Instructions for living a life:

Pay attention.

Be astonished.

Tell about it.

~ Mary Oliver

The dark night of the soul comes just before revelation. When everything is lost, and all seems darkness, then comes the new life and all that is needed.

~ Joseph Campbell

Bear in mind that everything that exists is already fraying at the edges, and in transition, subject to fragmentation and to rot. Or that everything was born to die.

~ Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

The casual phrase dropped by a friend in conversation, the paragraph in a book, the incident observed by the roadside, has some special quality, and is accorded a special welcome. But, having been welcomed, it is forgotten, or at least ignored. It sinks into the horrid depths of my subconscious like a waterlogged timber into the slime at the bottom of a harbor, where it lies alongside others which have preceded it. Then, periodically -- but by no means systematically -- it is hauled up for examination along with its fellows, and , sooner or later, some timber is found with barnacles growing on it. Some morning when I am shaving, some evening when I am wondering whether my dinner calls for white wine or red, the original idea reappears in my mind, and it has grown. Nearly always it has something to with what eventually will be the mid-point of a novel or a short story, and sometimes the growth is towards the end and sometimes towards the beginning. The casualty rate is high -- some timbers grow no barnacles at all -- but enough of them have progressed to keep me actively employed for more than forty years.

~ C. S. Forester, The Hornblower Companion

I read a lot of random stuff. Link Dumps are the things I think are worth remembering. Every Sunday (if I remember) I will send out my weeks worth of links. You can always check out my Link Dump Tag if you’re looking for even more to read and please forward these if someone might find them interesting.

1. The Dispatch has a good piece on how Trump’s election fairy tales were actually not supported by the documents he released during his speech about his fairy tales. Ah, that’s a paraphrase of the title…

2. Can the government require ID before you use artificial intelligence? An ongoing question I think we should all be thinking about at least somewhat…

3. A neuroscientist took some magic mushrooms and then watched his brain fall apart. This whole frontier is really interesting to me, the idea that psilocybin “desynchronizes” the brain is wild and I cannot help but wonder if this is one of the things that will let us continue to unlock what makes our brains so amazing.

4. Continued interesting thoughts on the Millennial midlife crisis. I think I might need to write my own thoughts on this eventually

5. I’d never heard of the book Impro before I got this piece but I read pretty much anything Goedecke publishes and this was an interesting one for learning more about startups and how “cult-like” they can operate. Impro is a handbook for running a cult

6. AM I A REAL ADULT IF I STILL FINANCIALLY DEPEND ON MY FAMILY? is a very interesting piece and a question parents and children both have to think about. Especially with all the questions about college looming in a couple years for Squirt…

7. 7,000 years ago humans were already transporting fish to other lakes for food. Neat!

8. The UK is a cautionary tale for the US. Some interesting insights here.

9. Movement helps thinking. I would add driving to this list as well as well as puzzles - anything with working with one’s hands or walking or talking all help.

10. Trump teleprompter aide made $100,000 betting on what Trump would say, reports say. Almost like betting with insider information is a bit of an easy button.

11. I like what Linus Torvalds has to say about AI — essentially get over it and start using it or get out of the way. I think as time goes on “it’s just a tool” will be where everyone lands. It’s not the boogie man, it’s also not a panacea.

12. I didn’t know Neal Stephenson was a fountain pen nerd or that he wrote all his books by hand. Kinda neat.

13. Noah Smith asks who the worst monster was of the 20th century. It’s a grim but interesting analysis. It’s also fucking fascinating to compare that to Americans leading the world in thinking politics is unsafe.

14. Wait But Why on the Fermi Paradox is still maybe my favorite longform write-up on the topic.

15. Hannah Ritchie digs into Thailand’s population having already peaked.

16. Prescribed burns makes a big difference for Sequoia forest. This is something Squirt and I have discussed a bit - that forest fires used to be a thing, then humans stopped them which created worse forest fires so now we are figuring out how to properly solve a problem we though we were solving back in the day by preventing fires.

17. This conversation between Terence Tao and ChatGPT is wild. I don’t understand it at all, it’s like like a completely different AI is on the other end of the phone — which is exactly what Sean Goedecke said in his piece about how LLMs reward expertise. I would echo what Sean says here for sure in my own usage of the LLM.

18. A couple years old article about gene therapy eye drops that gave a boy his sight back. I was as interested in the delivery mechanism as the fact that the gene therapy can do this.

19. So Playstation decided to stop doing discs and gamers are pissed because, let’s face it, gamers are always pissed. But from a business decision standpoint it seems to be…pretty obvious?

20. Fantastic reading on an opinionated guide of how to us AI. It gave me a bunch of ideas…which is scary now I think.

21. Great write-up on how AI changing open source code. Lots to mull overhere.

Artist

First, and simplest, almost every “hero” image I use on Substack is a generated image that Substack made for me. I feed in a caption, it goes and generates four pictures, and I pick the one that works (or amuses) the best. Sometimes I try multiple prompts, but this is where they come from. I’ll do that for this one too.

Yup. So bad. But funny!

Why? Because I only barely care about having an image for my pieces. But Substack works so much better with a picture. So I use their nifty and/or shitty image-generating AI service. It works for me, especially when it generates a hand with…four fingers instead of five. Heh.

Research

My brain is a deep mire of a swamp. Associations are fucking weird, at least for me. So I will frequently throw things at the AI and ask it to go find things for me. I am almost certain the imagery of a “swamp” is something I’m stealing from a quote I read decades ago, but I cannot find it. We just spent thousands and thousands of tokens together trying to find it.

I also use it to find the right “words” in Wikipedia sometimes - because I don’t organize my ideas like Wikipedia. I’ll give it a concept and say “find me the entries that go with this concept.” Essentially it’s super Google. I think this should be a thing that everyone does at this point - it understands context and personalization in a way that is completely beyond what “googling” something does.

Editor

This is probably the deepest part of my process. I layer the AIs over each other in a pseudo-variation of something called an ensemble method. To wit — I have a prompt that I will give to Google Gemini, and then Claude, and then ChatGPT. With each response I update my piece with the suggestions I agree with. Grammar errors are rare by the third of my “ensemble.”

Here is my prompt:

As a bonus I get to see how the different models analyze my work as well. It’s fascinating to see what they overlap on and what they pick up on differently. Especially for things like the “three most impactful sentences” which are frequently different for each model!

Not a Writer

It doesn’t write for me. What would be the point? Where would the fun be? The deep-spine reason I write is to order things in my head, put them out there on paper, give Squirt a lens into his dad’s mind, and maybe entertain a couple other people around the world. I’m the writer, not the calculator.

Conclusion

It’s a life-changing tool for me as a hobbyist. I’m far too prolific to have someone editing my hobby writing, and I couldn’t imagine asking someone to do so. But I’m also bad at grammar, so this second pair of eyes makes a huge difference. I have no patience for hunting down pictures and, indeed, I’m not sure an aphantasic could ever be much of an artist either. Googling is wildly inefficient for the research I need, at least as a starting point.

I cannot imagine ever doing this now without the tools that AI has put in my hands. It would be like imagining writing without having the internet’s information at my fingertips. It has become ubiquitous in my writing while, in my opinion, not impacting my creativity at all. I’m a better writer with AI, but I will always be the actual writer.

The living matters more, but the recognition of the concept in public is still important.

I posted this quote a decade ago on Facebook, and I wish I could get back in the headspace of the early-thirties kid that posted it then:

Loving is not just looking at each other, it’s looking in the same direction.

~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Thinking back, we were about to close on our first house and we were halfway through our pregnancy with Squirt. Today I think it resonates even more because we’ve crammed another decade’s worth of living into our time together. We’ve now passed over 20 years together. Half of it as parents, and half just us two against the world. Disagreements, love, smiles, and cries.

At this point I think the standard junk usually gets trotted out. “Marriage is work, marriage is compromise, etc.” And, I mean, sure that stuff is there but that’s not really my bag. I think, for me, the reason I’ve had such a wonderful twenty years with my best friend in the world is that we’ve almost always looked in the same direction.

I like to think that this is rare. It’s easy to find someone to look in the same direction for a bit of time, but I think figuring out how to do it for decades is pretty tough.

We’ve had to adjust our sight lines when needed. I guess you could call that “compromise” but I don’t really think it fits because that word carries with it an expectation that you’re accepting something less. In a compromise, everybody gets something but nobody really got what they want. I’m not sure that’s how it works for us. Instead I think that we just want the other person to have what they want more than whatever we wanted originally? We weren’t looking in the same place but we want to be. So one of us adjusts. I feel like we both do that, but I guess maybe I should check in and make sure.

But we are, and have always been, a team. Us against the world. Us raising Squirt together. Us making every big decision together. We are, before anything else, partners. Looking back, some of our bad decisions tended to be stuff where we didn’t lean into that “together” as much as we should have but we have the amazing life we do because we’ve been looking in the same direction. I’m incredibly thankful for that and happy with my life for exactly that reason.

And that’s not to say there aren’t frustrations, because of course there are. We disagree about things, and we argue about silly shit, and we snap at each other. But through all the ups and downs and tribulations of moving through this life together...we’ve always been looking in the same direction.

Yes! I am headless! I’m keeping this image because I love it!

So, naturally, we discussed how we define “truth” and “reality” and what passes muster as a “fact” and what he’s able to put on his webpage. I may or may not have momentarily tried to gaslight him for the tenth time into believing that the Earth is actually flat also...

Anyways.

Finding Truth

He asked me about how I would have found this information when I was a kid, because he knows something like Wikipedia was not around. So I told him about encyclopedias and World Book and visiting the library to read books. But we were quickly talking about primary sources and what qualifies as true.

He’s not allowed to use Wikipedia in school because “Wikipedia can be edited.” Which promptly led to my contrarian ass wanting to know why the thing printed in a random book was trustworthy. Wikipedia, of course, has the benefit of general consensus and hundreds or thousands of people contributing and scrutinizing it. There are rules about primary sources and rules for what is allowed to be put on the page. Certainly these rules, and Wikipedia in general, still result in an imperfect collection of information. Wikipedia is open to criticisms of distorting information but it is still one of the wonders of the modern world.

A printed book like the “M” encyclopedia I had in my house growing up is also very imperfect. More so, in many ways. For example - it would have said with certainty that there was no water on Mars because that’s something humanity learned since I was a child. It was also entirely subject to the editing and content supplied by a very small number of people. Why are these particular people so trustworthy? I don’t know them. How much research did they do? Did they have two hours of time to look into Mars before they wrote the entry? Are they simply using the previous year’s entry and taking thirty minutes to find out what might have been newly discovered or corrected? Were they distracted by an argument with their spouse the morning they finally got to the “M” book and the “L” book was way better?

Don’t use the internet, use these books you bought from the door-to-door salesman. That’s how you know what’s really “true.” Right.

Truth is one of the most slippery things we can ever ruminate on. Truth, you see, is a matter of opinion and perspective and time. What was true when I was a child may not be true now. Maybe it was never true. Consensus changes. Besides, humans are incredibly stupid anyways, why is this consensus so powerful in the first place? What’s the proper ratio of agreement to reach the vaunted heights of capital-T Truth? A simple majority? A plurality? Perhaps we can only believe something if 95% of people say it is true?

Maybe evolution is a lie, and science is a bitch, right?

At the risk of overwhelming this written piece with video links there was a solid breakdown of some stuff over at Wisecrack about the scene above which talked a bit about fanaticism and defined it as “a belief or behavior involving uncritical zeal or an obsessive enthusiasm.” Not sure it was worth a full 20 minutes of my time but it is, nevertheless, bringing some insight into the “debate” there and the concept of fanaticism. Fanatics are so fucking certain. Bugs the shit out of me. It’s a far cry from my own stance of uncertainty and ambivalence that I’ve written about in the past.

Intelligence

I was also just reading about how There is No Such Thing as Artificial Intelligence which smelled of someone who thinks humans and our organic brains are special in all the universe. Cute, I guess, but certainly seems like it could be the type of thing like “there’s no water on Mars” to me. Whiffs of that fanaticism.

It is undeniable that AI does get things incredibly wrong. Is it more wrong than the average human, though? It’s simply a glorified auto-complete that finds the next word based on all the words it’s read out on the internet. Words written by humans. Is the Chinese Room of an LLM any different from a theoretical human that’s read everything on the internet and has no original thoughts of its own? Do we really have original thoughts of our own? Where do those come from?

I suspect the author, and we humans in general, have a bit of an overinflated opinion of how original and special we truly are. That, I think, is one of the scariest things in AI. A glorified calculator is consistently writing better code than me so who am I, really? If a glorified calculator can draw logically consistent conclusions through happenstance and training, is it somehow illogical simply because it doesn’t have a meat brain? Why?

Slippery

Truth is a slippery bitch. Much of the reasoning behind what we believe is simply gilding over something more brittle and less beautiful than people want to face. Mars doesn’t have water. Humans have some special intelligence. There’s a right way to raise your child. The right choice is clear if you just believe in your god or your political party or your own individual spirit strongly enough.

I feel bad for Squirt sometimes. To start at a webpage about Mars and end up getting “the truth is slippery, kid.” Yet I think this is perhaps one of the most important lessons of the modern world — don’t be so fucking certain about anything. Critical, and rational, evaluation is one of the most important tools out there for a modern day human.

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.

~ Bertrand Russell

Doubt

Unlike so many things I muddle about in my head, I feel like there’s a strong solution this time: Embrace Doubt. Embrace Uncertainty.

Be comfortable saying “I don’t know.” Be willing to follow up with “But I’ll go see what I can figure out.” If I had to pick a single major problem with the modern world it’s that everyone is so fucking certain about a world that is far more complicated and nuanced and bonkers than humans want to admit.

We aren’t as smart as we think we are.

Anyways. I’m not sure of much but I’m sure of that. And now my poor kid will have this waiting in his inbox when he gets back from a long day of summer camp. Such is the life of my child.

Squirt Says…

I think that truth and reality are similar things but can be far apart on certain things. One day we may think that the truth is there is no water on mars reality there's lots of it frozen underneath. What we think today is not always going to be the reality.

Dad Responds…

I guess my follow-up question might be is anything we think today actually reality? And what do you mean by “reality?” We might need to look over the Epistemology Wikipedia entry at some point…even if you can’t use it in your book reports.

Social Media

What I used to like about Facebook, indeed what I’ve always liked about social media, is that it created what I think of as “frictionless connections” with friends and family. I knew what was going on with all my friends without having to work for it. My mind is both wired and trained to pull in knowledge like this that sinks down into the swamp of my brain and then percolates. So I knew when people were getting married or divorced. I celebrated their kids’ successes, I mourned with them when they lost their parents. All for the cost of having a habit of scrolling that worked well for me because I didn’t really join groups or argue with strangers via Facebook. It was wholly for my friend connections.

Similarly, it gave me an “audience” for my stuff. I got in the habit of generating content that amused me. Picture albums of other habits of mine. Quick little snarky comments. Rants. Longer form things that were essentially Substack-before-there-was-Substack. But always and only for an audience of my friends which never even got past 200 people. Again, there wasn’t really any effort or friction. Friends created content and I had a pseudo-dialogue with them. I created whatever I wanted and threw it out there and got some interaction. Easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy.

I felt connected to other folks. Then it slowly dawned on me that I was no longer really connected because the platform was morphing. It became a place not for my friends to talk to me, and not for me to talk to my friends, but instead just for all of us to feed our attention into the money-making machine. Which sucked.

But how to rewire my brain after 15 years?

Intentionality

A friend of mine, one not on social media, told me that he intentionally reaches out and connects with his friends and it changed the paradigm for me. He is about a decade younger, so he grew up in an entirely different world when it comes to the internet and social media. A world, I think, that was already quite down the road of enshittification and so he avoided the rose-colored nostalgia glasses I was subject to.

He had hit on something vital. The meaningful things should take work and energy. Sometimes you need to be intentional about what you’re doing and burn some of your precious time, otherwise the value becomes negligible. I chatted with the AI for a while about this, bound and determined there was a quote I had heard before that captured this but damned if I didn’t find words from a preacher I’d never heard of before that I fell immediately in love with.

Everything worthwhile is uphill. The problem is, we have downhill habits. If you have downhill habits and you have uphill hopes, you’re in trouble.

~ John Maxwell

Did I have to wade through some ad-infused crap to find that quote? Yes. Did I have to endure some fire and brimstone pulpit preaching? Also yes. Did I feel a little icky wading into the self-help guru world? Very much yes. Does it perfectly encapsulate the idea I want to communicate? Maybe.

Downhill

It’s axiomatic that change is constant. Everyone finds change to be uncomfortable. We are all, to some extent, uncomfortable at every moment of our lives. Things change around us, we don’t like it, and that leads to those “downhill habits.” Like wasting time on Facebook telling myself that I was in contact with friends rather than whoring out my attention to make Meta more advertising revenue.

But it was so fucking easy. So comfortable. So inevitable. Like walking downhill. Didn’t even have to think about it.

Easy has become a problem for me. In fact, I think I’m coming around to the argument that easy is a problem for the whole modern world. Except for the CEOs of the modern world who I’ve heard for years keep their kids away from all social media because they know just how damaging it is. One of the books that Squirt and I both read this year is targeted at all the kids that aren’t children of tech CEOs and it digs deep into the tricks and dangers of social media, styling these CEOs as evil “wizards.” I devoured this book and then I gave it to Squirt who also tore through it.

Something I remember from this book is how easy it was to fall into the trap, only to realize it wasn’t really making the kids happy. Because the world was designed to trap anyone who participated. The perfect soporific. You look up and you realize that hours of your day are just gone. Slid away over the ice-slick modern world of a downhill habit.

Friction

I am a lazy person. It’s actually one of the things that make me good at my job. I hate doing anything more than once. If I did it twice, then it went on my list as another thing I need to design a better solution for. In many ways my job is to automate myself out of a job. To eliminate friction. There are not enough hours in the day, of course, but that’s the end goal — to make everything just effortless and not need me ever again. The systems never stand still, though, which means there’s always another thing that needs fixing and another thing for me to learn.

Talking to my father last week, we actually touched on friction without ever saying the word. We were comparing his past jobs, specifically working on an assembly line vs. a job that required problem-solving and adaptation. A job that required the same thing over and over vs. a job that necessitated constant learning. A frictionless job vs. a friction-filled job. We drifted then into how my job is changing as AI continues to improve and, essentially, reduce the friction for me solving problems. Finally, we landed on what the job world would look like for Squirt. We don’t know what the world will look like for him. But, I said, at least I know he’s a problem-solver and the world will always need problem-solvers.

The trick, I think, is choosing which problems to solve. Which friction to reduce. The value I bring to my job is choosing. Hell, this whole fucking Substack is about choices. What hard things do I want to do?

We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

~ John F. Kennedy

Value

Hard things have value. Easy is cheap. I think most of us understand that even if we don’t say it out loud. Mindlessly doing something over and over doesn’t pay as well as highly skilled labor. My world is freaking out as it discovers that “coding” ain’t nearly the highly skilled labor we’d tricked the world into thinking it was. So the world, and the people, will need to adjust. Find the next thing to choose to put our effort into. Fair enough.

More stuff is becoming easy.

And there it is. I’ve been struggling on this piece for weeks trying to find the thing I wanted to say here, but I think I finally found it.

The modern world has made too many things easy and cheap.

Making so many things easy has leached meaning and value from them. Cheapened them. Relationships over social media lack depth. Or they become entirely parasocial. Computer programming is just an AI prompt away. Generating an image, like I do with almost every one of my posts, is just a matter of feeding a couple words into the Substack image generator. You don’t have to call and catch someone at home, you just text them and they’ll get to it when they get to it. Few of us struggle to eat or find shelter. We can find any information we can possibly imagine, true or not, to support our stances.

As easy as falling down. Or walking downhill.

This is the very definition of progress, though. Society does hard things because it makes things easier. I do exactly the same thing — solve the right problem to make something easier. Yet my concern here is that we’ve made some things too easy. That’s the tension, I think.

When has something been made too easy? When should we retain some friction? When should we avoid the easy answer?

Habits

There’s a thing you can do for good habits. Make something harder if you want to stop doing it. Make it easier if you want to keep doing it. For example, I find that my concentration has become shit with my phone. So I have turned off almost all push notifications on the phone for fewer distractions and it never comes off silent. I’ve also removed almost everything from my front screen except for the things I find “acceptable” to be immediately available when I unlock my phone. So here’s a picture of Ash and Luna on my “front page.”

Notice the distinct lack of social media apps other than Reddit. Yes, I know Reddit should be gone too, but I’m working up to it. The rest, though, are gone. It was too “easy,” so I formed the wrong habits. For the last year I kept Facebook on the last screen only to realize it would override that level of friction. I still find myself flipping to the back only to realize I fully deleted it now. My mind craves the frictionless social media drug. I know damn well I’m not alone in wanting the cheap little dopamine hits.

All because I was using it to be “social” and keep up with all my friends and post my own thoughts out to them. These are good things, right up until they weren’t. So, again, I ask myself — how do I determine when it’s not a good thing?

Choosing

I think, more than any other time in history, this is becoming a problem for us. How do we choose what’s good? Which habits do we want to encourage? Where do we find the valuable things that are worth the friction?

Man, I don’t fucking know, but I think I gotta figure it out. I think we all have to figure it out. I want Squirt to not only do hard things, I want him to want to do hard things. His brain, like all of ours, is wired to lean away from the friction. To avoid the hard things. But hard things are how we grow and improve. Hard things are where the pride and the confidence come from. Struggle leads to growth.

This, too, is frustrating and hard. So many of my pieces land here without a clear answer or rubric to apply to the world. Because nobody should only have to do hard things and fight against their biology. What a miserable existence. What an imbalanced existence.

So I don’t have any answers really, other than saying that “do hard things” should be part of a life well lived. How many hard things are up for debate. But not that there should be hard things.

Squirt Says…

I feel like that in the past, present, and future people will continue to do things that are easy over those that are hard, over those that are right, because it's human nature. Humans like simplicity, they like not thinking.

Dad Says…

Agreed, humans have always had these particular flaws. However, I think one of our strengths is that we’re making it easier for these very flaws to assert themselves. So perhaps I would change this to being that we’ve done it in the past, we’re doing it more in the present, and we will need to be on guard because in the future we’re probably going to get even worse.

I read a lot of random stuff. Link Dumps are the things I think are worth remembering. You can always check out my Link Dump Tag if you’re looking for even more to read and please forward to anyone else you think might find these interesting.

1. China pulls a SpaceX and lands a booster for the first time after it launches something to space.

2. I love these illustrations of caching in distributed systems. It’s one of those things that would never spring out of my aphantasic brain but it’s cool as shit.

3. A love letter to capitalism. I think this runs a little long and I think there are some quibbles and straight up avoidance of the BAD parts of capitalism but it’s very informative and interesting.

4. I’d never heard of the Great Green Wall and it’s actually pretty amazing to see the pictures and what’s being accomplished to combat the desertification over the last 50 years or so.

5. The looming demise of the 10x developer wanders around a lot but I think it’s an interesting lens on how things in the industry were changing 3 threes ago compared to what we’re seeing now. I already know Squirt will not have a job like mine because they won’t exist.

6. A Philosopher’s One-Word Theory to Explain Why the World Feels So Weird. Very long piece but fascinating. I think there’s lots of truth buried in here about how the world, the culture, and the connectedness is altering how humanity works. The idea of a “uni-context” is an entirely new lens for me that I think I will come back to over and over.

7. Fusion energy company went public and thinks they’ll have something on, oh, ten years or so? Still exciting but I did like the joke “fusion is the energy of the future and it always will be.” Still something to keep an eye out for because it could be a holy grail.

8. What does "playing politics" mean for software engineers? Good read.

9. Company wants to sell sunlight at nighttime with a big-ass mirror out in space. Yup.

10. Two Supreme Court Justices went before Congress to explain that they need more money for protection because the world is fucking insane apparently. Christ.

I read a lot of random stuff. Link Dumps are the things I think are worth remembering. You can always check out my Link Dump Tag if you’re looking for even more to read and please forward to anyone else you think might find these interesting.

1. An argument that AI could help with civic engagement that makes lots of sense to me. I remain disappointed in how little civic engagement we seen, even unto just understanding how our government even works.

2. Do you want to fight or do you want to win? Great write-up from Yglesias about different ways to approach Democratic politics.

3. SpaceX just launched the 1st-ever nuclear-powered commercial satellite. Neat!

4. Interesting analysis on the TikTok front page and what signals the algorithm respects.

5. The idea of ownership is something we don’t talk about enough in technology, and I actually disagree that this only applies to smaller companies.

6. Is the end of reading here? Christ, I hope not.

7. I like this piece about blogging about stuff you don’t understand. A big part of my writing experience is also bringing clarity and quietude to the clamor in my head about subjects.

8. Print Book Sales Fall Flat. This was just an overall interesting set of numbers to me.

9. What happened to front-end development while you weren’t looking? I love this narrative structure and learned a bunch. As someone who started where this piece starts but quickly moved on to other things…learned a bunch.

10. “AIDS-free generation” is no empty promise. Talk about an encouraging thing to read.

11. The radical act of loving yourself. I really enjoyed this piece about the importance of how we speak to ourselves.

12. The concept of AI companions that’s being discussed here is, I think, one of the more important things for humans coming down the road. The differentiation of “friction” and vapid “frictionless” stuff, the understanding of human-to-human connection rather than human-to-calculator. How will humans approach this world where there’s a million things that can pass the Turing test?

I read a lot of random stuff. Link Dumps are the things I think are worth remembering. You can always check out my Link Dump Tag if you’re looking for even more to read and please forward to anyone else you think might find these interesting.

1. Human egg cells from human stem cells. This lead me down a whole rabbithole about how every cell contains all of our DNA and there’s thousands of things that go into how a particular cell expresses itself to be so different. This is a really fascinating field to me.

2. Noah Smith has something similar to a Link Dump of mine but with more intelligent commentary. Vibecession (or not); AI depolarization; Existential AI risk; Millennials vs. Boomers; Deindustrialization; Russian oil revenue; GLP-1s; AI and jobs

3. Playstation doing away with physical discs in 2028. 80% of games are digital at this point? I imagine there ain’t much in the way of margins for the discs themselves…

4. The Subnautica 2 legal situation thickens with the CEO resigning but folks still getting their paydays.

5. They built a living cell from nonliving tissue. Still have to constantly feed and care for it but this is pretty wild.

6. I enjoyed this write-up about how code reviews are theater and how that’s becoming more obvious with AI. The Lucy and the Chocolate Wrapper metaphors works very well here.

7. Tesla sales up 25% in Q2 of 2026 so despite all the fire-and-flash it would seem folks are pretty much over hating on Tesla and it’s CEO.

8. American patriotism dropping. Huh, that’s so weird I wonder why that is.

9. Good post on what it means to have an AI mandate from an organizational level and what it communicates to those receiving the mandate.

10. Plex five year subscriptions for $250 and lifetime subscription is now, holy shit, $750.

11. Some fascinating facts about Americans. Including nearly 1/3 of Americans live alone at this point. I literally do not think I have ever lived alone for more than a week or so.

You know how folks point out that when you start a statement “I’m not a racist, but…” you are probably about to say something racist? Yeah.

You’re instantly on the back foot from a rhetorical perspective when you have to preface what you’re about to say. Front-load the defensiveness. Answer the most obvious criticism. You’re probably about to say something that proves you’re a piece of shit. So.

I love America, but…

Nationalism

Yuval Noah Harari asserts that when humanity really figured out how to cooperate that’s when our power, and civilization, really took off. One of the concepts underpinning that cooperation is the ability to lie. He has a story in Sapiens with a monkey promising endless bananas to another monkey to create motivation that has stuck with me for a decade. Call them lies, fictions, or just stories — they are what make humanity powerful. I like “stories” simply because I imagine people react more favorably to that framing.

Nationalism is one such story. So is religion. Corporations. History. The list is almost endless because our world is underpinned with things that do not exist in a physical reality. I like that word: “underpin.” Because these are fundamental things, essentially keystones to civilization. I think frequently people miss that they are the glue that keeps us moving forward because they give us a common set of mental models. We know what a nation-state is and that we are part of one. There are vast communities of religion that span nations. Corporations, too, spread out beyond national borders. All intertwined to form a global civilization of humanity where we juggle the mental models in our head. I’m talking to another American, or I’m talking to another Christian, or I’m talking to a coworker at my multinational employer on the other side of the world who won’t be celebrating the fourth of July.

These ideas all have holy texts too. The Declaration of Independence is one such holy text. So is the Constitution of the United States. Holy texts. Not because they are perfect — indeed the framers designed them in such a way that they would be able to change and move towards being “more perfect” as time went on. Not perfect, but holy. Sacred. They are part of the story of my nation and a huge part of the story of human civilization as well.

Patriotism

Patriotism, too, is a story. It is also an answer to a question. Is my nation the greatest in the world? Of course it is, I’m a goddamn patriot.

Thus my question today…

Is America the greatest nation in the world?

Read more

I read a lot of random stuff. Link Dumps are the things I think are worth remembering. You can always check out my Link Dump Tag if you’re looking for even more to read and please forward to anyone else you think might find these interesting.

1. Ukraine has launched a point system for killing Russians. I am so all over the place with this idea. You can buy shit with the blood of dead Russians. Brilliant? Monstrous? Horrific? Required?

2. Remoted controlled cockroach swarm can breathe underwater. Maybe it’s enough internet for the day.

3. AI Is Making Us Question What It Is To Be Human. Should It?

4. The $25,000 basic Slate truck with a bunch of DIY things looks really interesting to me. Hope it succeeds in a big way.

5. Huge steps forward in Nuclear Power. Incredibly exciting because I don’t think we can keep moving forward without this kind of thing.

6. Charity Majors with a call to Make AI Boring Again that’s really a fantastic meditation on being human and handling change. Maybe my favorite piece of hers, and that’s saying something. Bonus read on her career journey was another thing I hadn’t read before.

7. The White House app being forced upon government employees sounds just…incredible.

8. An Artic Circle shipping boom is kinda interesting - half or less of the time…assuming you can make it.

9. Saying the Obvious Thing. I agree with this piece and suspect that a large part of why I write and talk so much at work boils down to something like this.

10. Nick Catoggio explains why Pete Hegseth doesn’t need to bother to explain any of his decisions. Kakistocracy, indeed.

11. Trump’s weird D.C.-specific initiatives, ranked by Matt Yglesias is both a fun and horrifying read.

12. Rocket Lab bought Iridium. Neat!

13. Fintech Engineering Handbook. Big long read.

14. Dude got paid $50,000 by Washington DC because he got arrested for following the National Guard around playing Darth Vader’s marching song.

15. Elon Musk on MacKenzie Scott giving away $26 billion of her fortune: ‘Sadly,’ it makes the world a worse place. Ah. Okay.

SCOTUS, though? SCOTUS does its fucking job. This is illegal. This is legal. You can’t do this. You can do this. Here’s how we decided so you know for next time, so don’t come talk to us again.

They clear the Fuzzy. Sometimes.

Categories

There is an interesting linguistic subtlety between the words “absolute” and “categorical” when you’re talking about the law. The AI and I are struggling to find easy ways to exhibit this via links but we landed on one from Cornell about the categorical approach to restricting speech. The gist of it is this: not all speech in America is free. You have to categorize it first because some categories are, indeed, not allowed. To wit: obscenity, child pornography, defamation, fraud, incitement, fighting words, true threats, and speech integral to criminal conduct. This is contrasted with “absolute” where, literally, there are no restrictions. Absolute free speech would allow child pornography. Categorical free speech does not.

I deliberately chose the most odious example because pretty much everyone can get on board with categorical restrictions. Unless of course you’re incredibly rich and powerful in which case that’s not true apparently. Whatever happened to those Epstein Files anyways? Hmm.

Let’s move on from that one, though, before I devolve into a pointless ragefest I won’t be able to publish. Let’s talk instead about obscenity. “Normal” hardcore pornography if you will. Have you ever heard the phrase “I’ll know it when I see it?” when talking about pornography? Did you know it came from a Supreme Court Justice?

Talk about fucking Fuzzy.

I think a big reason that line is famous is because it’s a flagrant failure of a Supreme Court Justice. It’s abdicating responsibility to define a bright line or at the very least a balancing test. But there are lawyers who, surprisingly, would argue with that. Fucking lawyers will argue about anything. They’re all professional nerds, whereas I’m just an amateur.

But they argue for the same reasons I argue. To find some clarity. To establish a decision-making framework. To find out who is correct. Like so much else in life, it all comes down to choosing. That is the job of the Supreme Court - to form an opinion on who the United States of America as a nation says is “right.” At least until the next time a court case comes up with a different set of members on the Supreme Court and changes its mind.

Transition

I apologize for the long journey into legal theory, but if you made it this far, I promise it’s going to be less nerdy from this point forward. Well, less “legal nerdy” I guess.

Anyways.

I have a gradient saved to my computer with no words on it. I use it for some of my posts. Earlier I linked to my choice tag and you will see this gradient show up a fair bit only with words added to the poles in many pieces. The gradient is the visual personification of one of my favorite mental models for life: the continuum. The gradual transition from one state to the other. Where does “red” stop and “blue” start in this image?

Part of making a choice is finding the turning point. Collapsing the wave function. Choosing when the transition actually happened. Deciding where red stopped and blue began. But this model shows up everywhere. You can talk about how much choice a person has vs. how much they are a victim of circumstance. How much perfection over pragmatism you are comfortable with. How much caveman over astronaut. In fact, almost everything on my choice tag is a question about putting yourself somewhere on a continuum of some choice. Choosing where you want the other color to begin.

I like ambivalence because it recognizes that there are two poles, but I think frequently a healthy existence is making a choice somewhere in the middle. It is almost never the “bright line” that courts are always attempting to find. Instead, it is The Fuzzy. The transition. That’s probably not very clear, I know, but hey look at the title of this piece you know?

So consider the following gradients of age. On the left is the “young” pole, and opposite it is the “old” pole. But the transition is in an entirely different spot depending on the age of the chooser. A five year old has a very different idea of when someone has become “old” than someone who is sixty-five or twenty years old.

Transition - Death

What about death? Do you know when someone is considered dead at the hospital? It’s not when they’ve stopped breathing. It’s not when their heart has stopped. It’s not even based on their brain activity. The definition of dead in a hospital is only when a doctor declares someone has a time of death. You can come back from a stopped heart. You can start breathing again. Some bodies can live for years without a functioning brain. It is a Fuzzy transition and you’re not dead until someone with authority calls it. In fact, in the United States, every single person must be pronounced dead by someone who is authorized.

Largely irrelevant to most people most of the time, right? I know I’m alive. I know my grandparents are long dead. I know hospitals fucking suck in large part because it makes me think about those types of transitions. But this is the most important question when someone is on death’s door. The hospital doesn’t ever stop trying to save you until someone calls time of death. Until the transition happens.

Transition - Life

What about life? Do you know when someone’s life has begun? When a bundle of rapidly multiplying cells becomes a child? This is the fundamental question at the heart of abortion legislation for me. Consider this image, which is a reversal of the death transition with different words. When you declare someone dead they cease to be a person and become a bundle of cells.

The pro-Life argument is that “life begins at conception.” That is, as soon as an egg is fertilized it becomes a child. It’s a reductive argument, and I think it falls apart when placed into a hypothetical. Consider a nurse carrying a hundred vials filled with such fertilized cells who drops them and they smash. This nurse is not a mass murderer. Indeed, if that same nurse had to make a hypothetical choice in a burning building between saving a thousand of such vials and saving a single one month old newborn they would invariably choose the newborn. Beyond the rhetoric and the politicization almost everyone understands that there’s a transition at some point after fertilization when that bundle of cells becomes a child.

Absolutes

“Only a Sith deals in absolutes.”

~ Obi-Wan Kenobi

What I like about this quote is the absurdity. Obi-Wan is making an absolute statement and is part of a dogmatic institution that deals in absolutes all the fucking time and that’s at least part of the reason for Anakin’s fall. It’s just ridiculous. It is also such an amazingly human thing to say.

Humans are so desperate to find clear and absolute answers we will descend deep into hypocrisy. We will retreat into insouciance. We reduce incredibly complex and nuanced topics into single sentence sound bites. Everything becomes red or blue on my all-encompassing gradient.

There we go. A nice bright line between “right” and “wrong.” You’re either with us or you’re against us. You are my friend or you are my enemy. You are good or you are evil. There is no Fuzziness anywhere. Clean and simple. Absolute.

Fucking absurd.

Well, absurd sometimes.

You do, eventually, have to find the line. There must be an inflection point. You have to declare the patient dead. You have to declare the bundle of cells a life. You need to recognize when you’re too fucking old to be trying that ill-advised acrobatic.

You have to choose.

But recognize the Fuzzy.

The Problem

The first step to solving a problem is recognizing that there is one, but I do not see the Fuzzy as a problem. In fact, I see it as an intrinsic part of the world. Mathematics agrees and has an entire field called Fuzzy mathematics. The injection of randomness in computing is an attempt to bring some Fuzziness to the world. It’s so difficult that Cloudflare resorted to a wall of lava lamps. The reason it is so hard is that we are constantly trying to create a world that is binary and deterministic. We want a world that makes sense. We want a world with bright lines. We want a world without the Fuzzy.

We are the problem.

We must grow more comfortable with the Fuzzy. Comfortable with not knowing exactly where the line is. Comfortable with others deciding the line is a little bit more in one direction than where we might draw it. Humans are inclined to turn everything into a false binary because we want it to cleanly fit into our decision-making.

We need to be comfortable saying we do not know.

We need to be comfortable embracing complexity.

We need to be comfortable with not deciding.

Squirt Says…

I think partly the reason we don't like the Fuzzy is because the Fuzzy is not a fact. It can have multiple meanings and we as humans want truth, and facts are simply put an absolute. We, as humans, don't like the Fuzzy, we like the simple. The “I don't have to think about it.” The transition is something humans don't like.

Dad Responds…

Well put. I like the focus on “factfulness” as the thing humans want. It’s interesting because, as a general rule, humans are frequently not truly interested in facts but perhaps just the appearance of facts. It’s a bit of a paradox.

But, now, Squirt losing the internet is akin to me losing electrical power at his age — vastly inconvenient and fundamentally altering the day’s lifestyle. The internet, for my child, is just part of life. It’s electricity or water or food at the grocery store. I was looking back over the past 30 years and wondered aloud just what he would see when he was my age. What things would be a fundamental part of a grandchild of mine’s life?

It was an interesting breakfast.

Artificial Companion

This morning I read a screed from author Jason Pargin and his take on AI which eventually wanders into conjecture at the number of folks that have a “personal relationship with a bot.” I have some quibbles with some of his takes but it sent my mind in directions it hadn’t gone before. I have found myself being a little freaked recently at the things that ChatGPT can recall about me. Freaked out and amused and impressed all at the same time. For instance, just today, I was chatting with it about the sarcastic fringehead fish and whether I could keep it in my saltwater aquarium and its answer factored in my current tank size and the animals already in it, because I told it that maybe seven months ago during a tank emergency.

Spooky. Also cool.

I am not in a “personal relationship” with this bot. For me it is a tool and I have family and friends to fulfill my social needs. But it also has better recall, and is much more deeply read, than any one of my friends or family. There is no question that one of the uses for this “tool” is to fulfill social needs that might go unmet for some number of humans. One of the things I think Squirt’s generation is going to have to figure out is what these types of social relationships will look like. Will there be stigma? Will it just become commonplace? Will it only really matter if there are emotions in the relationship? I mean beyond the irritation when it hallucinates.

All I know for certain is that we will see the world shift.

Persona

A thing that is very useful when working with an AI system is to assign it a persona. It’s a sort of pseudo-empathy, which itself is an interesting question, that sets the AI system down a particular track. It’s a narrowing exercise. “You are a senior platform engineer” or “you are a cybersecurity analyst” means that it will focus down more on a particular function. You get better answers when you ask questions under a persona.

Last week I saw that Squirt was logged into ChatGPT while he was chatting with it and I asked it the following question:

pretend you are my father, take everything you know about me and consider if there is anything a father might be worried about or concerned with that you know or have had conversations with me about

Squirt was there while I did this because I wanted him to see what it would answer me with.

“Pretend you are my father.”

What a thing to ask a glorified calculator. But it shined a light into my child’s behavior that I would have never gotten otherwise. Spooky. Also, cool.

I’ve cribbed some of its answer here:

Interesting question.

If I were roleplaying as a thoughtful father who’s watched you over time and only using things you’ve talked about here, I don’t think I’d be worried about the cat wars, the record collecting, KSP, Linux, or the weird projects. Those mostly show creativity, curiosity, and persistence.

Then it went on with some “concerns” which I could easily wave away. It was stuff like school frustrations and bouncing from project to project and whether there’s enough sleep every night. Nothing surprising, nothing I didn’t already know about. In fact, things that I could wave away because I know my kid much better than this calculator.

But valid things to call out because of the scope of things that the calculator knew about my kid.

The final bit I also wanted to quote:

Based on our conversations, one thing that would reassure me is that you seem genuinely curious.

You’ve asked about:

science, math, programming, history, spaceflight, hardware, art, music collecting.

That’s a pretty broad range of interests.

So if I were your father, my main concern wouldn’t be that you’re headed in a bad direction. It would mostly be helping you develop the habits that let you turn curiosity into skills: finishing projects, checking sources, backing up files, and taking care of yourself while you’re busy building cat empires and launching spacecraft.

It was this final bit that prompted me to have him email me the response so that I could save it and maybe write about it. Developing good habits. That’s a pretty fucking solid answer. It’s something Squirt and I talk about all the time actually — having good habits.

Neutrality

You should take your favorite political hobby horse and throw it at the AI and see what happens. Ask it what proof there is for Trump’s stolen election. Ask it exactly how Bill Gates is in the Epstein files. Ask it about abortion.

I’ve done all of those. In fact, I’ve begun to make it a habit because it’s frankly brilliant at answering the questions. It has read sources nobody living in a bubble would have read. It isn’t emotional about it — it’s not coming to the conversation having chosen over and over to accept a disgusting politician in aid of getting whatever your pet legislative agenda is. There is a value in removing the “humanity” from these discussions sometimes, because we are where we are because of that very flawed humanity. That is a criticism and praise at the same time because, look around, humanity is fucking some stuff up.

What Is Humanity

This is the tension for me right now. I think this is the tension for civilization right now. What makes us special? Are we special because we are human? What does it mean to be human? It’s not our ability to reason anymore, it turns out you can get a reasonable facsimile of that with some heavy matrix math. Is it because we are “emotional” in a way that the calculator cannot be? Is it my rage and joy and depression that makes me special? Because some ineffable and invisible force gave me a “soul” and raised me up above the other creatures on the land and in the sea? Humanism posits what makes us special is that we strive to improve, that we try to learn.

What exactly is the meaning of life for a human?

Shit, I got no clue. But I guess I’ll keep asking questions. I guess I’ll teach Squirt to ask questions too. Be curious. Be creative. Be persistent. Have good habits.

All those things the spooky calculator said Squirt should be taught.

Squirt Says…

I think that as time progresses and we make more and more advancements we will have exponential growth in the advance of technology so when I'm your age I think there will be many huge advancements. These will make for an increase in the generational divide, I think, because while I'm a kid I will grow up with or without certain things while Generation Beta and future generations would not understand how I grew up just as I would find it hard to understand past generations' childhoods. That's all to say that the things that I have today won’t be understood by future generations.

Dad Responds…

Agreed, every generation sees a new world and understanding what came before will be tough. The other trick to remember is to remember not to give into hubris.

“Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.”

~ George Orwell

I read a lot of random stuff. Link Dumps are the things I think are worth remembering. You can always check out my Link Dump Tag if you’re looking for even more to read and please forward to anyone else you think might find these interesting.

1. A guess at the future of AI where we won’t have all the coolest stuff, and some thoughts on AI literacy as well. Good post from Steve Yegge

2. A Mental Model for Agentic AI Work - this is a cool model for how to think about the agent

3. Schwab is doing prediction markets now which is an interesting “mainstreaming” of this concept.

4. We are building a telescope that will cover over 120 square miles. Neat.

5. Temporary AI accounts for Cloudflare work is an interesting guardrail. I continue to be impressed with how Cloudflare is thinking about and approaching the AI revolution we’re living through.

6. An analysis on raising competitive kids and whether it really makes sense. This is a thing I am ambivalent about for sure — I think competitiveness is important but, at the same time, I think there’s something to be said for not being so cutthroat or consumed.

7. Jason Pargin has some…interesting…thoughts on AI and humanity.

8. Cory Doctorow on the AI “bubble.” Some interesting thoughts, some stuff I don’t necessarily agree with, but overall I enjoyed reading his thoughts and prognostications. Time will tell I suppose.

9. Global Cargo Delivery in space with SpaceX. Neat, I think the more we see of bending space to our will the better it will be for humanity. Assuming it doesn’t become a thing for kinetic energy weapons getting dropped from orbit.

10. Should datacenters pay a carbon text? Yes. Next Question. I guess I’m overall a massive fan of carbon taxes but I suppose that puts me in the minority?

I pay a yearly fee for two different services that have free alternatives. The first is my national newspaper, which I get from The Dispatch. The second is my personal money management software from Monarch Money. I think both of these bring far more value to me than what I spend for them each year, which is why I will happily signal-boost them. I like these products.

Each of these companies made some “interesting” moves in the past month. On Monarch’s side they’ve come out with a “plus” offering that doubles the price and adds retirement forecasting. The community is pissed. On The Dispatch’s side, I suddenly got a banner ad thrown in my face for the first time after years of reading every morning without a single advertisement. The very next day the editors had a big blurb about it because the community was pissed:

Further into that response was a mention of the “Premium” subscription and how that one would remain free of advertising. It is, of course, 2.5 times as much money to get the Premium subscription.

Similarly, we now have streaming services introducing ad-free “premium” tiers. All of a sudden Netflix is showing me advertisements? Really? Unless you pay more and then they’ll happily get rid of the ads. The plan for all of these is simple: weather the shitstorm of people raging and then enjoy your increased margins and advertising revenue. Few will walk away over just a little more pain. Boil the frog.

I keep flailing in my head trying to turn what’s rolling around in my brain into text this morning but I just keep getting examples of the “thing” rather than the “point.” So here’s another one: ChatGPT is serving ads now to their free tier. Anthropic/Claude explicitly refuses to do so even unto doing Super Bowl advertising about how they don’t do advertising in their platform. Essentially the exact same product with the exact same goals but entirely different approaches to how to do so. Both, of course, also encourage a “premium” tier to get even more services but Anthropic (the one without ads) is wholly dependent on those premium and business tiers.

This final example came weeks after I had written lots of this and let it languish in my drafts, but I think it finally “clicked.” There are now venture capital firms creating healthcare solutions that cut out health insurance companies. There are a couple things in that piece that I focused on. First, that these companies are breaking away from traditional models for healthcare. Finding gaps they can fill. But also that this isn’t meant for everyone. Not everyone can spend $365 a year per person just to get test results. It is, by its very existence, a “premium” offering.

News media. Financial Software. Television. LLM chat services. Healthcare.

Over and over again the general categories of consumption have been jumping into my head:

1. No Consumption - you are fully the product

2. Cheap Consumption - you are part of the product

3. Premium Consumption - you are paying to not be the product

Optionality

Squirt and I have a thing. I ask a question I’ve asked a hundred times, he rolls his eyes and answers with the same answer every time.

Dad: “What does money get you?”

Squirt: “Options.”

Capitalism in a nutshell — wealth is directly tied to optionality. The more wealthy you are, the more choices you have. The poor and middle class have to pay their own taxes, and it’s a luxury to have someone to do your taxes. We have to watch advertisements. We’re lucky to get 15 minutes with our doctor for a checkup. The rich have ways to move their wealth around that avoids taxes along with professionals who exist just to shelter this wealth. Personal doctors. Personal trainers. Personal chefs. You know, “premium services.”

Success to the Successful

I just finished Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows and there is a system “trap” that she talked about called “Success to the Successful — Competitive Exclusion.” The simplest definition of the trap is that when you start ahead it’s easier to get ahead and to keep getting further ahead. Her first example was Monopoly, which amused me because that factored into the opening sentence of one of my own system meditations where I wrote about Balatro. The first person who manages to start building their hotels (because they were lucky) is almost always the winner. In ecology it is called the competitive exclusion principle and it leads to one species outcompeting another. In the human capitalist world you can simply replace species with income level. The poorest children get the worst educations. The lowest earners get shitty payday loans with exorbitant terms because it’s all that’s offered to them. The middle class might avoid those but can easily fall into the credit card trap. Banks and casinos fight over the rich whales though and offer terms that you or I will never see.

This is something we all understand. It’s the system we live in. It’s expensive to be poor and it’s always easier to get rich when you’re already rich.

Success to the Successful.

Choosing

To be wealthy is to choose the premium service for everything. To be poor is to have almost no choices. To be middle class is to have choices that matter. To be rich is to have time for whatever you want. To be poor is to have no time. To be middle class is to have choices where you will put your time. This, I think, is what is whirling around in my head. This is why this has been bugging me. We exist in a place where choices and time are scarce.

How do we make good choices? How do we not get overwhelmed? How will Squirt not get overwhelmed? How will I teach him to make the right choices?

Fatherhood in a nutshell, right? If the goal is to teach your children to function on their own then you need to teach them to make the smart choices as much as possible. Unfortunately in the world as it exists right now I think that means the first answer has always been making smart financial choices.

Rule One: Don’t be Stupid with Money.

What a fucked up rule one. My mom’s rule one was “money doesn’t buy happiness.” But the truth is that money does buy you that optionality, and having choices is the quickest path to happiness. Money means freedom. And can you truly be happy without freedom? So be smart with your money and try to maximize your freedom.

Pissed Off

I think this is actually why these new premium tiers are pissing me off. Because now I’m seeing advertising in my paid for news. Now new features that I want from my budgeting software are locked behind a doubling of the price. If I want the good ChatGPT then I need to cough up some cash. If I want the best picture of my health then I need to start budgeting for that also. If I want to watch my fucking Netflix program without ads then it’s time to figure out where to put that in the budget too.

Or reconcile myself to seeing my experience diminish. The only smart decision is to reconcile myself, because I can’t pay for all the premium tiers. Not without violating Rule One. This sucks. Short of winning the lottery, though, that’s our lot in life — to choose which premium tiers we don’t get. I’ve never needed a private chef, but I sure as hell have gotten used to not looking at advertising.

The thing is, these are net increases in optionality. Growing up the nightly news and the newspaper were the only options for being informed. Now there’s a million options. The only medical tests you got were what your family doctor ordered. Budgeting was wildly more complicated and time-consuming. Television always had advertising, you just accepted it. You had no choices, really, for many of these things. It was undeniably a “simpler time.”

I sometimes think this is where lots of the rage comes in the modern world. The choices available. Quantitatively, virtually nothing is worse now than it was 20 or 50 or 100 years ago. The world is awful but getting better and we can do better. It’s irrational to look at the days gone by and think “it was better back then.” It was simpler back then of course. There were fewer options. And with options comes choices that must be made. Cancel Netflix or AppleTV? Pay for the news or become the product? Where must you trim the budget?

On the one hand, it’s a glorious thing to have all these choices. To have the freedom. On the other, freedom requires you to choose and choosing well is hard and frustrating.

Squirt Says…

The problem is poor people are always the product they have no choice on whether to deal with the ads or to pay for them. On the other hand, rich people have enough money to throw around that they don't need to make any choices at all. Pay a tiny bit to get rid of an inconvenience that bothers you makes sense doesn't it. However, people in the middle class have to manage it to budget it is getting rid of an inconvenience really worth it or should I just learn to deal with it. Choices Choices Choices.

Dad Responds…

Great thoughts. Explains why I have an entire tag just about “choices.” Also why there’s lots of research to back up the richer a country the higher their life satisfaction. I do disagree about rich people not having to make choices, it’s just that they have so many options most of their choices have many more options so they can also find a “good” choice. It’s interesting, though, that there is some debate if there are diminishing returns as you get more and more rich compared to happiness?

I read a lot of random stuff. Link Dumps are the things I think are worth remembering. You can always check out my Link Dump Tag if you’re looking for even more to read and please forward to anyone else you think might find these interesting.

1. So we got Fable (a neutered Mythos) and then the government blocked its export so then Anthropic took it all away. Wild ride of a 24 hours.

2. The UK is going to ban social media for kids under 16. This will make for some interesting conversations. The director of FIRE already has some thoughts.

3. Interesting breakdown of how non-profits can be abused. I was aware of some of this but it’s pretty wild to see it spelled out this way. Also seems…about right?

4. The tension between Anthropic and safety and the US government is one of the more interesting things going on with AI. The way the seas have shifted regarding them vs. OpenAI is also interesting. Great piece on Stratechery: Anthropic’s Safety Superpower

5. Charity Majors has a take on how software is changing that I haven’t seen yet. What is changing and what isn’t changing and, especially, the insight that has had me mostly comfortable with AI — we’ve seen all of this before. AI demands more engineering discipline, not less.

6. Is Iran Trump’s Katrina? Paywalled but a compelling case before the cut that the Iran war is an abject failure.

7. The next salvo in the fight between the government and Anthropic. This is an interesting take at least for Mythos making us “safer.”

8. Long detailed look at how Facebook/Meta engineering culture has changed by the Pragmatic Engineer.

9. Noah Smith wonders if what he writes matters. I think it’s an interesting question and it highlights something about why I write (mostly to work things out in my head and speak to Squirt) and why he writes — which is to change the world.

10. Perhaps it has something to do with where I straddle the Stoicism and Skepticism line along with some other philosophies. So Big Think’s Forget Stoicism. Skepticism is the ancient philosophy we need today was quite topical and a great read.

Five fucking stars to Thinking in Systems by Donella H. Meadows. I’m a systems-inclined sort of person but I’ve never formally had exposure to this type of abstractive modelling for all systems, whether it’s biological bodies or economics or pandemics or a bathtub. So the book was an immediate success for exposing me to new mental models to capture all of these into the same language.

I already know this is a book that will bubble up in my head over and over again because, as she alludes to in the book, once you start viewing things this way you cannot help but see it everywhere. So here I am in mid-40’s saying that it changed the way I understand and think about the world.

Not “view” things in the world but to “understand” these things. That is a particular nuance that I think is important to me — that this book isn’t necessarily looking to impart value judgements so much as a lens to explain it. The systems that should change are up to the reader, but finding the points of leverage and the adjustments that might be possible to the system is what you’ll come away with.

Meadows died in 2001. This book was edited/published in 2008. I read it in 2026. So it’s over a quarter of a century old at least and yet perfectly timely. Throughout the book there are references that have aged a bit and yet it all still rings true. Mentions of pandemics have a particular gloom to them, or discussions of how democracy can be eroded by populism and government control. I think that, too, speaks to the heart of the book. Thinking in Systems can exist somewhat outside of time because systems have always existed and always will.

I see myself coming back to this book in the future. It’s not a massive tome and it’s distilled down to exactly the right amount of information for its size. I will let it marinate, I’ll see it continually apply throughout my life, and then I’ll come back to see how I can update my understanding a bit.

Highly highly recommended.

His name is Mouse. He is over eighteen years old and riddled with arthritis. This week the inevitable kidney failure has finally started to show on his bloodwork. He’s lost a full pound of weight this year. He has walked in slow, crooked paths for a couple years now. He stares vacantly off into the middle distance for long stretches of time — we call this “buffering.”

Mouse loves to sit in the sunshine on the back porch. His old ass will run to the door when I am going to sit out there for lunch. He loves to curl up under the covers of beds sitting in sunshine too. He demands to be picked up on my shoulder so he can lick the side of my face. He follows me and Spouse around the house, and drags his crooked ass up the stairs to my office. He is sitting on my lap, right now, as I write this. He is devoted to us, and we are devoted to him. Dutifully taking him to get arthritis shots, checking the covers before we sit on a bed, and getting scratched when we argue with him about going back inside. He’s living his best fucking life.

But sorrow is on the horizon.

The Promise

Everything that brings you joy will end.

Entropy is a cold-hearted bitch and it always wins.

Impermanence is central to almost all philosophies and religions in the world.

“Bear in mind that everything that exists is already fraying at the edges, and in transition, subject to fragmentation and to rot. Or that everything was born to die.”

~ Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

So the sorrow isn’t a question of “if” but instead is a question of “when.” Mouse’s journey will come to an end, and all that remains is to know the point in time.

Well, that and living his best fucking life.

Lean the Fuck In

I like that term — “lean in.” I’ve been hearing it a bunch at work right now, like one of those things that you start realizing is popping up and making the rounds everywhere you look. Boss says it, coworker says it, the fucking news says, and I’m reading it on Reddit. It’s everywhere in my world right now. Lean in.

At work right now I am actively planning the destruction of most of the things I’ve created over the past couple years. It’s an interesting aspect of my job - I create things that I frequently have to kill. I had a mentor once comment on it actually and it sank into the swamp that is my head. I had created a simple solution to a problem over a couple weeks of time. It was a great little elegant solution that could easily be understood and supported by my team. But my mentor had discovered a better solution that we could simply purchase. Fuller features, more supportable, one less thing on my overflowing plate, and one more thing that anybody could pick up if I got hit by a bus.

So we killed it. Took it out behind the woodshed, put it out of its misery. I even got to be the one to flip the switch. “You know, you’re more okay with this than I expected given you built this whole thing a couple months ago and I know you had lots of fun doing it.”

I had indeed. The joy of a useful new solution and getting to be fully creative was a thrill. I had leaned the fuck in, which is when I do my best work. But it was always going to die. The sorrow was promised before I wrote the first line of code. It’s been well over half a decade, but I believe the solution that replaced mine is still being used. It, too, will die one day along with the company that has the solution.

Impermanence

It strikes me as a little odd to have jumped from a beloved pet who is in the twilight of his life into some stupid work shit, but I like the illustration of the universality. Sorrow follows joy in life, just like joy can follow sorrow. You form joyful friendships only to see them fade sometimes to be followed by new friends and new joys. I’m deep into a book hangover right now after finishing the last Dungeon Crawler Carl book, and deep into a game hangover because I finished Saros. Soon enough though I’ll find another book and another game.

Or I suppose I could stop looking, right?

I could never get another cat too. Stop making friends once the friendships fade away.

Avoid the sorrow by just…avoiding the joy.

It doesn’t appeal. I recognize the risk and the surety that sorrow will eventually come. I knew the day Mouse snuggled up on my shoulder and instantly got picked over the rest of his litter that the greatest likelihood was that down the road I would hold him on my shoulder for the last time before he reached the end. I can only hope that when that day comes he will pass right there in the same spot we started it all so many years ago.

But until then we’ll just keep living our best fucking lives in the present. Sit in the sunshine. Fight about when it’s time to go back inside. And cuddle.

Because the joy is worth the sorrow and it always has been.

Squirt Says…

I like how you switch between Mouse and your job. It shows that no matter what it is, it is constant. You can't have one or the other; they simply coexist or do not exist at all.

I read a lot of random stuff. Link Dumps are the things I think are worth remembering. You can always check out my Link Dump Tag if you’re looking for even more to read and please forward to anyone else you think might find these interesting.

1. There are now more bots on the internet than humans. I honestly would have assumed this happened a decade or two ago? I don’t actually think this means anything in particular…but an interesting factoid I suppose.

2. S&P 500 won’t list SpaceX in half the time it usually does in its indexes but, you know, Elon Musk is still now a trillionaire.

3. Introspection on changing while you age. I though the statistic of changing most before 30 and after 60 was particularly interesting.

4. What is the largest source of electricity in each country? This is a cool and very surprising article. It is interesting to look at the map behind that link and think about how distorted my understanding is from what I hear in the media. It ties into another graph I was just looking that shows the share of electricity production by source.

5. Good write-up on “doing nothing at work.” I continue to appreciate the way Sean approaches topics like this in the IT world.

6. The Perfect Storm for ADHD Overdiagnosis. An in-depth read but make sure to read the top comment as well. An incredibly complex subject.

7. Conservatives and Liberals Have Diverging Health Outcomes. Why?

8. Audiobook sales have exploded and that’s great to see. I love books and audiobooks and it’s fantastic to see “readership” growing because of them.

9. Stratechery has an interesting take on the iPhone’s placement in the emerging world of AI, along with Microsoft Solara project.

10. Good piece on the progress being made with cancer - a 33% drop in deaths since 1991.

11. Geothermal might not get the press or the bitching of Nuke but…it’s still freaking cool.

12. A deeply nerdy story about how Discord flipped all their voice chat to use Cloudflare’s edge compute. Very slick.

Love Your Neighbor Unless

I remember when I was a young teenager hearing a screed from a pulpit about how unholy homosexuals were in God’s eyes. It came out of the mouth of a loving and godly man. Someone who, for years, had taught me much more from the New Testament than the Old. Specifically, he’d taught me the Great Commandment which can basically be boiled down to “love God and love your neighbor and everything else is secondary.” He was a good man and while I haven’t talked to him in decades I cannot conceive of him being anything less now.

I remember being just baffled. This wasn’t a message of love. I might have been a kid but I recognized hate when I saw it. To look at someone and say “you are less in the eyes of God” was hateful. Indeed, probably the very week before that there might have been a sermon about how everyone was a sinner. And sins, at least as far as I knew, didn’t have levels. There are not greater and lesser sins. There’s just sins. So I asked my mom how to reconcile these things, why this particular sin was being singled out, and she didn’t have an answer either. I’ve spent my entire life seeking answers to a million hard questions I carry around in my head and I carried this one for a very long time.

A decade later was when I actually met my first “neighbor” in college who was openly gay. And soon after one of the people I love the most in this world trusted me enough to come out to me. Others followed over the next couple years. There are some memories that I’ll carry with me my entire life, and that I was trusted enough for these conversations will always be with me. I think it’s fair to say I even take some pride in being that trusted.

I think the world has come a long way from when I was a young teenager hearing a message of hate from a loving man. Come a long way and it’s easier now to find a loved one who will listen during a vulnerable conversation in a bedroom where someone is terrified but determined to no longer hide who they are. But I’m also aware that “we’ve come a long way” is pretty cheap coming from a straight dude. We have a long way to go yet, and right now most of us still have loved ones that deal with inequality and they shouldn’t. They shouldn’t. Today that’s what I think of when I think about Pride Month. A journey we’re still on even if I’m thankful my son will grow up in a world with less hate.

So while I will entertain dissenting opinions about very many things, I felt like speaking up about this one today during Pride Month as a grown man confident that I’m right rather than the child I was. If you believe that someone is less than another because of who they love or who they are then you are, quite simply, wrong.

Don’t let anyone tell you that one neighbor is worthy of less love.

We are all in this together. We are all worthy of love.