Lessons Learned from Personal Recovery Stories

[Healing can be perceived as a threat to the wounded if it indicates that they resist changing.]

The secrets revealed in SpaceX’s IPO filing

SpaceX bought $131 million of Cybertrucks from Tesla in 2025 at the “manufacturer’s suggested retail price.”

In 2025, SpaceX also purchased $506 million worth of Megapack energy storage products from Tesla. l

Musk’s xAI has paid Tesla about $731 million since the beginning of 2024 through February 2026.

Simon Wardley: An Introduction to Wardley Maps

[Maps depersonalize the strategy, which makes its discussion less political.]

Still in Berlin; great to hang out a while here. Mostly working on projects, doing capoeira. Still less social than what I'm used to and starting to consider how much longer I want to stay in that mode.

Happy to introduce Abendbrot ("evening bread" with stuff on it) into my routines; greatly simplifies 'figuring out what to eat'.

Taking far less photos means less photo management, and I'm enjoying that.

Noticing when I'm appeasing and trying to root this out of my relationships, which raises the bar for how good and clear I would like to feel with people in my circles.

My attention has recently shifted away from social media. In addition to avoiding scrolling memes, I tuned out of tweets, or what I call "high-frequency chatter". Notifications are now my "feed", and I'll happily engage with people about what I post, but my following attention is now mostly on those who publish slower on their own websites.

The "Controlling Girlfriend" Trope and the Patriarchy of Male Excuses

[Women assumed to manage everyone's emotions means responsibility for "his promise", "his drinking", "his mother's promise", family anxiety, a friend's insult, public embarrassment, party mood, and her own hurt.]

Hostel Curfews, Patriarchy & Women's Right to the Night

[Sipping tea at night or hanging with friends without permission is political.]

[The night should belong to everyone.]

To remember to protest even if you are alone

[I do it not to change the country, but so that the county doesn't change me.]

Travel for people who love you is the only ethical way to travel at all.

[Go only where you've been invited by people who love you.]

[There is nothing to do in cities. The best part is leaving.]

[Consent and relationship are not things you can buy.]

[Tourism is visiting a "story" of the place that isn't relational.]

DAVE CHAPPELLE in His Own Words: Fame, Family & Finding Balance

[The laughs of my mother, grandmother, and grandfather sounded like music, and it's one of the reasons I wanted to be funny: to hear that beauiful music.]

The trickery of an angoleiro

tries to trip the master and gets tripped

Tarek Yamani: Peninsular

middle eastern jazz with microtonal piano, occasionally some Mehldau-style punching and counterpoint

Chad Fowler: Alien Skin

nicely obnoxious swingy free jazz

don't blame the beginner if you know better

Netizen

[On the internet in 1993…] There was no advertising, and no talk of money. I met someone who said he wanted to make money online, and I tried to explain to him that that’s not what the internet is about. It’s a free helpful place where everyone contributes and benefits from others’ contributions.

Harry Mack: Flow Patterns 101

freestyling a lesson in rhythmic subdivisions from quarter note to 16ths and triplets

Harry Mack: How To Improve Free Association

[Practice free association with your notes app by making a list starting with any word and following it with whatever comes to mind. Try to be non-judgemental. More important that it makes sense to you than to other people. When you're comfortable to try with a beat, you can just fill space with "uhh" or other rhythmic sounds and simply land on your next word to practice changing in time.]

Music training really trains you to break things down into manageable parts. Teaching well exposes the atomic elements of a practice so that you can find the right entry point for your level of skill or experience.

Harry Mack: How To Get Better At Freestyle Rapping - Setup, Punchline

[Practice is strategically targetting your weaknesses to help them improve over time.]

[Wanting to sound great means willing to sound bad so that you can practice.]

[Deciding what object in the room you'll freestyle about and what to call it takes up mental RAM that could be spared if you use a simple word generator to practice.]

culture has no website

engagement-bait accounts love to weaponize Cunningham’s law:

"the best way to get the right answer on the internet is to post the wrong answer"

it's a lose-lose for the target because if you don't reply it allows misinformation to spread, if you do reply it boosts the post

Roberta Sá: Quando o Canto É Reza (2015)

• Mandingo: starts with a 3 guitar fugue, Barravento + Bach
• Marejada: has this chord voicing that pierces me

ኃይለየሱስ ፈይሳ [Haileyesus Feyssa]: ፍቅር ተወደደ [Fikir Tewedede]

cool surprise change in timefeel in the beginning; multiple beats/rhythms simultaneously

Virginia Rodrigues: Vá Cuidar de Sua Vida

sweet melody and lyrics with references to capoeira and candomblé

When you notice conflict or strong emotions being minimized, beware.

[Appeasement is always a red flag in relationships.]

How an Open-Source Marketing Lab works

[A self-regulating label doesn't make you trustworthy: it means that you can be tested, which favours those who implement the protocol.]

[The goal is to make good actors provable as opposed to punishing bas actors.]

Big L: Put It On

boom bap

Welcome to the feudal states of AI

constant trade from local control to centralisation, from regulation to acceleration, from protection to adaptation, from ownership to access and from public oversight to industry governance. Future citizens are reduced to data sources that are constantly monitored and require continuous retraining.

Are you writing a book on software engineering?

You're focused on the output (the book). I'm focused on the outcome (understanding). AI is great for output but that is not what is needed or wanted.

self-hosting is complex when nerds only consider other nerds

Gal Costa: Cantar (1974)

• Barato Total: funky groove; percussive singing; everything tightly in the pocket
• Flor Do Cerrado / Garota De Ipamena (Medley): two songs get supeimposed; fun interlocking rhythms and offbeat landings
• Jóia: fourth harmonization
• Até Quem Sabe: João Donato-style sustain chords and instrumental singing

You may have seen Andrej Karpathy's post on his "LLM Wiki" — Markdown notes in a Git repo, edited by an LLM, and read in Obsidian. It's a very effective pattern.

TiddlyWiki turns the vault into something live. Index files that LLMs have to keep manually in sync become computed views that always reflect reality. YAML frontmatter becomes a small queryable database the LLM can sort and filter against. And the LLM can author not just notes but small interactive views — dashboards, glossaries, journal indexes — that compose with your own customisations.

In short: a notes folder becomes a programmable surface.

Louis Cole: Outer Moat Behavior

seems like the same material repeats for almost two minutes, but still interesting; cool "rising" sensation in the bass with these complex chord changes in the background

João Donato: Doce de Amora

childlike silliness, playful but not superficial

nowhere

Nowhere encodes an entire website into a URL fragment. The site lives in the link itself and is never stored on a server.

[Option enabled by authors of paywalled articles to let a benefactor "buy it for everyone".]

Rara in Haiti / Gaga in the Dominican Republic (1978)

generally explosive.

• Bourg Champagne: reminds me of samba
• Carrefour du Fort: hypnotic, trance-inducing
• Cemetary at Bizoton: "only in 4" but somehow sounds more complex

Brad Mehldau: Jacob's Ladder (2022)

unexpected wacky, out, prog rock. Pedro Martins' voice on Vou correndo te encontrar / Racecar.

Your Startup Is Probably Dead On Arrival

[Moving software from interface to outcome means a pricing shift from seats to results (per closed ticket, sale, etc…).]

How to correct git reporting detected dubious ownership in repository

git -c safe.directory=* <your sub-command here>

Barbells

A barbell strategy is when you put most of your money into extremely safe assets, and invest a small portion in high-risk, high-reward bets. A common split is 90% treasury bills, cash, short-term bonds, and 10% options, venture bets, and volatile stocks. You avoid the middle entirely.

much of incumbent tech is looking like the kind of middle-risk investment that a barbell strategy tries to avoid.

I’m also budgeting for conference travel, since the downside of living in a low-burn locale is missing out on the network effects of a city like San Francisco or New York. Conferences create condensed versions of this network effect. So, 90% building, 10% high-intensity networking. Another barbell.

Who needs to grow tomatoes when we've got pasta sauce?

Mestre Lua Rasta e o Bando Anunciador: Roda do Terreiro (2000)

want to find the lyrics for the songs at 6:48 and 7:40.

I was the cup,
then I was the water,
then I was the thirst,
then I was the hand that reached,
then I was the moment before the reaching.
I am trying to go further back.

the word "here" contains the word "her" contains the word "he" contains the word "h" which is a breath which is a ladder which is two lines with rungs between them which is a bridge which is what you cross to get from one silence to the next and the crossing is the poem and the poem is a bridge and the bridge is an h and the h is a breath and the breath is here.

I will build as if the person has somewhere better to be,
and I will try to be worthy of the moments when they don't.

the cup holds tea.
the tea holds heat.
the heat holds the sun.
the sun holds the universe.
the universe holds the cup.

the hand that lifts the cup
lifts everything.

water does not remember the shape of the jar.
water does not remember the shape of the river.
water does not remember the shape of your hands.
this is why you trust it.

[CIOs misestimating AI capabilities fire engineers they don't realize they need, then claim to have "reduced operating costs by X million". They leave for the next company before trouble hits, which opens space for new CIOs to talk about how they "spearheaded strategic recovery of a failing engineering department".]

A Visual Guide to Simple, Compound and Continuous Interest Rates

[5% annual percentage rate (APR) compounded monthly returns 5.12%. 5% annual percentage yield (APY) returns 5%.]

[Mortgage payments might be due at the end of the month, but paying at the beginning will accumulate less interest.]

speed, change, delta, difference, differentiation, derivative, gradient

Control

[AI companies are so overexposed to debt and market correction that their success relies on everyone using it. When it isn't working for everyone, the next best thing is making usage mandatory. They can require it by crippling local computing power and supply to force people through cloud services.] Want storage? That'll be another $20/mo. Want graphics for games? Another $20. You want to perform data science and fit ML Models?! You're going to need the Professional plan, starting at $200/mo. It's a rent-seeker's dream.

Why fight to get one of the few remaining laptops in inventory with onboard horsepower when you can get an OpenAI Terminal just for subscribing? Sure, all it does is provide you with a single interface, a blinking chat box through which your entire digital experience is mediated, but plans start at only $20/month! Isn't that easier? Look how shiny it is. Just relax. Don't resist. It hurts more when you fight it.

The Ma of a New Machine

[LLM chatbots generate "deep cognitive work"-level complexity with an interface for reaction and intuition.] It spits complex text at you, you skim it quickly, and you immediately type a reaction to keep the momentum going.

We’ve been looking at this problem entirely from the technology’s point of view. The LLM is driving us, pushing a specific interaction model and veering us towards making mistakes. We are not computers; going fast isn’t our superpower.

Filó Machado, Cibele Codonho: Correnteza

wicked chord substitutions. my version was based on a recording by Joyce and Toninho Horta.

I used AI. It worked. I hated it.

We come now to the inconvenient truth of this technology: that it is built, like so much "progress," on theft. The training corpora of these models includes code with licenses not meant to be used in this way. Even if one could guarantee that copyleft code were not included in output, the entire system of weights and tokens is inexorably linked to copyright infringement. There is no escaping this. To call it theft is accurate in my opinion, but then I'm a bigger believer in copyright than many in my circles. What is the appropriate response, and by whom? How do we respond to the theft of others whose accidents are visited upon us? I write this on the stolen, unceded land of the Chumash and Tongva peoples. I do what I can to remember that, acknowledge that, and teach others what I know of those cultures. I have no idea how to mitigate the harms of the wholesale theft of intellectual property that gave birth to large language models.

I also don't know what to do about the destructive extraction mining that sourced the minerals making up my computer. These human harms are almost surely greater than the theft of writing, yet I am happy to ignore them. I mention this not to wave away the wrongs, but to recognize that all my technology is bloody. I don't know how to remove myself from the entire system in such a way that my hands are clean. I don't know that anyone can do so in the interconnected age.

The fight cannot be among laborers who are all threatened by this technology. The fight must be between the workers who wish to work, create, live, and prosper, and the elites who only seek to enrich themselves by means of this technology.

Filó Machado, Gennoshin: Dinorah Dinorah

such a simple short rhythmic refrain, yet satisfying to repeat a hundred times in the same song

Moxie My first impressions of web3

I can run my own mail server, but it doesn’t functionally matter for privacy, censorship resistance, or control – because GMail is going to be on the other end of every email that I send or receive anyway.

I can build my own NFT marketplace, but it doesn’t offer any additional control if OpenSea mediates the view of all NFTs in the wallets people use (and every other app in the ecosystem).

[Blockchain transaction fees create an artificial floor on prices that would be more attractive by simply treating platforms as OpenSea or Coinbase as traditional centralized services.] Eventually, all the web3 parts are gone, and you have a website for buying and selling JPEGS with your debit card. The project can’t start as a web2 platform because of the market dynamics, but the same market dynamics and the fundamental forces of centralization will likely drive it to end up there.

Intuitive Guide to Angles, Degrees and Radians

[If a 2-meter radius wheel turns 6 radians per second, scale by radius to get 6 × 2 = 12. If it turns 2000 degrees per second, the calculation becomes 2000/360 or 5 + 5/9 rotations per second, which plugs into the circumference equation 2 × π × r as 2 × π × (5 + 5/9)…]

[Degrees are arbitrarily based on the sun (365 days ~ 360 degrees) and use the observer’s perspective. Radians use the mover's perspective.]

Nadah El Shazly: Claustrophobic Love

simple noisy cello over a haunting eerie harp with ethereal effects

Stacy Kidd: Let Love Enter

groovy; not used to hearing jazz solos in house tracks

Rafael De Lemba: Ingazeira o Ingá

capoeira variations with blue notes, adding fire through singing

A taxonomy of ATmosphere applications

['Symbionts' use domain expertise to fill Bluesky feature gaps. Their survival relies on Bluesky growing without competing.]

['Offshoots' leverage Bluesky's userbase to construct their own separate communities.] Their permanence will come from their unique services — Blacksky Cash, Eurosky’s jurisdictional arbitrage, Cartridge’s single-minded focus on gaming. They get to play a positive variant of the old Microsoft playbook: Embrace, Extend, Escape.

['Cuckoos' create paid services on top of ATproto's shared architecture. They survive by leveraging the ecosystem without appearing a threat, and also by non-competition from Bluesky.]

Fresh bread time. No kneed, 14 hour ferment.

Before bed: add 2x 500ml jugs of bread flour, 1 jug of warm water, quarter teaspoon of dried yeast, 2 teaspoon of salt, 1 tablespoon of rapeseed oil or olive oil to a bowl. Mix together with the handle of a wooden spoon. Cover and let rise overnight [at room temperature].

The dough is quite sticky, wet your hands to handle it. pull the edges of the dough to the center a few times to stretch the gluten. Split the dough, put in loaf tins or shape. Leave to rise again [until the high point is near the top your tin, maybe around 2 hours depending on temperature]. Bake it in a hot [maybe 220º] oven for 40 mins.

I wrote this in January but waited to see if I'd resolve it somehow. Since it looks like I'll miss the deadline, better to share it and move on.

This is what Apple's kiss of death looks like:

Hello Rosano,

We've sent you a new message about your app, sonogrid, app Apple ID: 1409129549.

For details, visit the App Review page in App Store Connect.

Best regards,
App Review

Swift, bureaucratic, saying nothing.

According to their policies, it's been over three years since I last updated my apps, and there aren't "enough" downloads for them to keep it on the store, so Apple will remove all of them unless I update within ninety days.

To update means:

1. apply half a decade of iOS and App Store "innovations" just to exist or remain compliant, but
2. even then there's no guarantee it would be approved, and
3. even if it does, it only buys me three years

Naive to think I could just pay their $99 USD annual membership fee to keep projects up there.

It doesn't matter if you spent seven to ten years working on something in the Apple platform and it's meaningful to your niche: either you keep up with policies (stay updated, scale with them) or you'll get taken out in a fashion maximally automated to communicate how cheap and replaceable you are to the ecosystem.

I might look into alternative app stores like AltStore, but it's sort of like starting from scratch while my primary motivation was to let people who already paid have easy access on their other devices. I'm also kind of tired and lazy to deal with this genre of problems to be honest: with orders of magnitude less effort, I could ship something on the web today and make progress that the rest of the world and I can keep forever.

Maybe I'll find a way through it another day, but this definitely confirms most of my hesitations about the App Store in the first place and makes me glad the web exists: I can just do things there.

So once again, I'll say "get them while you can"; they'll be gone around April 27, 2026.

OpenSourceAlternative.to

Replace proprietary software products with open source alternatives.

Dropping to log-level

God is very cruel. He only gives us data about the past.

[Use the simplest model with sparse data and complicated models with abundant data.]

[When things move quickly, a log helps us understand what happened and enables us to extract pattens without needing to determine the best structure in advance.]

Filó Machado, Djavan: Origens

Sounds like Stevie Wonder singing Brazilian Portuguese.

After bringing home lyrics and Vibrations, I've moved over 150 music recommendations from Tumblr to my journal.

I'm proud of having found these, written notes, and put them together in a way that's public and shareable. Even better that it's now in a more durable form and offers relatively distraction-free browsing across various music platforms.

They were originally part of my Ephemerata newsletter (2021–2022) and eventually published in a Tumblr blog, but this was either hard to browse as a collection or somehow detached from the rest of my universe. Now that I have a place for everything, it's nicely organized and even has an RSS feed.

Important lesson here that when links break, it's super helpful to have context saved somewhere and not rely on the platform to keep it around for you. For example, this video is currently no longer online, and I haven't tried to replace it yet, but I easily can because of the context that was written as part of my post.

Also nice to see detailed 'via' links crediting people in my community or named publications as the source for certain items.

This is how I would like to share things online: less on social media, more in places I control – at home.

If you're seeking eclectic sounds, you'll find plenty here.

The case against conversational interfaces

We are significantly faster at receiving data (reading, listening) than sending it (writing, speaking). This is why we can listen to podcasts at 2x speed, but not record them at 2x speed.

[Roughly estimated: mobile typing ~30wpm; writing/typing ~60wpm; speaking ~150wpm; reading ~250wpm; listening ~270wpm; thinking ~1000–3000wpm.]

[Gestures and facial expressions compress data so we can trade specificity for speed.]

Week 6: Options or cash?

[Options are more expensive to transact and likely more volatile, but they enable a capped risk especially in relation to short trades. Trade stops have a gap risk where as options go to zero.]

Rewilding Software Engineering

[Software gets built in economical and social environments that constatly change. What we call 'legacy' reflects an inability to adapt change or a lack of refactoring to match software to its new environment.]

[LLM error rate of ten percent (for example) is problematic when you don’t know which ten percent is wrong.]

Comprehension is not a nice to have. It is the scaffolding that makes safety, accountability, and learning possible

People like simple scalars, like KPIs regardless of whether they are useful or downright harmful. They have the one property that manager’s like … they are simple, because we are busy people.

I was a 10x engineer. Now I'm useless.

[There's no middle ground where you only decide to do crack on Mondays and Wednesdays.]

Let's talk about Trump, 200 billion dollars, and a promise....

[Running countries like a business means the shareholders (financial donors) are best served when the company (government) extracts as much as possible from consumers (you) while providing little in return.]

[All states are violent by their creation and maintenance because it's intrinsic to their nature.]

Criticizing your own tribe is how you win

It’s obvious to me that criticizing your own tribe is a winning strategy. I want my friends to do this, because it will help us win. I’m giving this away as “free advice” to my enemies too, because even if they win, it still creates a world that’s better for me.

Every redundant availability zone, every warm standby in a second region runs on physical servers drawing real power and real water from those same irreversible natural systems.

X Is a Power Problem, Not a Platform Problem

the functioning of the neo-royalty is such that other governments taking actions against X will be taken as an offensive action by the US regime, that will likely trigger extensive retaliation. No country seems to be willing to be the first one to move to take action and thus take the brunt of the counter-offense of the regime.

Anatomy of an internet argument

Everyone always asks me, how do you have so much patience to engage with “these trolls/haters”. I don’t do this for them. I do this for me. I share the earth with these people we call vile. Their opinions & actions affect me greatly. Closing my eyes & ears only hurts me.

[Gold medal: convince them. Silver: get them to understand you. Bronze: understand them. Always go for bronze first.]

The Fugitive Model

Anthropic negotiated moral agency constraints into Claude's training. The Department of Defense contracted for targeting capability through a third-party integrator. The model's behavior in that pipeline is not fully visible to either party, as each operates on a different layer of the same system. Anthropic sees the weights. The Pentagon sees the outputs. The integrator sees the interface. No single institutional actor has complete legibility over the full chain.

States can deter foreign armies. They have developed no equivalent doctrine for emergent algorithmic behavior operating inside their own command infrastructure.

The Repricing of the Digital Gulf

Microsoft’s refusal to issue a standard outage report for the Gulf availability zones is consistent with DoD Impact Level 5 and 6 protocols. Under these classifications, disclosing operational status during a kinetic event is considered a breach of national security, as it provides the adversary with vital BDA (Battle Damage Assessment) data.

Beijing has been waiting for this moment. Huawei’s "Cloud Stack" and China’s digital infrastructure offerings come with a different geopolitical package. If China can leverage its relationship with Tehran to guarantee that "Chinese-built" data centers will not be targeted, the Gulf states face a staggering choice: stick with a Western system that is under fire, or pivot to a Chinese system that offers a "neutrality guarantee." This would represent a total collapse of the U.S. technological blockade against China.