3/30/2025

12:26pm

I don't want my writing to be influenced by a desire to make money from it, I want to use it to connect with other people and help make sense of the world. I think that extrinsic pursuits and attachment to livelihood will inadvertently pollute it. At least for me, and at least for now.

3/28/2025

11:31am

Garmin Connect+, "now with AI features" but only a matter of time before they start paywalling what they used to give away for free. The backlash will be fierce, but shareholders don't care about sentiment until it hurts the bottom line, and they are courting lots of new users who want marginally better battery life but still need the (illustrious) shiny AMOLED screens.

It's clear that Garmin has started adopting the enshifficiation playbook. It's going to be moving away from their core value proposition towards courting more users and squeezing more money out of them, and leaving behind the people that used the product for the thoughtful value and experience that it initially offered that differentiated it from its competitors.

If they are wise at all, and don't want to (or care about) alienating early adopters then will will do what Oura and ReMarkable have done and offer lifetime subscriptions to those folks (which I'm sure they won't because they are already a more established brand than that.

3/27/2025

1:56pm

Seeing Charles Barkley doing a Fan Duel commercial hammers home, how much money these gambling companies are willing to throw in to essentially create addiction peddling for sports and how this short-sighted cash grab is going to cause everyone to lose sight of pure enjoyment of these competitive events. But then again, maybe it's gambling is a problem as old as time.

1:09pm

Competition is not, "I'm going to dominate you". It's more playful, collaborative. It's more, "I'm going to set this level, can you match that"? To compete with each other, not against each other. (Via Bill Murray, Hot Ones - talking about improv comedy ethos)

7:45am

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime." - Mark Twain

3/26/2025

7:27am

Have you ever thought that because our brains aren't used to this modern day abundance and frictionlessness, and that it will make up problems because it thinks it needs to stay vigilant for our survival?

3/25/2025

9:29am

I just had this beautiful notion of first appreciating that trees are kind of living organisms and then thinking about the cycle of life and how it'd be interesting to be turned into fertilizer that lives on through a tree and then worrying that the tree could die or get cut down but realizing that then what if a part of me became a book or someone's home and I lived on through that and it was this like really beautiful cyclical thing.

3/24/2025

11:54am

Shareholder primacy is at the core of whats wrong with our tainted flavor of capitalism, the notion that a business should put the interest of its owners first, even if those decisions don't benefit employees or customers in the short term, and all that really matters is more profit in the long run.

3/23/2025

9:18am

Taking notes on my reading feels too chorelike, I'd rather make notes (of the evergreen variety) based on the insights, concepts, patterns, themes and their resonance and relatability to me. Notes that could stand on their own separated from the original context(s) they were pulled from.

This all tracks well with Maggie Appleton/Andy Matuschak's evergreen notes concept. As they are "permanent notes" that grow from "fleeting notes" (from the things I experience, consume throughout my days), that evolve into a library of clear opinions, beliefs, thoughts. They are atomic (capturing an idea concisely and entirely), declarative (statements, commands), and concept-oriented (not bound to any material specifically).

3/22/2025

12:08pm

I had this realization that the movement of playgrounds from wood to metal purposefully perfectly represents industrialization of everything. This movement away from raw material like wood to something that has to be produced and painted like metal. But also that kids can't be trusted with wood because they might get splinters.

It also reminded me much of my childhood was shaped by playing outside, at playgrounds, and camps, and after school programs. A very different, but necessary coming-of-age opportunity than the flavor of parenting I got.

3/21/2025

11:28am

Spotify going to video is going to backfire on them, and it's going to further alienate its customers. Losing sight of their core value proposition, is going to lead to cluttered user experience, an inferior product, in an attempt to compete in an already crowded space. It's becoming clear that growth of users isn't enough for them and their shareholders, they want more of our active time (eyeball hours), and likely more user generated content to make commission on. They are losing sight (no pun intended) of benefits of audio as a (passive consumption) medium. It's time to start feeling out alternatives to Spotify.

3/20/2025

6:41am

Sitting behind a zoomer on plane and fascinated by their phone use. The constant context switching, the quick taps, the effortless speed typing; quickly consuming bite-sized visual media, constant flurries of notifcations. Hasty scrolling, zooming, critquing, but never more than 5 seconds. Moving at this speed there is no time for reflection, no time for dealing with distress. This is part of what is drawing me back to the analog world, to friction, to mediums constrained by the physical world.

3/19/2025

12:48pm

Mobile order pickup at Blue Bottle means customers don't need to interact with anybody. Discourages interaction with baristas, others. 30 second transaction — leaves car parked in two spots, engine running — emblematic of of the side effect of inconsideration that our attempts at efficiency through convnience can cause.

11:31am

Its important to consider the the appropriate contexts for technologies, asking ourselves if this usage or behavior brings us closer together or futher apart. Or if its usage comes at the expense of other's well-being. Tools inevitably change how we interact with the world. We need to build technology that enables experiences and opportunities to bring us closer together.

3/17/2025

7:40pm

Captured by convenience: There is urgency and perceived inconvenience inherent at any efficiency a tool or technology enables. Cars vs. Bikes, Planes vs. trains.

7:29am

Turning the simplicity dial up on my writing would be the equivalent of making good line drawings - selectively choosing which elements of a scene to highlight.

Knowing which elements to include or exclude will come, as you'd expect with drawing, through consistent, intentional practice.

Over time these rules you try to follow will become skills and styles that move from your conscious brain to your unconscious.

Give it time. And practice.

3/15/2025

8:21am

Maybe this notion of nobody doing anything selflessly anymore has probably has to do with the fact that we don't have systems, structures, effective governance in place to take care of people, and they feel like they have to always hustle in order to stay afloat and then step on other people in order to get ahead.

3/13/2025

1:16pm

It's interesting to overhear Meagan say that the creatives produce better work when she is more flexible with them and less pressure. That's what I've found in my own personal creativity recently, and when I let it flourish without stifling it or rushing it. Really blossoms.

1:14pm

I think my extremely peaceful walk through a windy day punctuated by helicopters and leaf blowers really speaks to why some places need to be peaceful and calm and to avoid machinery powered by human energy. (Relates to the whole bicycles versus dirt bike thing that talk I had with Chris a while back)

12:54pm

Today on my morning bike ride, as I was tiring, closing out an all-out interval, I imagined outrunning a previous version of myself (calling to mind Bill Murray's mention of competing with not against myself) as a way to life my spirits.

7:03am

I think in a sense what I was also realized with the constraints of this analog system is that aspiration towards virtual value creation seems limitless but leads to the depletion and exploitation as natural resources and limits that have consequences in the real world that live in but because we live in increasingly in this digital one it's easy to ignore the consequences

6:57am

I'm realizing just like all the UI overlays that Apple's putting in their software (Apple Intelligence and text correction when handwriting, it all makes me self-conscious) that take me out of the moment because they're making me self-conscious the way the self-editing voice does in my head that is another big reason why I'm going to move away from Substack in that kind of ulterior motive profit and growth driven incentives that pollute my thinking and creativity. I want control of platform and publishing if I can have it.

These technologies all have these ulterior motives that they are more explicitly starting to shove down our throats and I think that's another reason we're seeing this analog dedicated devices resurgence

6:12am

Style is a series of choices that we make and formula we develop for representing things in a certain way it's the lens through which we look at the world and the rules that we apply when we try to re-create that.

3/12/2025

4:17pm

World building / fiction / short story idea: what happens in a world where everybody does everything the same, and everything tastes the same, and looks the same. And what kind of boring existence that would be.

This feeling of sameness and boredom with homogeneous. Makes me want to learn into being absurd and writing things that are different and outside of the box. And avoiding places and platforms that pressure me into popularity contests that are races to the bottom of the barrel. This is the appeal of authors like Vonnegut, Bukowski or Thompson who were weird, different, raw, absurd.

2:25pm

It's borderline absurd (but somehow not at all surprising) that some people are so selfish and disconnected from each other as a result of technology (in this case cars) that they will follow behind an ambulance because it means they'll get through traffic faster, with no regard for the potentially tragic circumstances that would call for the need of an emergency vehicle in the first place.

10:33am

We change ourselves (and others around us) with the little decisions we make every day. When we align our actions aligning with our values.

6:58am

"Among all the diseases of the mind there is none more epidemical or more pernicious than the love of flattery." - Richard Steele

This is the danger of social media mind rot.

3/6/2025

5:20pm

We are mistaking the virtual world for the real world, the simulacra and spectacle for the one we actually feel and inhabit.

These streaming platforms are this generation's movie studios and their push towards live events and watch parties underscores that they see the novelty and opportunity in this untapped segment and they are hedging their bets that we will willingly give up the real thing for the sake of comfort and convenience.

3/5/2025

5:06pm

The pandemic accelerated the virtual takeover (for better and worse). Better for knowledge workers to take back their time, worse in many more ways. Virtual interactions, virtual value creation, virtual pseudo-collaboration. We are evolved for the physical world, the tangible, the physical, the imperfect, the a social, a human scale.

3/4/2025

1:02am

Its not about being perfect it's about sharing your growth and journey with others

3/3/2025

2:31pm

When I talked to Michael about feelings of helplessness with current state of the country and politics, he replied that he thinks that are moving away from monoculture, but there has never been a more opportune time to build a subculture that can be a force for good. This aligns with James Clear's notion of changing the world in concentric circles; starting with self (me), then community (people like me), then globally.

3/1/2025

3/1/2025

4:15pm

Productivity is so insidious, much akin to riptide. As soon as you dive in, it pulls you deeper in, and despite how hard you try, you're basically swimming in place, tiring yourself out and more likely to drown in it. The more productive I try to be, the more I feel like I'm falling behind.

Some of this can also be attributed to the tools we try to use to plan. In the real world, when take action there's this friction (confined by the physicality of a thing) and an intentionality that comes from that friction that's like, "I have a limited amount of space, a limited amount of time to do this." It forces me to prioritize and be intentional, whereas like digital just hides all that complexity. Take all of these tabs open on my screen. If this were an actual desktop and these were each little pages on the desk, the desk would be a complete mess.

8:05am

Get it into prose. Encapsulate into paragraphs (building blocks). Distill down the theme and concept of that paragraph. Gather the materials, sort and categorize them, then worry about constructing the building.