And so I remain at an unresolvable juncture: the intersection of the very strong belief that we must experiment with new modes and systems of communication, and the certain knowledge that every time I so much as glance at anything shaped like a social feed, my brain smoothes out, the web of connections and ideas I’m weaving is washed away, and I tumble downstream, only to have to pick myself up and trudge heavily through the mud back to where I belong.

It’s exhausting. It is, at this point in my life, unsustainable. I cannot dip into the stream, even briefly, and also maintain the awareness and focus needed to do my own work, the work that is uniquely mine. I cannot wade through the water and still protect this fragile thing in my hands. And perhaps I owe to my continued senescence the knowledge that I do not have time for this anymore. Perhaps it’s age that grants the wisdom to know where my attention belongs and the discipline to be able to direct it. The great power of a middle-aged woman is that she knows where to give her fucks.

This is such a beautiful article, a great example of what it means to have a vision for your own life’s work and to go for it.

This website is a container that fit my needs around the COVID era, but now? I’m ready to start fresh. Dream big. Figure out what it is I want out of this site and start making it that way.

The same dreaming is also taking place in meat space. My wife gave me permission this week to build a new shed and a new mini office in our backyard. I get to spend all winter dreaming of what I want to see, and then I get to spend all spring / summer / fall making it a reality.

Perhaps related: I haven’t had a nightmare in months now. I’ve had a few bad dreams, but nothing close to the paralyzing terrors that met me nightly for around a decade straight.

Life’s good right now.

Because this is how we are conditioned to see value: we are only valuable if we do x,y and z – this is also how we value other people and our selves. It perpetuates an insidious suffering because very few people are truly loved or seen. We are not loved for who we are but the roles we play and the actions we make. Obedience is seen as a great virtue. Wanting to live in a way that we want is seen as selfish. When other people get to live in an unconventional way they want we ostracise them for it. If I didn’t get to do this, you can’t do it too. If I suffered, you should suffer too. Sometimes weird shit happens even if we do societally-valued things. For example, if we start caring about our health by eating better or exercising more, suddenly we start getting comments about how we are too health-conscious and should loosen up more.

If we spend a few moments thinking about this, it is shocking how little space we have to be our selves. Who exactly are our selves anyway? We may not know because we did not have the time, space or permission to unfold. We spend so much time and energy chasing the goals we think we want, without contemplating why we wanted them in the first place.

Another one I got a sore neck from reading because I found myself nodding vehemently the entire time.

Too many bangers to pull out of this one. Well worth a full read. But here are a couple juicy pull quotes to whet your pallette:

Programming lures us into believing we can control the outside events. That is where the suffering begins. There is something deeper happening here. This is not just about software.

I believe sometimes building things is how we self-soothe. We write a new tool or a script because we are in a desperate need for a small victory. We write a new tool because we are overwhelmed. Refactor it, not because the code is messy, but your life is. We chase the perfect system because it gives us something to hold onto when everything else is spinning.

I’m trying to let things stay a little broken. Because I’ve realized I don’t want to fix everything. I just want to feel OK in a world that often isn’t. I can fix something, but not everything.

You learn how to program. You learn how to fix things. But the hardest thing you’ll ever learn is when to leave them broken.

And maybe that’s the most human skill of all.

If you're ready, step in.
If you’re not, keep performing.
If you don't have a choice, I see you—and I hope you get free.

But know this:
You are not the problem.
The system was never built for you.
And you don’t have to shrink yourself to survive it.

I’m not here to help you bounce back.
I’m here to help you stop pretending.
And start returning.

Saw this on Brad Frost’s site and felt compelled to share it here.

I do wish I saw it three years ago, but hey, “second best time to plant a tree” and all that.

Every way I turn I am having to scale back on my ambitions of what I can accomplish. I am simply not going to be able to maintain a suite of healthy and fulfilling friendships and nurture a loving marriage and raise a teenager I wasn’t expecting to raise and be great at all of my hobbies while also participating in direct action mutual aid and harassing my elected representatives for being shitheel cowards and working a full-time job and keeping up with new frontend frameworks in my spare time and I guess learning Rust because apparently that is the thing that will optimize my employability once AI has eaten my corner of the software world. I do not have enough time in the day. No one has enough time in the day! The thing about getting older is that it is a process of accumulation, you accumulate people and stuff and responsibilities and moral obligations, and you can only Marie Kondo yourself out of so much of it. My dentist gets on me about flossing and I want to be like, motherfucker when? I know it’s only a couple of minutes a day but do you know how few minutes we all have?? Did you know the earth is going up in flames??? And you want me to FLOSS???? And host my own read-later service????? Why is this the reality we live in??????

I put this as a reminder in my phone to share a couple weeks ago, and I keep re-reading it and lolsob’ing every time I do.

This perfectly encapsulates life in the 21st century. 11/10 rant, A+++, would read again.

The last vial contains a flame within. It tells you to wake up each day with the bright eyes of the child you still are, even if he is hidden somewhere inside you. To do things with love. To live believing that everything is possible, even though deep down you know the odds are against you. To keep playing and to keep doing new things, because there is nothing braver than doing something a thousand times, even if you do it wrong a thousand and one times.

So yes, you can build yourself a life like Sam Hinkie’s; or you can doggedly pursue your passion for a single idea, like Kati Kariko; or you can follow your curiosity where it leads and then “connect the dots in retrospect,” like Steve Jobs; or you can master a complex skillset that allows you to provide for a vital human need, be it via medicine or accounting or sports or food preparation or software development; or you can be an artist, or a craftsman, or a homemaker, or a Renaissance (wo)man, or a community-builder, or any of the countless forms and combinations of well-lived lives that have been and have yet to be conceived. 

Choose with the knowledge that almost any choice is better than a default on choosing, and that most choices (with some obvious exceptions) are two-way doors. 

But choose with full awareness that what you’re choosing, what you’re building, is a life; your life. It’s never just “this moment,” or “this job”, or “this relationship”; it’s a point on your timeline, an inextricable part of this one precious, singular span of existence you get to design. So if you find yourself conflicted between “present you” and “future you”, the solution is not to sacrifice either one to the other; it’s to solve the underlying design problem.

Pairs nicely with this line from Rush’s “Freewill” which often drops into my head:

If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.

Whenever I talk about a knowledge win via robots on the socials or with humans, someone snarks, “Well, how do you know it’s true? How do you know the robot isn’t hallucinating?” Before I explain my process, I want to point out that I don’t believe humans are snarking because they want to know the actual answer; I think they are scared. They are worried about AI taking over the world or folks losing their job, and while these are valid worries, it’s not the robot’s responsibility to tell the truth; it’s your job to understand what is and isn’t true.

You’re being changed by the things you see and read for your entire life, and hopefully, you’ve developed a filter through which this information passes. Sometimes, it passes through without incident, but other times, it’s stopped, and you wonder, “Is this true?”

Knowing when to question truth is fundamental to being a human. Unfortunately, we’ve spent the last forty years building networks of information that have made it pretty easy to generate and broadcast lies at scale. When you combine the internet with the fact that many humans just want their hopes and fears amplified, you can understand why the real problem isn’t robots doing it better; it’s the humans getting worse.

I’m working on an extended side quest and in the past few hours of pairing with ChatGPT, I’ve found myself constantly second guessing a large portion of the decisions and code that the AI produced.

This article pairs well with this one I read today about a possible social exploit that relies on frequently hallucinated package names.

Simon Willison writes:

Bar Lanyado noticed that LLMs frequently hallucinate the names of packages that don’t exist in their answers to coding questions, which can be exploited as a supply chain attack.

He gathered 2,500 questions across Python, Node.js, Go, .NET and Ruby and ran them through a number of different LLMs, taking notes of any hallucinated packages and if any of those hallucinations were repeated.

One repeat example was “pip install huggingface-cli” (the correct package is “huggingface[cli]”). Bar then published a harmless package under that name in January, and observebd 30,000 downloads of that package in the three months that followed.

I’ll be honest: during my side quest here, I’ve 100% blindly run npm install on packages without double checking official documentation.

These large language models truly are mirrors to our minds, showing all sides of our personalities from our most fit to our most lazy.

I’m a sucker for this style of post. This one in particular is jam packed with so many great pieces of advice that I had to read it three times before sharing it.

Here’s the very first item on her list. If it speaks to you, take ten minutes and thoughtfully consider the other 100 items.

1. You are overly obedient. You not only do what people tell you to do, but find it hard to imagine any world other than the one they present to you. Spend more time thinking about what you want, in isolation from the pressures of the world. (Keep this in mind while you read the rest of this very prescriptive document.)

At some point you have to accept that other people’s perceptions of you are as valid as (and probably a lot more objective than) your own.

This may mean letting go of a false or outdated self-image, including some cherished illusions of unique unlovability.

I recently had a talk with Shannon that was eerily similar to the central conceit of this article.

We don’t get to pick how we show up in other people’s interpretation of ourselves. The author’s story about his dad sleeping at the movie theater next to him is a great example.