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

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

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

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

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

Highly highly recommended.

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

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

But sorrow is on the horizon.

The Promise

Everything that brings you joy will end.

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

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

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

~ Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

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

Well, that and living his best fucking life.

Lean the Fuck In

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

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

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

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

Impermanence

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

Or I suppose I could stop looking, right?

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

Avoid the sorrow by just…avoiding the joy.

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

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

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

Squirt Says…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love Your Neighbor Unless

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyways, it reminded me of a time when I was around 14 at church carrying around a different book with dragons and wizards and was told by the youth pastor that it didn’t belong in church because that was a book that “let Satan into the hearts of children” and it was “a horrible sin to read it.” Not only should I stop reading it but I should ask God’s forgiveness, throw it out, and throw out any other books like it. This is a core memory for me. More than any other singular moment of my life it set me on my own personal road to apostasy. It opened my eyes to a number of different things.

First, I realized that religious beliefs and opinions didn’t need to pay heed to reality. This dumbass knew literally nothing about the book except that it had dragons and wizards. And yet he was so certain in his belief that he told a child that what the child was doing was evil. That reading was evil. That anything with magic in it was evil. That dragons were one of Satan’s creations. This guy tried to convince me that one of the things that brought me more joy than just about anything else in my life was an evil thing because his personal view of God said so. Unreal.

Second, I think this was what truly opened my eyes to the fact that adults didn’t necessarily have a handle on what they were doing either. Just another scared human going through life handing out judgements and telling kids they were unholy. Cloaking himself in an unearned certainty that he knows the truth when none of us actually do. This guy was so obviously wrong that I started questioning everyone’s certainties. Turns out questions are sort of a good thing to embrace.

Third, and most importantly, that I didn’t ever want to be this guy. That, too, was an interesting signpost on my life. I don’t generally have heroes, but I have a very long list of folks I’ve encountered throughout my life that I try to be nothing like. This guy is at the top of the list. “I will never be like you” is something I’ve thought over and over in my life and I think it’s mostly worked out for me. As I roll my history around in my brain, though, this interaction was the first time I remember consciously thinking it. I am wildly thankful.

Sex, Religion, and Politics

Decades ago I learned the wisdom that one should avoid discussions about these things. But, fuck it, this is my Substack. Now it would be a different, perhaps more interesting, Substack if we were going to be talking about sex. At least I’m pretty sure “those” types of Substacks are out there but it’s not really the vibe I’m going for. I’ll just mention that I think it’s probably worth talking about a bit considering the global decline of fertility so, you know, maybe worth thinking about sex a bit. But, no, I think I’d rather focus on the other two.

The thing about religion and politics is that it turns everyone into a horrible person. By design. Like most things that last - whether it’s animals, plants, corporations, or systems - there is always a focus on survival. One of the goals is to persist. An animal will kill to protect itself or its young so it persists. Corporations will diversify and gather power and want to stay in business forever. Virtually all systems have some feedback mechanism to adapt and stay “alive.” Religion and politics are particularly nasty, though, because they use the mechanism of differentiation.

“Where do you go to church?”

“Who did you vote for?”

These are dangerous questions, because they invariably have wrong answers. I don’t go to church, so, just like reading books with dragons, this means to many folks in South Carolina that I’m a horrible sinner bound for an eternity in hell. Who I voted for is just as fun — either I’m a baby-killing Democrat or a Trump-loving Republican. But after I’ve answered these questions, well, now you know how you feel about me. Now you know if I’m different from you. Whether you even want to know me. Whether you need to invite me to church, or whether you are now certain that I’m an evil and/or stupid person.

Are you with me or against me?

Religion and politics divide. One of the surest ways to preserve something is to create an “in” group and an “out” group. A Christian will, with a straight face, explain that the billions of people who have never heard of Jesus are going to burn in Hell irrespective of how they lived their lives. This includes every Muslim, Buddhist, or any follower of a religion that isn’t Christianity. Donald Trump, possibly the least Christian of all American leaders, has overwhelming support from Christians. On the other side right now this Graham Platner dude sounds like he’s basically cut from the same stained moral fabric and yet the excuses are already flying about him. It is exactly the same bullshit I’ve been hearing about Trump.

“He’s not the best choice, but he’s what we’ve got.”

“I’ll admit he’s not perfect, but look at the other guy.”

The problems with the asshole are not important, what matters is that he’s not reading the wrong kinds of books.

The Different

Something I’ve told Squirt for years, something I still have to remind myself of all the time, is that everyone has value and everyone can teach us something. That “the different” is a valuable thing and can be an opportunity. That was the way the conversation should have gone with the asshole back in my childhood. He could have asked about the book, sought a connection, and learned something. He did not. He sat in judgement, talked down to me, and told himself he was teaching me something.

I’m sure he hasn’t thought about it in decades, but he showed me who I didn’t want to be and that’s stuck for decades in my head. I find that interesting. He leveraged what he saw as different and wrong to judge and belittle. I took that and fabricated my own explicit certainty that I wouldn’t be like him. And I did it by judging him and those like him. We are the same, both judging, and yet I do see a difference. A tangled web.

The problem with the world is that everyone is so fucking certain of their worldview. The other problem with the world is that avoiding certainty forces paralysis. I’ve argued before that you have to embrace movement over stillness. In that piece I argue that the important part is bleeding and learning. Maybe I’ve finally found the point after all this flailing. Maybe he looked at the different thing and believed that he already knew everything he needed to about this book he hadn’t read. I looked at him and said I wanted to be open to learning. He closed all the paths and closed his mind. I simply looked at the path he was on and said “Fuck that path.”

“Burn the book, be exactly like me, and don’t seek out new things,” he says.

“Bullshit, I’ll read the book, be nothing like you, and be open to learn from the world,” I say.

In the end, I guess that’s the thing. The people I dislike have shaped me. Perhaps even more than those I admire. I’ve been learning from horrible people since I was a kid. But goddamn do I wish there were fewer of them.

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

1. Nazi leadership had stellar IQ scores. One of the more elegant condemnations of measuring intelligence I think I’ve ever come across, even if it wasn’t intended to be a condemnation.

2. Multiple Discovery gets a deep dive with Derek Thompson. A favorite topic of mine.

3. Noah Smith talks about the big messaging pivot with AIs.

4. Pinecone Cowboys! This is a hell of a job and an interesting piece, though I think it’s interesting that coming back to it one of the subjects of the piece was concerned enough to call them up about their reporting.

5. Chicago Cubs argue that, legally, just because you can see the Cubs playing from a restaurant doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be paying the Cubs anyways.

6. A Mental Model for Agentic AI Work. This is one of those pieces that does an amazing job in recontextualizing something in a way that I find very valuable.

7. Triumph of Capital by Matt Yglesias is worth saving just to come back to his graph. Holy hell, talk about disparity.

8. Weird projects I shipped with AI. I envy Sean Goedecke’s gumption in doing this stuff when he’s done with his day job but I’m not interested in emulating him much...some very cool shit though.

9. NYT has a good piece on Texas senate hopeful Talarico’s Christianity. Texas will be answering soon I guess.

10. YouTube surpasses Netflix for number of daily users.

11. Two thirds of Americans between 5 and 90 are gamers. That’s kinda fucking cool.

Close enough for government work.

Sure, it might be a little crooked but it’s hanging on the wall. That thing there might not quite line up or be level but, really, who can even tell? I could use a couple more straps but as long as I don’t drive fast that thing won’t be going anywhere. I missed a spot with the paint but the paint can is already put away so…you know…close enough for government work.

I actually hate Dad Jokes. I have friends that make them or send them to me just because they know it irks me. Wordplay, puns, all that stuff just doesn’t do it for me. But this snarky comment about poor solutions aimed at the government? Sign me up. If I had to describe the government in a single word it would, I think, be “imperfect.” I like to think that the Founders would agree, seeing that they created a government that was supposed to adapt and grow with time. Not sure how well that’s worked out as most times when I interact with the government I am forcefully reminded more of my one word description. So that phrase…it’s funny ‘cause it’s true.

Beyond the Joke

But deep inside this joke is actually a foundational aspect of the way I view life that I think is important, healthy, and powerful. The ability to accept imperfect solutions. The speed of solving “good enough.” The value in acceptance, not through inertia, but through a conscious choice. The recognition that there is always, every single time, a trade being made.

One definition of a good death is that you die with things left undone. Because if everything is done then that means you ended up living a life where you ran out of goals. You died without even striving. Horrific. Give me a death where I’m begging for more time because there’s one more thing I want to do. A new book to read, another conversation with a loved one, one more thorny problem at work, one more beautiful sunrise. I want to always be living a life with another thing around the corner. I want to die with a to-do list still sitting there.

Thus the trade. Reading a book means I’m not talking to a loved one. Talking to a loved one means I’m not fixing that creaky hinge on the bathroom door. Playing a game means I might just reheat some crappy poverty nachos for dinner because I don’t have time to cook something real. I am sometimes painfully aware that when I’m mowing the lawn I could instead be watching a movie in the air conditioning. There’s always something else I could be doing, and there’s always something else to be done when I finish what I’m doing.

So I just need it to be “close enough” for me to move on to the next thing. I’ve got other shit to be doing. Perfect is the enemy of good.

Choice

Most of my arguments with other professional engineers fall into two categories:

• Should we solve the problem?

• How should we solve the problem?

First is the question of if we even need to solve the problem. Some of these are easy - production is on fire, we cannot do business, two decades worth of financial documents have been accidentally deleted. These are problems that must be solved but others…should we add yet-another-tool? Should we govern this or allow freedom? Should we create optionality here or have a single path? Choosing to solve a “problem” is choosing to focus on it instead of something else and there is always an opportunity cost.

Assuming we’ve chosen to solve the problem then now we need to discuss how to do this. Enter the really fun arguments. Nobody can argue like some fucking nerds about an inconsequential detail. I’ve lost count of the times where “consensus”, if it’s even achieved, ends up just being who gave up last. But it’s really about getting “close enough” or trying to reach the Platonic Ideal of how to parse that shitty log output.

I’ve got better things to do.

Usually.

Zen

I’m bad at being Zen. I’m grumpy, easily irritated, and much of the world tends to operate like sandpaper on my brain. But I try and one thing I’ve always been able to do is let something go. Turn in the paper rather than read it one more time. Publish that Substack. Commit that bug fix. Turn the water back on and look for leaks.

Move on. I mean, assuming that pipe isn’t leaking…

I love solving problems, but I do not need to solve problems perfectly. I think it’s important to “be Zen” about this shit. Important to be water. Important to adapt. Accepting imperfections is a strength. Lao Tzu predates Zen Buddhism but…

“Water is fluid, soft, and yielding. But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield. As a rule, whatever is fluid, soft, and yielding will overcome whatever is rigid and hard. This is another paradox: what is soft is strong.”

~ Lao Tzu

Perfect solutions are frequently brittle solutions. The closer you get to "friggin’ Plato” up there the more inflexible something becomes. More importantly, the more time you spend on something.

Be. Water.

Where to Land

I’m not sure I really managed to weave these things together but the obvious joke is obvious: I think it’s close enough for government work. The tension is where to land for all the questions. Just how Zen should somebody be? What’s an acceptable level of “close enough” for you? Is the problem really solved? Phaedrus went mad trying to answer that very question. I think empirically answering that question is unreachable. To quantify when something is “close enough.” Nevertheless, if Squirt learns anything, I hope he learns to walk that tightrope between obsession with perfection and not stopping until the job is done.

Squirt Says…

I agree with how you need to balance perfection with a lousy job. Good is the enemy of great. If you were to spend all your time working, trying to get to perfection, you would simply not have any time.

Dad Responds…

I really like “good is the enemy of great” and I’ve never heard it said that way before. It speaks to the tension and adversarial nature of accomplishing tasks. They do oppose each other. They are “enemies” from either direction.

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

1. Staring in wonder around the world — a good round up by Noah Smith of current state of some things.

2. CEO of Cloudflare lays of 20% of his workforce and explicitly blames AI.

3. 10 thoughts on new parenthood from Tim Urban, author of Wait But Why.

4. I may eventually come back to argue with this piece more but I’ll let it marinate a bit first. This software engineer’s answer to LLMs is that it’s “art” and it’s about “human connection” and states that they just want to be left behind rather than use LLMs. I both disagree and think there will be a very narrow space for this time of “artist” view of creating software.

5. Fantastic value on talking to people that you strongly disagree with it. Another thing I might like to unpack more at some point.

6. Etiquette for Befriending a Friend’s Friend. Good chuckles to be had.

7. Here’s 1,000 words on how the internet works. I have minor quibbles, this is a great overview.

8. A great summary of how the US government sent money to universities in 2023. Which isn’t exactly the same picture here in 2026 of course.

9. Solid take from Noah Smith: American Needs Liberal Nationalism Back

10. This ends up paywalled but is still vastly useful even with that. The AI Boom Has Enters Its “Wait, Is This Worth It?” Era.

Amputation

The more tools you have the less skill you need. It is undeniable at this stage that AI can be used to build things that were entirely out of reach for most. The thought processes, the skill, and the experience are no longer needed for most applications, they are within reach for anyone. I see it myself as my skills atrophy, especially with new languages, because I can lean so heavily on the LLM and I don’t need to understand. There’s an argument that a powerful person’s empathy can be strangled when they no longer need to persuade. Most of the folks constructing houses now have no concept of complex wood joinery and just slop things together. Barely anybody actually understands how a radio works nowadays, or how to wash clothes or sew something by hand. Not to mention growing food or butchering an animal.

The march of civilization necessitates a march away from knowing how to do things for yourself.

False Augmentation

I’ve been reading recently about how nobody reads anymore. Which sounds like a snarky flex, but I don’t intend it to be. But TL;DR is a thing “Too long, didn’t read.” I do not think I can despise a concept more than that one. But it’s a common theme of the Trump era that the written word has atrophied. Trump famously doesn’t like to read and far prefers to watch television. There are solid arguments that the entirety of his popularity doesn’t translate into writing in things like newspapers. Long form writing is far more subject to being broken down and criticized and refuted. Or, to say it a different way, long form writing requires a higher level of understanding and effort.

The modern media landscape spends all its time eliminating this effort because the American population doesn’t want to put effort into it anyways. Don’t read the article, just go off the clickbait title. Fox News and MSNBC talking heads in the background. TikTok/Reels/Youtube Shorts. Podcasts that have nonsense that sounds smart while you’re driving down the road but cannot pass a deeper analysis. It’s all so much more slippery and poisonous to attention and focus.

Yet there’s an argument that people are more “informed” than they have ever been before. Or at least they hear about more different ideas and goings on in the world. Maybe not with true knowledge, but truth is pretty fucking fluid here in 2026. Ten thousand years ago a human’s world was the community you could walk in a day or two. You knew what the other farmers knew. Two thousand years ago you knew what Roman Praecones cried in the square. Five hundred years ago the world got books and starting seeing things like the Protestant Reformation. Twenty years ago we got fucking Facebook. We began “learning” whatever the algorithm threw in our face as we endlessly scrolled.

The march of civilization has been a march from the shallows into a depth where we can drown.

Attitude of the Knife

“Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife - chopping off what’s incomplete and saying: ‘Now, it’s complete because it’s ended here.’”

~ Frank Herbert, Dune

For the last 3 decades I like to think I’ve been close to the edge of information technology as it advances into the “normal” world, as opposed to the “theoretical” world. Meaning I’ve never been the bleeding edge but as it was becoming ubiquitous I was there. Thirty years ago I was using the internet well before the majority of folks that will read this, though there’s a couple of friends who have me beat. I saw the advent of Java and .NET as modern enterprise software 20 years ago. I remember when “The Cloud” was a nebulous idea maybe 12 to 15 years ago. Now simply “AI” in the past 4 years.

All in aid of collecting, collating, and using information. Spreading knowledge. Augmenting. Accelerating.

In the world Squirt will see I will be the farmer from 10,000 years ago. The Roman listening to whatever is being shouted at the public square. The Catholic reading a Gutenberg Bible and asking “what the actual fuck?”

But Squirt and I are the same. We’re only human. Unwashed animals sitting around a fire talking to each other while eating our scavenged meal killed by a creature that was better evolved to take down prey. What sets us apart from that lion we’re scavenging off of is our intelligence. But now there is so very much intelligence that it’s too much. Those are different links, by the way. Same word, entirely different meanings. Even reading those Wikipedia entries it gets fuzzy and confusing. There is how our minds work and then there is what our minds can know.

I could spend my every waking moment learning more about this world and I’d die before I had even made a dent. My AI says there’s an estimate that the internet is comprised of around 200 zettabytes of information. That’s 200,000,000,000 terabytes. Interestingly enough the term terabytes has really only been common parlance for the last quarter century itself but I think everyone knows how much that is now. Wikipedia, however, is closer to 200 gigabytes — 2 tenths of a single terabyte.

Wikipedia has made a choice of where to cut. You cannot be a farmer, a hunter, or homebuilder, or an engineer with the contents of a generalized encyclopedia. It cannot teach you principles or procedures or practical applications. It cannot teach you judgement or nuance or give you the benefit of experience. You have to go deeper. You need textbooks, manuals, and field guides.

But at some point you have to stop reading and actually do the thing. You have to put your hands on the plow. You have to “practice” as they call it in the medical profession. Stop worrying about gathering intelligence and just fucking move.

The march of civilization has been a march towards the attitude of the knife.

Excision

Every day we are augmenting ourselves more and more, which means more and more things must be amputated. The question becomes what will you remove? Your ability to focus? Your ability to think through a solution? Your creativity? Your independent thought?

These are answers an individual has to find for themselves. But it’s not a question you get to avoid, because even avoiding it is an answer itself. I worry quite a bit, though, as I see what humanity is choosing to cut away.

Squirt Says…

I find it interesting how Wikipedia only makes up only 20 gigabytes while the entire internet is closer to 200 zettabytes, but there is one thing to be accounted for. How much of this information is well actually information and not just some slop generated by AI. Also the rise of new things such as AI makes people scared because humans as a whole do not like change but the more civilization progresses the more change we experience. Because of this what other changes in things such as mental health will we see in the future?

Dad Responds…

I think the 200 zettabytes is actually before the AI slop. The AI’s are basically trained on a not insignificant amount of those 200 zettabytes but that’s all human-created content. You’re right that change is scary and progress means even more change, and you’re right that it messes with people’s mental health — I think that’s another mountain we’ll have to climb as a civilization too.

This is perhaps a privilege thing. While I’m not happy about power bills climbing, I’m not horrified by it. I don’t live in a desert or generally worry about water availability. I do not have one being built next door or next to my child’s school. I am minimally impacted. I am also a technologist and am willing to have societal costs in pursuit of cool new shit. I naturally want to push back against NIMBYs and I think my Abundance proclivities are pretty obvious. And perhaps the last wrinkle is that I truly think AI is revolutionary.

All that said… there’s lots of pretty hairy shit going down with AI right now.

The Dispatch, a flagrantly conservative publication, is arguing for more government oversight on this stuff. They also had a detailed write-up on yet more places which are being impacted by what they called one of the largest infrastructure projects ever in America.

Utah just approved something that will consume more energy than the whole fucking state.

A Georgia utility found out that, oops, a datacenter had been stealing a shitload of water from them and didn’t even give them a fine.

In Lake Tahoe the consumers have to find some power from somewhere else because the datacenter is going to take all their energy.

In South Carolina the datacenter folks vastly underestimated how many natural gas generators and turbines they need.

In Louisiana, Meta is making this MASSIVE new datacenter much to the chagrin of some folks in the state.

These are just the links I’ve gotten in the past week. Like holy shit.

But at the same time my profession is fundamentally changing, especially in the past six months. Sean Goedecke has a good piece on exactly what is different now compared to a year ago for him.

There is a distinct tension here between technological progress, civic impact, and the levers that companies with lots of cash can pull on.

Who is right and who is the bad guy?

The most fun answer of all: maybe everybody! And it amused me that the answer of “everybody” can apply either to “who is right” or to “who is the bad guy.” Spouse and I were talking today about housing issues around the country. The constant churn between the YIMBYs and the NIMBYs. Growth requires change somewhere. The answer of “where” is what nobody can agree on. What fascinates me about the breadth of the datacenter conversation is that it highlights that nowhere is, apparently, a “good” place to put one.

The citizens:

“Growth is great, as long as it’s somewhere else.”

“I don’t want growth, the world should just stay the way it is.”

The investors and builders:

“We will build wherever we can even if it fucks over our neighbors.”

“We will devour natural resources because we can turn them into shareholder value.”

Ain’t nobody without sin. So it’s the most frustrating of conversations. I don’t have any answers. I don’t think anybody does, but sure as shit most people have opinions about who the bad guys are and…it’s whoever is on the other side.

Anyways, I don’t have a point here beyond recognizing the complexities here. Like everyone else, I am fearful of what the future holds with AI. Unlike many I am also excited for what the future holds with AI. It complicates my life but it also empowers me. I think it does the same for humanity as a whole and, overall, I like things that empower humanity, but it would be silly to not recognize that there is always a price to the empowerment.

Always.

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

1. Jon Haidt’s commencement address to NYU graduates is a fucking must-read.

2. And as a chaser, because the message deserves to numbers, here’s Greg Lukianoff’s take on the speech and the “controversy”

3. Good smattering of facts from USAFacts about dropping crime rates and median income.

4. You can’t just plug in a datacenter. This is a great in-depth read on some of the complexities that go along with energy infrastructure. Fantastic read.

5. What is ignored by the media -- but studied by historians? Fascinating read and reminds me of The Black Swan.

6. Good read from Iglesias on some changes on how to address the Abundance Movement. I especially like the throughline of the “too cheap to meter” electricity. I obviously agree.

7. Some parts of Utah will pay folks to not have grass. It’s kinda neat.

8. Two year old story about storing energy using compressed air is still cool as shit.

9. The Sigmoids Won’t Save You. I was unaware of this particular phenomenon about exponential curves but it makes sense I do think, despite the leaps forward this year per the link directly before this one, that I lean more and more towards there will be a ceiling. But who knows, maybe I’ll be explaining this to our AI overlords in a year or two when we get AGI.

10. Just a gobsmacking security breach by a US government cybersecurity agency.

11. All warfare is drone warfare now? A compelling case made by Noah Smith at least.

12. One More Time: The Average American K-12 Student is Doing Fine Relative to the International Baseline

I realized this week that I’ve spent more of my life with Spouse than without. From this desk I can look at a picture on my bookshelf that is over two decades old. A selfie taken with a camera that had to be taken to the pharmacy so we could get the pictures printed. We are, as was observed on our morning walk, getting old. She said, “It feels like so much longer, but it also doesn’t feel like any time at all” and I’ve been sitting with that for a couple days to try to understand the fluidity of time. How can it feel like we’ve barely lived our lives but, at the same time, like almost all of my life has been a life together with my partner?

I don’t really have an answer, so I’m going to write about something almost entirely separate from that. But it’s a good question, right?

We recently celebrated Mother’s Day and I find it a frustrating holiday. How do you really make your partner and best friend understand that they’re the keystone of your family? And even that admittedly poetic metaphor crumbles because a keystone implies completion. It drops into the arch and then you stand back and go “there, it is complete.” But obviously that’s not how this works. This is a living organic thing that changes as time marches on. Every day, Mother’s Day or not, is hopefully a day when our lives together get another story or two, even if some of them are boring even to us. But how do you show that to someone else? How do you explain just how fundamental to a family your partner is as a mom?

Words crumble and actions feel insufficient.

Partnership

I was reading a pretty enraging article yesterday entitled The Men Who Want Women to be Quiet and I worry that the poison enumerated in that piece can drip into his ear despite all Spouse’s and my best efforts. That poison, if you want to skip the article, is basically about the charismatic folks who advocate for “masculinism” and some level of supremacy for males over females. Women should all stay at home. Women should defer to their husbands. Women shouldn’t vote. Women are the enemy of men and, therefore, the enemy of progress.

Poison.

So as I read about the poison I kept thinking that I wanted to more intentionally introduce Squirt to the antidote. But what even is the antidote? Where do I even start? Do I just talk about equality and respect and autonomy and agency with respect to women? These things should be self evident in the way Squirt sees us live our lives. I would hope. Nobody starts out a misogynist, or any type of bigot. It’s a learned behavior, and we certainly are not teaching him such things. But part of growing up is learning and more and more from others besides your parents. Processing the world around you and forming your own opinions is part of growing up.

So it seemed like a good time for me to capture my idea of having a partner instead of some flavor of inferior like the clowns in the piece above. That page falls a bit short but it’s close. I also, oddly, liked business partnership for some of its focus on mutual interests and benefits before it descended into MBA jargon. But when you mix it all together what it distills down to is the idea that marriage and romantic relationships are about tackling the world together and being better because of your partner.

You and me against the world. You and me raising a precocious child together.

Squirt has heard for his entire life that every single person he meets in life can teach him something. A corollary to that is that every single person you meet in life is better than you at something. It follows, then, that my partner is just better than me at something. Many things actually. Attention to detail, planning, organization, intuition, and artistry are some that immediately spring to mind. And I think any healthy partnership works this way — with a give and a take, a recognition of our respective strengths and weaknesses. A healthy partnership is like an alloy. And alloys are invariably stronger in one or more aspects. They are a sum that is greater than the component parts.

The poison that’s bothering me so much creates some twisted thing that destroys partnership. It imagines instead a hierarchical relationship with a subordinate and a superior. With the male always being superior because something says so. The Bible. Some straight white dude with a flashy smile. Some silly woman.

Human beings aren’t fucking hierarchical.

I don’t understand how twisted you have to be to live your life in this way. How desperate for validation you are that you must push an entire gender down just to lift yourself up and then have the audacity to think you’re moral.

How weak.

How sad.

Fluidity

As I look back over this life that I’ve lived with my partner what shines through is that each of us has been the strong one. Each of us has been the one to decide, and each of us has been the one to support the decision. Lots of living over two decades, but always together and always tackling the problems as a team. Because we’re better as a team. But also tackling the problems with an understanding that there’s a fluidity to how we approach our life together. The clowns and their poison strike me as something ridiculously rigid and thus horribly brittle.

I feel like much of what I argue for Squirt to learn is to be fluid. We just came back from seeing just what water can do at the Grand Canyon. It’s one of my favorite quotes from Lao Tzu that I’ve held on to longer than even Spouse and I have been together:

Water is fluid, soft, and yielding. But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield. As a rule, whatever is fluid, soft, and yielding will overcome whatever is rigid and hard. This is another paradox: what is soft is strong.

~ Lao Tzu

And perhaps it’s as simple as that, both with life and with love. Be the water, don’t be the rock. Recognize that the fools that argue a relationship’s or gender’s roles should fit into some rigid hierarchy are doing it wrong.

For me, I say I want a partner in this life where our relationship is ever fluid. One who is more than me. One who is less than me.

Together we are undeniably better.

Dad Note: Squirt read this but wasn’t really sure what to say, which I thought was a valid response.

Dad Note Secundus: It amused the hell out of me to pick the most horrific AI generated photo.

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.

~Anatole France

No worthy problem is ever solved within the plane of its original conception.

~ Albert Einstein

FEAR, MY FATHER ONCE TOLD me, is simply our realisation of a lack of control. And that is why when we are afraid, sometimes the only way we can cope—the only way to dull the edge of that lack—is to put our faith in those who appear not to suffer it.

~ James Islington, The Strength of the Few

Because I joined the court that dealt with differences as friends, as we respected each other. And I don’t know how that civility – I don’t know how you bring it back in the current environment with social media and name calling and all people accusing each other of various things and animus.

~ Justice Clarence Thomas at University of Texas at Austin

In any environment, you are the environment itself. At any time, you are the time itself. Every time and every place is uniquely different. There is no need to compare it with any other time and other place. Just carefully taste the present - that is enough.

~ Tsai Chih

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

1. Tyrants are losing wars. I think Noah Smith is being pretty optimistic with what he’s seeing here but it makes for an interesting read.

2. Palantir Employees Are Starting to Wonder if They’re the Bad Guys. Always an interesting question to ask one’s self.

3. The Fading Trump Presidency. Maybe? Finally? Does it even matter?

4. Interesting insights into prompt engineering, some stuff I haven’t ever seen.

5. Worlds most complex machine. Sometimes bets pay off handsomely.

6. Antibiotics are an economic failure. Thought-provoking lens into the limitations of capitalism when it comes to something that CURES versus something that simple MANAGES. Way more money in chronic disease than curable diseases. Almost like maybe the incentives for healthy don’t quite match up with capitalism, eh?

7. Details on how ChatGPT serves ads. It’s been an unwelcome and noticeable change for my usage but it’s hard to argue against a company using this type of thing to try to turn a profit. The internet doesn’t work without ads. Hell does the economy even work without ads to promote the consume-consume-consume world?

8. Very detailed write-up on how AI datacenters and rural areas (hey, like where I live!) are coming into conflict. The great American data center divide

9. How American Dads Became the Parents Their Fathers Never Were. Great graphs and details in this piece.

10. Meta bled out 20 million users apparently. I’ve grown more and more disillusioned with how obvious the commodification of attention has become in the past year or two so I am curious about the underlying reason for this.

11. Reddit is forcing people off its website and into its app? I’m not even sure why, honestly. Presumably the website itself will still work as I use that as much as the smartphone app.

This book has been on my shelf for over twenty years waiting for me to read it, and the only real expectations I had established were that people I respected in college recommended it. And that it has Zen and motorcycles in it.

I don’t really think I can “review” this book without “spoiling” some things in it. Though there really isn’t a whole lot to spoil. I’m also not sure how meaningful this review will be for anyone who hasn’t read it. However, just like the book, I think there are a number of threads here and some of them really don’t have much to do with this book specifically, so with that fuzzy-ass introduction…

I found this book a struggle to read. In fact, I think I broke it up into three different “sessions” with (many) other books in between them and it was right around 5 months from start to finish. I didn’t like the writing that much. I found the viewpoint character (and the author himself) pretty irksome and insufferable. I did enjoy many of the ideas, but even those dragged a bit so when I’d get to the end of a chapter or the end of a part I would walk away for a bit.

I’m not sure I really lost anything by experiencing it this way. There is no true narrative. Instead there are three threads throughout the book. First is the foreground of a man on a motorcycle driving across the country with his eleven-year-old-son. Second is the background memories of how that man ended up on that motorcycle. Finally, there is the “inquiry” part of the “inquiry into values” portion of the book — a meditation on quality, philosophy, and trying to find that One Answer For Everything.

So why even continue? Because despite all the unenjoyable aspects of the book it was putting new ideas in my head and reframing old ideas that were already in my head. I found the journey into Quality fascinating. I thought the 1970s framing, a time period of major disruptions, very timely here in 2026. “Groovy” and “square” fit just as well 50 years later. The synthesis of Western and Eastern philosophy was something pretty unique to me. I marked page after page of “interesting” passages throughout the book.

It was the equivalent of getting some interesting and novel ideas presented to me while slowly realizing that I really didn’t like this guy. And it’s important to point out here that I didn’t like the narrator nor did I like the past ego of Phaedrus, though for very different reasons. I found the narrator to be a coward. I found Phaedrus to be smug. Though in some ways maybe it was for the same reason — I found both of them to be inveterate narcissists, wholly involved only with themselves and their own headspace.

This is, perhaps, most apparent when viewed through the lens of the narrator’s son Chris riding on the back of the motorcycle. The boy who doesn’t see anything but his father’s back while they drive through the country. The boy who hasn’t really been taught to communicate because it doesn’t appear he’s been communicated with very much. Ostensibly the whole journey is supposed to be about Chris and yet looking back over the narrative…it really was not. Chris is as much a ghost in the narrative as Phaedrus — though Chris is mentioned less and possesses even less agency.

Perhaps this says more about me than about the book. I have very strong expectations of fatherhood and I felt like they were not met at all. And I struggle with overt philosophy much of the time because I find it reductive and frequently masturbatory. So to read about someone trying to “make it make sense” to the point of an obsession that disregards their son I’m not sure I can help but feel like it’s incredibly self-involved.

Insightful though, too, and thus my ambivalence. Some journeys are not meant to be easy or comfortable or to be taken just with people that you love. Sometimes you just have to drive down the bumpy road and listen to the sound of the engine I suppose.

So I think it’s a good book. I think it’s a thought-provoking book. I think wading into the mind of the author will give me insights into how to live my own life and how to think about the world. I guess I’m glad there are people in the world thinking and writing like this, but I don’t think I would be at all interested in sitting down and getting to know the author at a bar or on a motorcycle trip.

Which, of course, now raises the question — was that the point? Was this supposed to be a raw human with all the niceties stripped away and anyone like that is unlikeable? Was writing this book actually brave? Was there just more subtext I was supposed to pick up on that solved for the fatherhood gaps and the narcissism gaps? Maybe I just don’t “get” it. This is a frequent thing for me when I read the “classic” and “popular” books, that I suspect I’m just missing something.

In the end, it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that it was worth reading and it has Quality.

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

1. You are what you consume is an interesting meditation from Noah Smith on one way of defining identity outside of what you produce. Very thought-provoking for me.

2. Interesting reasons why so many people are Right-Handed.

3. “We are moving from a world where features were bound by the constraint of how fast engineers could type to one where we are bound on human creativity, management of agentic systems, and how fast the product surface can absorb the output.” I think this is a little hippie-dippie overall but the sentiments make some sense to me.

4. Really interesting write-up on Tim Cook from Stratechery as he steps away from the CEO role. Learned quite a bit about Apple.

5. I love Cloudflare’s communication styles and the way they approach engineering problems. This write up about their internal AI engineering stack was an amazing read and taught me a bunch.

6. I keep meaning to write-up more about all the AI datacenter bullshit but for now I thought this was an interesting historical perspective on the Luddites from Sean Goedecke.

7. Meta gonna start Big Brothering to an interesting level and watching all their employees actions on their computer so they can use it to train AI. Well then.

8. If America’s So Rich, How’d It Get So Sad? by Derek Thompson. A good read and a great question.

9. I really like this wildly pessimistic take on the past fifty years by Freddie DeBoer: We Are (Still) Living in the Long Boring. I don’t necessarily agree with it, I naturally put more weight on the information age and the AI age but his points are solid -- we aren’t seeing a world that’s fundamentally changed that much from 50 years ago. Still circling the parking lot at Target, as he says. Of course, that’s assuming you didn’t have someone drop off your package. Many things have changed and many things, just, have not. So an interesting thing to noodle.

10. So now there’s a thing called “tokenmaxxing” that’s all about how many AI tokens you can burn at your job and…I just…wow. Anyways I do remember back in the mainframe days we used to get ranked by how much we made the mainframe crunch under our userid so this is essentially the same thing. An interesting badge of “honor” in this day and age. Here’s a related paywalled article too about JPMorgan measuring this stuff.

11. It’s an interesting framing that coding is a “meta-task” - meaning it’s a task that’s really about another task. It’s just problem-solving. So the better AI gets at coding the better it gets at general problem solving. I think I agree with this quite a bit.

12. Software Engineering my no longer be a lifetime career. I think I agree with this also. I don’t consider myself a “coder” though so I am hopeful I’ll be alright…at least until the AI can fully solve problems and completely do the “meta-task” which…I think we’re a long way from that right now.

13. An NYPD cop is coming up on 200 speeding tickets issued by cameras but, you know, since he’s a cop he doesn’t actually have to worry about them. Thus the eternal question: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

14. There’s a huge chunk of ice in the way of setting up Everest for climbers. They’re talking about airdropping people behind it while they wait for it to melt.

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

1. Strong piece from the President of FIRE — you might not like lawyers but they are fundamental to our country and Trump’s attack on them is bad and opens the door for the same crap with the next Democrat. “That is why this story should chill anyone, left, right, or otherwise. If the government can punish lawyers simply for opposing the administration in court, then it is not just threatening a profession. It threatens the right of all of us to defend ourselves, to dissent, and to place any meaningful check at all on executive power. It attacks what makes America great—the rule of law. “

2. Mushrooms form information networks! What!

3. Good write-up on where Artemis goes from here. Was cool to follow the progress while on vacation but, for me, the coolest part was the excitement it seemed to generate — that’s the one thing I think we can get better from something like NASA for sure.

4. I have had a Kindle for well over a decade. The news that Amazon is going to effectively brick a bunch of old ones is honestly just fine. I think we should normalize that technology is not going to work forever, and we shouldn’t foot the bill of keeping it working forever. I’m frankly amazed how long they supported these things — and while I still don’t like my newer Kindle paperwhite as much as my old clicky-button Kindle it was a big improvement when I finally sucked it up this year and switched.

5. As I was reading through various links after vacation something that struck me was just how litigious Elon Musk is. He has weaponized the courts to further his businesses and, much like the overly litigious culture of America, I think this is a bad thing. He’s fighting with Altman and willing to donate money just to say he won. He’s using the FCC to attack Amazon. He’s desperately trying to force everyone involved in the SpaceX IPO to use Grok. I don’t think this is that much different than what others businesses like Microsoft did in the past but still sad to see the common thread during one session at my computer.

6. Sam Altman talks a bit about his family, having a Molotov cocktail thrown at his house, mistakes he’s made, and the trajectory of AI. A good quick read.

7. Learning in the age of AI is turning out pretty horrific. Much like we’re only now adjusting to what social media and “always on” internet is doing to generations I am terrified of what it’s going to mean for education. To teach in the time of ChatGPT is to know pain

8. It’s spookily dystopian that Meta is making a Zuck-bot with his personality, mannerisms, and opinions. But I actually think this is going to be something we all end up doing to some extent. In fact, part of why I’ve been taking inventory of all my writing throughout the years is for something similar down the road.

9. What struck me about What Makes a Good GitHub Copilot Skill is how it dovetails quite a bit with what I see my job as being. Namely, it’s more about guardrails and patterns and systems than it ever was about banging out code. The deeper I’ve gotten into technical expertise the more I’ve seen that it’s about the thought patterns than anything else. Kinda neat.

10. The Real Reason Dating is So Hard Right Now (That No One is Naming). There’s a lot going on with that piece, including an incredible amount of mass being put on some statistics, but this was a great read.

Should the government totally ban cigarettes? Should they tax them into oblivion and legislate them out of existence like Australia is doing which has led to a resurgence in organized crime and black markets? Should people be free to slowly kill themselves? Where is the line between personal responsibility and protecting society from itself?

Always fun questions. Squirt, by the way, goes full on Communist command economy when it comes to cigarettes. Government should crush it under its jackboot and rip it out root and branch. Wipe out the companies and jail the leaders. Hardcore.

Addiction

Quitting smoking was probably the most difficult thing I’ve ever done. I loved smoking. I started when I was fifteen years old and I grew to adulthood with cigarettes as the most effective emotional regulator I’ve ever found. Anxious? Smoke. Depressed? Smoke. Happy? Smoke. Hungry? Smoke. Sleepy? Smoke. Angry? Smoke.

Think about it for a minute. I was fifteen years old and physiologically I was nowhere near grown. But my body was a storm of hormones, emotions, drama, and all the other things that make an adolescent itchy in their brain and body. Lighting up scratched the itch. My mind didn’t know how to stop. It didn’t know how to reset. But lighting up made it quiet and that’s been a thing I’ve sought my whole life.

Every cigarette was meditation. An opportunity to slow down and breathe. To process and regulate and deal with all the things we deal with as a human. Sure, it wasn’t good for me physically but mentally you better believe it was a goddamn amazing thing. What do you mean I should quit?

Escape

Quitting required me to relearn how to be human.

Quitting required me to relearn how to exist.

I couldn’t do it on my own. I ended up using Chantix which is a miracle drug in my opinion, even though I fucking despised it. I think there’s a hilarious (funny-not-funny) line in that link:

If you are using varenicline [Chantix] and experience hostility, agitation, depression, suicidal thoughts, or changes in how you act that you don’t think are due to quitting smoking, you should stop taking the medicine and talk to your doctor right away.

Because you’re absolutely going to feel hostility, agitation, and depression just from quitting and they know it. You’re gonna feel all-the-things. For me, being on that drug was also like my brain was wrapped in wool. Everything was fuzzy and plodding and just sluggish. I hated being on Chantix.

But I did quit. I relearned how to be human. I did a thing they say is harder than quitting heroin. Six years later, though, and I still think about smoking probably on a weekly basis.

This is at the top of my brain whenever I think about addiction. How even more than half a decade later I still sometimes don’t feel “right” because I haven’t had a cigarette. It’s what I think about when I see headlines about how Google and Meta just lost a major court case about the addictiveness of their social media features.

Social Media

I thought it was interesting that The Dispatch article above starts with talking about smoking. I’ve been framing social media harms that way with Squirt for a while now but to see someone else do it was gratifying. I believe the parallel to smoking is also mentioned in The Amazing Generation by Jonathan Haidt and Catherine Price. It’s a very solid metaphor that I think we’ll see grow as the pushback on social media, and the realization that it’s not good for us, continues to grow.

Squirt asks: “If smoking was so bad why did people do it?” and there are a couple points I make. First is that the extent of the danger wasn’t always clear even if we knew it was “bad.” Another was that the social stigma that has grown around it didn’t really exist back then either. Another is, as I tried to illustrate up above, it is a very useful habit for some folks. Utility and being virtuous are not required to be together.

But the primary answer is pretty simple: I made a mistake. Fifteen years old I tried my first cigarette and I fucking loved it. It was awesome.

So with social media. It becomes a part of life. It is useful and enjoyable. It gives you those little drips of dopamine. Whether you’re comparing yourself to someone else or sharing in rage or just finding the first people that think like you — you’re enjoying it and hating it both. You’re doing it when you get up in the morning and when you’re sad, happy, hungry, sleepy. Before you know it, it’s just part of your waking moments every. single. day. You realize you cannot get through a day without the little ritual of it.

And the kids watch the parents do it. I have a down moment and I check back in on reddit or Facebook. I learned it from watching you, right?

Blame

Fault is so hard to assign here. The internet is an attention economy so of course social media companies, and news companies, and Substackers, and every other damn thing just is thirsty for attention. Eyeballs are dollars. So creating something that holds attention is sort of the whole point. Can you fault a company for doing what it does to make money?

Of course personal responsibility should also be a factor. I think America is already a bit too litigious. If I die from some smoking related factor down the road it’s not the tobacco company’s fault. Surprisingly my life insurance company says I’m considered a “nonsmoker” now though, which I thought was interesting.

Of course, “everyone is doing it,” right? This has weight. It’s the strongest argument for the kids as well — to not be one left out from social media and having a smartphone and all of that crap. It’s like they’re surrounded by kids that are smoking, and talking about it, and socializing while they do it. The kid that isn’t using it is the weird one.

I envy people their certainty. Squirt’s hardcore approach to eliminating cigarettes from the world. Banning social media from younger kids and removing a parent’s agency in how they raise their kids. Or the opposite extreme of just leaving it all up to personal responsibility and agency. I see the points and stand here ambivalent. I stand here thinking real hard about when Squirt will get some of these things because I remember very clearly just what happened when Squirt’s dad embraced an addiction that will be with me until the day I die.

Squirt Says…

I know I might be clinging on to a certain part of it but a second hand smoke and in fact a second hand vape is horrible for you. You can read where I got it from here but basically a second hand smoke is when a person nearby smokes and you breathe it in. It cause[s] 19,000 people per year from it [to die], and adults that do not use tobacco product but are exposed to a second hand smoke have 20 - 30% chance increase of developing lung cancer. So, do your research before you make a comment like that.

Dad Responds…

I’m reminded of the piece I wrote — The Dose Makes the Poison. It is very true that second hand smoke is bad, but the 20 - 30% increases are for those living in the house with a smoker and constantly exposed, not for someone who encounters it walking down the street outside. The larger question that we keep returning back to, however, is at what point is the government allowed to force someone to not do something in order to protect others. Where does a person’s autonomy and freedom stop and society’s liberty to be “safe” being?

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

1. I love Rohit Krishnan’s idea that eventually running businesses and working in IT will become like playing a game because of AI agents. I’m sure part of this framing appeals to me because of my gaming proclivities but I think, also, he has some generally solid points and those very same gaming proclivities (not to mention the science fiction reading habit) have helped me with this world we’ve found ourselves in for the past 3.5 years or so.

2. Noah Smith has a fascinating conversation with Claude about where Claude thinks Claude will be able to help with the future of science. It is a very interesting read and I learned a number of things, but one of my other take-aways was just how similar Claude talks to Noah. I’ve never been privy to someone else’s long drawn conversations other than my own and this was an eye-opening experience that fits when I take a step back but still put me in the uncanny valley.

3. Noah Smith also has a fantastic argument for Democrats to embrace some pragmatism and come to the center. While the far left drift is way way less problematic than what’s happening on the right the independent middle shouldn’t be struggling to choose and, frankly, they are.

4. Popehat has an older take on free speech and the NYT Editorial Board that I enjoyed reading again today.

5. Squirt hates I-Ready and, honestly, I can understand why having read this piece about how dystopian it is.

6. Parents refusing to listening to doctors’ advice for babies is more extensive than I realized. Natural isn’t better. Good quote: “Nature will allow 1 in 5 human infants to die in the first year of life,” Hill said, “which is why generations of scientists and doctors have worked to bring that number way, way down.”

7. Jury finds Instagram and YouTube liable in landmark social media addiction trial reports the AP. This is something that Squirt and I have discussed more and more. I think Jonathan Haidt has done some really good work in this area too and I highly recommend The Amazing Generation for kid level intro. I have drawn parallels to smoking and how it wasn’t considered so horrible back in the day and I like that metaphor more and more.

8. Nobody is coming to save your career. This was an incredibly hard lesson to learn, but painfully true.

9. Solid meditation on the advent of gambling and the new prediction markets. Very worth reading. “It is now the market that tells us what things are worth, what events matter, whose predictions are correct, who is winning, who counts. Money has, in a strange way, become the last moral arbiter standing—the final universal language that a pluralistic, distrustful, post-institutional society can use to communicate with itself.”

10. The Dispatch asks Are We Approaching an Unprecedented Energy Crisis? I worry quite a bit that we may be because the world is not nearly as “in control” as some folks may think.

11. I love this point about developers not being “compilers.” I have a painful number of programming languages and syntax in my head and bringing any particular one out of the vault to answer things like interview questions is not the best way to judge how much I can impact your organization.

12. Turning Bourbon making leftovers into capacitors. Neat!

I love the concept of epochs. One moment in time when everything changes. For me the idea is closely associated with the idea of a revolution where something rapidly transforms in a fundamental way. In Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari breaks human history down into three revolutions: Cognitive, Agricultural, and Scientific. I like to take it a step further and break human civilization down a little bit more. I did so when I wrote Scarcity is the Lens but I’m going to crib it a bit here:

• Cognitive Revolution — invention of language and semantics for spreading knowledge and connection

• Agriculture Revolution — using knowledge, we started solving for food so we could have more brains to generate more knowledge

• Scientific Revolution — invention of systematic gathering and utilization of knowledge

• Industrial Revolution — using knowledge to begin solving for human labor weaknesses, the first true steps to removing scarcity

• Internet Revolution — explosion of knowledge and connection available to humans

• AI Revolution — using expanded knowledge and connection to begin solving for human knowledge weaknesses, another large step to removing scarcity

In the broadest strokes, this is humanity. These are our epochs. These are the turning points. Revolutions that fundamentally transform our world. And it is accelerating, as you can see from the hockey stick shape that traces an exponential explosion of human population.

The Thing You Want To Argue About

It’s the AI thing, right? Is this just another piece about how AI is going to change the world? One more tech bro who wants to frame AI as a revolution when it’s really just horrible? It’s a bubble. It’s bad for the environment. The water usage. The energy. The taxpayers that have to foot the bill for the utility costs. The economic shake-ups.

Fuck it. For the purposes of this piece let’s just throw out my injection of the AI Revolution. The last big revolution in human civilization was the Internet Revolution, alrighty? Cool?

Great! Glad we could agree on that.

It Ain’t Worth It…Usually

But, you know, now that we’ve agreed on me being wrong, let’s talk. Let’s talk about an unwillingness to go down some roads. Some arguments just aren’t fucking worth it. Sometimes the juice ain’t worth the squeeze.

I could never write a single word ever again about AI and absolutely nothing would change about the march of human civilization. I could write a library worth of takes on AI and…wait for it…nothing would change about the march of human civilization. The stark truth is that I’m almost certainly powerless to alter the march of human civilization.

And you probably are too.

I think grasping that perspective is important, because I think it’s important to recognize reality, which was the first step of the framework I mentioned in Powerless.

Here’s an interesting image that Claude generated for me. I asked it if every human who ever lived was a drop of milk how big would the container be to hold all of us? The answer is 177 shipping containers stacked together or a six-story office building - not actually that much needed to contain 117 billion “humans as milk drops.”

It’s an interesting metaphor of powerlessness to imagine yourself as a drop of ink that drips into a six-story building filled with milk. Will anything actually change? Of course not.

But the world is filled with ink drops that did shift it all. Norman Borlaug. Gutenberg. Newton. Jesus. Marx. Darwin. Alexander. Muhammad. Hitler. Mao. George Washington.

Dad Note: I actually fell down a rabbit hole here arguing with Claude about their top twenty list vs. my list. It didn’t have Borlaug or Washington, and while it immediately put Borlaug in the top ten when I brought him up, it then equivocated on Washington and maintains that the American Revolution succeeds without him. Another thing to sit with — there isn’t a female on either of our lists. As Claude stated: “…the list reflects history more than capability. For most of human civilization, women were systematically excluded from the positions in which civilizational-scale impact was possible.”

So were these men heroes and villains of human civilization? Were they the “Great Men” I argued about in my review of Oppenheimer? I am ambivalent. But whether it was them being special or the time being right…the next Norman Borlaug is out there. The next Norman Borlaug could very well be Squirt. But the odds are pretty strongly against it and we should recognize that.

Choice

As is my custom, I’ve wandered around quite a bit. What does any of this have to do with “a refusal to be miserable?” Where are we going with this?

We are, each of us, a drop of milk in a six-story building. Just one star in the galaxy. I think in the end there are only two ways to respond to this realization…

Choose to be miserable or choose not to be. But you are always making the choice.

Every story, every life, every day we have a choice. Living life can be reduced down to making choices so much that I began a tag page to capture all the endless variations. Every story that has a climax has, at its heart, a choice. An inflection point. Turn left or turn right? Take the risk or not? Fight or capitulate? Climb the mountain or stay in the valley?

We cannot control the world. We mostly cannot change the world. We can always control ourselves. We can always change ourselves.

I refuse to be miserable.

What about you?

Squirt Says…

I find it interesting that all of humanity could fit in those 177 shipping containers represented as milk drops, but I don't feel that entirely represents it. [Some] have more impact then others by luck or hard work. Either way, I think it would be more accurate to have each drop size to be depending on their impact on humanity just to show how small of an impact you have on the world.

Dad Responds…

It’s true the metaphor breaks down a bit. It makes me think of a meme that shows up throughout civilization: “We all die twice; the first time is when we cease to be — the second, when we are forgotten.”