To step into the stream of any social network, to become immersed in the news, reactions, rage and hopes, the marketing and psyops, the funny jokes and clever memes, the earnest requests for mutual aid, for sign ups, for jobs, the clap backs and the call outs, the warnings and invitations—it can feel like a kind of madness. It’s unsettling, in the way that sediment is unsettled by water, lifted up and tossed around, scattered about. A pebble goes wherever the river sends it, worn down and smoothed day after day until all that’s left is sand.

At some point I became acutely aware of a sense of scattering or separation whenever I glanced at the socials. As if some part of me, or some pattern or vision that I cupped tenderly in my hands, was washed away, wrenched from my grasp before I quite realized what it was.

This brilliant post is essentially four narratives weaved into one.

We are still reeling as a society from the impact of the internet. Being able to summon and mobilize our collective attention is not something we evolved to be able to handle.

My generation is the last one who remembers a time before it, but even that memory is slipping away amongst the daily grind of paying attention to the internet.

The early days of the internet felt a little easier to understand. It wasn’t like everybody was on it in the late nineties; in fact, it was usually the dorks and nerds that were on it.

Any community could be represented so long as there was someone nerdy enough to set up a message board and dorky enough to pay for the hosting costs.

And those early days felt like an escape. It didn’t feel like the internet dominated my mind the way it does today.

Today, though, is completely different. The internet doesn’t offer the same sort of escape that it used to. Now, it feels like a compulsion. Something I wish I could stop but can’t easily without resorting to drastic measures like ditching my iPhone.

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.

This is the same conclusion I came to after I did, in fact, ditch my iPhone this summer.¹

I find myself pulling my phone out at night and just sort of staring at it.

Whatever world I’d been building in my mind to that point is completely washed away.

And more often than not, I find myself jumping into the water feet first dozens of times a day, hoping to find meaning, instead emerging each time covered with a viscous layer of grime that leaves me feeling guilty and ashamed.

This realization is possibly one of my most important ones to come out of this sincerely horrifying year.

All of those sleepless nights where my anxiety-raddled brain conjured up infinite scenarios in a vain attempt to derive meaning in a place where none can be found.

It’s time to get out of the water for a while.

The problem with software is that it's too powerful. It creates so much wealth so fast that it's virtually impossible to not distribute it.

Think about it: sure, it takes a while to make useful software. But then you make it, and then it's done. It keeps working with no maintenance whatsoever, and just a trickle of electricity to run it.

Immediately, this poses a problem: how can a small number of people keep all that wealth for themselves, and not let it escape in the dirty, dirty fingers of the general populace?

Such a great article explaining why we can’t have nice things when it comes to software.

There is a good comparison in here between blockchain and LLMs, specifically saying both technologies are the sort of software that never gets completed or perfected.

I think it’s hard to ascribe a quality like “completed” to virtually anything humans build. Homes are always a work in progress. So are highbrow social constructs like self-improvement and interpersonal relationships.

I think it’s less interesting to me to try and determine what makes a technology good or bad. The key question is: does it solve someone’s problem?

You could argue that the blockchain solves problems for guaranteeing the authenticity of an item for a large multinational or something, sure. But I’m yet to be convinced of its ability to instill a better layer of trust in our economy.

LLMs, on the other hand, are showing tremendous value and solving many problems for me, personally.

What we should be focusing on is how to sustainably utilize our technology such that it benefits the most people possible.

And we all have a role to play with that notion in the work we do.

Although he was nominated for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series, Tadanobu Asano lost the award to Billy Crudup. While Crudup's performance as Cory Ellison on The Morning Show is a grounding presence for the outright insane leaps of logic the series can take, I feel that Asano was worthy of a win based on his multilayered performance as Kashigi Yabushige, the servant to Sanada's Lord Toranaga.

Spoilers in this link if you haven’t seen Shōgun yet, but holy cow, yes, Asano 100% should’ve won an Emmy for his performance.

I tend to avoid shows that are incredibly hyped, and I think I’ve had a good track record for doing so. I still haven’t seen a single episode of Lost, and I only reluctantly watched Game of Thrones because the final season was airing when our youngest was born, and it was a good way to kill time while snuggling.

I jumped in with both feet on Shōgun, however, and I believe it absolutely deserves the acclaim. Set aside a few days and binge it.

Specifically, I think Asano's performance as Yabushige was the most entertaining thing I've seen in years. "Multilayered" is a great word to describe it; he communicated mostly in grunts and facial expressions, and even though he constantly stepped on his own foot, you couldn't help but root for the guy.

I look forward to seeing more of Tadanobu Asano in the years to come.

Disposable vape pens are incredibly unsustainable. I’m glad people are finding clever ways like this to recycle them.

In these latter days everybody is familiar with concepts like the carbon footprint, sustainability, and the like. Measures of the ecological cost of the things we do. One of the most irksome problems bedeviling Earth's biosphere at present is the outrageous cost of many aspects of many human lifestyles. Society is gradually and too late awakening to, for example, the reality that there is an inexcusable, untenable cost to shipping coffee beans all around the world from the relatively narrow belt in which they grow so that everybody can have a hot cup o' joe every morning. Or that the planet is being heated and poisoned by people's expectation of cheap steaks and year-round tomatoes and a new iPhone every year, and that as a consequence its water-cycle and weather systems are unraveling. Smearing the natural world flat and pouring toxic waste across it so that every American can drive a huge car from their too-large air-conditioned freestanding single-family home to every single other place they might choose to go turns out to be incompatible with the needs of basically all the other life we've ever detected in the observable universe. Whoops!

This article really lays into Elon at the end, which honestly, as I’m getting older, I feel okay with.

Also: one of my main values in life is balance, which is essentially the goal of sustainability. How can we balance our needs with the needs of our planet?

Like any parasite, our species needs to achieve some sort of symbiosis with our host. You can’t extract so much that you kill it, but you need to live at the same time, so how do you reach that balance?

I finished this video and felt the same way I felt reading Hope and Help for your Nerves: seen.

When I talk to myself, there are times that I say unpleasant things to myself. I’ve spent the better part of 20 years trying to completely silence those thoughts.

When I started listening to them and welcoming them, my depression and anxiety improved almost immediately.

If you feel like you say mean crap to yourself and are looking for a way to stop, start with the advice that Karen Faith gives in this TEDx talk. It’s pretty much spot on, with what I’ve experienced.

I make a lot of small simple websites, I have approximately 0 maintenance energy for any of them, and I change them very infrequently.

My goal is that if I have a site that I made 3 or 5 years ago, I’d like to be able to, in 20 minutes:

• get the source from github on a new computer
• make some changes
• put it on the internet

But my experience with build systems (not just Javascript build systems!), is that if you have a 5-year-old site, often it’s a huge pain to get the site built again.

I have websites that I made in middle school that I’m able to get up and running in roughly as much time as it takes to find the old folders.

I also have websites that I am unable to run on my new laptop because the dependencies are too out of date and now supported on my new architecture.

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.

In summary:

• Facebook is a [redacted] company with a terrible web interface.
• React is a technology created at Facebook to administer its interface.
• React enables you to build web applications and their interfaces the way Facebook does.
• I am not calling Facebook "Meta"
• JavaScript-first interfaces built on ecosystems like React’s are cumbersome and under-performing.
• React prevails because its evangelical proponents and apologists have convinced developers that Facebook’s success can be attributed to technological quality and not aggressive capitalism.

Over the past fifteen years, I feel like I’ve had a pretty good track record of knowing which technologies to pay attention to and which technologies to confidently let pass by me.

When React first dropped, I thought the setup process seemed so onerous and filled with so many dependencies that I slowly backed away and haven't really needed to look back.

It would be irresponsible of me to have zero experience in React, so of course I've inherited projects that others have started on top of it. But every time I jump into a React project, I feel like I’m Homer jumping into his unchlorinated pool.¹