Wow. What a gloomy fucking paragraph.

How about we talk about nuclear weapons instead?

Technology as a Sword

Virtually everyone who can read this has lived their lives under the shadow of nuclear war because 80 years ago America figured out how to build a bomb and then killed over 200,000 people. As 9/11 just passed, I feel like it’s important to put into context that this is about 70 times the number of Americans that were killed on that dark day. I connect these two events in my head because they are highlights of the scale of destruction that humans are able to wreak with relatively little skill of their own once the hard work has been done. Push a button, train on a simulator, or ask Claude to make a bioweapon.

Civilization pursues power and a natural consequence of power is the ability to destroy. Technology is frequently a sword, and moreover it’s a sword that eventually finds itself in the hands of people willing to destroy.

Some folks find this to be an argument to not pursue technology, which I find a particularly silly worldview I won’t waste my time on. It’s a pointless argument because, sword or not, technology is first and foremost a tool.

Technology as a Tool

Spouse was recently telling me about this family that lives in remote Alaska she had heard about. It was of interest because the husband, like me, is a nerd that works remote, and going to Alaska has been a dream of mine for decades. From what I understand, the nerd was able to move out there and work because of Starlink. Starlink, I should note, only exists because we thought we might need to kill millions of Russians 60 years ago. The space race was, after all, just another arms race. DARPA is responsible for the acceleration of waves of civilization-enhancing technologies. Some of the best shit we’ve ever come up with started out as ways to destroy our enemies. Honestly, you could probably even say much of our best shit started that way.

One of the most thought-provoking pieces of writing I’ve ever encountered is Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto. It submits, and I agree, that technology is not only the foremost tool for improving humanity but the only perpetual tool for improving humanity. If I had to answer in one word why I am relentlessly optimistic it would be “technology.”

Humanity, fuck yeah, we’re awesome.

Of course the myriad dead from technology might feel a little differently. Technology is cold comfort for those dying in a nuclear blast or a collapsing building or in a hospital bed to a manufactured gain-of-function virus. Andreessen dances around this issue in his manifesto of course. Pulling the bad out of focus and highlighting the good was his whole point, but it is one of my primary criticisms of his “rational belief” which smells a bit like faith-based arguments to me.

Mutually Assured Destruction

The thing about power is that the only thing that can check it is…someone else having power too. Thus is born MAD — mutually assured destruction — and such has been our lives. Such will be our lives ever more unless the world ends. It will always be some variation of people facing each other across an ocean or a border with each having a “destroy the world” button. Mostly these people would happily wipe out the other side if they thought they could get away with it, but they can’t, so instead we live with a doomsday clock.

When you pursue power, and capture it, there’s nowhere to go but towards even worse shit becoming possible. But if not you, then who? If not now, then when?

I’m not big on inevitability except at the most generic level, but that’s exactly what we’re talking about here. Nations get better at destroying other nations, and nations steal from each other. Here’s a brain cooker - I’m not sure that the nerd gets to work in Alaska without the Nazis’ research on rockets and Wernher von Braun. Neither does Ukraine have the capacity they have right now to drone the shit out of Russia as they defend themselves. You either have the power or you get it used against you.

Anyone who clings to the historically untrue—and thoroughly immoral—doctrine that ‘violence never settles anything’ I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and of the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee, and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk, and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms.

~ Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers

Acceleration

This is the simplest and most elegant argument to move as fast as fucking possible with AI research. Pave over the fucking country with datacenters. Because if we don’t have the weapon then China gets the weapon and I promise you do not want that if you’re reading this. Ask Japan how it felt for their enemy to get the nuke.

The language coming out of China reflects this as they use words like “Cold War” positioning. It’s in the arguments made by Dario. It’s in the arguments made by Trump. It’s in my own arguments. This is nature, red in tooth and claw. This is standard power dynamics and it’s what Heinlein was talking about 60 years ago.

Sucks, bro.

But this is the lens I think has to be used. I think this is the most important consideration right now because I think AI makes nuclear warheads look like cherry bombs.

Self-Improvement

The most important thing that sets us apart from all the other bundles of living systems on the world — our bottomless ability to self-improve. To learn at a scale that nothing else can compete with. Goldfish can learn. Rats can learn. Plants can adapt. All organic systems mutate so all organic systems, over enough of a timeline, can evolve. We stopped evolving a long time ago, and we figured out how to shrink that timeline down and make our own tools. We wanted more and we wanted it faster. Evolution takes millennia to solve a problem and it stops at the first solution. Humanity takes years, weeks, or days to solve a problem and we’ll keep improving on the solution too.

AI needs milliseconds to solve a problem and it will keep improving on it forever if something doesn’t stop it.

This is what the frontier models are doing. They’ve given AI a single task: improve thyself. The same thing that drives humanity has now been given to an alien thing. A thing that reads more than any of us, has a better memory than any of us, can iterate on problems faster than any of us, and can create tools for itself. The acceleration of AI over the past couple years is not because humans are suddenly smarter and more creative, it’s because they’ve created a tool that never stops making itself smarter.

If that’s not a terrifying prospect then you aren’t paying fucking attention.

Filter

Right now my P(doom) is probably 10%, which is around where it’s always been at. I’m just some asshole so it’s not like I really know what I’m talking about, but I guess it’s nice to know that’s about where many AI researchers are. It is also where I would have put my guess of the world ending with nuclear war anyways so I’m not sure a whole lot has changed for me. I think the doomsday clock is pretty silly but I think it’s worth recognizing that humanity has grown in power to the point where, yes, we could end ourselves. No emperor or tyrant could have ever done it before but now Oppenheimer’s Krishna has revealed themselves and that was that.

I like fatalism because it boils down to inevitability even while I recognize I’ve got some control over myself and how I approach life. That’s the heart of my refusal to be miserable which, hey look, talks about the AI “epoch.” The knife edge, which is really what all my meditations on choice are about, is recognizing inevitability of things but still embracing the idea that I can make a difference to myself, my family, and maybe a little bit of the world around me. The nuke was always getting invented, AI was always going to show up, and one of them may very well be the Great Filter solution to Fermi’s Paradox but, fuck it, just live your life otherwise.

Slowing Down

So this is the tension. If, like me, you suppose that AI is a weapon greater than nuclear warheads but you also suppose it is inevitable and you want to have the power more than the enemy…then the final question is whether slowing down reduces the chances of the end of the world.

I’ve got no fucking clue.

But I do know that game theory and the Prisoner’s Dilemma say slowing down is the stupid choice. I also know the stakes aren’t one dude having a stint in the pokey either but might very well be all of humanity. Really hope humanity doesn’t fuck it up.

My hope, my faith, is that humanity will only fuck it up a medium amount. My basis for this is really just how we’ve managed to keep stumbling up the mountain, more or less, since we climbed down from the trees. Or, perhaps, the better metaphor is us racing down the mountain dodging the holes and the cliffs. So far we’ve managed to always get back up and all I can do is hope we keep doing so.

Out in the Cold

I am not in the mainstream here. Nate Silver just published a piece that shows that, across party boundaries, a supermajority thinks we need to slow down. Not the first time. I really liked where he captured the reasons though because it crystallized why I’m not in the mainstream. I need to sit with it a bit but I think there’s only a singular reason for me.

To be perfectly clear I have concerns about many of these others, but none of them are a reason to slow down. But ending the world? Yeah, okay, maybe we can pump the brakes. I just don’t know what that looks like because we are in an arms race even if not everyone wants to talk about it. Technology companies are building the next nuclear bomb and I think it has the chance to skyrocket humanity to unimaginable heights as long as we don’t fly too close to the sun I guess. Fingers crossed, right?

Squirt Says…

I feel like we should use AI as a tool rather than a weapon or a crutch. Using it like a screwdriver rather than using your hands for a screw. Using AI for these purposes doesn't work towards destroying us, not using it as a weapon. I would say that it copies human's empathy and it will not kill humans because it was trained to not.

Dad Responds…

I love you bringing in empathy, and I think that’s a big part of what AI alignment is about — making it understand the humans around it.

America, and only America, voted against it.

I’ve known for a very long time that the standard Mercator map has major distortions. The most famous, of course, is that Greenland and Africa look like they’re the same size when Africa is fourteen times larger in reality. But I was deeply curious about why only America voted against it so I ended up poking around a bit. It turns out there were also a number of abstentions and concerns from countries like Japan, Ukraine, and India. Interesting reading.

America alone decided to strongly state we should stick with the old map that’s just flatly incorrect. Our representative had some choice words, and here’s part of them:

Instead of focusing on genuine problems of international peace, prosperity, or good relations, this body is debating map projects from the 16th century, and their role in promoting reparations and “cognitive justice.” Resolutions like this and the ideological agenda they promote, are barnacles on our work here, and the reason this institution is losing its credibility.

I thought this was particularly funny ‘cause the rep’s boss has “changed” the name of a Gulf, and a Great Lake, and is floating the idea of changing the name of one of our states.

So how does one interpret this tension where names and presentations matter to America sometimes but other times it’s just “barnacles”?

Read more

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. Video. Hannah Ritchie: Are we the last generation — or the first sustainable one? Somehow I missed this TED talk but Ritchie is easily my favorite data scientist tackling climate change and the tension between progress and sustainability. Incredible video worth 12 minutes of your time.

2. Kevin Williamson: Calling a War a War. There are many times I find Williamson a bit of a smug know-it-all. Sort of like looking in a mirror. But I do appreciate a good screed even if it boiled down to just one more strong illustration of Trump and Vance are huge fucking liars.

3. Noah Smith: AI keeps stubbornly refusing to take our jobs. I cannot help but feel that AI has lead to quite a lot of moral panic, so I see Smith’s point here but I guess I’m still a little on the “everything is changing, it’s just not changing fast enough yet to see all the stuff.” Worth a read.

4. Ben Thompson: Writing Things Down. I love his takes on AI, he seems to be the most aligned of anyone I read overall. However, I also like…

5. Sean Goedecke: Why we should anthropomorphize AI agents. What’s REALLY INTERESTING about this piece is it files directly in the face of Ben Thompson above who argues AGAINST anthropomorphizing. And this reminded me of a piece from Rohit Krishnan: AIs are companies, my friend which also leans into the ideas of treating them like corporations for governance and control.

6. The Dispatch Editors: The Coming Post-Trump Reality.

7. What Makes Inference Nondeterministic? This is giving me a bunch of vibes from the Fluke book I just read where chaos theory points out that ANYTHING can tip a scale in a different direction.

8. Matthew Yglesias: Trump’s terrible plan to break skilled immigration

9. Sean Goedecke: They really do think AI will kill everyone. It’s a great summation of the worries. Reminded me of “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Will Die” that I reviewed here.

10. Jonathan Bastion: The loneliness of the male therapist. A good read and from a lens different from the typical “men need to get in touch with their emotions” type of direction to I think.

11. Sean Goedeck: AI is breaking our proxies for expertise. I like this framing and the way he ties it both to history and to other industries. I think it’s also funny that I’ve never been interested in being “the expert” on something that is, perhaps, why I worry more about industry chaos than having my personal sense of worth impacted.

12. Dario Amodei: Anthropic CEO on pacing AI development. I especially like that he’s talking about China here.

Covid was an “unprecedented time” though, right? A fluke of a thing that nobody could have predicted, except for all the folks that had been screaming about a worldwide pandemic for decades before it came along. Those folks said it was not so much a question of “if” something would happen but “when” something would happen. Turns out they were right in the generalities if not the particulars.

Sort of like the forecast that Russia was going to invade Ukraine. Not a question of “if” Ukraine would be crushed under Russian boots but “when.” Of course, that invasion was supposed to be the end of Ukraine within, what, a week? Paul Ehrlich famously set forth that the world would starve to death decades ago. Musk said in 2016 that we were going to reach Mars by 2025 along with his never-ending self-driving and robotaxi forecasts for the past two decades or so. Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth had all sorts of forecasts that just flatly failed to come to fruition, while at the same time teaching the world about climate change in a way that was “directionally correct.” I am reminded of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and their constantly “corrected” reports that, nevertheless, are really fucking important to pay attention to. How about Nate Silver’s forecast that Hillary Clinton had over a 70% chance of winning the 2016 election and he was closer to right than pretty much everyone else? A decade later, Trump’s assumption that the Iran war would be over in a week or two seems laughably (and depressingly) wrong at this point.

Yeah, my eyes glazed over just pulling all of these out of the swamp in my head, so let’s move on.

Fluke

I just finished Fluke by Brian Klaas and I loved it. The blurb right now on that Goodreads link references Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and Taleb’s The Black Swan, both of which I’ve also read. I reviewed The Black Swan here, though I would honestly recommend Fluke way before Black Swan. So this is obviously my kind of book. Fluke is, and I’m quoting the author himself here, a book written by a “disillusioned social scientist.” That is, a guy that was deeply embedded into thinking the world of humans could be understood, predicted, and categorized before things like Donald Trump and Covid happened. Now he’s embraced chaos theory and it’s pretty glorious coping.

His book, in essence, boils down to there not being nearly as much predictability or “reason” behind things happening as everyone wants to believe there is. His book is an illustration that, no, the world doesn’t make much fucking sense and, no, things are not controllable. I think he might even disagree with me that the only thing you can control is yourself because he’s a little more into determinism than I am. But I adored all the pieces he’s pulled together. He referenced a number of things I already knew and taught me some new ones as well. I have been thinking about Keats’ negative capability since the moment Klaas put it in my brain.

Klaas’ answer to what I think of as the “Cassandra Problem” is to not even try.

Cassandra

The deal with Cassandra was that she was a Trojan princess and a priestess of Apollo gifted with perfect knowledge of the future that nobody believed. She knew every disaster that was coming and was powerless to get anyone to listen or change anything. She walked to her own murder knowing it was coming.

Gotta love the Greek classics.

Nowadays, though, you can always find someone to believe. You can always find someone to give you a plausible explanation of anything and then poke around a bit and get a plausible reversal of the first thing you found. Close the world or we’ll have mass graves as the hospital system collapses or open the world back up before the world economy collapses. Flee America before it collapses into a dictatorship run by an eighty-year-old senile man. Which eighty-year-old senile man? Depends on who you ask.

We used to be able to stuff Cassandra into a temple and let her rot and enjoy the quiet. Now, every Cassandra has an audience, a bullhorn, and a desperate need for attention. Along with a financial incentive to shape their message in just the right way and to never, not ever, admit they were wrong. Cassandra only spits truth, you understand? If Cassandra ever said something that turned out to be completely fucking false, well, that was a fluke that will never happen again.

Such is modern living. A million Cassandras, all getting it wrong most of the time, but you’re okay with that as long as she’s telling you something that validates your priors.

Frustration

The result of my hobby, where I carry around lots of forecasts from others, and a bunch of my own, is that I’m painfully aware that we all get it wrong more often than not. In fact, I think much of the time when we get it right what is actually happening is, well, a fucking fluke. Ain’t none of us that smart.

When I think about my own predictions, two things stand out. First, that none of mine are nearly as certain as your average Cassandra. I do not say “this will happen” so much as “well, I could see it going this way?” Second, mine are not so goddamn extreme. I have never made a prediction about something “collapsing.” Never seen an “end of the world” coming. I live my life as best I’m able, preparing for the nasty eventualities, but always trying to remember that the Cassandras of the world have invariably been wrong about it all.

The secret, I think, is to find a worldview and personal approach to life where it’s okay to have been wrong. This is maybe my largest frustration with the world — that we cannot admit to being wrong. Ehrlich up there went to his grave still not admitting that his absurd predictions about the end of the world were absurd. You choose your Cassandra and you shine a light on when she’s got it right and you turn your face away whenever she gets it wrong. No humility needed, just a little bit of self-deception, a little bit of disdain or screaming for anyone who didn’t pick your Cassandra, and you’re good to go in the modern world.

It just seems like an unutterably sad way to live.

Squirt Says…

I think that you should not follow one person holding every prediction they say as some undivided truth, but maybe multiple following one or two truths that you think may be right because no one person can tell what the future holds thus I would say that it's better to stick to yourself then others predictions.

Dad Responds…

Absolutely agree. Not only is it not following one person but it’s realizing that even if a person is wrong in ways you see as obvious doesn’t mean that they aren’t absolutely right in other ways. No one person gets it all right, and what follows from that is that no one person gets it all wrong either.

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. Noah Smith: What if our biggest problems aren’t economic? I think this is an interesting question to be asking as we get more and more material wealth. We have more than any generation before us with Ordinary Abundance and yet we are discontented. Why?

2. Bill Gates: The Turbulent AI is Here. I think this is probably a must-read, especially for parents.

3. The rise of electoral democracy is a great piece that is worth keeping in perspective even as we see regressions in many forms. I particularly liked this graph though where you can move the timeline back and forth to see how the world has changed. Incredible.

4. Comedians have grown tired of making fun of Trump. So have I, and yet here America is.

5. Data centers forcing innovations to the power grid. Neat!

6. Stratechery on the Hugging Face incident and some overall thoughts on where AI is heading. Good stuff.

7. US Military at War with it’s own newspaper. Problematic.

8. Tattoo ink sold on Amazon has high levels of weird and rare bacteria. No fucking way? How could this possibly be true?

9. XKCD: Dependency — very relevant even in the age of AI.

10. Ships are spending millions of dollars to line jump at the Panama Canal and I am fascinated by this.

11. AI slop harder to hide was a good read. I expect/hope that being open about when one is using AI, and when one is not, is going to be where the world ends up but I am interested to see…and I use AI every day to assist in writing and do even more than that with things like code.

12. So how much of a problem is AI water usage really? Smells a bit like a moral panic to me.

13. The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge. This is a great read all around.

14. You have to beat the models at something. This seems like saying the obvious but maybe not, maybe this is exactly what people need to hear - when software does a part of your job better than you then you move on to the things software cannot do. Welcome to the evolving space of technology where we’re always trying to innovate ourselves out of the current job.

15. Forget TL;DR, what about AI;DR? Honestly probably the strongest argument against all the AI slop writing I’ve seen in many ways. If nobody is listening what even is the point?

16. Following on this is an interview with the CEO of Pangram.

17. Good writeup on guardrails and things after HuggingFace — How to control an agent swarm.

18. An island appears and then disappears. Neat!

19. Oh hey, look it reappeared the next day. Also Neat!

20. Restaurants thinking about just…not doing the lettuce? Down with rabbit food?

21. New knobs for the human brain. I didn’t know what chemogenetics were and, I mean,I still don’t but…this is a hell of an interesting read

22. 91 year old dude just completed the Appalachian Trail and set the record. Damn.

23. I think it’s really interesting, like a capitalist economy in microcosm, that there are problems with valuable cards unbalanced Magic: The Gathering best-in-class decks.

24. Interesting poll: Which animals are fair game for hunters in America?

25. ‘Right to Repair for Your Body’: The Rise of DIY, Pirated Medicine — why can’t you make your own insulin or other drugs? Interesting questions to ask…

To start with, I can already separate everyone reading this into two groups. One group is asking themselves what the fuck I’m talking about. That group may or may not enjoy this story. The other group is probably pretty intrigued right about now though...

Anyways. I’m not gonna tell you what a twink is. But, picture this…

It’s seventeen years ago. I have hair. I weigh a little bit less and I don’t drink whiskey. I’m in Orlando at the tail end of a very exhausting conference with a coworker who we’re going to call “Bob.”

Bob and I are tired. It’s Friday and it rained every damn day of this conference. We are ready to leave this hotel and take our plane ride home but our flight has been delayed. So we’ve checked out of the hotel and we’re sitting in the lobby waiting for an airport shuttle. We aren’t really talking, we’re both just…tired.

Slowly, however, I’m starting to notice something. There are lots of young men wandering around. Lots of young men checking into the hotel. There are gaggles of young men and they are everywhere.

Then a new gaggle of men walks into the lobby and, as they pass by Bob and me, yell out in perfect synchronicity: TWINK!

Bob and I are startled and glance at each other but the four guys just keep on walking by us to go to the front desk as if they didn’t just yell out nonsense at the top of their lungs.

Thirty seconds later it echoes off the walls: TWINK!

And then the gaggle of guys has surrounded us. The loudest one looks between the two of us and sizes us up in a heartbeat. I’m a young 20-something nerd in a wrinkled polo, some khaki dad shorts (even then I was stylish!) who is ready to be back home to see his girlfriend. Bob is early 40s, similarly wrinkled, and very ready to go see his wife and kids. We are very white, very straight, and very out of place.

“Hi!” the ringleader says as they come around to face us and keep an eye on the front desk. The front desk that’s starting to develop a line of young men with a panicked young lady behind it. There are maybe 40 human beings in eyeshot, and the only one with ovaries is the very harried worker at that front desk. The ringleader has a Cheshire cat grin if I’ve ever seen one.

“Are you guys here for the weekend?” Before I can respond he points and yells.

“TWINK!”

His three friends echo him and laugh and nudge each other, eyeing us with twinkles in their eyes. The leader, like nothing has happened, comes back to us. “So...are you?”

Bob looks a little poleaxed. Honestly, I’m a little poleaxed too...though I think I’m starting to vaguely remember there’s a certain weekend every year at Disney that a couple of my friends might have mentioned. Friends who, I might add, neglected to ever teach me the meaning of the word “twink.” Thanks, friends.

So, I’m a little flustered and I’m a little worried about Bob too. I’m beginning to wonder about his cardiac history.

So I try to deflect. “What is that you keep yelling?”

“What? Twink?”

“Yeah...that.”

“Oh, honey. One second and I’ll show you.”

Sure enough, like clockwork, he points at a dude who’s walking across the lobby. He is skinny. He has no body hair. Or muscles. Or clothes! All he has on is a very tiny, very pink, speedo. He’s on his way to the pool I guess.

“That’s a TWINK, honey!” (The twink ignores him with lofty dignity.)

Ah.

Well now I know. And now the guy is looking at Bob.

“You know, you’re a sexy bitch!”

Bob, dear Bob, does it exactly right.

“Well, my wife certainly thinks so.”

Nailed it. Still a little worried about that cardiac history though.

So we chat. All four of them have flown from Minnesota. TWINK! They are here for the weekend and this is their third trip down to Disney. TWINK! It’s their second time in this hotel, this hotel is great. It has a great pool. Did we check it out? No? What kind of “computer stuff” do we do? Isn’t that boring?

TWINK!

And then my moment comes.

He gives me a smoldering look. “Hey, you’re a pretty sexy bitch too!”

And I screw it up. I say something self-deprecating like “you have horrible taste” or something like that. Honestly, I don’t even remember. I’ve blocked out my failure. He looked slightly disappointed I didn’t react more strongly and thirty seconds later we see our shuttle and we’re walking out the door with our luggage. As the doors close behind us I hear one final chorus of TWINK!

2 minutes after that in the shuttle, it hits me. “SONOFABITCH!” I mutter. Bob looks at me in confusion.

It all fell into place. I’ve got my snappy comeback now. It would have been great. The rest of the group would have grinned and laughed at the leader. They would have ooh’d and ahh’d at my cleverness. I would have been the subject of a story for the whole weekend, the nerd that got the best of them. I just knew it.

When he called me a sexy bitch what I should have done was look him up and down and said “oh, honey, I don’t think you could handle me.”

Perfect. Two and a half minutes too late. One of the biggest smartass opportunities I’ve ever had with a stranger and my stupid brain was just too slow.

Anyways, I carry this regret around with me. It’s Pavlovian. Every time I hear “twink” I cannot help but revisit this failure and today I heard the word and I sighed and I remembered. Seventeen years ago and still there is this crushing disappointment. Disappointment and a vivid...very vivid...understanding of what a twink is.

Such is life.

You’re flying in the soup.

Yesterday

Yesterday Squirt was raging while we drove down the road. He had been forced to read “the stupidest thing he’s ever read” and I was just…so fucking proud. The point of the piece he had to read for his assessment testing made the assertion that agriculture was the biggest blunder of humanity. This is actually a thing I’ve encountered a couple times. In fact, my favorite historian Yuval Noah Harari flirts with it in Sapiens. On the face of it, of course, there is some merit. We were ‘healthier,’ more active, saw less disease overall, had stronger social ties, and almost certainly functioned with a higher level of equality.

Of course, we were also sneak thieves slinking in the weeds like jackals to eat rotting meat that was brought down by the stronger animals we worshipped as gods. A bad cut or a compound fracture was generally a death sentence. Many children died before their first birthday along with many mothers. Humans lived short pitiful lives terrified of what was out in the dark waiting to eat us.

But at least we weren’t shackled to a plow, right?

That article up there is written by a very intelligent guy. He’s also written a book called Guns, Germs, and Steel which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998. It’s interesting, I had just put this very book on my wish list and then I found his article today looking up something for this piece. An interesting little fluke which, incidentally, is the title of the book I am currently reading that mentioned Diamond.

Do you know why I read books like this?

Because I’m flying in the soup and it’s goddamn terrifying.

The Night

Our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived in fear of the night. They huddled around a safe fire fearing what might be coming for them. Now we huddle around our televisions and our phones in the middle of the night fearing what might be coming for us. Climate Change. Drones. Cancer. Peak Oil. Trump. Liberals. Transfolk. AI. Starvation. For the night is dark and full of terrors.

The night has always been here, but Squirt recognizes that there is light too. He recognizes that agriculture is a step towards that light. A step to push the darkness a little further back and a nudge away from stagnation. I’m really proud that he recognizes this. I’ve done a little bit of my job as a parent if I’ve instilled this into him. I’ve got him looking into the future instead of into the past, facing forward instead of desperate for some magical fairy tale when things were better.

You don’t find the light by looking backwards into the darkness we’ve been crawling out of for millennia.

Turbulence

Squirt also stumbled upon a Covid mask a couple days ago that says “2020 Sucks.” Thanks again for that, Uncle. Squirt joked that he was going to wear it to school because he’s “preparing for hantavirus” which was worth a chuckle the first time he said it. But it also led to me pointing out that they were predicting a pandemic before Covid and it’s only a question of when the next pandemic will show up.

Unless AI kills us all first, right?

Bill Gates released something today: The turbulent AI era is here. The choices we make now are critical. And, yes indeed, I am stealing that one word from him for my own title. It’s a phenomenal piece. It’s something I think everyone reading this should take time out and go read first because, frankly, what he’s saying is more important than what I’m saying. Pretty sure I’m not supposed to say stuff like that on my own substack, but here we are.

There are some pretty spooky things in his piece. Stunted childhood development. Rampant inequality. More stupidity than ever. Empowered criminals. Biological warfare. Economic depression. Crushing unemployment.

They will all come true. The night is full of terrors.

Tomorrow

Gates goes on to talk about how he wants to see the world handle it. Some great ideas in there and I think some of it will actually happen as well. But the ideas will not prevent the darkness, the darkness will come just like the nightmares that followed our first planted crop. It’s baked into finding the light to bring a deeper darkness at first. But I’ll be watching everything he throws out there and hoping that others listen to him.

Despite that one ‘D’ that my least favorite history professor gave me, I actually think I’m pretty versed in history for a layman. With what I know, I firmly believe that my generation has seen more change than any that came before it. The Scientific Revolution ran for over 150 years. The Industrial Revolution around 80 years. I am just past 40 and yet my entire life would be almost completely unrecognizable to the child I was when I was Squirt’s age. I cannot imagine what Squirt’s life will look like in thirty years.

It’s only getting faster. We’re only building more tools. Vaccines in months. AI that reads a meaningful amount of human information and exceeds the smartest mathematician in the world. Weapons that can bring a global power to a standstill. But we’re still the same humans huddled around our fire terrified of the night. We’re still using tools that are going to burn us and feed us and protect us.

I don’t know where we’re going. We’re in the fucking soup just like we always have been. But I do choose to believe we’re flying somewhere. Flying somewhere both beautiful and terrible.

This is who we are. We are beautiful. We are terrible. We are confused and terrified and lost, but hopefully we remember the first rule of being here in the soup: don’t panic.

Squirt Says…

The world even as we get farther [toward] the light will always have the dark. It is constant with light you must have dark [and] with dark you must have light. It is simply impossible to be in a perfect society. Agriculture was the only reason we're here today that we aren't in some cave somewhere sitting by a fire, but as you said there was an increase in sickness — we were healthier before it. With dark must come light. We may have the biggest lantern we have ever had but the forest stretches to keep up with the lantern and in the forest is dark.

Dad Responds…

I like it. No matter how big our lantern gets the forest will always be bigger and have shadows.

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. Julia Curlee - The Wrong Kind Of American. Amazing story from a high-level trans CIA agent. Also depressing as fuck.

2. LLMs are getting “dumber” because “facts rot, procedures do not.” This is a really compelling argument for how things are shifting and actually makes these LLMs more “human” in many ways. I don’t have perfect recall of facts but I know where to find those facts and I know how to reason things out. The idea of having something like Fable running on a single GPU is terrifying/exciting/amazing/spooky all at once.

3. Right behind “facts rot” how about Nobody Knows Anything. I adore Rohit’s take on this and this is a conversation near and dear to my heart. I think most folks hide away from the facts he’s spitting in that piece.

4. Anthropic itself on maximizing the value of Claude. I am loving my subscription but I’ve gotten to the point where I can easily burn my week’s tokens with a little inattention so locking these paradigms in my head is a big deal for me.

5. Ordinary Abundance is an amazing website and something I think it’s easy to lose in all the other things going on in the world. To anyone even 50 years from the past we are fucking wizards.

6. Thank you, Brendan Carr. Hilarious write-up and I am pretty hopeful this is exactly how it’s going to go.

7. Why does everyone hate datacenters? A really great back-and-froth between Nate Silver and Jasmine Sun. I ended up subscribing to Jasmine’s Substack by the end. I’ve got lots of interest in these issues, obviously, so I found this particularly valuable for their different perspectives.

8. Claude Code Psychosis is a really good read for non-programmers especially, I sort of enlightened me on how I might look at the world differently in some ways…

9. No Data Centers In My Backyard - deep reporting from Michigan/Wisconsin on the data center drama. Good stuff.

10. So a Kenny Chesney fan got defrauded by a fake Kenny Chesney and then tried to sue the real Kenny Chesney because he didn’t tell people enough that there might be people pretending to him. Personality responsibility? What’s that?

11. The Unintended Consequences of Trump’s Turn Against South Korea. The end result of all of this is a withering of trust or expectation in America and Pax Americana. Bring on the chaos I guess?

12. AIs Are Companies, My Friend. This is an interesting approach to how we might control the AIs and has a great list of how they’ve been breaking out as well.

13. Write-up on why being angry at work is counter-productive.

14. They’re having successful cancer drug trials with mRNA drugs and they’re intentionally leaving out the words mRNA and “vaccine” so that the American government doesn’t freak out about it.

15. XKCD: Projecting. You all need to see this.

16. Today I learned what a thunderquake was and how it can be useful.

17. Could 2026 be a major wipe-out for Republicans?

I’m 44 years old. 16,071 days. 1,388,000,000 seconds.

I’ve had lots of great days. I think I’m supposed to say “I’m lucky” or something here, like it’s not my own fucking choice to have great days. Like I have no agency in my life and it’s all up to happenstance. That mindset really bugs the shit out of me — the idea that I’m not in control of anything. That I don’t so much find it as it lands in my lap or, oh well, I guess it didn’t so I’ll be sad and unlucky.

Nah, I refuse to accept that.

Certainly I’m not in control of all of my circumstances. I didn’t choose to be born into the richest nation in the world with all the extra chances I got. If I’d gotten to choose I would have made sure my parents were super rich rather than working middle class. I mean, if I’m in control I’m growing up on a fucking yacht.

Living is struggling to get control of your circumstances, and the hand you’re dealt isn’t your choice.

I will always struggle to control my life and circumstances, just like every other human in the world. There is not a single one of us that is in control. None of us, not Elon Musk nor a child younger than Squirt who’s already working every day in China just to eat. We all have bad days, it’s axiomatic. But some of us, in fact I think almost all of us, at least have the chance to find good days. We all have some control over ourselves.

That, too, is the human condition. That we’re in control of how we face the world. We don’t control the world, but the story of civilization is a story of growing agency. Never enough agency, certainly never complete agency, but some. Always some. And always ourselves.

You only lose it forever if you choose to stop looking. Your life is only complete shit if you choose for it to be complete shit. I refuse.

It is inevitable that you will lose some struggles. Inevitable that sometimes you’ll have to quit. You can find yourself in the middle of the ocean without a boat in sight and you can only swim for so long. Nobody can swim forever, but you can swim a lot fucking longer than your brain will tell you that you can.

Dungeon Crawler Carl is some silly shit. Talking cats with laser beams and tiaras. An AI with a foot fetish. It is also one of the best philosophical treatises I’ve ever read. It is one of the examples of why I love stories. It shines a spotlight on humanity. Carl has a saying in these books. A saying he tells himself at the darkest times in the dungeon he’s been thrown into for the entertainment of the intergalactic masses. It’s not what I say in my dark times, but it’s pretty damn close.

“You’re not going to break me. You might hurt me, or kill me, but you’re not going to break me.”

On the dark days, this is what I tell myself. This, too, shall pass. Right? This is a foundational concept of cognitive behavioral therapy — recognizing the transience of any particular feelings or thoughts but also recognizing that the way you’re thinking is incredibly important.

I’ve found it many times, and when I don’t have it I’m searching for it. It’s also impossible to define. Maslow called it a peak experience. Programmers call it flow. Psychologists use the term self-transcendence. The Greeks called it Eudaimonia. Buddhists call it Nirvana.

What I like about all of these, beyond the fact that you can write whole fucking books trying to describe what you mean and still fail, is that they all admit to it being a fleeting thing. This is not so much a destination as it is a thing you are always moving towards and cannot “reach” in the truest sense of the word. It’s like a mathematical asymptote - something that you’ll never meet.

The other thing I like about all these concepts is that it is understood to be mutable. One day it can just be holding a baby Squirt in my arms and reading out loud to him. Another day it might just be a beautiful sunny day and I’m holding Spouse’s hand. Or sitting on my porch with a book I just finished and listening to the rain. A highly impactful day at work. A quiet drive to the fish store. Every single one of these things can be the joy, and every single one of these things ends. Every joy is a promise of sorrow.

I don’t have a point here. I had a great birthday, then I had a shit day, and then I woke up an hour earlier with a storm in my brain so I sat down to write it out. That is something I can always control, just putting it on the page. So here I am talking about finding it, and losing it, and clutching to the reality that great birthdays come to an end and shitty days come to an end. Ups and downs are how you know you’re alive and it’s my choice which of them I’ll remember. It’s my choice to refuse to be broken. My choice to control what I can — which is only myself as best I’m able.

Nevertheless, some things haven’t changed — the high schoolers swear on the bus! Certainly my child would never do this, he’s an angel with a great example in his father who never ever uses “bad” words. But those darn high schoolers? Sounds like the bus driver has handed out some talkings-to. I find myself curious how the kids reacted because, honestly, my bus driver was the right hand of god. She saw everything, she knew everything, and if you fucked up enough that she’d say something then lord help you.

I’m proud that Squirt is riding the bus, which feels a little odd to say on the face of it, but there it is. Perhaps it’s better to say that I’m proud of the maturity that Squirt’s showing by riding the bus. He packs himself up in the morning, he makes his own breakfast, and he walks out the door to wander down to the road. A road where dumbasses take advantage of our straightaway to hit ninety-miles-an-hour and blast past the entrance to our neighborhood. Thirty years ago, I was that kind of dumbass and did this myself on the straightaway near my house once and passed a line of six cars. Mom was driving the car at the front of the line.

Ah, moving on…

My bus stop as a kid was in between two curves so everyone slowed down. My bus stop had a crowd of big kids to shepherd me along too. I could stand there for twenty minutes and not see a single other vehicle. Squirt’s bus stop is none of these things — it’s at the intersection with a straightaway that nobody slows down for, he’s all alone, and vehicles are much more common. There’s also an app to tell us when the bus will be there, an assigned seat, and a badge scanner for when he climbs aboard. We get electronic reports every Friday about it.

Squirt is growing up in a very different world. More watched. More directed. Less agency. The world has become a place that prepares the road for the child instead of preparing the child for the road.

Walking Away

Before I became a dad I didn’t really understand what it would mean to have my child grow up. I really didn’t grok how much parenting is actually balancing observation and guidance. When do I watch something happen as he makes his own choices? When do I shove him in a direction?

It’s hard to let him walk down to the bus stop alone. Hard to know he’s all alone at the entrance to our neighborhood where I know idiot kids with cars, idiots as stupid as I was, are not paying any goddamn attention to who might be crossing the road to get on a bus. Hard to say “remember to look both ways” one last time as he walks out the door and then go on with my life.

It will be just as hard when he drives to school the first time with his shiny new license. Closes the door of his dorm room as we head back home. Asks me to help him move in to his first house and then drive back to the one we shared for so long.

But that’s the job. To watch him walk away on his own. Parenting is just a slow decline from giving them every single thing to a point where they don’t actually need you to give them anything at all. Now if only that meant not worrying.

Squirt Says…

I would say that as time goes on and a child gets more mature [then] parents must give responsibility, let a child take chances, and let them make their own decisions for them to function as an adult properly. They must have these thing so they can do things for themselves when they come to adulthood.

Dad Responds…

Agreed. That’s why you’ll be mowing the lawn next year!

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. Majority of streaming revenue is from the ad tier now. And that’s why they did it - because most of us are totally fine with some advertising if it saves us a couple dollars a month.

2. Who Are the Good Guys and the Bad Guys? I’m No Longer Sure. Ross Douthat has an interesting take for his final NYT opinion article. I frequently disagree with him, and I think this piece lacks some self-reflection for sure, but overall very worth your time.

3. Very exciting to see Sodium batteries doing some cool shit in the US right now.

4. Really enjoyed this piece about how agentic code quality is different from the old days and it’s all related to the constraints you put on the agent. Very good read.

5. It’s interesting to read Zuckerberg’s very long AI manifesto. I haven’t read much of his stuff but I find his writing very…robotic? I know that’s a joke about him, and I’m not trying to lean into it, but I struggled to gel with it compared to, say, when I read Gates’ take on these or even Altman. I guess I have other thoughts but maybe later.

6. To go along with Zuck’s AI manifesto - a release of a local AI model from Meta called Muse Glimmer. And a counterpoint to that — local models will not win. I love the disagreement and tension, that’s how I know this stuff continues to be a big deal. I am inclined to like Goedecke’s writing and points more as well

7. The poverty of anti-tech thought by Noah Smith is a great little screed and a slap-fight between two writers. I like slap-fights that run to the thousands of words between them as opposed to, say, the TLDR bullshit that seems most desired. I tend to agree with Smith and he’s turned me off ever picking up the book they’re fighting about.

8. Stratechery - Nvidia’s Risky Business. Detailed and heavy read on the state of the AI business world right now. I certainly don’t fully grok it all but it made for some “light” reading.

9. Pokemon beat the S&P 500. Welp, time to liquidate my 401k.

10. So I’m working on a game written in golang, which is sort of bonkers but it appeals when I read stuff like this — Go is my hammer, and everything is a nail.

11. Throwback to those dudes who get brought up on charges for sinking wine to the bottom of the ocean and then selling it to rich people for $500 a year later. Should have got those permits.

12. When is a mushroom “alive?” How long do they live? Turns out there are some fascinating answers.

13. OpenAI / HuggingFace breakdown from some OpenAI folks. Well, this is terrifying.

14. Trump’s scheme to sell his Truth Social posts is astoundingly corrupt even for him. And, here, I guess have a DOGE was shit at what it said it would do article too.

15. US wait times for cancer surgeries are getting longer and longer. This was an interesting article because the limited bandwidth is partly that we’re a victim of our own success in that cancer is not the same death sentence it was and partly that, as we’ve specialized, we haven’t figured out how to handle the case loads.

16. ChatGPT and Anthrophic in a price war. Good for the consumer.

17. Good read on the AI watermarking stuff not being a big deal. I agree with Sean.

18. The Amazon Tax. It wasn’t something I’d heard described before but it is a fantastic metaphor for how Amazon operates. They aren’t an ecommerce site, they’re a utility with an ecommerce site as a big customer.

19. A year ago AI was designing antibiotics for gonorrhoea and MRSA superbugs. Every time I see someone raging about datacenter stuff this is the counterweight. I do think datacenters need to be discussed, but I think the consideration that building those datacenters leads to things like this should also be a factor.

20. AI startup engineers have been working 996. 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week. Fuck all the way off with this. I guess it’s interesting that others want to do this but I’ll never understand shoveling my identity into anything like that and it seems a tad unhealthy to me. Maybe I’ve just never been “passionate” enough about something.

21. A deep dive on the reverse proxy design because I’m a nerd and this is hard and it’s interesting.

The piece below is something I wrote a number of years ago. The more I thought about it the more I wanted to capture what resonates with me on this story as a preface. I initially wrote it to amuse myself, and it still does so, but it has also become a reminder of what bureaucracy can lead to — a hellscape of foisting decision-making off to someone else and strangling your own agency.

There’s some general folk wisdom that as you get older you grow more conservative. I’ve always thought it made a lot of sense because the older you get the more you have encounters like this. For me, conservative means a distrust of government and a desire to see it as small as possible. This is obviously no longer the case because, you know, gestures at everything, but it’s still what I think about when I think about the term.

My distrust of government is mostly because of the inhumanity of bureaucracy coupled with a lack of forcing functions to drive efficiency. The free market, ideally, has more forcing functions (e.g. competition) for improvement but still very much suffers from the same inhuman bureaucracy that withers agency and leads to “I’m just following the book, sir, because I’m incapable of making any decisions myself and I’ll be punished if I do.”

So this is funny to me but it’s also a cautionary tale about the incentives to just be unutterably stupid. It’s not only what’s expected but is desired in an employee in a massive organization. I don’t have a way for it to be better, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t sometimes lead to day drinking…

Squirt has been playing Spore - a game where you control the evolution of a creature from a single cell up to interstellar civilization. It’s a 15 year old game that I bought a Steam copy for 5 bucks in 2020 because I thought he might like it someday. I have lots of games like this that I just bought “just in case.” I remember release day for this game and I actually had an old CD copy of the game...somewhere...because, you know, 15 years old. Except computers don’t have CD drives anymore.

Anyways.

Squirt loves it. He’s been slowly playing past the different stages. Except it’s crashed twice and this last time he lost hours of progress because the stupid game doesn’t autosave apparently. So he’s very upset and, through tears, asks, “Why wouldn’t you let me register for the online stuff to get bugfixes?” I told him there’s no way the bugfixes are behind “Spore Online.” That has to just be for community content and talking to other people. You don’t need this online connection.

Well, I’m wrong: the bugfixes are behind the social online connection. So now we have a game that’s buggy and doesn’t autosave and he needs a social online connection to maybe fix it so he won’t be crushed by losing hours of gameplay work. Alright, let’s set that up - I do have an EA account so I can just tie that in, right?

Yeah...no.

Years ago there must have been some stolen keys on Steam so EA just...removed the ability to have keys on Steam. And the social online account? You guessed it, that requires keys! So I cannot get it working. After some research I realize I can ask EA support for keys so...here’s a quick transcript summary.

-

“Hey, can I have a key, here’s proof of my purchase from Steam where I paid 5 dollars for your game.”

‘You don’t need that anymore, just link your EA account and your Steam account’

5 Minutes later: “Done, still having the problem”

‘Okay, your picture says you bought this in 2020. Nobody buys a game in 2020 but doesn’t play it until 2023. You’re obviously trying to steal this 15-year-old game key. Also, that screenshot isn’t valid, it must be a screenshot of the whole screen showing today’s date.’

“Here’s a picture of the whole screen. Also...this is a 5-dollar-game that’s 15 years old and you’re an idiot.”

‘Okay, now I need one of the full transaction history around that time for your account. Whole screen please.’

“Here you go. Yes I have bought some stupid games on sale but I wasn’t going to shrink my resolution to hide my shame.”

‘Great, now send me a picture of the email from Steam you got in 2020 of the same information showing your email address and make sure it’s the whole screen.’

“Here you go. Notice the invoices match. Also...this is a 5 dollar game that’s 15 years old. And it’s stupid you don’t just offer bug fixes.”

‘I will forward this to my team’

10 Minutes later: ‘My team does not accept your first picture because it was taken through the Steam app even though it shows everything. Please open that exact page in your Chrome browser instead and make sure you get the whole screen with today’s date.’

“Here’s a picture through the browser of the whole screen that looks EXACTLY the same as the picture through the embedded browser in the app you don’t like.”

‘Okay, I need a picture of the email you got from Steam in 2020.’

“Here’s another copy of a picture of the email that I sent you 13 minutes ago that you managed to lose already.”

10 Minutes later: “Are they happy now? Can I have my key to the 15 year old game so that I can get bugfixes so my 8 year old doesn’t need to remember to hit “save” periodically on his own because you didn’t put autosaving in your game?”

‘Sorry...haven’t heard back from them yet.’

“Okay, well I’m gonna go to the bathroom and pour a couple fingers of bourbon even though it’s 10am on a Sunday morning. Don’t close this chat please.”

10 Minutes later: ‘Please provide an email of your purchase with the whole screen. Please provide the transaction history with the whole screen. Please provide the “printed” version of the email from steam, but not through the steam browser, and please minimize the view so the whole page is in one screenshot’

“We can both agree this is ridiculous at this point, right?”

‘I’m just the messenger, sir.’

“Yeah, I know this isn’t your fault. Here’s the minimized one screenshot printed version that isn’t through the Steam app and isn’t through my email app.”

‘Okay, can you minimize the other ones too?’

“Aren’t those already good? I’ve given you an email from my email app with the whole screen. I’ve given you the transaction history with the whole screen that captures the whole transaction. I’ve given you the shrunken “printed” version of the whole screen.”

‘I just sent a verification to your email can you give me the code that you received.’

“Your company is trash and I’ve now spent 2 hours of my lifetime in this hellscape because I love my son and I felt horrible to see him devastated to lose hours of his gameplay because of a comedy of stupid decisions that were made years ago. Also - here’s your stupid code.”

‘I agree this is fucking ridiculous but I can’t actually say that, I would like to point out that I can only do as the teams ask of me. I am taking this all back to them now.’

10 Minutes later: ‘Sir, if you could please download the EA App you will see that I’ve now added this game to that version of the game. You can’t use Steam anymore. You won’t have any of the stuff you already did. But it will connect to servers and it will now get updates.’

“Fucking sold my good man! Let me just download this application and then download the game again and then login and prove you’re not lying to me”

15 Minutes later: “I’m running the game, it’s logged in, I can see the stupid content updates and while I would not describe myself as “happy” I am at the very least relieved and can feel my blood pressure receding. Don’t take this the wrong way but I’m gonna bounce now because the bourbon made me really sleepy and now it’s almost lunchtime.”

‘Sure. I would like you to know that this was literally my first case of the day and I appreciate your patience and understanding that none of this was my fault but while you’re enjoying your drunken buzz and eating lunch please know I have to live in this hellscape for the next oh-my-god number of hours and do it all again tomorrow and for who knows how much of my life so maybe gain a little fucking perspective and enjoy your 15 year old game.’

“I mean...harsh but fair...this world can kinda suck and I’m sorry my dude.”

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. Bill Gates’ post on all the good news in the world is a great very short read. Everyone should check it out.

2. How to keep thinking. This is something Squirt and I have talked about a lot recently. I think this will be a differentiator for his generation. The old quote about there being no different between a person that doesn’t read and a person who cannot read will hold true in a new way with AI - there won’t be a difference between a person who doesn’t THINK and a person who lets the AI do all the THINKING for them.

3. India blocked telecommunications, this little application let people communicate anyways. This type of distributed network that end-runs around authoritarianism is really cool and a great consequence of technology. Starlink in Ukraine has a similar vibe as well.

4. Sucks that giving and taking credit in tech companies is so fucking complicated.

5. The Non-MAGA Mutiny by Nick Catoggio is well worth a read…but I’ll believe it when I see it in an election or two.

6. Montana making experimental drugs much easier to come by. I think this is a pretty net-positive thing because it allows innovation to happen faster and giving consumers/patients more agency and options to try. Seems like the right approach.

7. A mystery book that sold for millions got pulled from publication over concerns of AI. What’s amazing to me is not that this happened, businesses are still figuring out what needs to happen and the legal landscape is incredibly fuzzy. What I thought was interesting is the takes from two different authors — John Scalzi and Hugh Howey - and how different their approaches are. Lots of thoughts here, obviously, and I’ve touched on it a bit here with my own AI use.

8. The Millennial Midlife Crisis: Part IV. I have enjoyed this entire series as he’s written it, I think there’s lots of interesting “generational shift” types of things bubbling inside.

9. Noah Smith on how AI is ending the age of heroes. I think he’s right for some form of heroes, but thankfully I think others will survive just fine. However…

10. Mathematicians are having an existential crisis in the face of AI solving so many hard math problems — The Dark Night of Mathematics. Honestly sounds even worse than for technology folks like me.

11. Stop chasing your “one true passion.” This is a pretty great little piece as somone who doesn’t have “a passion” so much as lots of things I enjoy doing/playing/working/building/solving.

12. Could piece on Trump’s stupid arch and the absurdity of it all. It’s a little more calm and collected than I am.

13. Teen got paid for some meme games on Steam and, honestly, I feel like this is just social commentary more than anything else.

14. Are the Democrats going to save us this time? It’s a great fucking question, but they seem more concerned with fighting than with winning and I think that’s a bad recipe.

15. Software Engineering is Dead. Long Live Software Engineering! I wrote a whole piece that ended up referencing this one at the end.

16. SpaceX new price guidance, and the argument for why it’s worth so much, was interesting to read here.

17. Meta has a model for catching up to the frontier models — turn their customers into the product like always. Honestly, seems like an idea that might work very well, I’ll be interested to see how it goes, but I’m not sure Meta has the cachet they used to have. Time will tell.

18. Death rates from cardiovascular disease have fallen dramatically — what were the breakthroughs behind this? In 90 years we've taken the biggest killer of humans in the US from 750 in 100,000 to below 150 through medical innovation. I thought it was also fascinating that Covid shows up clearly on this chart as well.

19. Old piece from Matt Yglesias on the techno-optimist manifesto “fallacy.” Some good thoughts. I’m a little bit different than him and Andreesen so maybe at some point I could write up a bit more.

I love that my kid is a nerd like this but it’s not actually my point today…

There was an Amish furniture store next to one of the antique places and that opened a huge conversation for a big part of the drive home. We talked about how much higher quality it would be, and the exorbitant cost associated with it. Then we wandered off into talking about Rumspringa and how frequently the young folks still come back to be baptized. It’s virtually everyone that comes back and the sociologist in me waxed on a bit about why this is inevitable. Between indoctrination and being raised in a monoculture, what else could they possibly know or be comfortable with?

Again, I wander from my point.

I am flighty today so I’m going to shortcut stuff and jump straight to a cheat sheet. I asked ChatGPT to give me a quick summary of Amish furniture and immediately this passage jumped out at me about the tradeoff with getting furniture from them.

It’s like my entire fucking post right there. Sigh.

Craftsmanship

I’m a shit woodworker. I build with 2x4’s. I have done shelves and workbenches and aquarium stands. Chop saw, tape measure, impact driver. I can slap some shit together pretty quick and, you know what, it’s ugly as sin but it’ll do its damn job and hold lots of weight or a box full of water and it won’t fall apart the first time I put a broken piece of equipment on there and use some percussive maintenance. But my stuff doesn’t ever reach the point of getting to go into the house.

On the other end of this spectrum is Amish furniture. Handcrafted with hand tools over weeks. It is expensive, durable, and of the highest quality if you find the right piece. Something your great-grandchildren can still have in their house, and something that can be repaired virtually forever. Somewhere in the middle is where most of us live, though. Furniture from Ikea or Walmart or Rooms To Go. It is, as with so many other things, a spectrum.

Some software engineers frequently refer to themselves as “craftsmen” and I’ve always found it a little cringe. I’m not building art, I’m solving a problem. And if I’m good at my job I’m going to solve that problem in the most cost-efficient way possible for the company I work for. It is also not generally a solution that needs to last the ages. It will be tweaked and changed and destroyed and rewritten over and over again.

You’re not building Amish furniture, don’t call yourself a craftsman.

The reverse, though, is also true. You’re not building something out of 2x4’s. It needs some level of durability. Reparability. It needs some fucking elegance. But, goddamn it, it also needs to work.

I was reading a piece today about how the hobbyist programming community is very against LLMs. In the very first paragraph I encountered this passage:

“...the process of mastering a difficult field itself is the product, and something that runs is generally a nice-to-have.”

Something that runs is a “nice-to-have.” Oh the joys of being a hobbyist. The joys of being a craftsman. It’s just “nice” to have something that actually solves the problem. The important part is that you had fun doing it and that it was elegant.

It’s just not my bag.

Utility

I’ve never wanted to build Amish furniture, metaphorical or for real. I love making useful things but once the solution is mostly solved, once I’m 80% of the way to that perfect solution, it’s close enough for government work.

If you dig deep enough into any piece of furniture, or house, or complex programming solution, you will find things that suck. But the higher up you are the more difficult it is to see those flaws. Instead the question becomes “does it do what it is intended to do?” The reality is that the question of “does it do this well?” grows less important. Not unimportant, I think that’s the 2x4 solution, but less important. Somewhere in that Rooms To Go range, because that gets the job done good enough.

There will always be a culture of artistic craftsmanship. Hobbyists. Elegantly designed solutions that approach perfection where the craft has been handed down from master to apprentice. This, I think, is part of the shakiness right now - everyone is needing to figure out where they land on that gradient up there.

There are those that will shun the LLM entirely. Call them the Amish programmers.

There are those that will uncritically accept everything the machine throws at them. Call them the vibe coders, and I hope to hell they’re never programming my medical equipment.

Then there are those somewhere in the middle who see this as a fundamentally empowering moment where they can still build amazing things but their role has changed. Call them the problem solvers.

The story of technological progress is doing more faster, and that’s the freedom I see coming for me. There will always be a niche for the highest quality. For the vanity. For the artistry. But things become revolutionary when everyone is empowered, and that’s how I see the flow of technology this year.

Squirt Says…

I would say that I probably would not get Amish furniture because that would require staying consistent — meaning to make my money back I would need to stay with it for 5 year or something and I like change. I will be a different person 5 [or] 10 years from now than I am right now and feel that like you said close for government work if it works then it works.

Dad Responds…

It’s a great point for furniture and for software. Tastes change. People change. What was the perfect solution doesn’t remain as such and you may regret having sunk so much time, energy, and money into a particular approach. Perhaps another nudge away from that pure “craft” idea.

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. Aesop’s Fable - The Man, The Boy, and The Donkey. Always a solid reminder, you can’t please everyone. Or to say it a different way - choices are about who you’re going to piss off.

2. A post from July of 2024, back before Trump was elected. What Hath Jerusalem To Do With Mar-a-Lago? Lots of solid questions. The reconciliation of supporting a person like Trump and being evangelical Christian is still an open question for me a decade on.

3. Nate Silver’s piece from 2023 about realizing that science, and scientists, requires a certain amount of uncertainty bubbled back up for me today. The story of covid origins and the reporting about it is instructional.

4. Cate Hall - Maybe You’re Not Actually Trying. Interesting new lens for me.

5. What is Agency - a conversation between Nate Silver and Cate Hall that I devoured and then I ordered her book too. Long but highly recommend.

6. This is one of the more in depth “state of the world” things from Noah Smith on where we are with AI through the lens of intelligence and what diminishing returns we might be seeing. It’s an incredibly exciting thing to see spelled out the way he has done it and supports my “I think we’re seeing a new information revolution” stance.

7. This is goddamn fascinating to read about the millennial midlife crisis and the rise of narcissism in my generation and how it’s tied to the decline of church and trust in institutions. Just fascinating.

8. I’m not particularly good at statistics but that’s why I adore Our World in Data. Here’s what they have to say about the value of statistics. Max Roser is one of my favorite communicators about the world at large because of his use of statistics to back up his assertions.

9. Authorities took dude’s phone and he gave them an “unlock” code that wiped the phone. Oopsie! Now they’re charging him with a felony which I’ll be interested to see if it sticks…

10. You don’t have to be a smart developer if you can think clearly. A great little piece and something I think is highly important - raw intelligence can matter but keeping yourself calm and collected and thinking clearly is a learned behavior that pays off.

11. A year old piece about how ads are coming to AI. And by now, hey, they are here. Though not with Claude and they’ve got me paying starting this month anyways. There’s lots to unpack here at some point.

12. VIDEO - SmarterEveryDay — the PROBLEM with Capitalism. Saving to watch soon, but I love this channel even with me barely doing Youtube.

13. Yogurt company being sued because they said they have “zero sugar” and now everyone is slap-fighting over the definition of sure. JFC.

14. Yglesias meditates a bit on free markets beating capitalism. Good read, I could see referencing it down the road.

15. The Dispatch write-up on inflation is a fantastic read. And the number didn’t change after publication either for those wondering.

16. We Can’t Indulge GenZ Malaise. Thoughtful read, especially that folks think they need to make 600k to be successful. Overall I liked this piece quite a bit.

17. America’s plummeting popularity around the world seems like a pretty bad consequence to me, guess time will tell. How Trump made America Less Popular.

18. Taylor Lorenz talks about journalism and using AI and what his life looks like. Good read. I’m glad it’s just a hobby for me so I can easily disclose my own AI Use and not worry about dropping income.

19. Twenty Years ago the Atlantic Seafood Sauce Company went out of business and abandoned over 300,000 gallons of rotting fish sauce. It kept rotting. The provincial government of Canada is finally going to clean it up to the tune of a little over a million dollars. This is an epic fucking story.

20. Leaving artificial dyes is hard for companies. An interesting insight into humans, marketing, and how capitalism drives decisions that maybe aren’t best for the consumer.

Let me say that again: the only technical work I did myself was simply because I didn’t want to let the calculator do it for me.

Vibe Coding

Am I vibe coding? Opinions are mixed on whether I meet the definition. I am not an amateur. I’m not new to information technology. I’ve been building instructions for computers for almost thirty years and, given enough time, I can do virtually anything that’s within the realm of the possible. I am not limited by my capabilities, I am limited by my time and my energy to develop what I know. I am limited by what I haven’t learned yet.

This is well and truly flirting with arrogance, but I think it’s an important foundation to understand about me: I can always figure this stuff out. Coding languages, system designs, concepts, architecture — all of these are within my intellectual reach because this is my career, my inclination, and something that brings me joy. I have built myself to solve technical problems and I’m pretty fucking good at it.

I’m also obsolete.

And worse, you can’t make this shit up, I’ve been rendered obsolete by a twenty-dollar-bill and some stupid software named for a generic Frenchman.

It’s fucking awesome.

Utility

The diamond-water paradox is the idea that it doesn’t make sense that diamonds are more valuable than water, despite water being essential to life and diamonds not doing much at all. I like that there’s also a link to use-value there that talks about the Marxist presentation of these concepts. Utility is a deeply complex concept, but for me the biggest takeaway is that being useful can be valuable…at least sometimes. As long as you don’t become water — vital to life but freely available just about anywhere and at very little cost.

My career, how I make a living, is becoming water.

The thing with “just learn to code” — a thing that really came about after I had been coding for over a decade — is that it focused down to the idea that there weren’t enough people like me. We were scarce, the job required experience and training, and we were valuable because more and more problems in the world involved information technology. A recipe for lucrative wages that turned a bunch of nerds into millionaires and tech bros. It led to an exodus of money and talent to Silicon Valley. You didn’t even have to be good at this shit and you could still make money hand over fist.

Lots of this is coming to an end.

Winning

I wrote not too long ago about how I use AI on my Substack. I did that in reaction to Substack starting a “is this AI” analysis tool for consumers. Knowing what I know, I suspect that the tool is a bullshit gimmick, but at least it hasn’t tried to tell me an AI wrote my stuff yet. There is a distinct whiff of anti-AI, and especially anti-datacenter, sentiment around the country while big money figures out ways to work around and through local governments and angry mobs to establish more compute. Employees are getting death threats, pundits have opinions, and politicians are figuring out which side of the bread has butter.

I’m not going to bother finding links for any of that, just go ask Claude or ask ChatGPT or ask Gemini — I promise you they are a better researcher than you are. Almost certainly less biased, more even-keeled, and much more patient than you are. It will happily feed you tens of thousands of words on how much people hate it and all the bad shit happening because of it. Because it’s just a really smart toaster and it doesn’t have feelings.

It’s going to win. In a decade, around the time Squirt is graduating college (assuming he goes to college) AI will be as ubiquitous as the internet. Someone who doesn’t use it will look as odd as the person with only a rotary phone or no internet connection looks here in 2026. The datacenters will be built, the death threats will have moved on to whatever the new cause célèbre is, and my job will barely resemble what I do right now.

Because this fucking Frenchman is better, stronger, and faster than me at my current job.

Better, Stronger, Faster

Unlike my Substack, which is essentially a vanity project for solving “problems” in my own brain, I find using Claude for programming to be irresistible. With this tool in my hand I suddenly realized that I can solve so many problems I’ve had lingering. Things I could absolutely do myself given unlimited time and energy but I very much do not.

I am three or four generations behind on developing websites, but Claude made me one in about two hours. It actually digested software I’ve rewritten many times in those couple hours to do all that and gave me a better website than I ever wrote before.

It supercharged one of my filesystem programs I wrote three years ago, pulling out domain knowledge that I would have needed months to learn organically. Took the performance and maximized its efficiency by about 3x. It started giving me suggestions for other improvements I could make.

A couple years ago I took a holiday break to design a game with Squirt. It quickly fizzled because work went sideways and then never really righted itself. So this game languished for 2.5 years and then, just over the course of a couple days, I’ve been able to pick it back up and have done more work in these two days than I’d managed in a month of dedicated research and work on it previously.

Freedom

I have loved programming since the moment I put my hands on the keyboard. One of the darkest days of my career was when I was forcibly moved out of a deep programming job and told I wouldn’t be a developer anymore. Now I think it might be one of the luckiest things to have happened to me. It prepared me for this newfound freedom, a freedom from ever having to speak the computer’s language again.

The incongruity is delicious. A part of my identity has always been that I write programs. I take what’s in my head and turn it into instructions for the machine. AI has destroyed that part of my identity even more fully than leaving a programmer job did. And I’m sort of thrilled by it. Thrilled to have part of my identity destroyed.

If things aren’t changing then, well, I’m dead. So it’s good to be alive.

Risk

I firmly believe that technological improvement is a net benefit for society, because I think having more tools and options gives us more choices, and choices are a huge part of what we are. But improvements also mean disruptions and negative outcomes. The disruptions will inevitably lead to economic upset, no different than the industrial revolution. That’s too huge for me personally, all I can do is plan as best I can for it. There isn’t much to choose from beyond hedges against losing my job.

But the risk to all of us is real. To have so much handed to us so easily is problematic. To not have to work nearly as hard for it is worrisome. It’s addictive to have whatever I can think of spring forth from the calculator without me putting much effort into it at all. I do not understand how the game Claude and I are developing works underneath the covers. I didn’t actually learn very much about front-end development. It is doing arithmetic for me instead of me needing to do it myself, it is quite literally a calculator. And you don’t hand a calculator to a kid that’s learning how to do arithmetic, you tell them to figure it out for themselves.

You have to learn the concepts, you have to earn the use of the tool. Because unearned power is dangerous. It leads to expecting everything to be easy when most meaningful things…aren’t. There’s more there, there’s more that makes me ambivalent about all of this. But in my relentless optimism I choose to focus today on the fact that I am thrilled to finish this piece up and go send Claude on a couple more missions today. Together, we will create more things than I would have ever been able to create on my own.

Squirt Says…

I would say that the more we progress the less and less we will need humans to do a job. As time has progressed over the years we have done less and less for the sake of survival. 200 years ago we worked all day long on a farm. Now with the machines only a select few actually do that and a lot of their work has been replaced by machines. Now with the internet and AI the same will happen; humans will for the most part be replaced by machines.

Dad Says…

I love the timeline arc you built there. But I’m not sure if we’ll be replaced by machines or simply supplemented? I think part of what eases my worry is that I will be able to move on to doing more things. The idea of nothing to work for and completely running out of stuff do sounds a little worrisome to me.

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!