Like, there’s definitely a disapproving tone in some parts of this article, but I can’t help but nod and agree.

This analysis applies neatly to the daily lives of secular monks. A feeling of “mundanity” and “diurnality” pervades their existence: The practical conduct of everyday life defines the scope of human existence, with daily affairs, tasks, and projects all shaped by habits. There is no world but this one, no day but today, no self but the one knitted together in this perishable mind-body composite.

Each Calvinist is ascetic inasmuch as he exerts rational, “constant self-control” over himself, so that by means of active supervision, “constant thought,” he can direct his will. His object is the calling, a “mundane occupation” through which he can exercise his will for the sake of God’s glory. He produces fruits, and those fruits might be a sign of God’s favor.

via: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/02/american-loneliness-personality-politics/681091/

And how to build things the right way.

In his first week at SingleTrac, a video game company that made cult classics like Twisted Metal, Jay Barnson discovered the “black triangle” – a way of describing problems that are giant in engineering scope but don’t tend to be all that impressive to anyone else.

via: https://github.com/coln-project/Coln

I would have kept my identity separate from my projects. Requests is a library. I am a person. The conflation of the two was the root cause of most of the damage. When the project is you, every issue is personal, every critique is existential, and every success is addictive in exactly the wrong way. I’d build the thing, release the thing, and then go home and be a person who also built a thing. Not a person who IS the thing.

As an avid user of Requests for over six years, I had no idea that the author was basically running on empty for a decade due to bipolar disorder. I wish the system—both open source and education—hadn’t chewed him up and spar him out like it did. Watch yourself.

What Mark from Peep Show taught me about authenticity

The hippies are no more “themselves” than Mark or Sophie. They may be more thrill-seeking, and they may like different things, but they are not more authentic. And Mark—stuffy as he may be—is being himself.

Deadlock is so much worse than either one, because you’re hopelessly stuck. You can’t do the thing, you can’t not do the thing, and you can’t even give up altogether because part of you insists that it still needs to happen. You go around in circles, chasing your tail, wasting time, and burning resources, all to no effect - neither a solidly completed task nor the rest or alternate accomplishment of refraining. Your experience is one of profound executive dysfunction, parts of you throwing vetoes at other parts of you.

Much in common with Mind in the Wheel.

via: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2026/06/29/links-for-june-2026/

You probably recognise these things as good, but a surprising number of managers seem to think they can just chastise people until quality improves. They talk themselves into this because they believe line workers are fully responsible for their actions.

But even those managers will find it very hard to convince themselves quality improves when they scream at the code-generating robot. It’s a robot! It can’t be responsible for its actions. We have to adopt the lean philosophy for building systems around robots. When something goes wrong, we have to blame the process, not the robot.

We always had to do that, even with people, but with robots it’s painfully obvious.

I thought I could solve this problem by spending more time with others, which works about as well as solving a hangover by drinking more alcohol. Validation and acknowledgement only hit the snooze button. No, the problem is that I can only view myself as worthy of love in the context of my relationships, which has again made my self-worth conditioned on something extrinsic.

Posting jobs that don’t exist should be illegal, imo. Time is the most valuable thing a person has and they shouldn’t be wasting it tailoring a resume for a ghost job.

I would agree.

The efficient market hypothesis tells you that if there was really free alpha, someone would have found it by now. But lived experience has taught me that there are in fact many free $20 bills lying around, waiting for someone to pick them up!

How text can outcompete the screen.

Perhaps things I should consider doing.

In Rules: A Short History of What We Live By, Lorraine Daston distinguishes between thick and thin rules. Thin rules are the algorithmic, mechanistic rules we in software favor; they are rules that can be obeyed and enforced unambiguously. Thick rules, on the other hand, are rules of thumb; they are guiding principles. Daston shows how there has been a historical progression from thick to thin rules. That today, we almost always think of rules as this thin, algorithmic process.

via: https://kevinlynagh.com/newsletter/2026_05_difftron/

A prototype of email triage via a custom-trained model. This is a report of the first two weeks of real-world use.

Works surprisingly well! This seems like a fun idea to try.

I built a machine learning pipeline for email triage. Includes a hand-labeled golden set, training the model in the browser, and evals. Plus options for local vs cloud embeddings.

Uses logistic regression in combination with embeddings. Works surprisingly well! Will be interested to see how he updates the model over time.

My new research project asks whether a personal algorithm, inspired by social media, can help us filter our email, group chats, and other personal correspondence.

One of the “god productivity algorithms.”

One of the first things advanced students and instructors told me when I got my black belt was: from this point onward, you are learning and practicing. Before then, you were just learning. Maybe I’m just learning how to write novels right now. I’m stepping onto the mat and finding my bearings.

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On factual vs. conceptual knowledge.

Spaced repetition has a natural domain of applicability: information that is systematically organized as an unambiguous key-value mapping with short keys and values. The “Hello, world!” of flashcards is the NATO phonetic alphabet: A → alpha, B → bravo, etc. Similarly, the periodic table can be thought of as defining a collection of mappings: element name ↔ symbol, element name ↔ atomic number, etc. You can just drill these cards and memorize the facts without a prior step of understanding, or building a conceptual model.

So, what difference is the AI going to make? “It’s going to write my notes”. About what? “It’s going to read articles for me and summarize them and add them to the digital garden”. For what purpose? “It’s going to find connections between my ideas!” What ideas? It’s going to pull an unfinished list of bulletpoints for an eventual draft of an essay on some inane thing, plus a bunch of PDFs you haven’t read, and combine them together and make, what? Another project you’re not going to do? The AI is going to do that?

But most people who write about note-taking don’t seem particularly accomplished in their own fields, whatever those may be. In fact, most such writers aren’t applying their notes to some exogenous creative problem: their primary creative work is writing about productivity. These writers offer advice on note-taking to help scientists and executives with the challenges of their work, but the advice was developed in a context disconnected from those external realities. There are two related problems here: Effective system design requires insights drawn from serious contexts of use, and Powerful enabling environments usually arise as a byproduct of projects pursuing their own intrinsically meaningful purposes.

via: https://borretti.me/article/human-bottlenecks