3 entries for Saturday, October 18, 2025

[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.