The new mid-life crisis is reading Proust.
Posts in "wastebook"
“We shall endeavor to survive the loss of your opinions.” Westenberg.
There’s a fine line between “charming” and “annoying.”
What would an annual intellectual purge look like? Accounting for and getting rid of unfinished thoughts and beliefs to start fresh, rather, declutter the mind. The goal is something like inbox bankruptcy.
As I get older, I need to do less “let’s see what happens.”
It is hard to keep up with American corporate smile-energy.
The curse of enterprise maturity
Enterprises have a habit of “professionalizing” consumer tech by adding control - security, compliance, cost management, approved architectures. All reasonable. And often exactly what kills the thing.
Heroku and early cloud worked because they removed friction: no tickets, no permission, no approved stack. Developers could move fast, make local tradeoffs, and live with the consequences.
Enterprise adoption usually means re-introducing the friction the tech was designed to eliminate. It’s called maturity.
Sometimes, you accidentally delete a paragraph of text and it’s not in the undo buffer for some reason. And most of those times, it’s good to think: I probably didn’t need that anyhow.
Even after 3 years of tuning ChatGPT to be my best dumb friend, I keep getting told to cut the shit with my rambling, e.g., recent faint praise from the robot for my attempt at re-stating an answer: “You’ve basically got it; the only thing to do now is sharpen the tool so it’s usable without sounding like a philosophy seminar.”
What you’re putting off now is not going to get any easier or less boring to do in the future. So, try to just do it now and gift yourself future self the lack of that bullshit.