I love watching how they drive in India. It’s not orderly. But neither is water flowing in a stream. It flows around obstacles. Everything is opportunistic, selfishly taking the effective path, exploiting available gaps. It’s natural.
I showed up at 5am, checked in for the 6am surgery, changed into the gown, and waited. Nobody came. I asked a few times, but nobody knew where he was. After four hours of waiting, I walked out and made an appointment with a different surgeon, and that went great.
It’s just a chicken sandwich. But I’m still not going to give Chick-Fil-A my money. The issue isn’t the product; the issue is what they’re going to put that money toward. Driving away with a combo meal doesn’t mean I agree with their philosophy—yet I would be, in a literal sense, buying into it. This is why I don’t eat there.
Perhaps we will be saved by as little as ten minutes of breathing space. By someone deciding to wait before sending an email. Deciding to pour another cup of tea. Deciding to go on a little walk around the block and noticing the way the trees make them feel.
Hiding the count means people judge a post by its title and writing, not by how many people liked it first, especially on the Newest page.
A no-parking sign is an implicit rule. It relies on people choosing to obey it, with a vague threat of a potential fine. A tree planted on a sidewalk is an explicit rule. You can't park there, mate. A traffic light asks you to stop. A roundabout makes it physically difficult to not slow down.
How to Give Up Your Life’s Work
I count a project as working if it makes money, teaches me something, or gives me real enjoyment. If I go three months without getting any of those from a project, I stop.
cheap to start increases supply, cheap to stop weakens a foundation
Artizen: Compost to the Commons
If that kind of data-curation infrastructure could be generalized — a way for affected communities to document, verify, and aggregate claims across collapses — it could eventually become its own engine. Not just for recovery, but for building the credibility that attracts the next wave of capital. A track record of accountability is worth more than a pitch deck.
a game about keeping everyone looking down
[Instead of framing around your skills, understand how the buying decision gets approved and what makes the choice feel risk-free for them; remove friction from that moment and tailor everything to address their pain point.]
[Regularly move things forward from stranger to lead, lead to client, and client to lifetime client by publishing an article, following up on warm leads or past clients, and developing a valuable recurring or next offer.]
[If sales stall, the offer isn't safe enough. If leads stall, the offer lacks visibility or niche. If revenue stalls, value isn't being captured clearly.]
[Soak your dishwasher filter in vinegar for 30 minutes and rinse to degrade the invisible film that inhibits water flow.]
[Pop out your washing machine filter and scrub with soap and hot water to freshen up.]
[Set your extractor hood filter in a bucket and sprinkle with baking soda and vinegar, then scrub with a lemon. Rinse with hot water and dry.]
[Dryer filters can also develop a film that blocks airflow. Soak in vinegar for a while, then scrub and rinse.]
My body is not a machine carrying a head. It is not even entirely my body in the sense of something I possess and control. A body is an ongoing collaboration between billions of cells, microorganisms, nutrients, hormones, histories, environments and countless processes that happen without my permission or understanding.
Tools are implements with which you do something, they do not do things for you. Tool use builds, rewards, and often requires, expertise and skill. The continuous application of technique and energy, and sensory feedback, are essential to the buildup of expertise (from experiri - "try").
What you are doing while using automation, instead of learning real-world truths, is attempting to divine the details du jour of some automaton. And striving to game them - e.g. ordering a custom burger (no onions) in order to get a freshly made one. Or filling voodoo.md with just the right incantations. You are only a software update from everything you've 'learned' being rendered obsolete by the latest algorithm. (A soggy cold burger from which the onions have been removed) You have traded working with the world to working for a capricious robot.
What do you miss by abdicating doing the reading? Pretty much everything. First and foremost, you miss learning how to write from those who can. You miss learning how to formulate an argument. You miss noticing things. You miss loading your background mind with fodder for novel ideas. You miss building trust in some authors and suspicion of others. You miss all the jokes. You miss all of the edges. You miss learning how to think.
search your address and get nearby indigenous languages, territories, treaties, and place names.
[You play the Internet as an instrument.]
[Listening allows new information to change who you are.]
Nobody pays for open source. We can force them to.
Free wins the code game, but the supply game is won by whoever is the default, and defaults can charge.
the people who run the meter pay the people who make the thing worth metering.
I Am a Flat-Rate Monthly Responsibility Service
There’s no prestige in being an active contributor to an open-source community anymore because you are just a meat proxy for the Borg. Make sure your docs are formatted for them!
Nothing was mastered. Their passion for solving the problem didn't push them through the hard part. They had an errant thought, manifested it into reality, and are now showing it to me. It's exactly like a coworker cornering you in the breakroom to tell you about a dream they had. You have to nod, but you are dead inside.
I am a flat-rate monthly responsibility service that agrees to assume full liability for the output of the robot. I am the human face with a pulse who can be lectured about why something did or didn't work. I will apologize. I will attempt to fix it. I will take the blame.
vibe coding doesn't work. maybe in another 5 years but not today.
for me "vibe coding" is what lovable, etc do. allowing non-devs to build software with a chat bot. i think you still need to be a trained software engineer to build reliable and secure software. from my experience agents still mess up very basic things. they def need steering. agent-assisted coding on the other hand is very real and a productivity multiplier.
A small team with a strong agent workflow can produce an enormous amount of convincing work very quickly. That does not mean the work is correct, maintainable, secure, or worth shipping. Without strong ownership and production discipline, the feature team becomes a prototype generator that leaves the rest of the company to clean up the mess.
[AI makes judgement, domain expertise, and production ownership more important rather than unnecessary.]
[In "non-zero mindset", avoid waiting for large chunks of uninterrupted time to meaningfully practice: just do 5 minutes or a few reps and then stop.]
