Psychologist Paul Bloom's research on pleasure suggests that we derive our deepest satisfactions not from hedonic experiences but from making meaning; not from having but from being; not from displaying but from experiencing; not from accumulating but from connecting.
In response, new status hierarchies have emerged that privilege experiences that money alone cannot buy: deep relationships, creative fulfillment, community belonging, physical vitality, spiritual practice, and environmental stewardship. In some ways, these new status markers are even more rarified than the old ones, if only because they're harder to fake. Anyone with money can buy a Rolex, but you can't purchase the glow of someone who has fulfilled duty, found purpose. You can't buy your way into belonging to a community that values contribution over consumption.
This isnāt to say that material prosperity has been rejected entirely. But it is a more sophisticated, epistemic relationship with wealth ā treating financial capital as just one form of abundance alongside social, intellectual, physical, and spiritual capital.
One of the best parts of going through unemployment was being forced to figure out who I wanted to be.
One way to approach this exercise is to identify what you do not want to be. The easiest entries on that list involved chasing status through my job title and material possessions.
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After asking Henry Rollins if he is still punk at age 64:
I would have to say yes because itās the ideology that has stayed with me: anti-racist, anti-fascist, anti-homophobia, anti-discrimination, and you know, equality, fairness, decency, all of that. To me, thatās punk rock. And I donāt think thatās bad. If I had a kid, I'd say be honest, you know? Find a slow kid in school and become friends with them because people make fun of them. And when people start making fun of him, you know, stick up for him, man, youāll be a hero, youāll lead.
(via Naz)
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Itās not the mistakes that matter. Apple has made them before. The Newton, MobileMe, the butterfly keyboard. What matters is the posture. A company once defined by joyful provocationāby thinking differentāis now defined by its defensiveness. Its leadership acts not like inventors but like stewards of a status quo. They protect margins like relics. They fear dilution. They optimize at the expense of surprise.
Iāve been really into Joan Westenbergās writing here lately. In her most recent post, she compares Appleās current posture to that of Charles V, who had to face Martin Lutherās simple yet devastating observations of where the church was failing.
I canāt say Iām over Apple as a company, mostly because I still am not aware of a better option for the sort of work I do.
But youād better believe Iām on the lookout for a better browser, a better phone experience, a better in-home audio setup, and a better wearable.
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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.
Iām trying to let things stay a little broken. Because Iāve realized I donāt want to fix everything. I just want to feel OK in a world that often isnāt. I can fix something, but not everything.
You learn how to program. You learn how to fix things. But the hardest thing youāll ever learn is when to leave them broken.
And maybe thatās the most human skill of all.
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One thing youāre not supposed to admit to: not enjoying basic activities of hygiene maintenance. I get that itās suspect. I swear to you I do shower enough, but the whole process (the hair removal! the exfoliation, body and facial! the shampoo-rinse-shampoo-rinse-conditioner-rinsing!) is to me tedious at its core, and I know few enough of you all in real life to be able to admit it here.
So: I bought a Bluetooth speaker that claims enough waterproofness for my own plausible deniability to use it in the shower.
This then opens up an important soundtracking opportunity. What is the right music to propel one through the emotional deadness of a shower1?
Maya goes on to recommend froge.mp3 by piri & Tommy Villiers. Listening to it now, I can totally see myself shaving and washing with this album in the background.
It makes me wonder: what albums do yāall recommend for random every day tasks? Like, what are you bumping when youāre folding socks? Or pulling weeds?
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We should stop worshipping numerical comfort. Twenty partial views donāt make a whole picture. They make noise. They make an echo. They create professionalized, sanitized, panel-approved blindness.
If you're lucky enough to know someone with twenty years of scar tissue in a domain, listen. Don't just ask what they know. Ask what they've unlearned. Ask what they stopped saying because nobody understood. That's where the signal lives.
āWorshipping numerical comfortā is a fantastic phrase that Iāll be pondering here for the next few days.
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How did we get here? What can we do? Maybe it starts by trying to just... be normal about technology.
There's an orthodoxy in tech tycoon circles that's increasingly referred to, ironically, as "tech optimism". I say "ironically", because there's nothing optimistic about it. The culture is one of deep insecurity, reacting defensively, or even lashing out aggressively, when faced with any critical conversation about new technology. That tendency is paired with a desperate and facile cheerleading of startups, ignoring the often equally interesting technologies stories that come from academia, or from mature industries, or from noncommercial and open source communities that don't get tons of media coverage, but quietly push forward innovating without the fame and fortune. By contrast, those of us who actually are optimistic about technology (usually because we either create it, or are in communities with those who do) are just happily moving forward, not worrying when people point out the bugs that we all ought to be fixing together.
We don't actually have to follow along with the narratives that tech tycoons make up for each other. We choose the tools that we use, based on the utility that they have for us. It's strange to have to say it, but... there are people picking up and adopting AI tools on their own, because they find them useful.
Is there a ālawā that says the amount someone actually knows about a given technology is inversely proportional to the amount that they hype it?
ChatGPT says itās called āClarkeās Law of Hypeā but I donāt see that anywhere in a Google response.
Looking things up on the internet in 2025 sucks.
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I wish I could say I was past this part. That Iāve grown thicker skin by now. But the truth is, I still care. Not about applause. I care about peopleās time. I care about making things that are worth showing up for. And that pressure? It can be paralyzing.
Still, something in me wants to try. Slowly. Gently. Maybe Iām not going back to who I was. Maybe Iām heading toward something new, something more honest.
This post was extremely timely because I literally talked with my therapist about this yesterday.
Time to get posting!
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Iām writing about this today because itās been one of my ācan LLMs do this reliably yet?ā questions for over two years now. I think theyāve just crossed the line into being useful as research assistants, without feeling the need to check everything they say with a fine-tooth comb.
I still donāt trust them not to make mistakes, but I think I might trust them enough that Iāll skip my own fact-checking for lower-stakes tasks.
This also means that a bunch of the potential dark futures weāve been predicting for the last couple of years are a whole lot more likely to become true. Why visit websites if you can get your answers directly from the chatbot instead?
The lawsuits over this started flying back when the LLMs were still mostly rubbish. The stakes are a lot higher now that theyāre actually good at it!
I can feel my usage of Google search taking a nosedive already. I expect a bumpy ride as a new economic model for the Web lurches into view.
I keep thinking of the quote that āinformation wants to be freeā.
As the capabilities of open-source LLMs continue to increase, I keep finding myself wanting a locally-running model at arms length any time Iām near a computer.
How many more cool things can I accomplish with computers if I can always have a āgood enoughā answer at my disposal for virtually any question for free?
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The single best trait to predict whether I'm looking at a good programmer or a great one is undoubtedly perseverance. Someone that takes to each new challenge like a dog to a bone, and who struggles to sleep until the next obstacle is cleared.
Today (literally today), I delivered the final story for the third project Iāve had at my day job since starting back in October.
This project involved a lot of unknowns and uncertainties, and resulted in a ton of code that was written and thrown away in order to arrive at the final stab at version 1.
It was painful. Ask my wife and sheāll tell you I spent many days in doubt, riddled with anxiety and impostor syndrome, feeling like a fraud.
But then, just like that, Iām able to click the āsquash and mergeā button, and itās done. The clouds lift. Itās incredible.
Sort of reminds me of Courtney Dauwalterās pain cave metaphor. Every time I start an engineering project, I go into the pain cave and start chiseling away at the walls.
Once Iāve chiseled enough, I am rewarded by stepping back out of the cave and celebrating what Iāve built. Itās an incredible feeling.
Itās a short lived euphoria, though. I only get a few moments before I dust myself off, grab a quick bite to eat, and begin my descent back into the cave to start chiseling away on the next project.
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