More than 100 million individuals had their private health information stolen during the ransomware attack on Change Healthcare in February, a cyberattack that caused months of unprecedented outages and widespread disruption across the U.S. healthcare sector.

This is the first time that UnitedHealth Group (UHG), the U.S. health insurance provider that owns the health tech company, has put a number of affected individuals to the data breach, after previously saying it anticipated the breach to include data on a “substantial proportion of people in America.”

Really, really hard to feel any sympathy for this organization when you read this a few paragraphs down in the article:

According to its 2023 full-year earnings report, UHG made $22 billion in profit on revenues of $371 billion. [Andrew Witty, CEO of UHC] made $23.5 million in executive compensation the same year.

Let’s say you invest in state-of-the-art workforce development programs, advance threat detection solutions, zero trust and identity management solutions, resilience infrastructure, and throw in some R&D.

Let’s even give UHC the benefit of the doubt and assume they have done all of this.

How are you able to walk away with $22 billion after you’ve allowed the PII of nearly a third of Americans (myself included) to walk out the door and into the hands of cybercriminals?

Nobody else is angry that this news isn’t blasted all over this election cycle?

Nobody else thinks we should be holding this conglomerate’s feet to the fire for this breach?

I’m not here to minimize the importance of other issues like border security and women’s reproductive rights, but I haven’t heard any politician make noise about our horribly inefficient healthcare system at all during this election cycle.

Why can’t we stop picking fights with each other and focus on addressing the systemic issues which lead to companies selling us all out in the name of shareholder value?

“Mom, look at THIS!” said her son (age 6) producing a balled-up fist in the air. Then, as if peeling a banana, he pulled out a tiny middle finger. There it was. In the upright and locked position.

“THIS” was none other than the oh-so-satisfying one finger salute.

🖕

“So, what did you do to him?!?” I asked my Jacksonville neighbor Louise between chuckles.

“I wanted to laugh. But, I remained calm. Validated his frustration at not getting a third popsicle. And explained why THIS wasn’t a good expression of anger.”

Louise then shared her belief that kids need to be a little weird and wild at home. That it’s okay for them to get their “crazy out” at home so they can be (slightly higher) functioning individuals out in the world. Kids, she said, need to trust that they will be safe and loved no matter what. That doesn’t mean she doesn’t discipline, she just doesn’t lose her cool over it.

Sounds like some Dr. Becky-style parenting skills in action here.

Lauren goes on to explain how crucial it is for us to have a space where we can retreat to and be ourselves.

When my daughter stomps her foot and growls at me like a cartoon character when I ask her to brush her teeth, I can’t help but chuckle and say, “you know kid, I wanna do that all the time, too.”

When my son screams in my face because I make him, uh, get dressed in his Halloween costume to go to his school’s Halloween party, I can’t help but chuckle and say, “I get it, man. It sucks to be told what to do.”

One thing that’s been massively helpful in keeping my anxiety and depression in check is to give myself space to be myself. The full version of myself who doesn’t have to censor his out-there thought process for fear of being misunderstood and ridiculed.

My journal is my number one place for this freedom. This blog is my second.

I just finished up my second week in a job. I emphasize the word “job” because I haven’t really had a job in nearly fifteen years. Being in charge of a business is totally different than working for a business.

Working for a business requires conformity by definition. You can’t be cowboying off and doing you own thing if you want to build a system with repeatable success. I get it.

One way I hope to grow at my new job is to figure out how to maintain my individuality and uniqueness while making meaningful contributions to the collective effort.

In other words: how can I be happy and “myself” being the guy rowing an oar in the bottom of the boat rather than being the guy who pounds on the timpani?

Tradeoffs exist; improving one aspect of a system can make other aspects worse. As projects grow, our control over them shrinks. Ugly truths abound, and beauty is a luxury we can rarely afford.

Knowing this, however, does not mean accepting it. Confronted with this dissonance, this ugliness, we inevitably gesture towards a better future. We talk about better design, better practices, better processes. We await better abstractions. We imagine a world in which we cannot help but make something beautiful.

This belief in the future, in an unending ascent towards perfection, is a belief in progress. The flaws in this belief — its internal tensions, the fact that it is closer to a theology than a theory — have been pointed out for centuries. It is, nevertheless, an inescapable part of the software industry. Everything we do, whether design or implementation, is oriented towards an imagined future.

This is a beautiful sentiment about software systems which could easily apply to most any system (like, our political and social systems, for example).

If you’re thinking, “Figure out the kinds of sequences that generate good responses,” you’re still looking for essences. You’re seeking a list of words that can make someone excited.

Instead, the process of making something that people want is the process of learning, through experiment and error, to be the kind of person who can generate needs, wants, and jobs in other people. 

This kind of person is one who notices that a new restaurant in their neighborhood has a line out the door. Instead of walking by, they walk in. 

They stop to notice the soft, earthy color palette of its interior decoration, one that evokes a coastal Mediterranean village. They see the way its menu layers in unexpected ingredients like za’atar, cinnamon, and chile as subtle references to other cultures and traditions. They notice the feelings that this sequence of experience evokes in them, the way it feels familiar and also pleasantly surprising. They know that if they linger on these feelings, they’ll be able to evoke them later—for themselves and for others—in a logo design or an article.

I’ve been trying to be more aware of things happening to me lately.

I know I can be in my head, a million miles away from reality unfolding before me. I feel more comfortable there, if I’m honest. Reality can be uncomfortable, not quite right for me.

As it turns out, when you retreat from reality too often, you start to forget that while it can be uncomfortable sometimes, its contents can be incredible.

I’m finding that the moments I am aware of what’s happening around me are when I am the happiest.

And it turns out, paying attention to reality with your own unique perspective can really make a difference for others.

I was afraid I had become too cynical to find excitement in technology again. It wasn’t true.

While I’ve grown more cynical about much of tech, movements like the Indieweb and the Fediverse remind me that the ideals I once loved, and that spirit of the early web, aren’t lost. They’re evolving, just like everything else.

One thing that excites me about the web is our ability to communicate effortlessly with other people across the world.

It still feels like magic every time I get an instant message from my friend in Uruguay.

Hell, I spent several hours on video chat with my coworker from Brazil today. How insanely cool is that?

I think I just want to find interesting problems to solve using that tech, which feels a bit like “I have a hammer and I’m looking for nails.”

I’m just grateful that people want to pay me to play with computers all day.

Productivity is a topic you have probably searched for on Google. There are thousands of gurus trying to sell you the idea of the ultimate system when, in reality, it is simpler than that.

Don’t be fooled; productivity is not about complex systems or automating everything. Productivity is about knowing when to push and when to stop, understanding what to do and what not to do. Above all, it’s about thinking long-term and pursuing things that genuinely interest you.

What follows is a solid list of simple tips which help keep you focused and productive.

We don’t relax when we can trust the people around us. Maybe we can relax when we prove ourselves worthy of trust. At least in the small things.

We can do the small things. We can live in small moments. We can find hope and love in the people around us. We can stand watch for them, and in turn, they will stand watch for us.

This past year continues to be one where I am peppered by realizations that are only obvious by taking the time to, um, realize them.

One of them is that I take for granted all of the various chores that my wife does around the house.

I’m a lazy person, I’ll admit it. I’d rather spend 100 energy units thinking up a way out of doing a chore than the 3 energy units it actually takes to just do the chore.

And it’s awful to have realizations like this one because, unless you’re an unempathetic jabroni, you feel instantly guilty for being such an untrustworthy person.

I’ve been trying extra hard to build up better habits around my chores. But I think this quote from Mike Monteiro hits me hard because I feel such strong anxiety when I’m procrastinating.

Maybe I need this in my quote rotation as a reminder that beating that particular form of anxiety is the easiest one to defeat. All you gotta do is do something.

I was listening to a podcast episode the other day while I was driving and in there there was a thought that stuck with me: the idea that the web is moving from a creator economy to a curator economy. With a web flooded with AI generated slop and the platforms themselves encouraging it, the role of curators is gonna become more and more important. Who knows, maybe with a digital world filled with low-quality garbage we’ll find refuge in old-school printed magazines.

I would love that!

I recently watched the Dogtown and Z-Boys documentary, and one point they made clear was that so much of early skateboarding culture was shaped by misfits around the country reading the same skateboarding magazines and being inspired by the same people.

Shared culture is something I find myself missing these days. Unless you and your friends are watching the same stuff, you quickly run out of things to talk about.

It’s great I have a place to talk with people about the indie web or large language models or The Simpsons, but I miss the larger, more generic topics that we can all bond over more easily together.

I’d share screenshots of these things, but one of the primary reasons I’ve been enjoying myself so much while making them is because they are literally only for me to see or use. I’ve gone through creative periods where I’m coding outside of work but in the end it has always been shared to some kind of audience - whether that be the designing and coding of this site or my CodePens. This is different.

Robin Sloan coined these type of apps as home-cooked. Following his analogy, technically I am a professional chef but at home I’m creating dishes that no one else has to like. All the stuff I have to care about at work - UX best practices, what our Community wants, or even the preferences of my bosses and colleagues re: code style and organisation can be left behind. I’m free to make my own messed-up version of an apricot chicken toasted sandwich, and it’s delicious.

I’ve been doing the same lately, largely driven by how easy it is to get these home-cooked apps off the ground using LLMs.

My favorite one so far is a tool for helping me manage my sound and public address duties for our local high school’s soccer games. I whipped up a form which lets me set some variables (opposing team name, referees, etc.) and it spits out the script I need to read.

It also contains a mini sound board to easily play stuff like the school’s fight song when they score.

I hope nobody else ever needs to use this thing because it’s certainly janky as all hell, but it works exceedingly well for me.

I’m sure most people are aware of how expensive it is to go out and see shows, but I’m not sure if most people are aware of why.

This video does a great job of explaining how the Ticketmaster + Livenation monopoly works.

We’re quickly approaching election season here in the US. Growing up, the importance of an informed electorate was driven into my brain.

This is the kind of stuff more voters need to be aware of. How do monopolies form? What market conditions lead to consolidation of power, and how do we hold those in power accountable?