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I saw yesterday that someone had tweeted about a small, local, and not particularly well-written article about the design flaws in Apple’s new flagship Chicago store. John Gruber was mentioned in this tweet at the end via “cc @gruber”, and Twitter showed me that Gruber liked this tweet. That would have been that, except for the fact that when I scrolled up a little more, Gruber, after being alerted by that tweet, had posted a reference to the article on Daring Fireball, his blog that drives a lot of traffic. Wow. A few minutes later, The Verge, with over 2 million followers, publishes an…

I caught myself doing something shady recently and thought I’d share so that you may avoid doing the same. I ought to have known better, but, I was a few weeks into a new feature branch on Standard Notes, and last minute, I needed an important feature to make everything else work. And it got really, really ugly. The background of it is I wanted to sync user preferences to a user’s account, rather than saving just locally. This way if you choose to sort your notes by title instead of date, this preference will take effect on other computers you open the app on. The challenge is, there needs…

A friend of mine is experimenting with a podcast, and at the end of one such experiment (and coming from a finance background), he gave out some tips on stocks you should look into. And while I was listening to that segment, I felt something strange that hadn't materialized so directly in me before: A strong disdain for stocks and stock markets in general. Psht, stocks. I thought it was normal, but after reflecting on it later in the day, I thought, when did that happen? When did stocks become boring? I’ll speak for myself and say: very, very recently. And cryptocurrencies have all to…

The morning is a better time to write. My hands do not hesitate like they do at night, after 80% of my energy has been depleted. My stream of consciousness flows less sinuously, and empties effortlessly onto this ocean of paper. This transcription process is cathartic. The coffee makes me brash. Morning writing gives structure to my day. Waking up is essentially like calling Math.random() on your day. Without structure, it will quickly devolve into anarchy. Rebounding is difficult. Randomness can be good, but best saved for controlled environments, especially when you’re intentionally trying…

For the first time in sixty-something days, I’m legitimately struggling to upkeep the habit of daily writing. It’s not that I’m losing some battle. But, I have most to write about when I’m undergoing some kind of struggle, in which case writing helps me explore that struggle. Now has come time to work, and the struggles I undergo can all be fixed from the command line. Hats off to you Seth Godin. I don’t know how you do it. The habit. That was the important part. The habit is more important than the writing. This started as a “first thing you do when you wake up” type thing. Now it’s…

This is no good. It’s not that I don’t want to write, but just not in the thinking mood. This is getting to be dangerous. I need the consistency of the routine back. But I need to code in the morning. No solution yet. But, the tradeoff has been valuable in many ways. Progress continues on some really cool features for Standard Notes. It’s not just the features themselves that I'm excited about, but the way the features are built and installed. I risk being publicly committed by mentioning what they are, but, it's the only thing that's been on my mind all day, and thus the only thing my mind…

I’m in a generally positive mood today. And I bring notice to this fact only because it is very easy to see, given previous posts, that this isn’t always the case. A friend of mind was asking me how I felt recently after I had messaged him some weeks back about my apparent state of despair. I couldn’t recall what he was referring to, or what state I could have been in at all two weeks ago. He told me it was on December 12, that he sensed I was in a panic. Well, December 12 is meaningless. Unless… Unless I keep a daily log of my days. Wonderful! Finally a use for my uselessness. So I looked…

I’ve been running a dangerous habit the past few days of letting writing occur on a non-fixed time, as opposed to first thing in the morning. But, it felt like a necessary adjustment, as writing first thing would put my mind in the frame of writing, which would not rub off for hours. For me, the morning is the most productive part of the day, so what I do for the first four hours is probably the highest quality work I'll do all day. For the past two months, that’s been on writing this blog and developing a useful habit. But, there are new frontiers now on the technical side of things.…

Get into it and you’ll be into it. It’s so commonly prescribed as to almost be cliche, but we know the hardest part of doing anything is starting it. Starting requires the most amount of energy. But, you only need one Big Bang. Once you start, physics kicks in. Momentum. Inertia. At that point, you’ll just keep going until something stops you. This pervades every corner of our world. Cars make all kinds of funky noises when they start in the cold. But once they warm up, they drive like a dream. It’s a lot harder to start running than it is to stop. Waking up by alarm is hard. But once…

I wrote a few days ago about how the quote “All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone” had profoundly resonated with me, and that I thought I would take that on as a challenge to strengthen my resolve against my monkey-mind. For my own sake, though, I’d like to adapt this challenge to a more modern way of life, in a way that I can benefit from directly. I can expand the definition of “do nothing” to include activities which accomplish productively little as to essentially be a null activity. In that case, cooking can be seen as a do nothing activity.…

In accordance with my recent understanding that it is more efficient to seek help from external sources than to pedantically rely on yourself, I’ve gotten some operations & marketing advice from an operations & marketing savvy person. He immediately opened my eyes to all the wonderful things I'd been doing wrong. Politely of course. But he was right. He saw holes in my strategies in minutes, while I have grown too numbingly close to the problem to have any sort of clear sight. I thought I’d do a quick brain dump of what I learned, and hopefully elaborate on them in some future…

I’ve become increasingly a fan of Naval Ravikant of AngelList. The man freestyles prose on all topics, from life to cryptocurrency. His Twitter bio links to a Farnam Street article, and the article links to a podcast the two of them did together. I am halfway through the podcast and am thus far amazed and astonished at Naval’s eloquence and unstoppable substance spewing machine. At one particular point, Naval quotes the 17th century French mathematician Blaise Pascal who says something that profoundly resonated with me. He says: All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit…

A wild, wild place.

Undomesticated, savage, untamable: these are some synonyms for wild.

Primitive, uncivilized, uncultured, barbaric.

Unpopulated, rugged, rough, inhospitable, desolate, barren.

Stormy, squally, tempestuous, turbulent.

Disheveled, tousled, tangled, untidy.

Unrestrained, out of control, undisciplined, unruly, disorderly, riotous.

The mind is a wild, wild place.

This post embarrasses me in many ways. The first is that I’ll be making extensive Rocket League analogies, which is a fantastic game I play on PS4 (but available on almost every platform). The game is supremely well made, and offers infinite room for self-improvement. There will always be someone better than you, which gives you the incentive to keep playing. The second is because despite having spent many, many hours playing this game, I have today I realized I am pathetically under-skilled. To date, the game tells me that I have spent about 2 days and 2 hours playing the game, which…

I’m in a weird state where all my thoughts are unapologetically raw. By raw I mean unassembled. I have a hundred different variables floating around in my head, and the cruel job bestowed upon me is to figure out how to arrange, combine, and breed them to achieve some sort of increase in progress. It is an absolutely maddening process. The ideal solution would be to iterate over the possibilities like a computer, quickly and thoroughly. But in our world, each of the floating variables requires prohibitive amounts of energy. So the game is made crueler by the fact that your resources always…