive at the desired outcome much faster than if they had to manually control the computer through a myriad of tedious commands, as was required by the traditional command-based UI paradigm, which ruled ever since we abandoned batch processing.

But one major usability downside is that users must be highly articulate to write the required prose text for the prompts. According to the latest literacy research, half of the population in rich countries like the United States and Germany are classified as low-literacy users.

This might explain why I enjoy using these tools so much.

Writing an effective prompt and convincing a human to do a task both require a similar skillset.

I keep thinking about how this article impacts the barefoot developer concept. When it comes to programming, sure, the command line barrier is real.

But if GUIs were the invention that made computers accessible to folks who couldn’t grasp the command line, how do we expect normal people to understand what to say to an unassuming text box?

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-07-04 19:21:00

There’s not going to be some new killer app that displaces Google or Facebook or Twitter with a love-powered alternative. But that’s because there shouldn’t be. There should be lots of different, human-scale alternative experiences on the internet that offer up home-cooked, locally-grown, ethically-sourced, code-to-table alternatives to the factory-farmed junk food of the internet. And they should be weird.

If you missed this one when it was making the rounds seven months ago, Anil Dash did not disappoint with this think piece about the weird internet.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-07-04 00:32:00

Two years ago, the New Mexico Department of Transportation decided to spice up a particularly desolate stretch of Route 66 between Albuquerque and Tijeras by adding grooves in the road that will play music when you drive over them. If you drive the speed limit of 45 mph for the quarter-mile stretch, you can hear "America the Beautiful" play through the vibrations in your car's wheels.

Some delightful engineering here. I wonder what happens if you hit it at faster or slower speeds?

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-07-03 12:31:37

It is hard not to see this development as a true indicator that we're nearing the endpoint of robust, meaningful music criticism as a concept. The idea that music journalism has no value is one of the most pervasive thoughts circulating among the suits who control the industry. What those people continue to deprive us of is smart, varied music coverage produced by actual journalists, most of whom now find themselves being squeezed out of an industry that only rewards slavish devotion to the biggest pop stars, or a constant courting of drama, gossip, and violence that is only tangentially related to music.

If there's a better future for music journalism to come, it will perhaps spring from the re-emergence of small-batch music blogs and more localized coverage. But what we're left with now is a corporatized wasteland, and fewer publications than ever equipped to write about music with all the rigor and passion it deserves.

I’m glad Iz mentioned the optimistic part of the situation at the end.

I’m, of course, sad and frustrated by what mega corporations are doing to journalism as a whole (not just music journalism).

But what keeps my hope alive is continuing to support smaller writers who cover their beats with an infectious passion.

I don’t see a future where journalism suddenly becomes a six-figure kind of job, because capitalism is not a system where art (and nuanced, considered discussions of art) is valued enough to justify that sort of business investment.

I suppose that could be seen as bleak, but take it from someone who is currently grappling with the costs associated with doing the thing I love in exchange for a salary: it’s great for the pocket book, but damn near lethal for my soul.

And I suppose by trading my passions in for money, I can use that money to support artists who are out there making stuff that makes me happy.

On a similar note: how do y’all discover new music these days? Are there any good writers or blogs I should be following?

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-07-03 00:08:00

Person 1: Do you think the arc of history bends toward justice?

Person 2: Of course. But then again, the moon bends toward the earth constantly, and still gets farther away every year.

Man, this comic delivered a haymaker directly into my core belief of justice. 😂

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-07-02 23:32:00

I don’t doubt that Taylor Swift fans sometimes feel marginalized or attacked. Especially the ones who are extremely online and see every bozo on Twitter who says Taylor Swift isn’t a real musician or erroneously claims she doesn’t write her own songs. Misogyny exists. No one (except those bozos) disputes this. And it’s undeniable that Swift communicates something extra special and relatable to her core fans that more casual listeners miss. And that is worth writing about. But at some point, the compulsion to hush or shout down anyone with a dissenting opinion starts to feel wearying and ungenerous. In 2023, it felt like a classic case of being a sore winner, to borrow a phrase used by the writer B.D. McClay in 2019 to describe thin-skinned cultural figures who want “acclaim, but not responsibility; respect without disagreement; wealth without scrutiny; power without anyone noticing it’s there.”

The first example McClay wrote about, naturally, was Taylor Swift. And that was before she got really big over the pandemic and beyond. But for all her winning, she hasn’t got any better about sportsmanship. She remains obsessed with score settling. (When you have a billion-dollar tour and still feel the need to drag Kim Kardashian for something that happened in the mid-2010s you have unlocked a new level of pettiness.) As for the Swifties, I’m sorry, but you don’t get to say 'This just isn’t for you' when your idol has achieved the ubiquity of Taylor Swift. Because Taylor Swift isn’t just for you. She’s for all of us. Everyone on the planet has Taylor Swift being shot into their ears and up their nostrils. She’s inescapable. Whether you like her or not.

So, some of us are sort of sick to death of hearing about Taylor Swift. And that’s an understandable reaction that has no bearing on your personal enjoyment of her music if you’re a fan. Some of us being sort of sick to death of Taylor Swift will not stop the content machine from servicing you. Fear and capitalism will no doubt roll on in 2024. But maybe we can all be a little more normal about it.

I admit that I'm a bit late to this one considering we're more than halfway through 2024 already.¹

Maybe it's a consequence of me being intentionally not online this year, but I haven't seen a whole lot of Taylor this year, which is odd considering she released a new album.

Anyway, while I was reading this article, I thought of a recent Daily Show segment where Jon Stewart quips: "Why does everything have to be so fucking weird?"

Go watch the clip (relevant segment is from 2:32 to 3:45) to understand the context and the delivery of that line.

My wife and I have been saying that nonstop this past month, and it's the perfect question to ask ourselves in what could be perhaps the most bizarre year of our lives to date.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-07-02 03:13:00

Embeddings are one of the most useful but unfortunately underdiscussed concepts in the artificial intelligence space relative to the modern generative AI gigahype. Embeddings are a set of hundreds of numbers which uniquely correspond to a given object that define its dimensionality, nowadays in a multiple of 128 such as 384D, 768D, or even 1536D. The larger the embeddings, the more “information” and distinctiveness each can contain, in theory.

These embeddings can be used as-is for traditional regression and classification problems with your favorite statistical modeling library, but what’s really useful about these embeddings is that if you can find the minimum mathematical distance between a given query embedding and another set of embeddings, you can then find which is the most similar: extremely useful for many real-world use cases such as search.

You wanna cut through the hype about AI? Here's the key takeaway: it boils down to a bunch of math nerds figuring out interesting relationships between numbers.

Which, of course, is useless to all of us non-math nerds... except for when you apply this information in the context of Pokémon.

Joking aside, I have a basic understanding of embeddings, but this article, with its basis in Pokémon lore, is the clearest explanation for how embeddings work in practice that I’ve seen.

Warning: there's still a lot of involved math happening here, but stay with it. You might learn a concept or two!

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-07-01 18:58:00

"Inside Out 2" has also showcased how vital the family audience is to the box office. This underserved crowd accounted for more than 70% of those in attendance during the film's domestic debut, according to data from EntTelligence.

While this audience came out in droves for Universal's "The Super Mario Bros. Movie," which generated more than $1.36 billion at the global box office, there was little for them to feast on until the recent releases of Sony's "The Garfield Movie" and Paramount's "IF."

We saw Inside Out 2 as a family the week it came out.

The anxiety attack portrayal in the movie got the tears rolling. I haven't felt so seen as it relates to mental health struggles, and I'm glad I have an example in the media I can show my kids as they get older and start dealing with stuff like this.

I don't understand why everyone keeps dogging on Pixar, saying they haven't released a good movie in years. Elemental, Turning Red, Soul, Onward, and Luca are all incredible movies.

The only turd since the pandemic is Lightyear. The reveal about Zurg's true identity made me literally yell "you've gotta be kidding me" out loud in a crowded theatre.

The article here does make a good point about the family audience being underserved essentially since the pandemic. We love taking the kids to our local Marcus theater, and there have been very few opportunities to do so with new movies.

The Garfield Movie was cute but also quite skippable. Better to find the 90s cartoon and binge that.

IF is not a kids movie; it's a movie geared towards aging parents who have lost touch with their inner child. (🙋‍♂️)

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish was dark as hell. I enjoyed it, but my daughter had nightmares for a week after seeing it.

So yeah, I'm grateful for Inside Out 2, and I'm looking forward to more family friendly movies coming to theaters here yet this summer like Despicable Me 4, Harold and the Purple Crayon, and Transformers One.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-07-01 11:41:30

The Web we have was not born out of neglect. It has taken intentionality to become what it is. The Web we have today will not continue to be what it is and what we envision it to become if we do not involve ourselves.

Yes, it’s good to take a break when your burnt out and tired. Yes, it’s good to know when to stop or circle back when something isn’t working. Yes, it’s good to humbly trust others. These are all healthy, necessary things to do if we want to see the Web thrive, but do not remain extinguished, stalled, or sidelined.

The Web needs you and me.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-07-01 06:49:00

In early 2023, an 18-year-old college student decided to make her first-ever shoegaze song. Her friend sent her a “beat,” a grungy shoegaze instrumental crafted by the producer grayskies, and she spent two hours recording herself singing over it into her phone, using her everyday Apple earbuds as a microphone. No guitars were strummed, and no reverb pedals were stepped on. The next day, she titled the song “Your Face” and uploaded a snippet of it on TikTok, posting under the artist name Wisp. The video gained 100k views overnight, so she made another. That one got 600k views. She made another. That one quickly racked up 1 million views. Soon after, “Your Face” was being streamed millions of times on Spotify, and before Wisp even released a second song, she had signed a deal with Interscope Records.

Fast-forward eight months later and “Your Face” has been streamed nearly 30 million times on Spotify, almost twice as much as My Bloody Valentine’s classic Loveless closer “Soon.” The official sound snippet has been used in 126k TikTok videos, almost as many as Mitski’s runaway TikTok goliath “Washing Machine Heart” (174k videos). In the real world, Wisp sold-out her first-ever show in less than a half hour, and then her second just as quickly.

Consider this article a bit of a “shot, chaser” to my previous post.

I’ve been really into shoegaze lately. This article does a fantastic job of highlighting how zoomers used TikTok to give the genre a renaissance.

It's a good reminder that social media isn’t innately awful. It warms my heart to see the children using these incredible technologies to unite under the banner of ethereal and somewhat depressing tunes.

Go check out Duster's album Stratosphere.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-07-01 02:50:00

The whole point of the web is that we’re not supposed to be dependent on any one company or person or community to make it all work and the only reason why we trusted Google is because the analytics money flowed in our direction. Now that it doesn’t, the whole internet feels unstable. As if all these websites and publishers had set up shop perilously on the edge of an active volcano.

But that instability was always there.

The only social network I post on anymore is LinkedIn. I have close to 2,000 followers there.

Lately, I’ve noticed that the “engagement” on my posts is increasingly sparse. Earlier this year, I was routinely seeing thousands of views per post. These days, I’m only seeing hundreds, and when it comes to sharing links to my newsletter, I’m seeing only dozens.

Meanwhile, here on my rag tag blog, I know my thoughts end up reaching people who matter the most to me.

It’s certainly less than the 2,000 people who follow me on LinkedIn, and substantially less than the tens of thousands of people a week who “engage” with my “content”¹ there… but I don’t care.

By posting here, I’m taking the harder route of building an audience without the flashy shortcuts promised by platforms like LinkedIn and Google.

Whenever I try to take shortcuts and play SEO games, I end up doing things to my website which make it feel less authentic.

And these days, I find myself asking, “what exactly do I need to take a shortcut for?”

Robin also quotes this piece by Jeremy Keith where he discusses our need for human curation:

I want a web that empowers people to connect with other people they trust, without any intermediary gatekeepers.


The evangelists of large language models (who may coincidentally have invested heavily in the technology) like to proclaim that a slop-filled future is inevitable, as though we have no choice, as though we must simply accept enshittification as though it were a force of nature.

But we can always walk away.

It’s tough to walk away from the big tech companies, but I can assure you it is possible.

Facebook used to dominate my daily existence, but besides perhaps Marketplace for selling my junk, I do not miss any of Meta’s properties since I left several years back.

Google was my portal to my email, search, and maps for years. In the past few years, I have switched to primarily using Fastmail, Ecosia, and Apple Maps. Here in 2024, they all work well.²

I do my best to avoid ordering stuff off of Amazon, and I hardly stream anything on Netflix anymore.³

I haven’t made the move over to the Light Phone yet, and I find it hard to believe that I’ll give up my Apple Watch, Apple TV, or iPad/Macs… but I do find myself questioning the prolific presence of Apple in my life more often than I did, say, ten years ago.

As I continue to experiment with LLMs, I’ve noticed that the locally-run, open source models getting closer to the performance you see in closed source models like GPT-4o and Claude Sonnet 3.5 Sonnet. It’s only a matter of time that they’re good enough to do the tasks that I find myself turning to ChatGPT to complete today.

Enshittification isn’t inevitable. Like depression, it’s an indicator that something in your digital life needs to change.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-06-30 23:57:33

This is a dope 8-bit-styled CSS framework that makes your site look like something straight out of an old school Nintendo game.

Someday, I’ll add some themes to this site, and this would be a fun theme to incorporate.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-06-29 06:07:27

I saw this article referenced while reading Bill Mill’s recap of relaunching a website, which in and of itself is a delightful read for those of us who nerd out on large-scale system architectures.

I am almost certain I’ve read Dan’s piece on boring code before, but I wanted to share it here because it serves as a great reference for those of us who are sick of making bad tech stack decisions for bad reasons.

In particular, the ending here sums up my experience consulting with many different tech teams:

Polyglot programming is sold with the promise that letting developers choose their own tools with complete freedom will make them more effective at solving problems. This is a naive definition of the problems at best, and motivated reasoning at worst. The weight of day-to-day operational toil this creates crushes you to death.

Mindful choice of technology gives engineering minds real freedom: the freedom to contemplate bigger questions. Technology for its own sake is snake oil.

The teams which move the fastest are the ones who are aligned on a vision for what is being built.

Often, these teams hold a “strong opinions, loosely held” mentality where they decide what tools they’ll use, and they’ll use them until they no longer solve the problem at hand.

Put another way: in a business context, experimenting with your tooling is a huge organizational expense that rarely yields a worthwhile return on investment.

Your focus should be on what you are building rather than how you’re building it.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-06-28 15:18:37

We’ve seen a lot of AI giants engage in questionably legal and arguably unethical practices in order to get the data they want. In order to prove the value of Perplexity to investors, Srinivas built a tool to scrape Twitter by pretending to be an academic researcher using API access for research. “I would call my [fake academic] projects just like Brin Rank and all these kinds of things,” Srinivas told Lex Fridman on the latter’s podcast. I assume “Brin Rank” is a reference to Google co-founder Sergey Brin; to my ear, Srinivas was bragging about how charming and clever his lie was.

I’m not the one who’s telling you the foundation of Perplexity is lying to dodge established principles that hold up the web. Its CEO is. That’s clarifying about the actual value proposition of “answer engines.” Perplexity cannot generate actual information on its own and relies instead on third parties whose policies it abuses. The “answer engine” was developed by people who feel free to lie whenever it is more convenient, and that preference is necessary for how Perplexity works.

So that’s Perplexity’s real innovation here: shattering the foundations of trust that built the internet. The question is if any of its users or investors care.

Well, I sure do care.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-06-25 23:06:00

As everyone was celebrating and feeling good, I was barely functional. Truthfully, I had never felt closer to death in my life. I’ve done hard workouts before. I know what it’s like to push myself. I’ve been running for over a decade. But what I experienced after crossing that finish line was something else entirely.

And for what? To have a 07:25 pace instead of a 07:30 pace? Remove my two sprints from the race and I come in maybe 30 seconds later. What difference would it have made in my life? None. I don’t win some extra prize by coming in at 25:57 instead of 26:27. 

So why did I do it? Yes, I wanted to push myself. Yes, I wanted to beat my goal. But, ultimately, I did it because I was selfish.

I love a good running analogy.

I heard Derek Sivers make a similar point with biking a few years back. Pacing is an important aspect to a well-lived life.

I also enjoyed this Josh Brown quote he included in this article:

Make yourself useful to smart, successful people. That’s how you should spend the first ten years of your career.

Surround yourself with smart, successful people and then bet on them. That’s how you should spend the next ten years.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-06-25 08:37:00

When you embrace the idea that, yes, you were lucky, the fear drops away. And then you become more open to the possibility that the universe will continue to guard your back.

Because here is a truth that only a few discover: when you look for signs that the Universe is ‘friendly’ you will find them everywhere.

It is far better to live in a ‘friendly’ universe than an ‘indifferent’ or ‘hostile’ one.

I’m used to ascribing neutrality as the universe’s default mode, but I didn’t consider the possibility that a neutral universe can be harnessed in whichever way you want.

As a developer, whenever I see my code works right, I often squint at it in disbelief, wondering what I did wrong, feeling like it’ll break the second I push it to production.

Maybe in those moments where my impostor syndrome is peaking, I should accept the pat on the back from the universe and give it some flowers.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-06-25 05:26:00

I'm a sucker for profiles on people like Conan O'Brien. The way his mind works is endlessly fascinating to me.

What intrigued me about this particular New York Times piece is his observations on agony:

Many comedians see a connection between misery and their ability to be funny, often citing humor as a survival mechanism. But after considerable therapy and reflection, O’Brien has changed his mind. He’s come to believe that not only are they not related at all, but so much stress didn’t help him be funnier. With new eyes, he has set about creating a new story. “Looking back now, I think some of my best ideas came from just goofing around,” he told me.

He points to possibly his most celebrated writing credit: the monorail episode of “The Simpsons,” which many television critics agree is the greatest in the history of the show. He describes its origins in an Olympic Boulevard billboard for a monorail, leading him to write on a legal pad: “Springfield gets a monorail. Homer likes the idea. Marge not so sure. First act: ‘Music Man.’ Second: Irwin Allen parody.”

He brought this pitch to the “Simpsons” office, writers liked it and started adding jokes. “It was like falling off a log,” he said. No agonizing at all.

I have a ton of quotes on the main page of this site¹, and one of them is from Eckhart Tolle: "Suffering is necessary until you realize it is unnecessary."

The more I agonize over my own life choices and what's next for me, the more I realize that I just need to let go. It's a constant push/pull; you have to be both unabashedly dogged in your pursuit of what you want, but you also need to be chill about it.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-06-24 03:57:00

In my opinion, security is one of the most forgotten aspects of software engineering. It rarely gets focused on until it’s too late. Even though at least one incident lands on HackerNews every week where some data gets leaked or someone gets hacked — people still think, “Nobody cares about my little startup.” You might think you're too small to be noticed by the big, evil hackers. Wrong. Size doesn't matter. You're always a target; there’s always data to leak and ways to exploit your business.

This is a great primer for the security-related items you need to consider when you’re building software.

Some takeaways:

First, any human-built product is going to be insecure. Nothing is 100% secure, ever. The best you can do is make the bad guys earn it by making it difficult to break into.

Second, your biggest vulnerabilities are almost always human. You can build Fort Knox, but if I’m able to trick your guard into opening the door for me, then what’s the point?

Third, I’m grateful for frameworks like Ruby on Rails which handle a good chunk of the author’s “step 0” items out of the box. Picking the right tool (and keeping that tool sharpened) is the best first step.

Fourth, there’s never a moment with software when you can dust your hands and say, “ope, we’re done!”

Security is especially an area in which you can’t sit still. If you build an app and let it sit for a decade without any updates, I can almost guarantee you that there’ll be a vulnerability in one of your dependencies which I could exploit to take over your system.

Finally, if you reach a certain size of organization, you need someone thinking about this stuff full time and orchestrating all the pieces needed to keep a secure system.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-06-23 21:01:01

[Techno-selectionism] is a perspective that accepts the idea that innovations can significantly improve our lives but also holds that we can build new things without having to accept every popular invention as inevitable. Techno-selectionists believe that we should continue to encourage and reward people who experiment with what comes next. But they also know that some experiments end up causing more bad than good. Techno-selectionists can be enthusiastic about artificial intelligence, say, while also taking a strong stance on settings where we should block its use. They can marvel at the benefits of the social Internet without surrendering their kids’ mental lives to TikTok.

As much as I personally enjoy hanging out on the cutting edge and experimenting with new technologies, I would consider myself a techno-selectionist when it comes to adopting these tools into our lives.

I am sure some people enjoy the new Google search results that are driven by AI, but when it still recommends you add glue to pizza despite the widespread mockery they received initially, maybe we should take a step back and demand better from our techno overlords.

Or, since we know that’ll never happen, maybe we need to decide for ourselves which tools are worth incorporating into our lives.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-06-21 21:22:00

Consider the fact that most companies are unable to successfully develop and deploy the simplest of CRUD applications on time and under budget. This is a solved problem - with smart people who can collaborate and provide reasonable requirements, a competent team will knock this out of the park every single time, admittedly with some amount of frustration. The clients I work with now are all like this - even if they are totally non-technical, we have a mutual respect for the other party's intelligence, and then we do this crazy thing where we solve problems together. I may not know anything about the nuance of building analytics systems for drug rehabilitation research, but through the power of talking to each other like adults, we somehow solve problems.

But most companies can't do this, because they are operationally and culturally crippled. The median stay for an engineer will be something between one to two years, so the organization suffers from institutional retrograde amnesia. Every so often, some dickhead says something like "Maybe we should revoke the engineering team's remote work privile - whoa, wait, why did all the best engineers leave?". Whenever there is a ransomware attack, it is revealed with clockwork precision that no one has tested the backups for six months and half the legacy systems cannot be resuscitated - something that I have personally seen twice in four fucking years. Do you know how insane that is?

This whole article is a must read.

The main point: with any major leap in technology, there will be hucksters who purport to use the new hotness to solve all your problems.

The problem is that most organizations don't even take the time to solve the already solvable problems that exist within that organization.

New Javascript frameworks, database software, on-prem versus cloud-based server architecture, containerized systems, blockchain, mobile apps... unless you know how using these tools will solve a problem that your existing tech stack cannot solve, they're nothing more than distractions.

You don't need a garage full of tools to get a job done. Getting the fundamentals right is so much more important than making another trip down to Home Depot to buy your sixth version of a hammer.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-06-21 21:09:00

Bob Marley (supposedly) said that “some people are so poor, all they have is money.” What he meant was that there are people that mistake the pursuit of wealth for their purpose, and when they realize that they’ve conflated the two, they understand that they’ve missed the point of why life is so worthwhile in the first place.

This is why purpose must be discovered without the promise of incentives or monetary rewards. It can only come from conducting an honest audit of what makes you feel wonderment (i.e. childlike curiosity) or a sense of duty (i.e. parental responsibility), and then directing your attention to making the most of those endeavors.

The sense of self-worth that can be derived from purpose is free from money’s clutches, so keep this in mind whenever you feel discouraged by how much you have. Money is simply not a variable here, and the knowledge of that goes a long way.

I’ve spent the past six months of unemployment conducting the audit described above.

And I’ve learned that what brings me wonderment is learning how technology works¹, and my sense of duty is in teaching others how to use it.²

It’s not so much that I forgot those things about myself. What brings me such shame is the fact that I’ve suppressed the urge to pursue those activities in the name of making money.

Ultimately, love is the thing that matters most, but it’s often overlooked and disregarded as a cheesy emotion. In the minds of many, skepticism signals intelligence, whereas love signals naivete. After all, you garner respect by sounding the alarm on humanity’s problems, and not by pointing to love as the answer to them.

This is precisely why love is taken for granted. Even if love is felt between you and another person (be it a friend, partner, family member, whomever), it’s often left unarticulated because saying “I love you” means that you’re fine with seeming naive and aloof. And if this fear goes on long enough, you’ll feel that the best way to express your love will be through ways that act as surrogates for it.

Another thing I’ve learned about myself is that I am a naturally trusting person.

The majority of people I’ve encountered professionally appear to be the opposite. In particular, those playing the entrepreneur game seem especially skeptical or fearful of leaning into love.

Skepticism and fear drive those folks to make decisions about their business which ultimately lead to their demise.

I’ve sat in countless meetings with teams of executives who are frantically trying to come up with an idea for how to get more people to buy their thing.

At some point, an obvious answer emerges which involves building something that genuinely helps people.

But that obvious answer is almost universally looked at the same way you’d look at a plate of boogers because of financial concerns.

This general feeling is why I’ve struggled so hard to find a job. I’m tired of building software which only serves the purpose of making money.

Instead of jumping into another job where the culture is driven by money, I’m waiting until I come across a culture that is driven by love.³

Money’s a great tool, granting me a level of freedom that I may not have experienced had I pursued any other career.

But money is also the primary reason why I am dealing with severe anxiety and depression. It’s why my heart constantly feels like someone is squeezing it like a strongman squeezing an orange.

The only thing that causes the grip to be released? Doing things that lift the “purpose” and “love” levers. It’s when I trust others and spread as much love as possible when I feel the most alive.

Using the analogy in this article, I’ve spent the last 12 years of my life optimizing for the money-receptive levers. I’m gonna spend the next few in pursuit of lifting the money-negligent ones instead and see where that leads me.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-06-20 12:26:00

Because of my experience with Remini — and despite my natural and deep-seated antipathy toward tech solutionism of all sorts — it’s impossible for me to dismiss or decry grief tech out of hand. At present, at least half a dozen high-profile start-ups claim they can train interactive chatbots or video avatars to mimic the personalities of the dead; tech-savvy mourners have also turned several general AI apps, such as Remini and Paradot, to grief tech applications. 

These services — marketed under names like Project December, You Only Virtual, HereAfter AI and Seance AI — raise pressing, significant questions around issues like privacy, predatory marketing and consent. What happens if grandma doesn’t want to “live” forever? Or her platform ups the cost of a premium subscription? Other commentators and ethicists — including, just last week, the prominent sociologist Sherry Turkle — have voiced concerns that grief tech blurs the boundary between the living and the dead and locks the bereaved in a sort of limbo. Such critics assume that the bereaved cannot spot the illusion of AI chatbots for themselves, and, moreover, that the bereaved should not indulge themselves in any comforting fantasies about death.

But people take comfort in all sorts of stories; I no longer feel wise enough to judge them for that.

First off, huge respect to Caitlin Dewey for sharing this story. It takes guts to be vulnerable and share something this intimate.

Second, consider me privileged, because I would have never considered miscarriage grief as a use case for artificial intelligence.

People grieve in all sorts of ways. It’s not up to me (or you, or anybody) to judge, but it is up to us to show up for each other and be helpful.

I know how important journaling is to my mental health. There’s something cathartic about forcing yourself to stare directly at your thoughts, putting words to the vague feelings that gnaw at you incessantly.

I can only imagine how cathartic it may feel to someone to see a rendering of what could have been. To give yourself some closure on the possibilities you dreamed for yourself and your future family.

Again, I’m not here to judge or endorse. I find myself once again just impressed at how people are able to figure out how to take technology and use it to deal with their problems.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-06-19 20:03:27

In the context of nutrition, we’re comfortable deciding to largely avoid ultra-processed food for health reasons. In making this choice, we do not worry about being labelled “anti-food,” or accused of a quixotic attempt to reject “inevitable progress” in food technology.

On the contrary, we can see ultra-processed good as its own thing — a bid for food companies to increase market share and profitability. We recognize it might be hard to avoid these products, as they’re easy and taste so good, but we’ll likely receive nothing but encouragement in our attempts to clean up our diets.

This is how we should think about the ultra-processed content delivered so relentlessly through our screens. To bypass these media for less processed alternatives should no longer be seen as bold, or radical, or somehow reactionary. It’s just a move toward a self-evidently more healthy relationship with information.

This mindset shift might seem subtle but I’m convinced that it’s a critical first step toward sustainably changing our interactions with digital distraction. Outraged tweets, aspirational Instagram posts, and aggressively arresting TikToks need not be seen as some unavoidable component of the twenty-first century media landscape to which we must all, with an exasperated sigh, adapt.

They’re instead digital Oreos; delicious, but something we should have no problem pushing aside while saying, “I don’t consume that junk.”

Brilliant analogy from Cal Newport.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-06-19 11:50:18

I was recently part of a big parenting discussion group about whether a parent should allow her tween to have a smartphone with Snapchat. It produced a lot of stories and anecdotes and feelings and opinions, including a few tales of teens finding ways to circumventing parental controls or even picking up burner phones in order to be able to do things like keep up streaks. There were also some anecdotes of real-life consequences around location tracking, hazing, content getting shared and saved without consent, etc.

It was eye-opening and terrifying, because my kids are too young for this sort of thing today, but I’m sure the options will be even more overwhelming and difficult to manage by the time they’re this age. The social pressures in their and your peer group will influence what’s considered appropriate, regardless of any age listed for any terms of service, and there are so many things that are technically permitted but not exactly good for us in this world.

I wanted to take the time to formulate the long reply I had composed into a more publicly shareable blog post – which will likely come back to bite me in the ass! I’m sure things will shift between now and when my eldest hits iPhone age, but for now, my perspective on giving a 13yo a smartphone with Snapchat is a hard NO, and this is my reasoning why.

My daughter is already asking me for a phone for her eighth (!) birthday, and right now, it’s an easy no.

I understand that social media is obviously where all your friends are and you don’t wanna feel left out, but to me, there is no difference between using social media and using drugs or alcohol.

The thing I keep telling my kids with stuff like this (swearing, adult themes, etc.) is that it’s all about context.

There will come a time when you are able to fully understand the context of when to deploy an F-bomb.

There will come a time when I can’t shelter you from the maelstrom of crap that rains down on you from every direction on social media. I hope if you choose to engage with social media, you do so with the knowledge of both the benefits of these platforms (connectedness, sharing your life) and, more importantly, the detriments (data privacy, mental health struggles).

But yeah, for now: no phones. Sorry, gang. My number one job as a parent is to keep you safe, even if you aren’t happy with me.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-06-18 11:15:00

Once you do things quietly you become selfish in the best way – using money to improve your life more than you try to influence other people’s perception of your life. I’d rather wake up and be able to do anything I want, with whom I want, for as long as I want, than I would try to impress you with a nice car.

It always seems to come back to your vision, no?

As soon as you have a vision, you can set your own scoreboards, play whatever game you want with whoever you want.

I am still working on improving my horrible relationship to money, but I’m glad I have a partner who constantly reminds me that it’s important to not put your entire life on hold because you’re stressed out about finances.

From what I’ve experienced so far in life, there’s never a point at which you dust your hands and say, “welp, I did it. I won the money game, and I’ll never need to stress about money ever again.”

So as long as you’re being smart with squirreling away money when you can, you should feel empowered to buy things that make your life better.¹

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-06-18 00:07:00

Fathers have a direct, positive impact on the social, emotional, and cognitive development of their children, and this shows up in measures of educational achievement, social skills, and long-term mental health. While fathers do more paid work, and perform less childcare overall than mothers, they play a unique and complementary role in child raising.

While they play an essential role at all stages of a child’s life from infancy to adulthood, their presence seems especially influential as they grow older. A father’s closeness to his child in middle childhood and adolescence protects against loneliness and depressive symptoms, particularly in girls. Sixteen-year-old girls who are close to their fathers have better mental health at 33. Controlling for many other factors, the adolescent delinquency rate for boys is lower when they have involved fathers.

First off, a happy belated Father’s Day to my fellow dads, cool uncles, and other father figure-types out there. It isn’t just biological dads who need the shout outs; if there’s a kid in your life that you care about, then you should get your flowers as well.

Second, ever since we had our first child, I have looked forward to the current stage that both of my children are at.

I’ve never been one to see a baby and melt into a ball of baby talk and snuggles.

But I sure am down for teaching my kids how to apply the ultimate chinlock, ride a bike, catch a ball, step outside of their comfort zone, and cope with tough feelings.

I’m just glad that I found some empirical evidence to validate my unsubstantiated thoughts around fatherhood.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-06-16 07:49:00

I won’t argue that smartphones are significantly responsible for America’s sense of economic malaise. What they are is unusually helpful for understanding and interpreting this malaise in common terms. They’re a heightened, sped-up microcosm of the weird, sour vibrancy of the economic moment, little worlds in which participants are both increasingly active and increasingly worried. By most measures, the smartphone economy is booming, and yet it also feels like shit in a way that everyone can feel for themselves, together, no matter what soda they drink.

That’s the thing with creating these cool slot machines that live in our pocket: they’re really fun at first, but once you’re addicted to them, you keep going back even when it’s painful.

That pain hasn’t manifested for me much by way of exorbitant pricing, although I have noticed my subscriptions for things like iCloud storing are increasing.

The way this manifests for me is when my kids look at me and say, “can you snuggle and watch this episode with me without being on your phone?”

I know it’ll hurt, but I gotta make the switch to my Light Phone soon. I’m sick of feeling hopelessly addicted to this dumb piece of glass I’m currently typing on while my kids are playing in the water park in front of me.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-06-14 20:11:00

The invention of the wheel is often put forward as a pinnacle of human ingenuity, but it strikes me that the defining characteristic of modern transportation systems is not the wheel but the pneumatic tire.

I was biking with my kids up to a splash pad earlier this week when I heard a pop beneath me.

I let the kids get splashing while I investigated my bike, and I found that there was a huge bulge in my back tire.

It caused the tire to have such a severe warp that I had to ride home (slowly) with my rear breaks detached.

So it’s fitting that I came across this article in my Instapaper queue explaining the history of the pneumatic tire.

There are loads of good details about tire manufacturing in here, but one of the more surprising things I learned: as late as 1570, the number of four wheeled carriages in Britain could be counted on a single hand.

Reading this article gave me a lot of appreciation for the humble tire, and there’s no doubt I will have one of my favorite Simpsons bits stuck in my head all day.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-06-14 12:28:23

Early in the morning on October 21, 2016, Scott Shapiro got out of bed, opened his Dell laptop to read the day’s news, and found that the internet was broken.

Not his internet, though at first it struck Shapiro that way as he checked and double-checked his computer’s Wi-Fi connection and his router. The internet.

This is a gripping tale of how a few nerdy kids were able to take down some giant pieces of the internet.

It’s also a story filled with redemption, coming to grips with what you’ve built, and how to atone for pain you’ve caused.

I can’t recommend this long read enough.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-06-13 20:35:00

I have this dream for barefoot developers that is like the barefoot doctor.

These people are deeply embedded in their communities, so they understand the needs and problems of the people around them.

So they are perfectly placed to solve local problems.

If given access to the right training and tools, they could provide the equivalent of basic healthcare, but instead, it’s basic software care.

And they could become an unofficial, distributed, emergent public service.

They could build software solutions that no industrial software company would build—because there’s not enough market value in doing it, and they don’t understand the problem space well enough.

And these people are the ones for whom our new language model capabilities get very interesting.

Do yourself a favor and read this entire talk. Maggie articulated the general feeling I have felt around the promise of LLMs within the confines of a concise, inspiring talk.

A friend approached me a few months back and asked me to help him build an app to facilitate a game he likes to play with his friends in real life.

I told him that a good first step would be to experiment first with facilitating the game using good ol’ fashioned paper, and use the lessons learned from that experience to eventually build an app.

A few weeks later, he came to me with a fully baked version of the app in a prototyping tool called AppSheet.

I was stunned at how much he was able to get done without any professional development support.

He’s a prime example of a barefoot developer. I don’t think he has any interest in crossing the “command line wall,” but as these tools get more capable, it’ll enable him and scores of others to build software that’ll solve their problems for them.

Helping more “normal people” to become barefoot developers is a cause I’d love to be part of.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-06-12 00:40:00

Last year, we decided to launch Tiny Awards, a small prize to celebrate interesting, small, craft-y internet projects and spaces which basically make the web a more fun place to be.

We hoped it would be a small contribution to celebrating ‘people making stuff on the internet for the fun of it and the love of it and the hell of it’. We were thrilled to see that people seemed to like the idea, so we’re doing it again in 2024 - still tiny, still celebratory, and still (hopefully) helping spread the word about some of the small, personal, whimsical, weird and poetic things people are making on what is left of the web.

Woohoo! Can’t wait to see the shortlist published on July 19th.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-06-11 20:16:00

It's been a while since I used my own website as much as I did during this year's WeblogPoMo. The daily posting routine revealed some small annoyances which made visiting this site a little less fun.

For starters, I haven't redesigned this site since I got COVID back in 2021. 13 year old Tim would have been mortified at how long we've gone without a big redesign.

That's not to say I didn't try! I experimented with (and coded out) nearly a dozen different potential layouts.

The one I had the most fun with was a 90s Memphis style layout where the background elements were independent SVGs that were subtly animated.¹

The problem I'm realizing² is that I'm not a particularly skilled designer. I know what good design feels like, but I haven't taken the time to articulate what good design feels like.

The other problem? Building websites isn't fun for me anymore.

The tools you use to build websites are all essentially the same. There is functionally zero difference between a monolith Rails app running Postgres, a monolith Laravel app running MySQL, a static site generator powered by a Rube Goldberg-ian series of GitHub actions, or a GraphQL-powered React app.

The biggest casualty of choosing to build software professionally is my desire to learn new web technologies.

Instead of forcing myself to sit down and spoon-feed myself a puree in the form of a Next.JS tutorial, I'm leaning into other areas that interest me more.

Offline, that includes fixing up my house and lawn, writing, and being a better parent/husband.

Online, that includes playing with generative AI and sharing more of my thoughts on this blog and in my newsletter.

But even while I'm exploring other interests, that doesn't mean I can just let this site deteriorate and fill up with prickly weeds.

So over the last couple days, I made a couple small changes to this page that subtly improve the user experience. Most of these changes come in the form of discoverability.

When I launched this version of my site, I decided to lean into the linked list style of posting.

This was a great move because it's allowed me to (1) share interesting webpages with y'all, but also (2) make an archive of thoughts and ideas that inspire me.

Earlier this year, I added tags to all my posts. That process is what first made me realize that once I posted something on this site, it was next to impossible to find it again without jumping into a Rails console and searching for it.

Now that all of my posts have tags, I wanted a way to better visualize what topics I tended to think about and navigate through them.

If you visit the main page of this blog, you'll see a section at the top that explains what I tend to write about along with some groups of tags.³

I also made some slight CSS tweaks so the site looks even better on mobile.⁴

The main page is another source of stress for me over the past couple years.

As previously mentioned, my blog is mostly linked posts, but I do occasionally post longer essays and these shorter posts.

My main page had two separate sections to display my longer posts and my recent links, but these sorts of posts vanished into the ether.

My solution was to display a stream of all the posts along with their tags and an indication if it's a link post.

Like I said: these are small tweaks.

But small tweaks are sometimes all you need. It's important to maintain our virtual spaces.

Just because I'm not inspired to build new websites doesn't relieve me from the obligation to keep it functioning the best I possibly can.

And a positive consequence of these changes? You can expect more shorter posts from me like these!

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-06-09 20:06:18

Like many people I’ve been dealing with the collapses of the various systems I relied on for information over the previous decades. After 17 of using Twitter daily and 24 years of using Google daily neither really works anymore. And particular with the collapse of the social spaces many of us grew up with, I feel called back to earlier forms of the Internet, like blogs, and in particular, starting a link blog.

One of us! One of us!

This isn’t a lengthy post, but I damn near quoted the whole thing because Kellan makes great points about the state of information sharing, the collapse of the Web 2.0 social infrastructure we all used for twenty years, and lamenting the fact he doesn’t really consume media from a wide variety of sources (me too, friend).

If you’re reading my link blog here, consider starting one of your own. Make it low effort for yourself, but just start one and stick to it for a month.

I think you’ll find your media consumption habits begin to trend toward higher quality sources of information/entertainment.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-06-08 21:32:05

Where I have settled in my own work is to strive to keep some meaningful part of my mindset hungry and foolish. To continue to be open to new opportunities and eager to explore them. I don’t want to end up miserly defending what I have already achieved, I want a professional life still rich with tackling interesting problems.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-06-07 21:44:00

Lately, I've been working on several projects which interface with the OpenAI APIs.

Since this is 2024 and I'm far too lazy to open the official API documentation and write code myself, my first step in generating code is to ask the 4o model of ChatGPT something like this:

Write a Python script which uses the latest OpenAI APIs. I'd like the function to accept a custom prompt and a custom top-k value. It should return the prompt's response.

It returns something like this:

import openai

def generate_text(prompt, top_k=5):
    # Define your OpenAI API key here
    openai.api_key = 'your-api-key'

    # Define parameters for the completion
    completion = openai.Completion.create(
        engine="text-davinci-003",
        prompt=prompt,
        max_tokens=100,
        top_k=top_k,
        n=1,
        stop=None
    )

    # Return the generated text
    return completion.choices[0].text.strip()

# Example usage
prompt = "Once upon a time"
top_k = 10
generated_text = generate_text(prompt, top_k)
print("Generated Text:", generated_text)

Which looks super great, right?

Except when you go to run it in a terminal, you get this:

openai.lib._old_api.APIRemovedInV1: 

You tried to access openai.Completion, but this is no longer supported in openai>=1.0.0 - see the README at https://github.com/openai/openai-python for the API.

You can run `openai migrate` to automatically upgrade your codebase to use the 1.0.0 interface. 

Alternatively, you can pin your installation to the old version, e.g. `pip install openai==0.28`

A detailed migration guide is available here: https://github.com/openai/openai-python/discussions/742

If you paste that error into the chat, it'll respond with this:

It seems like there has been a major update in the OpenAI Python library since I last checked. Let me update the script to use the latest version of the library:

And then it spits this out:

import openai

def generate_text(prompt, top_k=5):
    # Define your OpenAI API key here
    openai.api_key = 'your-api-key'

    # Define parameters for the completion
    response = openai.Completion.create(
        engine="davinci-codex",
        prompt=prompt,
        max_tokens=100,
        top_k=top_k,
        n=1
    )

    # Return the generated text
    return response.choices[0].text.strip()

# Example usage
prompt = "Once upon a time"
top_k = 10
generated_text = generate_text(prompt, top_k)
print("Generated Text:", generated_text)

Notice how it still uses the openai.Completion method!

I've tried prompting it with something like:

You're still using the openai.Completion method. Reference the official up to date API documentation to get the latest call that replaces the openai.Completion method.

And it responds with:

Apologies for that oversight. Let me update the script to use the latest API method based on the official documentation:

And here's the code it generates:

import openai

def generate_text(prompt, top_k=5):
    # Define your OpenAI API key here
    openai.api_key = 'your-api-key'

    # Define parameters for the completion
    response = openai.Completion.create(
        engine="davinci-codex",
        prompt=prompt,
        max_tokens=100,
        top_k=top_k,
        n=1,
        temperature=0.7,
        stop=None
    )

    # Return the generated text
    return response.choices[0].text.strip()

# Example usage
prompt = "Once upon a time"
top_k = 10
generated_text = generate_text(prompt, top_k)
print("Generated Text:", generated_text)

Which, again, still uses the openai.Completion method!

I've noticed this sort of "oops, I screwed up, here's the exact same thing I just outputted" behavior appear more frequently when I use the new GPT-4o model.

If I use GPT-4 and I'm using my ChatGPT Plus subscription, I will still run into the issue where its first response references the deprecated method, but if I inform it of its mistake and provide a link to the official documentation, it'll access the web and try to offer something different. (It still generates unusable code lol but it's at least trying to do something different!)

When it comes to Python and Rails code, I'm seeing that the GPT-4o model is not as good at code generation as the previous GPT-4 model.

It feels like the model is always in a rush to generate something rather than taking its time and getting it correct.

It also seems to be biased toward relying on its training for supplying an answer rather than taking a peek at the internet for a better answer, even when you specifically tell it not to do that.

In many cases, this speed/accuracy tradeoff makes sense. But when it comes to code generation (and specifically when it tries to generate code to use their own APIs), I wish it took its time to reason why the code it wrote doesn't work.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-06-05 12:11:10

If you’re a painter, you’re still allowed to paint landscapes. Singers are still allowed to sing about love. And heck — I’m betting the first time your critic learned about this particular topic, he wasn’t standing atop Mount Sinai. Knowledge transfer is a vital human activity, and it’s all about synthesizing, refining, and incrementally expanding on what’s been said before.

Here’s a short list of posts I’ve been wanting to write but have chickened out every time I start a draft:

• How I’ve organized my Plex music library
• How to pick the perfect karaoke song
• Ways you can move out of the corporate world and into the startup world
• Why I stopped reading the news and quit social media
• How to avoid clickbait articles

Maybe I should force myself to write one of these and publish it with little self-editing.

I made a concerted effort to write more this year. I’ve journaled roughly 98% of the days this year, and I’ve published something on this blog just as much. I even started a newsletter.

I’ve learned a lot about myself thanks to all of this writing. I didn’t realize how much a daily blogging challenge would reveal about my musical tastes. I wouldn’t have been able to identify my feelings without yelling at a journal until my voice became hoarse.

Best of all, writing is proving to be an effective way for me to share what I’ve learned with others. Feeling useful helps beat back the depression demons.

I encourage anyone reading this to write down whatever you’ve been interested in lately and post it somewhere. Share it with me so I can learn with you!

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-06-05 00:27:18

As alleged, Bill Guan, the Chief Financial Officer of a global newspaper and media company, conspired with others to benefit himself, the media company, and its affiliates by laundering tens of millions of dollars in fraudulently obtained unemployment insurance benefits and other crime proceeds.  When banks raised questions about the funds, Guan allegedly lied repeatedly and falsely claimed that the funds came from legitimate donations to the media company.

Since graduating with a journalism degree nearly 15 years ago, I’ve worked on honing my internal bias detector.

One thing I've come to accept is that there is no such thing as a completely neutral news outlet. Every publication is biased in some way because every media outlet is run by people.

The good media outlets are those that try to set up guardrails to counter the natural biases that reporters may bring into a story.

Those guardrails include things like publishing retractions to erroneous statements, checking the credentials of those who give statements, and avoiding the use of anonymous sources.

The bad media outlets do none of those things. They take up the mantle of the demagogue who constantly claims everything is “fake news”, and they publish anything which corroborates the demagogue's story rather than doing actual journalism work.

I'm not mad at people for getting suckered into reading The Epoch Times. I understand that when your worldview is built up around a narrative, you do whatever you can to validate it. Challenging your core identities is painful¹; it's more comforting to find news that parrots back your beliefs, even if it's wrong.

So while I understand the human instincts at work, I'm furious at those who choose to exploit those instincts.

And of course The Epoch Times attracted the kind of person who would allegedly attempt a $63 million money laundering scheme².

The internet enables all kinds of speech to propagate at incredible speed. We need to all be better about honing our internal bias detectors and find ways to help each other not get suckered in by those who would try to harm us with blatant lies.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-06-02 04:41:07

At the heart of today’s dysfunction in Congress — the serial ousting of speakers, the perpetual threat of government shutdowns, the inability to address pressing issues like immigration, runaway deficits or climate change — lie three political fantasies. These illusions warp the perceptions, cloud the judgment and misdirect the energies of House and Senate members of both parties. Letting go of them will be the necessary first step to restoring a functioning legislature to a country that desperately needs one.

This felt like a great summary of why we have such dysfunction within our legislative bodies.

What it doesn’t do, unfortunately, is give much of a path towards resolving this dysfunction.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-06-01 12:08:00

When I started this WeblogPoMo series, I knew I'd eventually need to write about Neutral Milk Hotel.

I kept putting it off because it's always been tough to put into words what this band means to me.

I mentioned in my POTUSA post that we used to go to Duluth every summer as a family.

When you visit a place every year, you start to develop routines and habits. My habit was to stop into the Electric Fetus.

Over the years, I acquired most of my CD collection from the Fetus. Highlights included The Unicorn's Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone?, Death Cab for Cutie's Transatlanticism, Ambulance Ltd's 2004 LP, and, of course, In The Aeroplane Over The Sea.

Back in my Rilo Kiley post, I mentioned how much it bothers me to answer the question "what is your favorite band."

If I were honest and not at all self conscious, I would have answered "Neutral Milk Hotel" from roughly eighth grade until my senior year of college.

Let's face it: the band is an odd choice for a favorite, no?

A lot of their songs explore heavy feelings and are, more often than not, pretty depressing. Their most famous album is about Anne Frank. Jeff Mangum's voice is simultaneously soothing and haunting, but unconventional and jarring the first time you hear it.

If this WeblogPoMo challenge has taught me anything, though, it's that it feels so much better to just like the things you like with a full throat. No point in whispering about the things that light you up, right?

When I got my first guitar in high school, the very first song I learned to play was "In The Aeroplane Over The Sea."¹

It's a perfect song for a noob: G, Em, C, and D. Rinse and repeat.

I'd sit and strum those four chords in my basement for hours, belting out the lyrics with my best Jeff Mangum impression.

After figuring out "Aeroplane," I tried my hand at the other songs on the album. "The King of Carrot Flowers, Pt. 1" taught me my first barre chord (F). I even busted out my baritone to learn "The Fool."

Like I said, though, I was pretty guarded about my love for Neutral Milk Hotel growing up. I only shared it with folks who I could talk about deep things with.

I remember sitting in the back seat with my mom on a car ride back from Iowa. She asked me what I was listening to, and I showed her the album cover. She put my headphones in right as the first chord from "Communist Daughter" began.

She liked it up until he started singing about semen staining the mountain tops. 😬

This band got me through some of the hardest moments of my teenage years, and more than twenty years after that Electric Fetus shopping session, I find myself drawn to this album when I need to deal with my hardest crossroads.

Albums come and go from my music collection, but I wonder if I’ll ever be able to let go of this album.

It’s truly my most personally meaningful album.

I saw Jeff Mangum perform live a few years back. He took the stage and tears immediately started welling up in my eyes.

He sits down, politely and awkwardly waves at the crowd, picks up his guitar, and starts belting out “Two Headed Boy Pt. 2”.

His raw, haunting voice filled the music halls, powerfully belting out this beautiful song, sending chills up my spine.

At the end of this deeply moving performance, he casually plops his guitar down on his waist, looks up at the crowd, and says, “Thanks!” with the same gusto I use when I meet someone new at a professional networking event.

It made me laugh so hard.

“How strange it is to be anything at all,” indeed.

And for the record: when I die, nothing would honor me more than if someone sang “Aeroplane” at my grave side.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-05-30 21:43:25

The story my daughter makes me tell the most is the time I asked Taylor Swift out on a date.

In 2008, my dad’s cousin was a truck driver for the Rascal Flatts tour. He asked if we’d like to go see the show and get some backstage passes.

Country music has never been my go-to genre, but I especially find pop country to be frustratingly formulaic and addresses a range of human experiences I don’t personally identify with.

But who am I to turn down an opportunity to go backstage and see how a major tour moves about the country?

My dad’s cousin took turns bringing my family backstage, and it was my turn just prior to the show starting.

We got to see where the trucks parked and the drivers napped while the show was being set up and torn down. My dad’s cousin’s cab looked particularly roomy and comfortable, not at all what I expected the inside of a 40 foot semi cab to look like.

We got to see the area where the video mixing guys did their thing. I remember being surprised because I know the audio mixing guys sit on the floor in order to get a better feel for how the audio plays in the given arena, but for video, I guess that doesn’t matter as much.

We made our way over to the area that led to the stage. It’s basically a bunch of curtains that make a tunnel. In pro wrestling terms, you might call this “gorilla position”, named after Gorilla Monsoon who you could find perched at that area during a show.

While standing there chatting with my dad’s cousin, a golf cart quickly pulls up, and off jumps Taylor Swift.

In 2008, Taylor was in her “pink sparkly guitar” era. She was amiable and full of energy.

She sees me and asks if I live around here. I say yes.

She asks me if I know who plays hockey in the Xcel Energy Center. I look around at the dozens of Wild logos and reply, “The Wild.”

She asks me if I know who they are playing that night. I happened to know they were playing the Chicago Blackhawks, so I reply, “The Blackhawks.”

She asks me if I know of a good place to grab a bite to eat around here.

I don’t know what came over me, but I decided to take a shot.

I responded: “Cossetta’s is right down the road and they’ve got amazing pizza. I’d be happy to take you there once you’re done with the show, if you’d like!”

She laughs politely, thanks me for my help, and disappears into the curtain tunnel.

She performs her first song and then addresses the crowd:

“Hello Saint Paul! How about those Wild? I hope they crush the Blackhawks tonight! Hey, is anyone gonna hit up Cossetta’s after the show for some pizza?”

I’m still not very interested in “You Belong With Me” and “Love Story”, but the last few years of Taylor’s evolution are compelling to me.

I will throw on Midnights and Folklore when I’m looking for some good background grooves.

The two Taylor songs that I have on my playlist¹ are “Anti-Hero” and “the 1”.

“Anti-Hero” is so absurd that it cracks me up every time.

“The 1” is chock full of solid one-liners that layer on top of a general feeling of malaise. In other words, an accurate encapsulation of my internal dialogue.

I’m not a Swiftie, but I’m in an era where I’m working on countering my natural instinct to dump on any exceptionally popular pop icon without cause.

And while I might enjoy listening to some of Taylor Swift’s discography, I’m glad she shot me down.

She’s not even close to being on the same level as Shannon.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-05-30 00:03:10

You try listening to this song and not getting a little nostalgic or happy.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-05-29 12:14:00

I mentioned in a previous post how much I despise picking a favorite of anything.

But this WeblogPoMo journey is forcing me to actually reflect on what it is I enjoy about music.

An interesting consequence is that once I am able to articulate what I like about music, I feel more comfortable in expressing my musical tastes.

So in the spirit of personal growth: I’m gonna go ahead and say that CHVRCHES is my overall favorite band of the past decade.

I own each of their four albums on vinyl, which is noteworthy considering my picky rules when it comes to vinyls.¹

Here’s what I love about each album:

The Bones Of What You Believe

The Bones Of What You Believe brings me right back to 2014, which was an exceptionally remarkable year for me.

I got married that year. Seems remarkable in and of itself that I was able to find someone to love me enough to wanna spend their life with me. It doubly rules that I love her right back.

I stood up in four other weddings that year. The summer was the last one where I saw my high school and college best friends with any sort of regularity.

I went full time with the company I started that year. We signed our first six figure deal and moved into an office. I couldn’t believe we were able to do that, and I can’t believe how proud I was of us for accomplishing that.

I suffered my first anxiety attack that year. My heart hurt so bad, I swore I was having a heart attack. Turned out it was only my fight or flight response kicking in.

I ran a marathon with my fiancée that year. I can’t believe I talked her into doing it. I did believe she could do it, though. She’s tough.

Throughout all of that, I can remember Bones blaring in the background.²

The single song that best represents CHVRCHES to me is the opening song on this album, “The Mother We Share.” I will likely never tire of this song, and someday, I will perform this song on an acoustic guitar at an open mic somewhere.

Every Open Eye

When Every Open Eye came out, I didn't like it as much as Bones. It sounds similar to Bones, but it does depart in a few ways which were hard to accept at first.

Over time, I've come to love many of the songs on the album, and "Clearest Blue" is untouchable when you hear it live.

I've seen CHVRCHES play live twice, and both experiences were incredible. I’ve heard the band described as "arena synth," complete with the kind of booming bass that reverberates deep in your soul.

Hearing the chorus of "Clearest Blue" along with pulsing strobe lights is an etheral experience.

Love Is Dead

Love Is Dead is my end-to-end favorite CHVRCHES album. It kicks off with the nostalgia-inducing "Graffiti" and ends with "Wonderland", a song about someone trapped in a cycle of anxiety and can't get out. The whole album goes hard and I’m frequently gleaning new insights when I pay attention to the lyrics.

“Graffiti” is the CHVRCHES song my kids know best. My daughter and son both sing this song loudly when it comes across shuffle, and my daughter added it to her playlist (which is about the highest honor a dad could achieve).

Screen Violence

Screen Violence, much like Every Open Eye was not my favorite when it was released. I listened to it for a few days on repeat, assuming I would grow to love it.

Sure enough, when I turn to CHVRCHES these days, I find myself drawn to songs like "California", "He Said She Said," and "Asking For A Friend."

This album will forever be tied in my memory to working on the wellness app I worked on during my time at BG. That period was one of significant transition and growth for me, and this album feels like a bit of a transition for the band as well.

Again, I’m very here for it.

If Rilo Kiley was the consistent soundtrack for me from age 16 to 26, I'd say CHVRCHES is the consistent soundtrack for 26 to 36.

Funny enough, Lauren Mayberry recently started a solo career. I hope she finds as much success as Jenny Lewis found when she went solo.³

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-05-28 11:39:00

When I inherited my sister’s 1991 Pontiac 6000 LE, it came with the custom CD deck that she installed after she inherited it from our grandma.

My vanity mirror-mounted CD sleeve contained the 5 or so burned CDs that I would rotate through, as was the style at the time.

Apocalypso was one of them.

This was the record I’d throw on when I needed to wake up before a party.

This was the record I’d throw on when I was making my way back from Edina after an exhausting truck unloading at Best Buy.

This album took me all over the metro area up until the day my car died and I needed a new one.

Related: I saw the Presets open for Cut Copy my sophomore year of college. Rob and I walked in flip flops from my house in the Como neighborhood all the way to the Fine Line in the warehouse district to see them.

That’s a 3 mile trek in one direction.

The show was incredible, but I will never forget how much pain I was in on the walk home.

I’ll also never forget how hard we were laughing about it.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-05-27 05:47:03

A long time ago, a manager friend of mine wrote a book to collect his years of wisdom. He never published it, which is a shame because it was full of interesting insights. One that I think a lot about today was the question: “How are you paying your team?”

With this question, my manager friend wanted to point out that you can pay people in lots of currencies. Among other things, you can pay them in quality of life, prestige, status, impact, influence, mentorship, power, autonomy, meaning, great teammates, stability and fun. And in fact most people don’t just want to be paid in money — they want to be paid some mixture of these things.

When I was in college, the phrase “it’s all about the perks” became something I ironically said often when people described their jobs.

I’m realizing as I get older just how true that axiom is.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-05-26 21:13:00

A heads up: this post talks about mental health and suicidal thoughts again.

When you mention suicidal thoughts to your therapist, the first thing they do is work with you to write up a plan.

The plan is a series of steps you can take when you are unable to pull yourself out of a funk.

The steps start out small and accelerate all the way up to “go to the hospital.”

My first small step was to write down movies, TV shows, or songs that make me happy.

The movies and TV shows were easy, but I struggled to think of songs that made me happy.

As I’ve written a lot about this month, most music simply distracts me or serves as a sympathetic friend. It’s not often that songs put a smile on my face.

I started a new playlist in Apple Music called Anxiety Attack Mitigation¹. Over the following few weeks, I added songs that brought a legit smile to my face when I heard them.

Here are the songs on it as of today:

Black Box - Fall into My Love (Radio Edit)

One night, my daughter was eating at the table while I was doing dishes. We were arguing about something unimportant. She was “very mad” at me.

This song comes on shuffle and I begin dancing. I can’t help it with this song, it’s too damn groovy.

I turn around and look over at my daughter. She looks up from her plate with an angry scowl. She sees what I’m doing and her jaw drops like a cartoon character. She gets this look on her face that’s equal parts amused and shocked.

She quickly realizes that she’s supposed to be mad at me, so she quickly covers her mouth and looks away.

Whenever this song comes on, even if I’m “very mad” about something, I can’t help but crack a smile.

Coolio - The Winner

I mentioned this song in my Hit ‘em High writeup, so I’ll make this quick:

This is a song that I’ve heard all my life, but never actually listened to until very recently.

Seriously, read these lyrics.

I’ll admit that I didn’t expect this sort of message from the same guy as Gangsta’s Paradise, but I’m grateful for the wisdom of Coolio.

Des'ree - You Gotta Be

102.9 Lite FM was my second favorite radio station growing up².

I’d fall asleep to that station every night.

The song I most looked forward to hearing was this one.

Even as a fourth grader, this song made me feel good about myself.

As an adult, the song serves as a manifesto for how to keep moving through life.

Sum 41 - Fat Lip

I had this song on my Cybiko.

That’s a big deal because my Cybiko had a 16 megabyte card, which could store a whopping 16 minutes of low quality MP3s.

This song reminds me of middle school. Wanting to rebel but never feeling courageous enough to do it.

I’ve been lucky enough to see them perform it live twice this year³. I used to think pop punk music wasn’t something I was allowed to have as part of my identity, but the past few months have needed a soundtrack to help me make sense of my present situation.

Now, I’m no longer ashamed to admit that I love it.

12 year old Tim would’ve loved to see Sum 41 live. 36 year old Tim is grateful to have had that realization before it was too late.

And every time I hear this song, it reminds me that I need to put on my own oxygen mask before helping others.

Rêve - Still Dancing

I already covered this one.

Hoobastank - Crawling In The Dark

I’m embarrassed to admit I listen to a lot of these songs, and this one is probably the one I’m the most embarrassed about.

Maybe I’m reaching a point in my life where I want to care less about what other people think, and this post serves as exposure therapy.

But I can’t rock out enough to this song when I feel angsty. It helps me feel less alone.

Jimmy Eat World - The Middle

This was another song that was on my Cybiko.

Every time I hear it, I try to place myself into the perspective of either the singer or the girl.

As the singer, someone pops into my head that I feel could use a pat on their back, so I shoot them a text and see how they’re hanging in there.

As the girl, I allow myself to get the pat on the back.

Bluey - I Know a Place (The Creek Song)

The best children’s television show of the past few years is unquestionably Bluey.

The soundtrack to the show is part of the reason why.

Close your eyes when listening to this song and picture the scene being described.

It’s a sure fire way to ground yourself back in reality, to give you a chance to let go of the thing that is causing you so much stress, to make space for thoughts that matter.

Em Beihold - Numb Little Bug

I went out for karaoke a month or so ago and heard someone sing this song that I’d never heard before.

The lyrics match the way I feel when I’m especially down, and listening to her helps me feel less isolated.

Modest Mouse - Float On

Like the Coolio song above, here’s a song that’s been in regular rotation for years, but I hadn’t really listened to the lyrics.

This song is a reminder that life often works out just fine in the end.

Hoku - Perfect Day

You listen to this song and try to not get a dumb grin on your face.

Curtis Mayfield - Move On Up

Yet another song I’ve enjoyed for years without considering the lyrics all that much.

The uplifting lyrics and encouragement to persevere through struggle make this song perfect for this playlist.

It also often gives me perspective for my own struggles. I know there isn’t such a thing as “the suffering Olympics,” but come on, my struggles aren’t much compared to those of an African American in the 70s.

The Linda Lindas - Talking to Myself

I’m seeing Green Day this summer, and the Linda Lindas are one of the opening sets.

Their entire Growing Up album is very good, but this song made it on this playlist because, much like the Numb Little Big song, it often feels like we’re alone when we have depressive thoughts.

I’m super lucky to have friends I can call to talk about the things I think about that I can’t help.

Some of you may even be reading this post! I can’t believe people read this stuff, but again, I’m a very lucky guy. ❤️

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-05-26 00:37:19

I came across this list of various questions for how personal websites reflect social movements these days, and this one got me thinking:

what’s punk online today? what’s the website equivalent of a zine? the photocopy look or the ethic of throw this up fast and cheap?

When I started designing websites in the late 90s, we didn’t have much by way of templates or nice aesthetics to adopt. Everything was looping MIDIs, seven baked-in fonts, and maybe a <marquee> or <blink> tossed in for good measure.

Nowadays, the kids have an incredible amount of templates and tooling available to make websites look really polished and smooth out of the box.

But I guess the point Tracy is trying to make here is that stuff isn’t really punk or counter culture. People expect corporate websites to look polished. Rounded rectangles. Big, bubbly fonts with (shudders) dynamic carousels.

I am feeling the itch to redesign my site again, and I am unsure what direction to take. My personal braaaaand is still being defined, but the elements I can identify off the dome would be inclusive, optimistic, sarcastic, and warm.

Are those elements counter culture these days?

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-05-23 20:25:39

When I started working in tech in the early 2010s I began running in to idea guys. Upon discovering I was a developer, they would get very excited and pitch me their big idea for an app/website/service to see what I thought.

After receiving a polite reaction they would often say something like: “I think it would do really well, if I could only figure out how to get it made”. Like the idea was the main thing that mattered, and the pesky task of actually building it was an insignificant little bump along the road to success. At this point I would usually tell them that ideas are worth nothing, until they are implemented.

This post is brilliant. Sometimes, I use generative AI like cardboard to prototype an idea.

Testing out an idea is the first step toward doing the countless hours of work needed to make an idea a real thing.

Since I don’t think I’ve said it on this blog yet: “Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything.”

(I also love Rachel’s footnote after the word “guys”, saying “it was literally always guys” 😂)

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-05-22 18:21:00

Some have fallen into the trap of framing the so-called "AI debate" as a face-off between the effective altruists and the effective accelerationists. Despite the incredibly powerful and wealthy people who are either self-professed members of either camp, or whose ideologies align quite closely, it's important to remember that there are far more than two sides to this story.

Rather than embrace either of these regressive philosophies — both of which are better suited to indulging the wealthy in retroactively justifying their choices than to influencing any important decisionmaking — it would be better to look to the present and the realistic future, and the expertise of those who have been working to improve technology for the better of all rather than just for themselves and the few just like them.

That’s it, I’ll admit it: I’m a Molly White stan.

Effective altruism always felt wrong to me, but leave it to Molly to explain those abstract feelings in such clear and well considered terms.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-05-21 12:44:05

We've all heard the personal finance advice popularised by Robert Kiyosaki: "Pay yourself first."

I've never liked this advice. It rings hollow. It feels selfish.

When you run a business, you don't pay yourself first. No, you have an obligation to pay your taxes first. To pay your employees second. Your vendors and suppliers third. And yourself? Dead last. This is how business works in the real world. Personal greed is a poor substitute for personal responsibility.

As an individual, yes, I find the “pay yourself first” mantra to work well for me.

As a business owner, I feel gross paying myself. I feel like someone is always gonna come after me for more money.

Maybe this is why I’m not a great entrepreneur.

But maybe there's a kernel of wisdom in "pay yourself first" that we can apply - not to money, but something far more precious - to our time.

This feels like a way more fitting application of the axiom, and it’s certainly something I’ve been prioritizing these past few months.

Maybe this advice will help you, too.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.)

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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!

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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?

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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!

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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!

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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. ❤️

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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?

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.)

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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?

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.)

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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?

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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?

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.)

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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?

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.”

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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?!

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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?”

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.)

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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?

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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!

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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. 😅

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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!

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

2024-02-21 12:46:57

There is not much in this world more satisfying to me than watching an Odd Tinkering video.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.”

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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!

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.)

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.”

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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!

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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?)

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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!

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.)

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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!)

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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).

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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).

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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?

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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?

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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’?

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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)

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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?

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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?

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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 .

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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? 😬

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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]:

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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”).

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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.

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email

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?”

Read this post on the web | Respond to this post via email