Mindblown: culture, urbanism, leadership, technology.
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happy birthday
My birthday starts in ten minutes. I grew up in the cold war ten miles from a SAC base, so we didn’t bother with duck and cover or fallout shelters — we were dead if the nukes flew. So not knowing if we’d make it another year isn’t a new feeling. But it has been…
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send an email…
I think that seeing idiots try to use the tools you use all the time (and take for granted) is maybe more depressing than seeing them try to use tools that you don’t know about. “take 15 minutes at the end of the week to write me an email that I can read in 5…
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too abstract
Abstraction is the practice of peeling away the unnecessary, the unimportant, and the unwanted to arrive as some ideal, yet unreal representation of where you started. It happens in any discipline where we try to represent the real world in a fabricated realm of ideas or concepts. In computing, abstraction takes on a guise of…
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motd: 20250222
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occupying the space of opposition
It has been 31 days since Donald Trump took office and began to keep his promises to systematically destroy the United States for the benefit of those who need no help amassing power and riches, and in that time there has not even been token resistance from the Democratic Party. Instead of wielding the same…
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Don’t hold bombs for those who call you “enemy”
I’ve squandered my time on this Earth in workplaces awash with acronyms and can say without pause that acronyms in the non-infrastructure civilian world provide negative value. When you don’t say the words they stop having meaning. This is fine when you are in the military and everyone is trained up and kept sharp because…
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motd: 20250215
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motd: 20250208
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a thought exercise
Imagine, if you will, that on the day you were born, you were handed a trust fund designed to run out the day you died — 100 years later. Every day of your life, you could spend some of that trust fund, and on the final day, you’d spend the final penny.1 How much would…
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minutes watched
Streaming sites evidently measure how much you like something by a metric called “minutes viewed” which really ought to be “cumulative minutes viewed” (if this was advanced stats for sports, it would be called CMV) because it is a measure of all the minutes that any client watched the show. Which is… weird, like, as…