I have been grieving for 18 months. Maybe more. One loss after another. Mostly invisible. A shrinking job title that enabled my team to grow stronger. An industrial scale disruption that is melting my craftsmanship into machine learning. Relationships not meeting me where I thought they would. It’s been a stripping away of false identities and latent securities to find what I really value and what truly endures. I’ve been mourning in the unseen world where ideas, hopes, and expectations eventually meet reality.

“Imagined futures” are becoming grieved losses as each arbitrary evaluation horizon comes and goes. None of these expectations were owed to me, promised to me, or even alluded to me. And now they’ve eluded me. The grief shows up whether the desire earned it or not. I truly am God’s image bearer—I’ve created something out of nothing. That’s not quite right. Desires aren’t nothing, and emotions are definitely something. Out of nothing, I’ve created disappointment.

And yet, I’m happier than I can ever recall. My connections with my wife and children are stronger than ever. I’ve come to realize those are the constants I care about most. Everything else is free to be variable and volatile. I can’t control any of it. And the constants don’t ask me to.

I’m embodied and emboldened by this nervous system. Dis-regulation and all. Who called it a nervous system, anyway? Why not a “courage system” or a “hope system?”

I suffered a real loss today. My uncle died. He’s gone. We’ll never laugh together again. That’s an imagined future that cannot be pursued. I’m mourning. It’s good to grieve.

Kenneth Chavious was kind, patient, and generous. He came to my graduations. He endured my angst. He smiled and laughed at every opportunity. I miss my uncle Kenny.

I’m going to continue missing him indefinitely. I’m not going to miss out on my next imagined future.

Alone is good entertainment. I keep showing up to watch it despite the familiar story arcs and predictable outcomes reinforced across several seasons. Each year I say “we don’t need to watch this, it’s just gonna be more of the same.” And then we watch each episode as rapidly as it’s available depending on when we locked in to the release cadence.

I’d like to see a companion show to bridge the gap between seasons of Alone. Connected. The premise of Connected would be endurance, just like Alone. But instead of going into the wilderness to survive on bushcraft, the contestants go into a one bedroom apartment to live a larp of luxury. They’ll inhabit the kind of cookie cutter apartment buildings that show up adjacent to the interstate in developing cities. Perfectly curated to live a simple life.

Contestants can choose any 10 items for their stay in this monument to suburbia. Instead of choosing amongst hatchets, saws, or bows and arrows, they choose which devices they’ll need to thrive in their frictionless survival. They can have laptops, phones, e-readers, coffee brewers, pots, pans, utensils, treadmills, washing machines, dryers, a bed, a book, a mirror, anything. It’s their choice, just like Alone.

Running water, unfettered internet access, and a reasonable monthly budget are provided. The only thing contestants are not permitted to experience is the real witness of another human being. All interactions must be mediated through a screen. Any arrival of supplies or exchange of services happens in an air-lock style entryway with no liminal interactions with another human.

Contestants can order anything they want and have it delivered within their budget. They can sign up for Netflix. They can subscribe to an AI companion. They can send their laundry to a dry cleaner if they opted to forego the machine. They can invest their money in the market and increase their capital if they want to take that risk. These contestants live as hyper-connected as possible in the digital world, and see how long they can endure.

Contestants tap out by walking out. No calls for retrieval. Just a step outside the one bedroom apartment.

Medical checks don’t exist on this show because the apartment is filled with closed circuit cameras that are running all the time and vitals are recorded daily. If someone is going to be pulled for medical reasons, there is no hint from previous checks or the periodic feedback of possible decline. When the decision gets made by producers, the air lock is replaced by the door opening straight into the natural world. Every time a contestant prepares to fetch new supplies, they face the dread that they might find themselves losing. It’s a constant anxiety engine to know they’re always being monitored but never receiving feedback about how it’s going.

The winner’s reward is a pension that pays exactly enough to cover a one bedroom apartment with utilities and match the contestant’s monthly budget for the rest of their life. The reward for enduring Connected is guaranteed provisions to pursue connection.

The still small voice of RSS feeds emitting from personal websites is my favorite part of the web. The acts of expression and bids for connection that made the early 2000s web fun are still present, they’re just drowned in the volume of commercial adaptations. You’ve gotta work harder to find the signal and drown the noise, but the dream of the 2000s is alive in hypertext.

I’ve been enjoying two experimental RSS readers.

• Reeder reimagines RSS feeds as a social media timeline. Working through items like an email inbox is replaced with scrolling through timelines.
• Current leans hard into a metaphor of content flowing by in rivers and streams. There’s still marking things read, but the key interaction is releasing content from the body of work. Optimizing for flow.

Both of these apps drop the notion of unread counts, which is a welcome omission. I jump into RSS feeds to graze for interesting ideas, not to manufacture a todo list. When I was building an indie RSS reader a few years ago, that was my key design decision. Even though that ambition stalled, it’s nice to see that leaning validated in emerging alternatives.

This is what I love about simple and stable protocols. When the means of exchange are agreed upon, the receiver is free to interpret the payloads in new and interesting ways. There are many ways to see the world (wide web). Agreement on protocols enables wild experimentation in both production and interpretation.

I’m guessing we’ll see an abundance of slop apps in this space in the coming months and years. And we’ll engage in a higher order task of separating the noise of abundant tools to find the signal of an RSS reader that niches down on a reading experience that matches the reader. Both the means of production (ai slop content) and the means of distribution (ai slop reader applications) are being accelerated and amplified. Is there any audio engineering tool that handles over-amplification? Gain? Compression? The core need remains making meaningful connections with other human beings.

Anyway, if you’re into RSS feeds, maybe give these two readers a shot.

I’m sorry for 40’ish repeat entries re-appearing as brand new and potentially unread in your reader of choice multiple times over the last few days. I’ve been doing some housekeeping ‘round here, and I was moving fast to get through the migration so I can get back to sharing words on the Internet with as little friction as possible.

Potential causes of the noise:

1. Stabilizing on a canonical URL structure
2. Moving from my bespoke static site generator to jekyllrb (RIP)
3. Moving from an assumption of noon to building tooling that always gets my publish Date into a DateTime and down to the second
4. Implementing the Atom feed with jekyll-feed, which uses timestamps as unique identifiers
5. Not liking that, and some of the other choices made by jekyll-feed, so I replaced it with a custom template

Things should be stable now. If things continue re-appearing, please nag me as best as you know how, and I will find a fix!

This is a second test of my Apple Shortcut for publishing content. I expect this to show up as a post with a title, even though it’s only two sentences.

I woke up at 2:30am this morning. Not because I’m stressed. It’s because I’m excited. I’ve got big kid on Christmas morning energy. That feeling when you have a pretty good idea of what will be under the Christmas tree based on requests, but won’t know until you gather together and unwrap the gifts. Anticipation fulfilled by magic.

Then I learned Santa was my parents. The gifts kept showing up but the magic was gone. My hard earned knowledge about how Christmas worked and how to get on the nice list melted away. I still woke up early, but not quite as early. Comprehensibility made things less meaningful, somehow.

There’s a gap between finding out and becoming. A season where the magic is just gone and nothing replaces it.

Then I had kids. I stay up late assembling bikes. I eat the cookies and drink the milk. I’ve embodied the spirit I’d stopped believing in. The magic gets made by those who show up.

Here are two pieces of simple advice that make a difference in my work. Things flow smoother when I remember to embrace these rhythms.

18 minutes

A deliberate 18 minutes can keep most work days on track.

1. 5 minutes at the beginning of the day: plan the outcomes to focus on and what to ignore
2. 1 minute at the beginning of every hour: check in with your plans, and recalibrate as necessary
3. 5 minutes at the end of the day: reflect on what actually happened and find a way to be 1% better tomorrow

At each step, write things down. These notes can be ephemeral and tossed at the end of the day. But the writing is part of the magic.

Be specific about what, when, and where. Visualizing the action in space and time increases the chances of making it real.

I don’t remember where I heard this advice. If you’re familiar, I’d love to give proper attribution.

30 seconds

Take 30 seconds to write down the most important thing after any meeting, conversation, or otherwise significant moment. It can be a few things, but it doesn’t need to be mountains of text.

I remember where I picked this up because I saved the link and the most important pullquote (to me) on my own website.

Passing the time

Don’t create distinct notes for every meeting, conversation, or otherwise significant moment. Just keep a daily append only log as you would on a legal pad. Life is lived linearly and memories are sorted out at rest. Synthesize the daily notes at the end of the week if you must. Only then do you add brief insights to long standing notes representing ongoing commitments and projects

Throw out the daily notes after a while. Or put them on an external hard drive so there’s actually a cost to retrieving them. This will force memory to form about what matters, action to make it meaningful, or both.

Be a human. Use computers. Or pens and paper. Quit fighting the hardware.

I’m noticing a shift as I work with LLMs. I used to manipulate my code as if sculpting angels in the architecture. Each program was a cathedral housing ornate beauty. The code I generate with LLMs is an airport parking structure. Pure utility with the necessary materials.

Both structures have their purpose. Sacred spaces for quiet reflection serve my needs. Protecting my wheel vehicle while I travel in a wing vehicle also meets a need.

I’m witnessing a realtime rebalancing of my values. I’m following curiosity faster. I’m delaying craftsmanship until there’s proof of utility. This is a positive change for me. I tend to get stuck in prematurely predicting what a solution will need rather than attempting to produce a system I want. Yes, code is just another avenue for humans to express and distinguish their wants and needs.

I want infrastructure for making human connection. LLMs for building pipelines feels right. LLMs clogging those pipelines with slop isn’t interesting. And yet, “the medium is the message.” The medium is produced by the statistical average of the next token that should appear. Perhaps it’s modernized as “the mean is the message”—the computed average of logarithmically accelerating messages received is how we interpret the world, and decide what to do next.

Man’s search for meaning (pun intended) should not decline to the mean because of this new mode of operating. Satisfying the search for meaning requires choosing, not averaging. I’m using the means of production to build infrastructure, while keeping the search for meaning for myself. The parking structure exists to get me to the cathedral faster. Maybe the real cathedral was the curiosity I followed along the way.

I’m building this personal website with the help of LLMs. I wrote these words with my own hand using Bear for iOS and Bear for macOS. You long press the dash to insert an em-dash on iOS. You chord option-shift-dash to type an em-dash on macOS. Just because the computer predicts em-dashes too often doesn’t mean it’s not the character I want.

Acceleration of discovery, not delegation of meaning, is the key.

Matt Webb’s idea about agents acting on Reminders inspired me. So I built Thaings.

Thaings adds agentic workers to my to-dos in Things. It’s AI inside of Things. Thaings. You get it.

I’m really proud of the name. It’s a testament to the creative energy I can manifest from pursuing something with a stupid name.

Here’s how it works. I manage my to-dos in Things, same as ever. If there’s ever a to-do that I believe an agent can complete, or at least accelerate, I select the to-do and call an Apple Shortcut. The shortcut broadcasts information about the to-do to my ~/.thaings folder, where an orchestration of scripts communicates receipt by adding the Working tag and begins executing on the to-do. The progress from working is reported back by appending to the to-do’s notes and replacing the Working tag with the Ready tag. I am the human in the loop, so only I decide whether or not it is ready to mark complete. If it’s not quite there yet, I can add more notes and re-broadcast back to Thaings by re-invoking the shortcut.

I’m shelling out to Claude Code under the hood. Which means this only works on macOS. There’s probably a better way to make this generic so the shortcut and it’s side-effects could run across all Apple platforms targeting a plurality of LLMs. The first exploration of this idea was actually completely self contained in a Shortcut. It worked, but completely relied on a one-shot request/response assumption. It would use “Ask Claude” on iOS, and “Execute Shell Script” to call Claude Code on macOS. And even though it worked, seeing all those one shot chats when I opened the Claude app was gross. And even though the platform-dependent branching both returned strings, Shortcuts wouldn’t accept that reality and provide the control flows I wanted.

The invocation of the shortcut with to-dos selected is kinda goofy. I experimented with Things’ “Find Items” action in Shortcuts as the mechanism for finding to-dos within a specific project, with a specific tag, etc. In practice, Shortcuts is paranoid of this interaction that results in sending a bunch of Things data to a shell script. It asks for permissions every time, no matter how many times I select “always allow”. I’ve got a few ideas on ways I can try to code around this. Or maybe leveraging LaunchAgents and AppleScript to potentially rely only on actions within Things, and eliminate the need for the shortcut entirely. That would cement the constraint of working only on macOS.

So that’s Thaings. Is it useful? Maybe. I’ve been able to execute on a few to-dos without leaving Things. Was it fun to build? Heck yeah. Building is the best part.

Use Things and Claude Code and wanna kick the tires? Installation instructions are in README.