When I’m not talking, just walking (which is most of the time), I try to cultivate the most bored state of mind imaginable. A total void of stimulation beyond the immediate environment. My rules: No news, no social media, no podcasts, no music. No “teleporting,” you could say. The phone, the great teleportation device, the great murderer of boredom. And yet, boredom: the great engine of creativity. I now believe with all my heart that it’s only in the crushing silences of boredom—without all that black-mirror dopamine — that you can access your deepest creative wells. And for so many people these days, they’ve never so much as attempted to dip in a ladle, let alone dive down into those uncomfortable waters made accessible through boredom.

For me, from this boredom—this blankness of mind as I walk past sometimes fields and sometimes giant gambling pachinko parlors—words flow. I can’t stop them. My mind begins writing about what we see and refuses to shut up. That gap created by a lack of artificial stimulation is filled—thanks to the magic plasticity of our brains—with words and more words. Without Candy Crush, an inverted event horizon spawns, and out shoots: thoughts. I dictate as I walk.

During the peak of mobile app madness, iOS and Android developers would often find themselves cornered by friends, relatives, and random people at parties.

“I’ve got a great idea for an app…”

More often than not, this dreaded sentence would be followed by a hard sell when the developer didn’t display adequate enthusiasm. If the developer didn’t act fast and feign the exact right level of approval — enough to communicate they ‘got’ the idea but not so much that they’d be asked to build it — the idea guy would advance onto hashing out NDAs, equity allocations, and asking when coding can start.

Recently, I’ve noticed the AI era is a bit different. The balance of power has shifted. Builders need domain experts as much as domain experts need builders.

You can no longer simply copy an app model with a few improvements or obsess over user feedback as you sharpen your prototype towards product-market fit.

To build a differentiated AI product you need training data and examples curated by a domain expert.

I don't think the role of a software engineer is going to go away, but I do think personally, I'm not gonna cut it anymore as "just a software engineer."

The real value is in pairing someone who knows how these AI systems work with someone who knows how to get deep with a real world problem.

The modern advertising apparatus exists to bypass rational thought and trigger emotional responses that lead to purchasing decisions. A sophisticated machine designed to short-circuit your agency, normalized to the point of invisibility.

“But it's free speech!”

Bullshit. No one is entitled to yell at you “GET 20% OFF THIS UNDERWEAR YOU GLANCED AT YESTERDAY” with a dopamine megaphone in your bedroom. And to track 90% of your life to know when and how to say it. That's not free speech, that's harassment.

Been thinking about this article for months now.

My mortgage was recently purchased by Rocket Mortgage¹. As a result, I now receive mail from them several times a month.

Each envelope looks identical, but the contents are either (a) urgent information related to my mortgage, or (b) an advertisement to take out a HELOC through Rocket Mortgage. Therefore, I have no choice but to at least open every single envelope to see what it is.

Your blog is a radio station.

Every time you publish a post, you are programming your station. You are choosing what goes into rotation. Some post types are your familiars, the topics and themes readers already associate with you. Some are deeper cuts, things that matter to you but may not matter to everyone. Some are experiments, signals sent into the dark to see if anyone recognizes them.

Reminds me of the blog post I recently shared about how a good blog post is actually a complex search query.

This whole article is the encouragement I know I'll need to be brought back to at some point. Some great passages from Brian Eno in here:

One thing experience shows us over and over, if we pay enough attention, is that the way out of such suffering, out of the abyss of self-concern with our mattering project, is always unselfing. Eno describes the cycle:

"It goes like this: me thinking, “What’s it all for?/ What’s the bloody point?/ I haven’t done anything I like and I don’t have a clue what to do next/ I’m a completely empty shell.” This lasts two days or so… Then I suddenly notice — apropos of something very minor, like the way a plane crosses the sky, or the smell of trees, or the light in the early evening, or remembering one of my brother’s jokes — that I am thoroughly enjoying myself and completely, utterly glad to be alive. Not one of the questions I asked myself has been answered. Instead, like all good philosophical questions, they’ve just ceased to matter."

(Hat tip to my buddy Scott for the link!)

The Klan of the 1920s wasn't just a racist organization, they expanded their hate to include Jews and Catholics and immigrants (which back then were largely one and the same, as many Jews and Catholics had recently immigrated to America from Eastern Europe, Germany, Italy, and Ireland). Expanding their hateful scope brought them huge success. The Klan of the 1920s had millions of members, a women's auxiliary, and a Junior Klan for kids. They were also politically powerful, the driving force behind the Immigration Act of 1924, which would pass 10 days later and create the US Border Patrol.

So the Klan gathering in South Bend—billed as a "May festival, celebration, and parade"—was different. Sure there would be a barbeque and a parade, but this was a show of force too. In many ways this "Konklave," as their gatherings were known, was the culmination of the Klan's anti-Catholic bigotry. They boasted that 50,000 Klansmen, women, and children would descend on the town to take part in what was expected to be a weekend-long celebration. DC Stephenson, the grand dragon of the Indiana region, and HW Evans, the imperial wizard of the national Klan, were on hand to speak. This was a big deal. This was a chance for the Klan, at the very height of their political power, to show the Catholics of Notre Dame where they stood.

Except.

Except that on this day, students from Notre Dame—back then still a men's school—were waiting.

When the first trains arrived, students beat the Klansmen so savagely that they retreated back onto their train cars.

I had no idea there was such a straight line from the politics of the KKK to the foundation of the U.S. Border Patrol.

“Sometimes — or a lot of times,” I hedged, “when people think about environment and climate news, they think about doom and gloom. What, if anything, makes you feel optimistic these days?”

There was a long pause. An almost uncomfortable stretch of silence. Finally, Amy spoke.

“I will be totally honest and say, I think there is something about that question — nothing personal — but this is a question that we’re asking ourselves over and over again in a world that I think deserves a little bit of pushback.”

I still have the recording from that interview. The moment when Amy said “nothing personal,” I can hear myself murmur and gulp. I gulped! I remember feeling nervous to hear her answer. I was surprised she was going off-script, and unsure where we were headed next.

“I think optimism and hope are important things to have,” she conceded. “But I also worry about that frame, because I think that there’s a way that we — especially people who are living in relative comfort and relatively privileged societies — focus a lot on how bad the news makes us feel, and how we need something good to make us feel better.”

At this point, I’d stopped typing. I trusted the recording and just listened to Amy’s words.

“It’s a totally valid question — but I also feel like I’m getting asked it so many times,” she continued. “I think we need to be focused much more on what we are going to do. What are we doing? Let the doing — the action, and the solutions-building — be the thing that brings us hope. You get optimistic by doing the work.”

There’s considerable correlation quality between optimism and hard work.

This article explains how database indexing works in a way that feels hyper-targeted toward me: using a database filled with Pokémon.

Tracking every single song I listen to seems to be a habit I built a long time ago and can't seem to shake.¹ My tracking tool of choice continues to be last.fm.

I recently stumbled across this site that downloads your entire history of tracks and presents the data with some seriously fun charts and graphs.

You can look at mine if you aren't a last.fm user yourself. I could stare at the race chart all day.

And tonight, the category is: covers that go hard.

These madlads are back in the kitchen throwing down hard to perhaps my favorite System song.

How dare they. How dare they.

My daughter is gonna go nuts for that alto sax solo.

Of course that song won a Grammy this year.

From that first strum in Tema de Guile, I was hooked.

Edit:

I woke up this morning and the algorithm delivered me more SFII content, this time in the form of Japanese jazz fusion.