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Financial options live in highly liquid markets. You can hold an option on a barrel of oil without knowing the first thing about drilling, and extract value purely through arbitrage. Human value is illiquid and depends on compounding. You can’t buy mastery of a hard skill, a deep friendship, a sense of community, or a real reputation on any spot market. None of it exists in a liquid state. These assets accrue only through the sustained, irreversible investment of time and attention. ...

When we record every casual encounter, we’re optimizing for “Information Retrieval” at the expense of “Relationship Formation,” treating our friends // colleagues // loved ones as data sourced to be mined, rather than co-conspirators in the brilliantly messy and intentionally unquantifiable business of being alive. — I’m Begging You to Leave Your AI Note-taker at Home

[…] LLM-generated prose undermines a social contract of sorts: absent LLMs, it is presumed that of the reader and the writer, it is the writer that has undertaken the greater intellectual exertion. (That is, it is more work to write than to read!) For the reader, this is important: should they struggle with an idea, they can reasonably assume that the writer themselves understands it—and it is the least a reader can do to labor to make sense of it. ...

Emphasis mine: On my first solo two-night camping trip, I forgot to bring a backup battery to charge my laptop or phone. I was car camping, so I could have charged them that way, but I felt like that was outside the spirit of the exercise, and inconvenient anyway. So instead, I mostly kept my phone turned off. Very quickly, I started being able to think about aspects of my situation that had been too overwhelming, too in motion, to get leverage on the day before. Because I wasn’t dealing with them. I wasn’t keeping up with anything. I was just present, where I was. I wished I’d done this years ago ...

Poor is the person without Slack. Lack of Slack compounds and traps. Slack means margin for error. You can relax. […] Slack permits planning for the long term. You can invest. Slack enables doing things for your own amusement. You can play games. You can have fun. Slack enables doing the right thing. Stand by your friends. Reward the worthy. Punish the wicked. You can have a code. Slack presents things as they are without concern for how things look or what others think. You can be honest. ...

I’ve been thinking about doing this exact thing recently. I was so delighted to run across this post and WriterDeck.org. After reading through this, I installed Ubuntu 26.04 on my Rapsberry Pi 4 B and did this exact thing using Sway: tldr: I installed console-only Debian on an old laptop (no desktop OS at all) I added some packages to make it work better for writing: network-manager for connecting to hotspots while I’m away kmscon for custom fonts and more than 16 colors in the tty tmux for a nice status bar and rudimentary screen tiling, as well as acpi and light for battery and backlight details, respectfully neovim as my editor and vim-vimwiki to give myself a personal wiki syncthing to sync and backup my work — It’s time to talk about my writerdeck by Veronica Explains

In my view, the current core AI skill is shifting as much work onto AI agents as possible, without going too far. Many people are under-utilizing agents: not allowing them to investigate bugs or test their changes, or not throwing enough simple tasks at them. Other people are over-utilizing them: using them to write messages that ought to be hand-written, or trusting them to make sweeping changes that need careful human review. ...

Give me a blank page of my notebook and my pen — I shall fill that page in no time. I’ve been doing this for years now. It doesn’t matter the problem, something with math and numbers: paper and pen. Org structures? Paper and pen. Blog posts? Paper and pen. This seems to work because the human mind abhors the emptiness of a blank page. I typically juice the cycle by writing a heading, a date, or any one liner associated with what I want to think about to get things moving. From there the mess happens, scribbles and words. They are disjointed but reconfigured with arrows. In all of that, my thinking solidifies, and the idea takes hold. ...

Thanks for Simon Willison for the link. […] Between 2000 and 2024, farmers sold in total a Colorado-sized chunk of land all on their own, 77 times all land on data center property in 2028, and grew more food than ever on what was left. None of this caused any problems for US food access. And then, in the middle of all this, a farmer in Loudoun County sells a few acres of mediocre hay field to a hyperscaler for ten times its agricultural value, and the response is that we’re running out of farmland. ...