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 can’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. 

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. 

You’ve always hated people being wrong, and it turns out a lot of things can be defined as “wrong” if you have the right temperament. Women’s pants have tiny pockets that won’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 can’t tell if this quiz is up to date with the latest recycling advice.

It occurred to me, while rinsing the cup, that I don’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 I’m now 36 years old, success doesn’t really get defined in that way anymore.

I am glad this article surfaced in my Instapaper queue this morning, because I think it’s mostly the article I would’ve written for myself.

I really enjoyed the author’s advice on determining authentic motivation, viewing procrastination as a workers’ strike, and realizing that your taste will often outpace your abilities.

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 it’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?

It’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. It’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 I’m sharing this article is as a case study on how hard it is to moderate a system.

I’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, “man, that really sucks, I’m sorry.”

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

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, announced plans to build a new data center in Rosemount, Minnesota. The more than 700,000 square foot center will be located along County Road 42, just east of the Dakota County Technical College.

During an announcement Thursday, officials revealed the project had been under wraps for several years. They called the secret project "Project Bigfoot."

This will exist roughly a mile from my house.

It’s a lot of feelings, to be sure.

A quibble I have with this report is that I’m not entirely sure we can say with a straight face that Meta is a great representative of “emerging tech”. What does that phrase even mean?

But maybe I’m just being a NIMBY. A hundred jobs at this data center isn’t bad, Minnesota’s cold season¹ is perfect for naturally cooling these systems, and the folks I know who work at the city are extremely capable and thorough; they would not let something like this go through if they didn’t do their diligence regarding impacts to our various shared infrastructure.

So I guess, uh, welcome, Meta? I hope y’all do, as our Iowan neighbors reportedly claim, “step up.”

Seabound’s carbon capture technology diverts a ship’s exhaust gas into a container full of small pebbles of calcium oxide, which chemically react with CO2 in the exhaust gas to form calcium carbonate. In other words, we make limestone onboard ships, effectively locking the CO2 into small pebbles. When the ship returns to port, we offload the limestone and either: 1) sell it for use as a building material, or 2) recycle the pebbles to separate the CO2 from the calcium oxide so that we can reuse the calcium oxide to capture more CO2 on another ship, and then sell the pure CO2 for clean fuel production or geological sequestration.

Our process is unique because we only capture the CO2 onboard and leave it locked in limestone, rather than trying to separate and liquefy the pure CO2 from the limestone onboard as well. These steps of separation and liquefaction are typically the most complicated, expensive, and energy-intensive for carbon capture technologies, which is why we’ve shifted them to shore where we can leverage economies of scale and land-based energy infrastructure.

This is the sort of solution I want to be a part of. How cool of a concept is this?!

My official position is a fact followed by an opinion: The fact is that iOS is built to work best when you just let the system handle things for you. The opinion is that I don’t particularly care how you use your own phone because it impacts me precisely 0%.

I’ve only recently noticed a direct impact on the correlation between my own acceptance of a person’s flaws and the improvement of my own mental health.

There are several posts on here about “letting go” and “dropping fucks” and whatnot that speak to this exact thing, but Matt’s explanation here is beautiful.

It doesn’t really matter why you swipe up on all your apps. If it makes you happy, and you don’t mind the slight hit to your UX by way of a tiny battery drain and longer initial load times, then by all means, you do you.

Reminds me of the Bluey episode where Bluey and Bingo are playing Grannies, and Bingo thinks Grannies can Floss (the dance).

After a bitter fight with her about it, Bluey’s mom says, “Well, do you want to be right, or do you want to keep playing the game?”

I gotta find the video from this and watch it myself, because essentially every single thing mentioned in this article is what I wanna build a podcast around.

Let’s start with this:

As Kwan first explained, modern capitalism only worked because we compelled people to work, rather than forced them to do so.

“We had to change the story we told ourselves and say that ‘your value is your job,” he told the audience. “You are only worth what you can do, and we are no longer beings with an inherent worth. And this is why it’s so hard to find fulfillment in this current system. The system works best when you’re not fulfilled.”

Boy, this cuts to the heart of the depressive conversations I’ve had with myself this past year.

Finding a job sucks because you have to basically find a way to prove to someone that you are worth something. It can be empowering to some, sure, but I am finding the whole process to be extremely demoralizing and dehumanizing.

“Are you trying to use [AI] to create the world you want to live in? Are you trying to use it to increase value in your life and focus on the things that you really care about? Or are you just trying to, like, make some money for the billionaires, you know?”  Scheinert asked the audience. “And if someone tells you, there’s no side effect. It’s totally great, ‘get on board’ — I just want to go on the record and say that’s terrifying bullshit. That’s not true. And we should be talking really deeply about how to carefully, carefully deploy this stuff,” he said.

I’ve literally said the words, “I don’t want to make rich people richer” no fewer than a hundred times since January.

There is so much to unpack around this article, but I think I’m sharing it now as a stand in for a thesis around the podcast I am going to start in the next month.

We need to be having this conversation more often and with as many people as possible. Let’s do our best right now at the precipice of these new technologies to make them useful for ourselves, and not just perpetuate the worst parts of our current systems.

The era of social-media monopolies has been unhealthy for our collective digital existence. The Internet at its best should be weird, energetic, and exciting—featuring both homegrown idiosyncrasy and sudden trends that flash supernova-bright before exploding into the novel elements that spur future ideas and generate novel connections.

This exuberance was suppressed by the dominance of a small number of social-media networks that consolidated and controlled so much of online culture for so many years. Things will be better once this dominance wanes.

In the end, TikTok’s biggest legacy might be less about its current moment of world-conquering success, which will pass, and more about how, by forcing social-media giants like Facebook to chase its model, it will end up liberating the social Internet.

I saw Cal reference this article in his most recent post, and I’m glad he mentioned it because I must’ve missed it a couple years back.

I have been grossed out by TikTok’s blatant predatory behavior ever since hearing how their algorithms work.

Sure, most major social media companies have resorted to similar tactics, but there was something brazen about the way TikTok does it which feels egregious.

Cal’s analysis seems spot on to me. TikTok represents what happens when you’ve won the race to the bottom, or when the dog catches the tire.

As soon as you’ve got the thing, what else is there to do? Where else is there to go?

It’s all sizzle and no steak.

I’m sick of having my attention stolen from me under the guise of “connectedness.”¹ Real connections require compromise, empathy, and growth. Sure, I get some dopamine hits when I see a funny or enraging video, but I don’t seem to get much else.

This rally is so different because no one is beating around the bush anymore. It’s not about technology. It’s not about use cases or improving the world. It’s just, “More people buy, number go up.” The veil has been lifted and we all know it. It’s a momentum trade plain and simple. We turned a bunch of computers into a casino and then dressed it up as something else. 

But people know the truth. I got my hands on an early copy of Nat Eliason’s upcoming book Crypto Confidential that convinced me of this point. The book, which provides an insider’s perspective on the 2021 crypto bull run, made me realize how much of a game crypto is. More importantly, it made me realize how many people know it’s a game as well. They understand the rules and they play accordingly. They know they can get scammed. They know they could lose it all. Nevertheless, they still play.

The article goes on to talk about reasons why people gamble knowing they have little to no chance of winning, and honestly, it’s depressing but rational.

I love the hottest take. 😂

(For what it's worth: I am starting to come around on pineapple on pizza, especially if it's part of a really spicy pizza.

A couple years back, I tried to watch all the MCU movies in release order. I gave up after Winter Soldier. It was just too much. I'm glad superhero movies exist, but they're not my cup of tea these days.)

I just released a feature to this site where blog posts can now be tagged with any number of tags.

You can then read all the posts that are tagged as confidence or music or programming or whatever.

I was extremely inspired by kottke.org's recent redesign. The idea of turning your blog into your own social media stream-looking thing strikes me as one of those design decisions that feels revolutionary and obvious at the same time. I will no doubt try to do something similar to this site right here.

But as I think through the best place to start, I'm resisting my urge to just blanket redesign the site without a plan. And the first step of that plan is to do the tedious work of going through my archives and adding tags to the old posts.

Tags aren't exactly a revolutionary new feature. It took me about a half hour to implement the basics, and then another day or so of tweaking the process of adding them to each post so I can do it quickly.

The reason I wanted to share this as a post is because one unintended consequence of going through this process was [pause for sarcastic and dramatic effect] ... anxiety!

Because of course the creation of a a feature for my site that is read by an exceptionally low number of people must result in getting way into my head about it.

Yesterday, I spent about an hour going through my old posts and adding some tags to them.

As I got deeper into the archives, I kept thinking of tags that would've been great to add to posts I had already added tags earlier.

I found myself getting mad at myself for not being optimized up front and just having a tag list to choose from.

Well guess what, Tim? There’s no way you’ll know what tags you want to add until you’ve added all the tags!

Just do your best, man. Even getting half way is an amazing leap forward. Just keep moving forward.

It's proving to be surprisingly hard for me to not beat myself up over this tag system, which again, is supposed to be fun, you goober!

Here's the best case scenario from doing all this work: maybe these tags will help me articulate the overall themes I cover on my site, to identify the topics I’ve been interested in throughout the last fifteen-ish years.

Here's the worst case scenario from doing all this work: complete and total indifference from the universe.

Note to self: just enjoy getting a chance to go through the clutter of your site and clean it up. It’s fun! Add whatever tags you think will help, and if you get an idea about a better tag later, go back and look it up then!

As you can see, I'm still working on not letting anxiety cripple me from starting and completing a project.

Why am I even stressing about this?

Just go have some fun with your tag thing.

It makes you happy.

That should be enough.