33 entries for October 2025

[Start not with solutions but with people you seek to serve and a problem they want solved.]

[Commodity work isn't lucrative when other options are a click away.]

[Charging ten times more isn't about quantity: it's for a different story.]

[Grateful Dead favoured extremes on the XY axis (live recordings over polished albums, long jams for their fans over short radio hits) and owned them.]

[Beside the intended audience, there's also an accidental audience who ends up getting more satisfaction from tearing down the work.]

["For those who want A and believe B, choosing C is perfect." Based on who they are and what they want and know, everyone is always right.]

[Launching an extreme (fastest, cheapest, . most convenient) means breaking the former extreme's status.]

"I made this" is a very different statement than, "What do you want?"

[Specific is kind of brave as it's accountable: it either worked, matched, spread, or it didn't. Are you hiding behind everyone or anyone?]

[Find a corner of the market that can't wait for your attention, where you are the perfect answer.]

["How can I start a business?" is contrived, whereas "What would matter here?" relates to real needs of others.]

Focus on the smallest viable market: "How few people could find this indispensable and still make it worth doing?"

Instead of looking for members for your work, look for ways to do work for your members.

Everyone is lonely, insecure, and a bit of a fraud. And everyone cares about something.

[Pet food caters to the owner; humans don't even know what it tastes like.]

[Conspiracy theories might attract out of a desire for uniqueness or belonging in a small group.]

[When you show up with a flotation device to help someone drowning, they don't need ads to understand or be persuaded.]

[Old-fashioned marketing centers the one buying ads, and is done to the customer rather than for them.]

Marketing is the act of making change happen. Making is insufficient. You haven't made an impact until you've changed someone.

[Marketing is the generous act of helping someone solve their problem.]

Marketers don't use consumers to solve their company's problem; they use marketing to solve other people's problems. They have the empathy to know that those they seek to serve don't want what the marketer wants, don't believe what they believe, and don't care about what they care about. They probably never will.

[Humans tell themselves stories. We should consider those as indisputably true and not persuade otherwise.]

[Not the drill bit, not the quarter-inch hole, not the shelf, but rather the satisfaction of doing it themselves or the admiration from a spouse or a room free of clutter. Understand how the utility of an object is to serve their real wish: to feel safe and respected.]

[We buy how it makes us feel, and there aren't so many feelings to choose from. To deliver belonging, connection, peace of mind, status, or other desirable emotions likely means something worthwhile.]

[All communities need a mind programmer they trust. Today we call it "memetic engineer", "influencer", or "political leader", whereas before it was "priest" or "shaman".]

with correct deep breathing, the ribs gently massage the spine and internal organs.

Blood circulation throughout the body happens via blood vessels (veins, arteries, and capillaries). There are around 100,000 miles of blood vessels in an average adult body! These lie across or underneath, or are surrounded by muscles. Relaxed muscles that are not stiff and over-contracted won't squeeze and pinch the blood vessels, meaning they transport blood more effectively.

Remain relaxed, even when you are doing exercises that may seem at first to be primarily strength building; consider all the movements to really be a stretch.

1. [Identify edges objectively.]
2. [Calculate risk for every trade.]
3. [Accept the risk or reject the trade.]
4. [Act on edges without hesitation.]
5. [Take money off the table when it's available.]
6. [Monitor susceptibility for errors.]

[Partial take profit reduces risk on the stop by that same proportion.]

[One hierarchy of stages for taking profit can be 1. initial moves in your favour; 2. support or resistance on a larger timeframe (with a move of your stop to the entry point); and 3. significant high or low on a larger timeframe.]

[Variables used to deal with market dynamics can go in and out of effectiveness as market participants and their interactions change.]

Franz

supports a great variety of business and private messaging & chat services like Slack, WhatsApp, WeChat, Messenger, Telegram, Google Hangouts, Skype, Zendesk and many more.

Open-source alternative to Beeper which makes much code available but not their main client.

a football player who trains with weights and sprints is "conditioning" his body for playing football.

A sub 2.15 marathon runner is not "fit" to dead lift 600 pounds of iron, and a world-class power lifter is not "fit" to run a sub-28-minute 10,000 meters. Using our narrow definition, neither athlete would be "fit" to perform any number of movements on the gymnastics balance beam. The Olympic gymnast would not be "fit" for sumo wrestling, and so forth.

Strength is a muscle's ability to contract against the resistance of an external object (a weight) or one's own body weight.

Power utilizes strength within an explosive burst of energy.

Agility encompasses the possibility of executing power movements in rapidly changing directions

[Regardless of their belief, everyone wants to be believed because it feels good, and being disbelieved can easily feel harsh, like an attack.]

1. Beliefs seem to take on a life of their own and, therefore, resist any force that would alter their present form.
2. All active beliefs demand expression.
3. [Beliefs keep working whether or not we are aware of them.]

[If you woke up one day and everyone acted as if you didn't exist, you'd probably try to shake someone out of it. Beliefs will act the same way if purposefully ignored and force their presence to be acknowledged.]

Thinking outside of the boundaries of our beliefs is commonly referred to as creative thinking.

[The pattern-making sensibilities of our mind are tricked into confounding a unique now as potentially not unique when it seems to share similar properties with another occasion.]

We can "know" exactly what an edge looks, sounds, or feels like, and we can "know" exactly how much we need to risk to find out if that edge is going to work. We can "know" that we have a specific plan as to how we are going to take profits if a trade works. But that's it! If what we think we know starts expanding to what the market is going to do, we're in trouble.

[The objective is not making money, but consistency. The skills involve having an objective state of mind less easily blinded by pain-avoidance mechanisms; to let things unfold and be capable to take advantage when there's an opportunity.]

[Market info is only threatening if you expect it to do something for you; otherwise, you have no reason to fear being wrong.]

[Your edge is only an indication of one thing more likely to happen than another; the only evidence needed is whether the variables used to define the edge are present. Other information is noise and makes as much sense as trying to prove the next coin flip will be heads after ten flips came up tails: the odds are still 50/50 regardless of what you find.]

[If you believe you called the market once, you'll probably try to do it again, thereby setting yourself up for a trap; things are never the same again.]

when the positive or negative energy from our memories or experiences become linked to a set of words we call a concept, the concept becomes energized and, as a result, is transformed into a belief about the nature of reality. If you consider that concepts are structured by the framework of a language and energized by our experiences, it becomes clear why I refer to beliefs as "structured energy."

Since we can't expect something we don't know about, we could also say that an expectation is what we know projected into some future moment.

Move your FOSS project to an org!

[When you're the only owner of the repository, people are] more likely to see you as the (only) person responsible for fixing things when they break, or reviewing external contributions.

users are able to advertise their membership to the project, shown both on their profile and on the organization’s profile

the project is more identifiable as a team endeavour, as the association to your account is visually less prominent

Bufferland

To countless low-wage employees across the world, low-cost products will seem attractive - even ‘liberatory’ - but, when you zoom out, they are the ones cheaply producing the cheap things that are being sold back to them.

whenever a company is claiming to ‘democratise’ something, they’re basically saying that they will drive down costs on the production side of the equation to get the consumption side hooked on the resultant cheap thing, after which they will be in a position to extract.

It sometimes feels like easyJet’s management presents customers with a devil’s bargain: we’ll give you cheap travel if you agree to hand over your dignity and be treated like the crap you are.

When the core of your business model involves squeezing both customers and employees, it means that relations between those two camps very quickly get frayed. The stressed employee and the stressed customer are both being played by the senior management, but they often end up facing each other as mortal enemies in different parts of the system.

Bufferland exists to provide a shallow layer of human care within an otherwise bureaucratic profit machine, but today easyJet is also using it to _recoup its losses_from yesterday’s cancelled flight.

Companies like easyJet drive down prices through so-called ‘economies of scale’, but they also make heavy use of Economies of Silence: the frontline employees act as punching bags for customers, like an emotional shock-absorber, but this also serves as a system of noise-cancellation for management, freeing them from the emotional responses that would come from actually hearing the customers’ voices.

Events that have probable outcomes can produce consistent results, if you can get the odds in your favor and there is a large enough sample size.

[If casinos have a 4.5% edge on their customers, it translates to netting 4.5% on all money wagered there with that probability.]

[Technical analysis is mathematical, whereas mental analysis is psychological and uses technical indicators as a proxy for collective behaviour patterns.]

Each trade contributes to the market's position at any given moment, which means that each trader, acting on a belief about what is high and what is low, contributes to the collective behavior pattern that is displayed at that moment.

At the moment he puts a trade on, and for as long as he chooses to stay in that trade, other traders will be participating in that market. They will be acting on their beliefs about what is high and what is low. At any given moment, some percentage of other traders will contribute to an outcome favorable to our trader’s edge, and the participation of some percentage of traders will negate his edge. There’s no way to know in advance how everyone else is going to behave and how their behavior will affect his trade, so the outcome of the trade is uncertain. The fact is, the outcome of every (legal) trade that anyone decides to make is affected in some way by the subsequent behavior of other traders participating in that market, making the outcome of all trades uncertain.

Since all trades have an uncertain outcome, then like gambling, each trade has to be statistically independent of the next trade, the last trade, or any trades in the future, even though the trader may use the same set of known variables to identify his edge for each trade. Furthermore, if the outcome of each individual trade is statistically independent of every other trade, there must also be a random distribution between wins and losses in any given string or set of trades, even though the odds of success for each individual trade may be in the trader’s favor.

[Casinos don't need to predict the future to create consistent results: as long as the odds are in their favour, a large enough sample size will give their edge a chance to work.]

[For any pattern to be "exactly" the same as in a previous moment, exactly the same traders would need to be present with the equivalent mental state; therefore virtually impossible. So every market moment is unique even though it may rhyme with a previous occurrence.]

[Being aware of uncertainty and probabilities doesn't automatically translate to profiting from it.]

When you've trained your mind to think in probabilities, it means you have fully accepted all the possibilities (with no internal resistance or conflict) and you always do something to take the unknown forces into account. Thinking this way is virtually impossible unless you've done the mental work necessary to "let go" of the need to know what is going to happen next or the need to be right on each trade. In fact, the degree by which you think you know, assume you know, or in any way need to know what is going to happen next, is equal to the degree to which you will fail as a trader.

Traders who have learned to think in probabilities are confident of their overall success, because they commit themselves to taking every trade that conforms to their definition of an edge. They don't attempt to pick and choose the edges they think, assume, or believe are going to work and act on those; nor do they avoid the edges that for whatever reason they think, assume, or believe aren't going to work. If they did either of those things, they would be contradicting their belief that the "now" moment situation is always unique, creating a random distribution between wins and losses on any given string of edges. They have learned, usually quite painfully, that they don't know in advance which edges are going to work and which ones aren't. They have stopped trying to predict outcomes. They have found that by taking every edge, they correspondingly increase their sample size of trades, which in turn gives whatever edge they use ample opportunity to play itself out in their favor, just like the casinos.

[Typical traders avoid predefining risk because "it isn't necessary", which implies they believe that they can and do know what will happen, as well as that they're correct.]

When you're convincing yourself that you're right, what you're saying to yourself is, "I know who's about to come into this market. I know what they believe about what is high or what is low. Furthermore, I know each individual's capacity to act on those beliefs (the degree of clarity or relative lack of inner conflict), and with this knowledge, I am able to determine how the actions of each of these individuals will affect price movement in its collective form a second, a minute, an hour, a day, or a week from now."

[Watching a market with no intention to trade is frustration-free because nothing is at stake.]

Choosing to 'skip over parts' is reading because reflects a choice about what's being processed.

If I've absorbed a point through my own lived experience or heard of it in another context, I'm still "reading" the idea as I recognize it well enough to skip over.

Cultural or self-inflicted frowning upon 'screens causing us to skim rather than read' creates pressure to do things 'properly', but the standard is not relevant: set your own objectives and make your own meaning.

Skipping is about feeling when you're not connected and moving to yes.

The average entrepreneur faces mild shame and maybe bankruptcy proceedings if their venture doesn’t work out, but even then they tend to maintain strong networks, saved money and cultural clout.

the greatest risk-takers in our society aren’t the tech bros on the cover of Wired Magazine, or the person with a Forbes profile.

A person who takes really hardcore risk might face starvation, destitution or deportation if their gamble doesn’t work.

[The Japanese may often speak vaguely because of historical norms where people were beheaded when not replying as expected.]

[There's often much activity in the final minutes of a trading session as computerized signals activate based on closing prices.]

[The open is a rudder for the day and provides a first clue about direction.]

[The more anxious, the earlier they want to trade.]

[Large orders at the open or close with the intention of affecting prices are called "morning attacks" and "night attacks"]

A trend reversal signal implies that the prior trend is likely to change, but not necessarily reversing. [A car's brake lights indicate an incoming slow or stop, but not whether it will continue or reverse afterwards.]

['hammer' in Japanese is takuri, which means "gauging water's depth by feeling for the bottom"]

[harami is an old Japanese word for pregnant and used to indicate a market 'losing breath'.]

['Belt-hold' comes from sumo wrestlings yorikiri, meaning 'to push the opponent out of the ring while holding onto their belt.']

Feed me up, Scotty!

RSS feeds for arbitrary websites, using CSS selectors.

Smartphones and being present

if you're trying to lose weight, you shouldn't carry cookies around in your pockets. And my phone is the bag of cookies in this metaphor.

Week 4: A respite from winter

[narrative analysis] is often about nailing down the one, most important story the market wants to trade and then tracking the evolution of that story.

It is very difficult for markets to hold two competing themes in its collective hivemind at once, and so the focus oscillates back and forth instead of going in two directions at once.

Just because a narrative is well-known, that does not mean it’s exhausted.