thoughts

The Internet Needs to Change


šŸ”— a linked post to youtube.com » — originally shared here on

I hate the internet.

...that's a lie. I love it, but I hate the algorithms.

That's also a lie... I love the algorithms.

I watched this video on the plane ride back from Nickelodeon Resort yesterday, and I have to say, it got me.

Hank's assessment of how the algorithms deployed by social networks come up short in actually giving us what we want is spot on.

It's why I love how many friends are spinning up their own newsletters. And this new newsletter was a no brainer instasubscribe.

Ever since my buddy Paul gifted me a premium subscription to Garbage Day, I've been a voracious newsletter subscriber. They do a great job of filling the void that Google Reader left in my life.1

This website has been my way of curating the internet, sharing things I've found that interest me, but maybe I should start a newsletter myself and do things in both places.

Should I tell my impostor syndrome to shove it and start my own newsletter, y'all?


  1. I do need to find a way to get them out of my inbox, though. I really should move all my subscriptions into Feedbin so they show up in my RSS reader app. 


Juan L. Otaiza - System of a Down - Relaxing Piano Version


šŸ”— a linked post to youtube.com » — originally shared here on

The algorithms1 blessed me with this video last week, and I find myself coming back to it when I'm doing deep work.

I also am enjoying his Rammstein version, and I am eagerly looking forward to checking out the Linkin Park and Avenged Sevenfold ones soon.

If I could play the piano, this is absolutely the kind of stuff I would want to play.


  1. Speaking of algorithms, you should watch Hank Green's latest video that I just wrote about. 

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All about the money


šŸ”— a linked post to builders.genagorlin.com » — originally shared here on

One can of course relate to money in pathological ways. For those whose standard of value resides not in a conception of their fully-lived life (a la the builder), but in the impressions or judgments of others (be it God or society or their parents or some other ā€œdrill sergeantā€), money means whatever it purportedly means to those othersā€”status, in some circles, or wicked materialism in others, or in still others, ā€œprivilegeā€ to be forgiven with obligate philanthropy.Ā 

By contrast, a builderā€™s relationship to money is not mediated by any of these external intermediaries. She understands that money is a medium of value exchange, and what she values is set by the life she wants to build and the world she wants to live in.Ā 

There are also simpler pathologies, such as when fear or insecurity drives founders to pursue short-term monetary gains over the longer-term health and durability of their business. But such financial anxieties can be diagnosed and remedied by re-orienting toward the overarching goal of building oneā€™s best life, which presumably includes a healthy and durable version of oneā€™s business (or whatever one is building) as part of it.

Quite a useful way to reframe money and its importance to a well considered life.

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Claude and ChatGPT for ad-hoc sidequests


šŸ”— a linked post to simonwillison.net » — originally shared here on

Iā€™m an unabashed fan of Simon Willisonā€™s blog. Some of his posts admittedly go over my head, but I needed to share this post because it gets across the point I have been trying to articulate myself about AI and how I use it.

In the post, Simon talks about wanting to get a polygon object created that represents the boundary of Adirondack Park, the largest park in the United States (which occupies a fifth of the whole state!).

That part in and of itself is nerdy and a fun read, but this section here made my neck hurt from nodding aggressively in agreement:

Isnā€™t this a bit trivial? Yes it is, and thatā€™s the point. This was a five minute sidequest. Writing about it here took ten times longer than the exercise itself.

I take on LLM-assisted sidequests like this one dozens of times a week. Many of them are substantially larger and more useful. They are having a very material impact on my work: I can get more done and solve much more interesting problems, because Iā€™m not wasting valuable cycles figuring out ogr2ogr invocations or mucking around with polygon libraries.

Not to mention that I find working this way fun! It feels like science fiction every time I do it. Our AI-assisted future is here right now and Iā€™m still finding it weird, fascinating and deeply entertaining.

Frequent readers of this blog know that a big part of the work Iā€™ve been doing since being laid off is in reflecting on what brings me joy and happiness.

Work over the last twelve years of my life represented a small portion of something that used to bring me a ton of joy (building websites and apps). But somewhere along the way, building websites was no longer enjoyable to me.

I used to love learning new frameworks, expanding the arsenal of tools in my toolbox to solve an ever expanding set of problems. But spending my free time developing a new skill with a new tool began to feel like I was working but not getting paid.

And that notion really doesnā€™t sit well with me. I still love figuring out how computers work. Itā€™s just nice to do so without the added pressure of building something to make someone else happy.

Which brings me to the ā€œside questā€ concept Simon describes in this post, which is something I find myself doing nearly every day with ChatGPT.

When I was going through my album artwork on Plex, my first instinct was to go to ChatGPT and have it help me parse through Plexā€™s internal thumbnail database to build me a view which shows all the artwork on a single webpage.

It took me maybe 10 minutes of iterating with ChatGPT, and now I know more about the internal workings of Plexā€™s internal media caching database than I ever would have before.

Before ChatGPT, I wouldā€™ve had to spend several hours pouring over open source code or out of date documentation. In other words: I wouldā€™ve given up after the first Google search.

It feels like another application of Morovecā€™s paradox. Like Gary Casparov observed with chess bots, it feels like the winning approach here is one where LLMs and humans work in tandem.

Simon ends his post with this:

One of the greatest misconceptions concerning LLMs is the idea that they are easy to use. They really arenā€™t: getting great results out of them requires a great deal of experience and hard-fought intuition, combined with deep domain knowledge of the problem you are applying them to. I use these things every day. They help me take on much more interesting and ambitious problems than I could otherwise. I would miss them terribly if they were no longer available to me.

I could not agree more.

I find it hard to explain to people how to use LLMs without more than an hour of sitting down and going through a bunch of examples of how they work.

These tools are insanely cool and insanely powerful when you bring your own knowledge to them.

They simply parrot back what it believes to be the most statistically correct response to whatever prompt was provided.

I havenā€™t been able to come up with a good analogy for that sentiment yet, because the closest I can come up with is ā€œitā€™s like a really good personal assistantā€, which feels like the same analogy the tech industry always uses to market any new tool.

You wouldnā€™t just send a personal assistant off to go do your job for you. A great assistant is there to compile data, to make suggestions, to be a sounding board, but at the end of the day, you are the one accountable for the final output.

If you copy and paste ChatGPTā€™s responses into a court brief and it contains made up cases, thatā€™s on you.

If you deploy code that contains glaring vulnerabilities, thatā€™s on you.

Maybe I shouldnā€™t be lamenting that I lost my joy of learning new things about computers, because I sure have been filled with joy learning how to best use LLMs these past couple years.

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High quality album artwork

originally shared here on

I don't know if I'm one of the only weirdos that still uses Plex and listens to MP3s, but dammit, a carefully curated music collection of which I feel some ownership feels critically important to me.

I have started going back in and using the rating systems to rate entire albums.1 Because this seems like a natural follow up question, I basically only give albums one of three ratings2:

  • ā˜…ā˜…ā˜…ā˜…ā˜† (4 stars): This is an important album to me, but I don't wanna hear it every day.
  • ā˜…ā˜…ā˜…ā˜…ā˜… (5 stars): This album is everything right now.
  • ā˜…ā˜…ā˜…ā˜…āÆØ (4.5 stars): Somewhere in between the two. It is either a 5 becoming a 4, or a 4 on its way to fivedom.

Doing this gives me the ability to create a smart playlist containing all of the albums with at least a 4.5 star rating.

This morning while getting ready, I uncharacteristically grabbed my iPad and used Plexamp to listen to that playlist on shuffle.

The first thing I noticed on the much larger screen was how awful the album artwork looked for many of my albums.

They looked quite pixelated and blurry. Some of them looked like scans where you could clearly see stickers and thin, diagonal white lines on the sides.

I decided this must be something I rectify tonight.

I've updated the artwork for maybe 50 albums so far, and I'm stunned at how much of a difference it makes to have nice looking album art.

I've had some of these albums for decades now. When I added artwork back in the mid 2000s, the best I could hope for in many cases was a 256x256px JPG that I could find on a message board.

At the same time, the past few weeks gave me several opportunities to pay attention to these albums in a way I never have before.3

For most of my life, I generally used music to distract me from my thoughts. I would occasionally listen to the lyrics and look up the meaning of a song, but those details were often secondary to the overall feeling of a track.

Something in the past couple of years changed that in me, though, and now I have been enjoying music on so many more levels. What was an artist going through when they made a song? What was the creative process like? What do these words mean to the artist?

The best system I found was to use the Plex web app on my laptop to select new album art, and then use the Plexamp iOS app to move from song to song, finding songs which had low res album art.

I noticed after a few changes that when I saved the album art on my laptop, it instantly reflected on my phone.

So of course, I started hovering over the "save" button on my laptop, then glanced down at my phone while clicking.

And what you'd see was a cool cross fade where the image got sharper. Cleaner. Fresher. Way more detailed. Way less pixelated.

It allowed me to be a bit of an ophthalmologist, covering one eye, flipping between two different lens strengths and asking whether I preferred option 1 or option 2.

Polishing up my music collection, cleaning up this blog... these were things I used to do for fun.

They were mindless activities. A chance to express myself without feeling any judgement.4 To feel accomplished and organized, a little slice of order within a chaotic life filled with incessant disorder.

I have been so busy for the past twelve years that I forgot what fun really looked like.

I thought fun was learning how to build a company. To understand what it takes to build successful and impactful software.

And in many ways, those things were fun. It is really cool to make computers do complex stuff, to build tech that makes people's lives better. It brings me so much joy.

But that's not the only thing that's fun in the world. And I might have done a bit better at relegating those pursuits to my professional life, and then figured out a way to pursue other joyful things outside of that.

It's weird coming back to my media library after essentially neglecting it for most of my adult life. It feels like opening a time capsule, but then jumping down into it and living amongst the decade old cruft.

But it feels good to clean it out and use it again. To treat it like my house instead of a history exhibit.


  1. I don't really care much about rating individual songs. It feels too granular and seems like unnecessary to accomodate my listening habits. 

  2. If I don't rate an album, then it's only in my library because I'm a digital hoarder and I need to seriously do a deeper purge on my virtual footprint. 

  3. I can't believe how much I rushed through the last 12 years of my life. Everyone talks about being mindful and present, and there's nothing quite like anxiety to take you out of being present. 

  4. When you learn how to program computers, they become far less judgmental of you, by the way. Or maybe you get less judgmental of them. 

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The Best Way to Get Things Done


šŸ”— a linked post to ofdollarsanddata.com » — originally shared here on

Thatā€™s why your goal should be to be about 80%-85% utilized. You may have a less productive day here or there, but this slight inefficiency will prevent larger failures when fires inevitably pop up from time to time.

My secret to getting so much done is rarely operating at full capacity. My philosophy on this is simpleā€”if you take care of the days, the years take care of themselves.

We know that this is right intrinsically, but many of us choose to ignore it to our own detriment. If I told a runner to sprint at 100% effort, they might be able to sprint for a minute before they would have to slow down or stop completely. But, if told them to run at 75% of their max effort, they could go on for hours. Same person. Same body. The only difference is what capacity they are operating at.

So instead of trying to get everything done, the better solution is to get the right things done (at the right capacity). But figuring out what the right things are is a challenge all its own.

A few years ago, I heard similar advice, but it used a carā€™s RPM gauge as the example.

Thereā€™s a reason your car can go up to 140 MPH: if you created a car that ran in the red all the time, it would break down all the time.

Most of us drive our cars in an optimally designed range so it can last way longer.

So it goes with our own bodies. We arenā€™t meant to sprint for :checks calendar: 12 years straight with no breaks.

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If you can use open source, you can build hardware


šŸ”— a linked post to redeem-tomorrow.com » — originally shared here on

Iā€™ve been dreaming of building my own electronics since I was a kid. I spent so many afternoons at Radio Shack, and even tried my hand at the occasional kit, with limited success. Every few years in adulthood, Iā€™ve given it another try, observing a steady downward trend in difficulty.

Iā€™m telling you: weā€™re at a special moment here. The labor savings of open source, the composability, the fun: all of it has come to hardware. You can build things that solve real problems for yourself. I first imagined my heat pump devices over a year ago, and I have been frustrated they didnā€™t exist every day since.

Now my dreams are real, and the largest energy consumer in the house can be automated and remotely controlled.

Thatā€™s amazing.

As soon as I gain employment again, the very first thing Iā€™m buying is a 3D printer, and Iā€™m gonna start building stuff.

I donā€™t quite know what yet.

But Iā€™ll find something.

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Every Billable Hour is Amateur Hour


šŸ”— a linked post to daedtech.com » — originally shared here on

If, on the other hand, you view freelancing as a path to real business ownership, your first step is to recognize that the billable hour is a binkie that keeps you in amateur purgatory for the entire time you rely on it.Ā  A kind of Hotel California with timesheets.

And thatā€™s really my only call to action ā€” the recognition as the first step.

Iā€™m not suggesting you fire all of your hourly clients or do anything dramatic.Ā  Iā€™m not even suggesting any immediate change.Ā  Rather, Iā€™m just suggesting that you change your viewpoint.

If you want to be a professional business owner, you need to become an expert in delivering outcomes that add value.Ā  And youā€™ll never achieve that without enough reps to flat price your work and enough skin in the game to feel it when you get it wrong.

I found it difficult to do ā€œvalue-based pricingā€ when running my agency.

But I think it took a little time away to really understand my value. It was never about programming stuff. It was about making something that could turn $1 into $2.

And knowing what to spend that $1 on.

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Dear Self; we need to talk about ambition


šŸ”— a linked post to lesswrong.com » — originally shared here on

Like the programming path, the legible independent ambition path works for some people, but not you. The things you do when pushed to Think Big and Be Independent produce incidental learning at best, but never achieve anything directly. They canā€™t, because you made up the goals to impress other people. This becomes increasingly depressing, as you fail at your alleged goals and at your real goal of impressing people.Ā 

So what do we do then? Give up on having goals? Only by their definition. What seems to work best for us is leaning into annoyance or even anger at problems in the world, and hate-fixing them.Ā 

Youā€™ve always hated people being wrong, and it turns out a lot of things can be defined as ā€œwrongā€ if you have the right temperament. Womenā€™s pants have tiny pockets that wonā€™t fit my phone? Wrong. TSA eating hours of my life for no gain? Wrong. Medical-grade fatigue? Wrong. People dying of preventable diseases? Extremely wrong. And wrong things are satisfying to fix.

Yesterday, I was doing the dishes when I saw a mostly eaten yogurt cup laying in the sink.

As I started rinsing it out, I wondered whether I should throw it in the garbage or the recycling bin.

I thought about this quiz game that my county has on their website where they present various household items and you have to say whether it can go in the recycling, compost, or garbage.

The last time I played it, I found myself just getting mad.

Mad that I was getting questions wrong.

Mad that I canā€™t tell if this quiz is up to date with the latest recycling advice.

It occurred to me, while rinsing the cup, that I donā€™t really like learning most things for fun. I learn them because I like to ensure I have the best chance at complying with the rules.

I like passing through the hoops that were laid out for me.

I liked school so much because there was a clearly defined metric for success and failure.

But as Iā€™m now 36 years old, success doesnā€™t really get defined in that way anymore.

I am glad this article surfaced in my Instapaper queue this morning, because I think itā€™s mostly the article I wouldā€™ve written for myself.

I really enjoyed the authorā€™s advice on determining authentic motivation, viewing procrastination as a workersā€™ strike, and realizing that your taste will often outpace your abilities.

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npm install everything, and the complete and utter chaos that follows


šŸ”— a linked post to boehs.org » — originally shared here on

We tried to hang a pretty picture on a wall, but accidentally opened a small hole. This hole caused the entire building to collapse. While we did not intend to create a hole, and feel terrible for all the people impacted by the collapse, we believe itā€™s also worth investigating what failures of compliance testing & building design could allow such a small hole to cause such big damage.

Multiple parties involved, myself included, are still students and/or do not code professionally. How could we have been allowed to do this by accident?

Itā€™s certainly no laughing matter, neither to the people who rely on npm nor the kids who did this.

But man, it is comical to see the Law of Unintended Consequences when it decides to rear its ugly head.

I applaud the students who had the original idea and decided to see what would happen if you installed every single npm package at once. Itā€™s a good question, to which the answer is: uncover a fairly significant issue with how npm maintains integrity across all of its packages.

But I guess the main reason Iā€™m sharing this article is as a case study on how hard it is to moderate a system.

Iā€™m still a recovering perfectionist, and the older I get, the more I come across examples (both online like this and also in my real life) where you can do everything right and still end up losing big.

The best thing you can do when you see something like this is to pat your fellow human on the back and say, ā€œman, that really sucks, Iā€™m sorry.ā€

The worst thing you can do, as evidenced in this story, is to cuss out some teenagers.

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