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Every post I publish represents at least two things I’ve learned: the thing that prompted me to write the post, and the thing I learned in the course of writing it. If I don’t learn anything new while I’m writing, it’s not interesting enough to publish. […] I think the core reason this works is that every single one of my blog posts argues a point. I never publish a post that just gives some scattered thoughts on a topic, or a post that only says “yes, I agree with this other article”. If I write a draft that nobody sensible could disagree with, I scrap the draft. Making sure that everything I write is at least minimally controversial is a forcing function: it forces me to think about what the most interesting part of my position is, and it forces me to do enough research to defend it against the obvious criticisms. ...

This was a helpful reminder to focus on the basics first. For the median well-off Silicon Valley person spending money on longevity, two free interventions dominate the entire effect of everything they buy by a wide and somewhat embarrassing margin: Get enough sleep, and… Don’t be lonely. Everything downstream of those two things is, at best, rounding error, and at worst, a way to feel like you’re doing something so you don’t have to do the hard things. ...

Among other things, Fong argues that Costco’s limited selected raises its average product quality. This is similar to to Joan Westenberg’s argument as well. In other words, winnowing selection is a service, not a limitation—especially with Costco’s product catalog. Costco is not known for having the cheapest goods, but it is known for having the cheapest price on its goods, and that is because its buying team has closer relationships with suppliers than any other big retailer. Such scrutiny and communication point away from low-road suppliers. This is a structural effect of Costco’s conscious choice to offer a low SKU count: fewer products to investigate means more time to investigate each product, and a natural gravitation away from the bargain basement. That its member-customers have come to expect a certain quality of everything in their stores reinforces this dynamic. ...

Here’s the thing no one acknowledges about the entrepreneurship narrative: it’s written by survivors. The people who write the books, give the TED talks, and post the LinkedIn manifestos about “betting on yourself” are, by definition, the ones for whom the bet paid off. You don’t hear much from the ones who went back to traditional employment after three years of grinding, a depleted savings account, and a marriage that got stress-tested past its limits. ...

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