rent is the most you’ll pay, whereas a mortgage is the baseline.

My lived experience bears this out.

Forced mobility of this kind is an emerging theme of the 21st century, in contrast to the discretionary mobility that defined the 20th, which began with the advent of the automobile and ended with supersonic air travel—a century characterized by technology expanding the physical scope of life, propelling us faster and faster, juicing us up with kinetic energy until we seemed to overdose on it, a moment perhaps symbolized by the weaponization of airplanes on 9/11.

In a 2019 newsletter, I quoted Alain Bertaud’s observation that “the new proletariat in places like the United States no longer consists of industrial workers, but rather people who are forced to commute for three or more hours a day because they can’t live near their jobs” The same motorized transport that was once pure luxury is now as likely to be a curse.

Luxuries becoming curses is something I’m on the lookout for. Access to information. The immediacy of cellular communication. Working from home. Doordash.

The luxuries in themselves aren’t the problem.

I no longer believe I have the answers for anyone but myself.

One of my favorite acronyms and one of the first I heard was for the word SOBER: Son Of a Bitch, Everything’s Real.

I haven’t mentioned the improvements in my relationships because they are so close that all I can really say is, life is all about relationship—to everything and everyone.

Something I’ve been encountering time and time again is the difficulty of getting both “good vibes” and “good ideas” in the same movement.

This tension is real in many domains.

Custom Elements seem designed for providing (wait for it) custom elements (markup), while framework components (old and new) put more focus on combining all the elements into reusable templates.

This distinction between “custom elements” and “reusable templates” is helpful. Many (not all) framework component authors don’t believe their consumers can be trusted with the raw materials. So they provide a templating language instead of composable pieces.

The auto-register idea towards the end of the post is compelling. If quickly defining templates with slots is what you need.

I love seeing a desktop progressive web application that just works. A Great little utility. And greater inspiration for what can be achieved by going with the grain of the web these days.

The mix of status quo bias, organizational inertia, satisficing, risk aversion, and incrementalism is a recipe for change aversion. And everything is OK until it isn’t (at which point you have zero adaptive capabilities and can’t weather the storm).

Principles to build by.

The Henry Ford quote is so well known in product development that I don’t need to to quote it here.

“faster” wasn’t the selling point of cars over horses. Speed wasn’t the problem. Spending huge amounts of money, time, and space on keeping horses alive and dealing with the literal horse shit was the problem.

Those original problems are so far removed from modern day. It’s not intuitive to imagine the problems I’ve never had to solve. It’s intuitive to substitue my modern problem of speed over everything.

TL;DR: Henry Ford did not say “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”. He pretty much said the exact opposite.

Listen to people. Get their point of view. Discover their problems.

I mean a much more general notion of “ability to absorb or respond to change” – change of all sorts, including both bugs or failures, but also change in product needs, change in the market, change in the organization or team composition, whatever.

The true competitive advantage is being able to adapt to changing conditions.

A system with no slack is efficient as long it works, but brittle and will break down quickly in the presence of any changes to its usual operating modes.

When we accuse a system of being wasteful and inefficient, it’s worth pausing to ask what that “waste” may be buying. When we set out to optimize a system, pause to understand where the joints and flexibility in the current system are, and which ones are vital, and to do our best to preserve those. When we set metrics or goals for a system or a team or an organization that ask for efficiency, let us be aware that, absent countervailing pressures, we are probably also asking for the system to become more brittle and fragile, too.

“Become more fragile” is not something I would wish on any team. This is helpful framing.

A beautiful little site with big opinions about web typography.

publishing conglomerates don’t care about readers; they only care about customers. If they had their way reading would be 100% digital, because they continue to own and have complete control over digital books, which cannot therefore be sold or given to others. They are the enemies of circulation in all its forms, and circulation is the lifeblood of reading.

Circulation is a word worth dwelling on. Even at rest, there is constant circulation of certain resources.

Ambition is when you expect yourself to close the gap between what you have and what you want.

Entitlement is when you expect others to close the gap between what you have and what you want.

For decades, scientific studies suggested moderate drinking was better for most people’s health than not drinking at all, and could even help them live longer.

A new analysis of more than 40 years of research has concluded that many of those studies were flawed and that the opposite is true.

Whoops.

What I’ve learned since, mostly through designing thoughtful processes that nonetheless failed, is that good process is a deliberate tradeoff between quality and overhead.

This reads like the managerial manifestation of “do you want more boilerplate or more magic [in your codebase]?” Nobody likes having more overhead…but nobody likes defaulting to uncertainty to handle routine situations, either. Knowing that the tradeoff must be made made feels like the smallest increment of progress.

The technologies that most empower humanity almost always produce a shadow ledger of pain. The steam engine unleashed the industrial revolution and brutally shortened life spans. Nuclear technology can power energy reactors or atomic bombs. The internet makes us productive and unproductive, delighted and miserable, informed and deluded. Like the future of everything else, the future of work will be, above all, messy.

There is no silver bullet. Every benefit has associated cost(s).

I try to have the things in my life — particularly books, media, and software — be as high quality as possible, because I enjoy having a nice life where things work and I am surrounded by beauty. Seeing people transfixed by a machine that can generate massive amounts of mediocrity is baffling to me.

Flattening the curve on creativity.

The home is no longer seen as a space of personal expression or comfort, or as the backdrop of everyday life, but primarily as an investment and as an asset—meaning that enforcing one’s aesthetics is a financially detrimental decision. Those with the capital to become homeowners (already a diminishing segment of the public) conceive of their houses as being for selling before they even live a day in them.

Curating our personal space for hypothetical mass appeal is dumb and I want to be done with it.

I like having a mix of bullish and bearish thoughts about ChatGPT and large language models. This critique is worth the time.

[ChatGPT] wants to incrementally bring us to the conclusion that “overreliance” is actually convenience, the classic affective alibi for all forms of imposed automation: Why would you want to bother with the effort of thinking? Where is the edge in that? Why struggle internally with how to express yourself when you can instantly produce results? Why struggle to find new kinds of consensus with other people when all the collaboration we need is already built into and guaranteed by the model? What’s more robotic than doing what society tells you to do and being part of a group?

A prediction engine will flatten the discourse toward acceptable mediocrity.

Convenience has also long served as a way to repackage isolation as a treat.

Geesh. Individual microwave meals come to mind on a completely different horizon of technological advancement. How convenient it is to dine alone in perpetuity.

I love a good CSS baseline to make things look halfway decent.

I’ve always wanted to be one of those kids in my computer science classes that routed all traffic through an SSH tunnel. This is an approach I can keep up with.

An ode to the hyperlink. Practical advice with a focus on accessibility for all.

A to-do list isn’t a catch all. It’s not a list of tasks that could be done. It’s a ruthlessly prioritized list of tasks that must be done.

Each and every item on a to-do list must earn its spot. If a new one is to be added it must at least be better than the bottom item on the list.

A set of criteria I’m apt to adopt. I’m great at the capture step of Getting Things Done methodology. The act of capturing is not enough proof of worth. Catch and release is an available strategy.

of course people think we’re in a computer simulation. We always conceive of our minds as a dominant technology of our moment.

This historical trend is a new insight for me. How does the availability of a metaphor shape our mind’s relationship with our bodies? Does reaching for virtual private servers instead of managing racks of hardware cause a devaluation in the embodied experience? Are there trends of (un)health that correlate with hardware choices? Does using Docker cause a person to have a more compartmentalized form of attachment?

I always forget this so here’s a reminder for the future: books are always the answer when things suck.

Six tight paragraphs about a reader’s relationship with books and self.

• Read books to stay healthy
• Discard books without a second thought

Build your own news feed

A beautiful imagining of RSS, web clips, and other bygone ideas that need to come back to the forefront.

There’s a lot of nuggets of truth in this post. Worth the read if you’re into (engineering) organizational leadership & health.

The reason most written strategies don’t apply is because they’re actually visions of how things could ideally work, rather than accurate descriptions of how things work today. This means they don’t help you plot a course through today’s challenges to the desired state.

I’ve been encountering this in multiple spheres. Changes in habits are necessary as an organizations grow. Changes in individual habits are slow. Incremental adaptations are the basis of transformation on all horizons. Writing things down should be mostly an act of documentation. Maybe 5% of a document should be testing out a mutation that you’d like to be true.

Once you’ve documented them, discussions will happen more frequently, which will create a persistent pull towards improvement. It’s better to go slowly than to avoid starting altogether.

This also matches my experience. Action begets action. Documentation unearths differences. The key is making sure everyone understands that mutual understanding and shared clarity is the goal. Most documents are editable. Most decisions are reverisble. And most decisions are small bets. One foot in front of the other makes for a nice walk in the park.

At what point do you realize the engine you are building is the one that’s preparing to run you over?

Dilution, added sugar, and individualism sells better than ritual and intimacy. The former is what we want. The latter is what we need.

Authenticity concerns aside, a powerful reason to NOT use ChatGPT to write stuff on your behalf is that it will prevent you from thinking.

Every time I write to think I’m happy with how I spent my time. The anecdotes are true. Writing (in english) before writing (in code) produces better solutions. And clearer scopes for dividing up the problem.

A blog post from the author of The Psychology of Money. Providing a fly-by view of some attitudes that emerge. Particularly of those who are entrenched in their habits.

Some immediately actional advice to start making better use of your time. From the author of 168 Hours.

I think we’ve lost the idea that there is such a thing as professionalism, but I think we need to bring that back.

This entire article is helpful. Some companies need to inject more empathy into their culture. Others need to quit calling a business a family and bring back the idea of professionalism.