Let’s start with my belief that a manager’s job is to tell you where you are, and a leader’s job is to tell you where you are going.

This is a good place to start. Management and leadership are a venn diagram. The orientation towards presence and futures tracks for me.

transaction costs are collapsing. The activities that used to require organizations can increasingly be performed by individuals with the right tools.

Coherence is a differentiator and is difficult to scale. LLMs can accelerate towards coherence of fragmentation. The transaction costs that justify the formation of companies are disappearing. This was Nobel Prize worthy insight 90 years ago, and unimagined edges of the bell curve are coming into view.

Context engineering is the art and science of curating what will go into the limited context window from that constantly evolving universe of possible information.

Sounds a lot like living a life. Choosing what to hold onto and what to discard. We do this all the time.

I’m starting to think lan­guage models are a fun­da­men­tally manic technology, in part because they operate exclu­sively through logorrhea, the “yeah, yeah, YEAH!” of the all-nighter.

Everyone could benefit from having an Andrew W.K. hype-man by their side every now and then. While exhilarating during show time, operating in a manic state with no regard for steady rhythms is no way to live a complete life.

Since I updated to MacOS Tahoe 26.1 the open/save dialog of Finder became unbearably slow, like five seconds for every navigation step.

Same story here. A Duck Duck Go search landing me on a personal blog saved the day. Here’s the solution in my own voice, in a place I control.

# In Terminal.app
rm ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.appkit.xpc.openAndSavePanelService.plist

Joan has articulated something I’ve been feeling deeply. I’ve always sucked at the pursuit of Zettelkasten, but felt like I just wasn’t trying hard enough. I’m immediately embracing my own metabolism as I get back to work after a long winter’s nap.

the core idea is simple: information should be treated like food, not furniture. I don’t keep every meal I’ve ever eaten stored in my basement. That’s a disgusting notion. I eat, extract the nutrients, and let the rest go. Ideas have a half-life, and clinging to them past their expiration date actually poisons my ability to think clearly.

I reviewed old notes recently. Can confirm they’ve lost some nutritional value.

you’re not building a Second Brain; you’re building an anxiety management system that happens to look like productivity.

So much of GTD systems are activities masquerading as productivity. I need minimal organization that helps me achieve the results I want.

The note is documentation of a transformation that has already occurred. Deleting the note doesn’t reverse the transformation.

Notes as documentation, not aspiration.

The person who reads a book, thinks hard about it, discusses it with friends, and then forgets most of the details has genuinely engaged with ideas. The person who highlights the same book, exports their highlights to Readwise, auto-syncs them to Notion, and never looks at them again has performed the ritual motions of intellectual work without the substance. One of these folks will grow. The other will grow their database…

“The ritual motions of intellectual work” are some times necessary. Sometimes ritual and routine gets me through a drab season. But I ultimately need actual intellectual work that is making life better for some subset of humans. It’s about human connection, not information accumulation.

But that’s not what we use the Internet for anymore. These days, instead of using it to make ourselves, most of us are using it to waste ourselves

The tools haven’t changed. The derivative tools offered for mass appeal are limited. There’s a growing sentiment that it’s time to get back to the basics of what made the Internet compelling.

The blank page is an infinite canvas. The network of computers is ever expanding. Of course there are limits, but they’re not a limiting factor for the needs of today. There’s room to create and share at any scale.

The shape of media shapes our available thoughts.

The format [of a blog] accommodates the actual texture of thinking, which is messy and recursive and full of wrong turns.

The format [of social media] actively punishes nuance, which means that a thoughtful caveat reads as weakness and any acknowledgment of uncertainty looks like waffling.

I want to think well. So I will write in my own space.