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.
A race against software calcification
Eventually, software is very hard to change. There are numerous reasons for this, and they often don’t even involve the software. The systems that run the software are old, regulators don’t let you change things, security controls, people have just forgotten how to program COBOL. There is so much code that it’s hard to know what the code does.
So when you want to change it, you don’t know what to do.
“Oracle’s predicament is more acute than the hyperscalers’. Its business is smaller, its pockets shallower and its lot hitched more tightly to the fate of a single customer, OpenAI, which accounts for over half its $500bn in pledged revenue.”
Recently in the Netherlands:
The group of people experiencing anxiety or depression has grown over the past ten years. In 2014, it was 36 percent, and last year almost 44 percent. The increase is particularly noticeable among young people and women.
More than half of Dutch renters ages 18 to 34 fear they will not find a rental home because of high rents and growing competition among house-hunters, as the supply of available housing continues to shrink.
🔗 Over 40% of Dutch have anxiety or depression; 1 in 20 receive mental health treatment
“The question that actually determines success is simpler—and almost never asked: Are we ready to operate a private cloud as a product for the next 3–5 years?”
“a new AI-infested economy”
“Let’s say one person forgot to pick up groceries or didn’t accurately recall a conversation; the other would say, ‘Oh, you’re gaslighting me. This is psychological abuse,’” he said. “But they weren’t. They were just having what I would consider pretty normal miscommunications.”