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.
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 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.
Prepare your “no” and keep it handy
I took an hour to write a really nice “no” in advance. Considerate, but decisive. Not too long, but not too short. Generalized and versatile for all situations.
this refusal is the kindest I could have written. Yet it took three seconds to send. And I can use it over and over again.
[Increasing speed and distance over time by a maximum of 10% per week made each run was challenging but not insurmountable.]
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.
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.
[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.
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.]
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.
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…).]
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.
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.]
[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.
[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.
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.
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.]
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.
Tagged: recipe.