For a woman raised in the Rockies and settled down in Montana, you’d think I’d be more outdoorsy. And yet I can spend days at a time in just one room with little trouble and even enjoyment.
Even with that wholesome “National Parks” backdrop, I was always a bookish and imaginative child. I was once derisively described as having “a particularly pictorial interiority” by a babysitter.
I don’t have the energy I once did as a girl when I’d spend my time at the barn and loved camping & hiking with my Outward Bound going army surplus shopping Eagle Scout achieving band of hippie environmental teens.
Setting aside the humor of a toking Austrian anthroposophy student projecting onto an elementary student, I am a long winded introvert who writes a lot. They really nailed me.
When the pandemic forced us all inside I had no problem with being home. I did a full three months without setting foot outside the apartment.
As a choice I make for health & preference, it’s a far cry from cultures where women are forced indoors. I’d prefer to be outside more when circumstances allow. They haven’t for quite a few days. But it’s ok, I like being an indoor cat.
It seems to be an absolutely awful week on Planet Earth. War, natural disasters, and human venality are on full display. It’s hard to even read the news, political or otherwise.
In contrast, I am myself in a good news place. I have a few leftover health issues as I leave behind the bout of respiratory issues (Covid’s legacy) but am otherwise full steam ahead.
Because I am so busy I find myself offline and missing things. It’s all good news in my world. And then I come back online to check feeds and it’s just all bad news.
I feel the privilege of it but I am also proud to have this stability. We made choices so our lives could be this way. We value preparedness and the calm that comes from planning.
I wish more people could live this way. Focus shouldn’t be reserved for a select few who can make good big life choices. That can be luck of the draw.
I do believe however it’s possible for many more of us to narrow focus so we can let small good choices compound. It’s good to appreciate the value of limiting your attention to your own priorities.
There is an argument to be made that only once you have steadied your own life can you look outside. Given how crazy the outside world can be give yourself the chance to have good news in your life. There will always be bad news.
I am in a good vibes places right now. I am a bit tired from some whirlwind pacing but feeling very good about how a number of projects are playing out from an amusing purchase to more serious matters of fundraising and deal management.
I do feel the fatigue that comes with running at full speed. I have been hitting it hard in writing and at work this week and it’s only Tuesday (not that I am one for weekends).
It’s the end of my workday as I’m on European time and I still have a few miles to go before I can be done so I’ll keep the post short. If you want to see where my head is at check the links as I did some good work this week.
On a housekeeping note, I’ll be in New York the second week of October and in Miami the last week of October if anyone is either city would like to meet up. I’ll be prioritizing LPs for chaotic as we are raising along with founders and weirdos of all stripes. Just hit me up on DM on Twitter. Or email me but I’m more likely to respond to DM.
I came of age in the blogging era, where we got writing like Joel on Software. I learned to build thanks to other builders sharing their craft and discussing it on forums & personal sites. I had access to the insights of builders like DHH and Alex Payne. Their commitment to publishing accessibility helped onboard millions of normies like me.
In some ways, startups and the software giants of FAANG are a victim of our own success. We onboarded the world to our efficiency.
And now with AI coding software (incidentally trained by Stack Overflow data & GitHub repositories built by my community) we are experiencing a Cambrian explosion level of coding access.
And it’s not Zapier hacks or snide remarks about Rust anymore. Anyone who can think critically about a product feature can build it with clear thinking and natural language.
If history is any indication the growth curve in app building is just getting started. Much awful nonsense will be built and sold, but imagine how it enables those with taste and opinions to make new solutions to our problems.
Ironic a critic of software like MKNDH should play such a role in reminding us of just how hard it is to make something good. Making money though can have a much lower bar.
If you aren’t familiar with the term, it’s an economic and industrial design strategy to deliberately make products with shorter functional lives to “shorten the replacement cycle” aka make you buy a new one.
But right to repair issues and planned obsolescence doesn’t just happen in electronics. It’s a problem in auto repair and home appliances too. Repairing a broken part can be more expensive than buying a new item.
And it’s getting worse. Computer chips are now in everything from your refrigerators and dishwasher to your car. Consumers reasonably loathe the increased complexity and challenges of repairing major purchases when everything is “smart.”
At this point I’m willing to pay more money for appliances with zero smart features and physical controls for everything. @ Kelsey Hightower
And I fear most of our regulatory climate is dedicated to making this problem worse. When Japanese automakers first come to the United States their vehicles had longer lifespans so American carmakers were forced to respond by building more durable products. That was a positive thing.
But geopolitical tensions being what they are the, U.S. Commerce Department proposed a national security ban on certain Chinese and Russian-made car parts from U.S. roads The motive is to protect American consumers from digital surveillance and hijacking. But who knows what gets caught up in the effort as we could be allowing in parts that make it easier to repair our own cars.
If we learned anything from Japanese cars it’s that allowing competition was an unalloyed good. There are cars I wish we had in America like the iconic Toyota Hilux. Here is a synopsis from Perplexity on why the Toyota Hilux is considered to be so durable. It’s got a robust chassis, a simple design that is easy to repair, minimal electronics and high quality components.
But you can’t own a Hilux in America. Why? The “Chicken Tax,” a tariff on light trucks, was imposed by the United States in retaliation for tariffs placed by other countries on American chickens.
But maybe it’s good we Americans can’t have a light truck that is easy to repair and designed to last. The internet has a long lore of memes dedicated to the car’s use in revolutions. You certainly wouldn’t want Americans getting any ideas about that.
A viral parody meme about why the Hilux is the choice for insurgents
I dislike how illness messes with your sense of time. One of the themes of the pandemic was how it affected people’s perception of time. We measure time but our experience of it is harder to pin down.
The COVID-19 pandemic significantly distorted people’s perception of time. Many experienced a disconnection between objective time and subjective time, often feeling that days blurred together or that time moved unusually fast or slow.
Temporal disorientation feels as disorienting as spatial disorientation to me. Getting lost in your own personal time fucks with the reality of consensus reality time passing.
Every time I have a couple of sick days in a row I am fearful. You can reorient if you are lost on a road but the world moves even if you don’t. How do you reorient yourself to time?
We humans live forward. If we somehow find other ways to experience the fourth dimension I’d question if we remain human through that. We understand time dilation but living with time as a concurrent dimension to space and having it be mutable warps the mind a bit.
Maybe it’s always been “strange days indeed” and it’s naivety to think otherwise. You’d think the children of American hippies and yuppies would be some of the most cynical people alive and I’m regularly shocked by the sincerity of normies.
And so while my hippie mother made sure I got all of the John Lennon, even the later years, I can’t say nobody told me they’d be days like these. I pretty much came into this skeptical of authority because America’s baby Boom liberals won the culture war.
A lot of propaganda has been slung for and against Uncle Sam. And we let people talk. Mostly. Media filtered a lot for us and now the internet has broken what little trust we had after Nixon. Not as if everyone remembers how we got here.
Americans barely handle the responsibility of our open information environments any better than your average culture. We let it mostly flow. And now it’s all strange days. If you pay attention it’s hard not to feel like it’s all falling apart at the seams. But maybe that’s normal.
It would appear I have pneumonia. Healthcare being what it is, doctors say there little point in doing clinical testing to find out if it’s bacterial, viral or fungal (unlikely given climate) as the treatment is basically the same. I did a round of antibiotics because why not. Nuke it from orbit.
I’m stuck in bed mostly, my voice comes in and out for the few calls I absolutely must take, and I’m bored and irritated as I would prefer to work though it as it’s exciting times. I’m sleeping like a champion as my Whoop records day after day of long nights of somewhat fractured sleeping are forced by cough medicine into submission.
Having had Covid at the end of May, I now fear being doomed to some degree of respiratory illness risk for the rest of my life though I rarely had so much as a cold in decades of living in a big dirty city. Global calamities leave uneven marks and I consider myself lucky.
The benefit of bed rest is the amount of reading one can get done. My favorite cultural publication Dirt did a Tech Canon overview to get must reads from the slightly more stylish emissaries of the Silicon Diaspora. No offense to Patrick Collison who initiated the discourse with his own list (which is quite good) but it’s good to think outside the empire’s core for the trendy extracurricular bits of the syllabus.
As someone who self labels as a fashion bitch, I was pleased to contribute Neal Stephenson’s bitchy novella on abstraction and the graphical user interface called In The Beginning There Was The Command Line. It’s dated and old and free on GitHub so go read it.
There is quite a range on the list of core texts including a few books and essays that one could easily imagine being put onto banned reading lists. It’s nice that we have Heidegger Zoomers inside the pantheon now.
Schizophrenic philosophy posting is all the rage with the artificial intelligence kiddies. And to think I thought reading Deleuze and Guattari was a waste of time. Do your homework kids so you can discuss rhizomatic thought and large language models at your next conference. Perhaps you can dig into the war machine.
If I’m having a frail Victorian lady kind of week then there is nothing better than attending to the aesthetics of the moment and now you can too! Remember Alex Karp studied under Jürgen Habermas
There is a beloved meme in communities like YIMBYism (a movement advocating for building more housing with the slogan “yes in my neighborhood”) in which the protagonist agonizes over subsidizing demand as the cyclical pattern of rising demand giving rise to rising cost carries on.
“I just need to subsidize demand”
America is a strange place where we espouse a lot of free market policies but we tend to favor subsidies as a solution. Which isn’t always a bad thing. Sometimes there are good reasons for providing support for things that aren’t as commercially viable immediately like pure science or education or other public goods.
It is however not the only policy tool available to people. A fun fact about how I have a good time, my participation in civic life was as an appointee on the New York City Community Boards. I was part of a group who approve licenses and permits for things like liquor and parades and the like. I also served on quality of life and transportation boards. I also did monthly meetings for land use.
I was easily the youngest person who volunteered time and I learned a lot about how damn many rules we have at every level from neighborhood to city and state on everything from ventilation and to environmental review. And some of those rules are pretty good things!
But it would be preposterous to say that all rules are good and that every part of the process of starting a business (large or small) is easy. Some problems you can’t through money at and fix. Or if you can it creates a whole unintended set of other problems. Like paying for lawyers and consultants.
Because Twitter is the land of any old idiot getting a say (just like a community board meeting) I’ve got every flavor of opposition and missing the point on this tweet.
We do a lot well in America. It’s relatively much easier to start an LLC and get a license to do business. Complying with everything from the liquor board to FinCEN will take a little more. Anyone who has run a business can tell you about their corner of the universe and the paperwork involved. Just ask my husband who spends most of his time as a businessman keeping up with paperwork.
I think it’s perfectly fine to be skeptical that throwing more money at a problem like how challenging it is as a business owner to contend with government bureaucracy. Demand subsidies can only fix so mich. It’s just a lot more complicated than that. Be smart and don’t let your head spin like our meme gentleman.
It’s been a weird couple of days for me. It’s been a weird couple of days for just about everyone. At least all of my electronics are intact and no one has tried to kill me right?
I was hoping I’d be on the mend for this pneumonia like thing I’ve had for a few days. I took a Z pack on advice of my doctor. It’s a bit better but I’m still coughing. I’ve got my voice back at least. I keep hoping better medicine will arrive but I’m not getting my hopes up.
I’m going to lay low. I’ll keep it short. Maybe tomorrow I will have more to say and better lung capacity. I’ll keep it light. Lightening up. It’s better than lighting it up.
