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.
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.
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.
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.]
The perfected, generated, prompted resume is generic and impersonal. It tells me nothing about this person, other than that they use particular tools. I can't see the inputs to their outputs, see what they typed, or the process of building.
The email about why I'm the right person to try your side project says nothing about you. I don't know why you made it, who you are. I don't know your writing style. I don't have any way to connect to you as a person, and no reason to care.
ive been "promoting" things on the internet for 15 years now! here's my top tips
- show yourself having fun
- many consistent repeated small launches is better than one big launch
- someone needs to see something like nine times before it sticks
- reward people for following along with everything. you can never go too far with in-jokes
- let people feel part of something.
- never show off. never try to be cool
- be like a monster in a horror film - never show the whole thing. make it seem like there's more to discover by clicking through
- create drama and arguments by being fearless and stupid
- make it clear you dont need anyone - you're having fun on your own. its more infectious that way
- show how you feel. feelings are more powerful than information
- its a lot like rolling the dice. to go viral once, roll a thousand dice
Universal basic income is not a reward for idleness; it is recognition that productivity gains belong to society, not just to capital.
A society that automates its way to prosperity while abandoning its workers has not progressed at all.
Technology advocacy without social advocacy is just greed with better tooling.
most daily choices are reversible, and because life presents an endless stream of future opportunities, spending excessive time and energy on minor decisions is inefficient and puts you at the end of the lunchtime rush of orders put into the kitchen.
In Western contexts, "martyr" carries a heavy political or theological weight—the idea that someone made a conscious choice to die for a cause. But that isn't how shaheed functions for Palestinians.
Calling a child playing in a yard, a sleeping family, or an elderly patient in a hospital bed a shaheed isn't claiming agency or choice. None of them chose to be targeted. Instead, shaheed is an act of love, sanctity, and honor. It is a communal refusal to let a life stolen by Israeli military violence be reduced to a cold, clinical statistic.
This creates a constant struggle in translation: In English, saying someone was "killed" feels completely inadequate—it strips away the honor owed to the victim and flattens the active, systematic violence taking their life.
A Quirky Introduction To Number Systems
[Math is software for your brain: each concept is an app or approach with uses and limitations. Getting stuck on a problem often has more to do with our method than reality itself.]
This is how learning works. Be interested. Don't assume you know anything. That's how you stay dumb. Be a beginner. Ask questions.
'Sterile' is a word that accompanies the spread of modern corporate capitalism, precisely because of that process in which the rough edges of older, more informal markets are sanded away. In the midst of an accelerating capitalist economy, people operating according to its logic feel compelled to remove friction or 'inefficiency', but in doing so begin to scour away all the texture that gives a neighbourhood its soul. Inefficient snags are the very thing around which community collects, which is why efficiency can create malls but not community.
Gentrification appropriates the aesthetics of punk, anarchism, village life or immigrant culture, and uses it as a marketing tool while stripping away the substance of that culture.
The end result of a gentrification is an area that feels like a museum of itself. Your eyes catch glimpses of things that still look edgy, exotic or alternative, and yet your body does not feel it, because all those little cues that would be present in an authentic and alive space are missing. The honesty box by the beer fridge is gone. In its place is a Square terminal for cashless payments, plugging into the banking sector via Visa and Mastercard.
