[Jargon is an indicator of high-resolution conversation between those inside domain. It may exclude people outside, but that doesn't it should be avoided inside. Help newcomers quickly get up to speed and they'll be happy to join in.]

[The experiment suggests that participants chose cake afterwards not only because their challenging cognitive task required more calories, but also because the same process drained their willpower to resist. There's only one pool for both.]

Every moment spent struggling with a confusing UI, frustrating customer service, poor documentation, or anything requiring patience, self-control, or intense concentration on the tool could be stealing resources from learning, practice, and becoming badass at the thing they really care about: the context.

The Zeigarnik Effect means cognitive resources are being consumed in the background while you’re doing other things. The more open/unfinished tasks that are running in the background, the less resources are available for focusing, practicing, and learning.

[Marketing materials focus on the compelling context, while remaining easy to understand. Learning content focuses on the tool, and the dry or hard to read material gets interpreted by the brain as spam.]

[Asking "Why?", "So what?, and "Who cares?" can help reframe unfocused material so that the brain says "worthy".]

[Easier for their brain is good, but less is better: is that element truly necessary?]

Please Use AI

be sure to use AI when your next child
gets married, so that you can write them
the perfect toast or poem or speech or song
because no one wants to hear your
words, the actual poorly written words
of a parent (you) who changed
hundreds of diapers for said child or fed
them in the middle of the
night from your actual body. Or cried
when they were late home because
you were positive they were dead. We don't
want those words—we’d prefer the sterile
words of a machine that never lived, never
had an original thought, never felt
the pain of miscarriage or broken
relationships or the joy of a friendship restored

I’ll be over here in my 50th
year, my youngest daughter asleep on my chest,
my arm falling asleep because I dare not move
lest I scare away this moment,
lying here melancholy about my older
children moving out and my middle
children no longer needing me, at least
not like they used to, weary about this body
that fails me now in ever increasing ways
that will never be restored. Sighing
over stories I tried to write but never hit
the page the way they felt in my mind.

On the Regular

Another nice thing about being a regular at a place that values regulars is that you meet the other regulars. This summer I was often left to my own devices for dinner and a couple times a week, I ended up at my local. And almost without exception, I ended up having dinner with someone I’d previously met at the bar. Routinely turning a solo dining experience into dinner with a friend is an amazing accomplishment for a restaurant.

Abu Obaida Hassan & His Tambour: The Shaigiya Sound of Sudan (2018)

[This Sudanese pioneer is known for having electrified the tambur (lyre), creating a hypnotic, trance-like sound in the ’70s and ’80s. Notice the call-and-response pattern in the chorus.]

The Charlie Rose Paradox

[Webcams flatten people and their interactions.]

[Wise guests can turn dumb questions into insightful and informative answers.]

[Not showing their feet in the shot focuses on their face, hands, and fashion, and speaking as Greek busts.]

Xikipedia

pseudo social media feed that algorithmically shows you content from Simple Wikipedia.

available fully offline, and you can even install it as an app by clicking the install button.

you a worm?

two worms find themselves

If we knew as much about Haiti as we do about France, the world wouldn't be the way it is!

[Napoleon's bankruptcy from the Haitian revolution forced the sale of Louisiana territory to what we now call the United States; without this, it would be a third of the size today.]

Mestre Manoel (Ypiranga de Pastinha) e Mestre Boca do Rio (Zimba)

trickery, humour, control, fluidity, theatre

ADVANCED AIRHORN TUTORIAL

so many rhythmic permutations from a single sound sample

Open Source Psyop

It’s a psyop if you understand the other mind’s decision calculus, and have the ability to override their decision purely via careful selection of input information.

The Diary Of A CEO: Jefferson Fisher

[Walk into a room as if you've been there before and everyone else is visiting.]

[I want to know the names of helping staff, how many times they've done this today, how they're doing, because it's too easy to just talk to the "important" people.]

[Let your breath be the first word.]

[In times of emotional crisis, they walk instead of running. Being calm is contagious.]

[Announce whether either of you is under capacity, and if both are then make a plan for kindness towards each other.]

Marx, Ecology and the Lie of Separation

[We can go beyond "consume better, recycle better, choose sustainable products" to ask "who owns the land? who controls energy? who profits from extraction? who bears the waste and breathes pollution? who labours? who has water? who gets sacrificed for development?"]

The Intolerable Hypocrisy of Cyberlibertarianism

The thing your industry would prefer not to deal with is reframed as an obsolete burden. Your refusal to do it is rebranded as innovation. Your inability to imagine a world where you don't get exactly what you want becomes a manifesto.

Once the platforms got large enough to be unstoppable, once they captured enough of the regulatory apparatus to write their own rules, the libertarian rhetoric got quietly shelved like a college poster you took down before your in-laws came over. Meta no longer pretends it stands for free speech and seemingly takes delight in putting its thumb on the scale. TikTok users have invented an entire euphemistic shadow language to evade automated censorship like "unalive," "le dollar bean," "graped" that would have made 1996 Barlow weep into his bolo tie.

Copyright and patents matter when they're Apple's copyright and patents. Or Googles. Or OpenAIs. Go try to make a Facebook+ website and see how quickly Meta is capable of responding to content it finds objectionable.

People did not get better because they went online. Giving everyone access to a raw, unfiltered pipeline of every fact and lie ever produced did not turn them into better-educated people. It broke them. It allowed them to choose the reality they now inhabit, like ordering off a menu. If I want to believe the world is flat, TikTok will gladly serve me that content all day. Meta will recommend supportive groups. There will be hashtags. There will be Discords. There will be a guy named Trent who runs a podcast. I will never have to face the deeply uncomfortable possibility that I might be wrong about anything, ever, until the day I die, surrounded by people who agree with me about everything, including which of the other mourners are secretly lizards.

The $8 Website Blueprint

This web page is live, mobile-responsive, enterprise-secure, and full https. It costs $8 a year to run. No subscriptions, no platform traps, and 100% owner control. Here is how you can build one just like it.

hope:Re

an open-source tool that shields your artwork from unauthorized AI training and style mimicry.

It applies invisible adversarial perturbations to your images, making them resistant to generative AI systems that attempt to learn or reproduce your unique style without consent.

The Giant's Cup

[Increasing speed and distance over time by a maximum of 10% per week made each run was challenging but not insurmountable.]

I Deleted My Second Brain

over time, my second brain became a mausoleum. A dusty collection of old selves, old interests, old compulsions, piled on top of each other like geological strata. Instead of accelerating my thinking, it began to replace it. Instead of aiding memory, it froze my curiosity into static categories.

I’ve been sober for six years now, and that kind of milestone does something to your perception of time. It creates a before and an after, and it invites you  -  forces you  -  to take stock.

PKM systems promise coherence, but they deliver abstracted confusion. The more I wrote into my vault, the less I felt. A quote would spark an insight, I’d clip it, tag it, link it  -  and move on. But the insight was never lived  -  it was just stored. Like food vacuum-sealed and never eaten, while any nutritional value slips away.

Human memory is not an archive. It is associative, embodied, contextual, emotional. We don’t think in folders. We don’t retrieve meaning through backlinks. Our minds are improvisational.

This mirrors a deeper psychological error: the belief that by naming a goal, you are closer to achieving it, that by storing a thought, you have understood it, that by filing a fact, you have earned the skill to deploy it

I don’t think I want a map of everything I’ve ever read. I want a mind free to read what it needs. I want memory that forgets gracefully. I want ideas that resurface because they mattered, not just because an index card was forced to the forefront by some complex system of levers and pulleys.

Our bodies remember

["Indian belly" as a meme distracts from systemic famines during British colonial rule that resulted in millions unalived and future generation bodies storing energy maladaptively.]

Belief is the key ingredient

[Talking about the world's problems is optimistic, rather than pessimistic, because it implies we could and should be doing better.]

[Standing up to power relies on believing change is possible.]

[The powerful speak with a tone of inevitability to convince you that change is not possible.]

[There is no secret sauce: any prolonged collective act of non-compliance will do.]

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.]

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.]

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.]

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.]

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

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.