It's that time again for my weekly update, which includes a short collection of noteworthy finds, posts that inspire, as well as a few reflections from the past week or two. I'll aim to land these in your inbox by the weekend, in time to pair with your morning coffee (or your preferred cup of inspiration).

The Latest Drippings ☕️

  • There Is No Epidemic of Loneliness, But There Is an Epidemic of Scurvy. I thought this was an interesting companion piece to an article I shared a few weeks back, Another Symptom of Growing Isolation. Adam Mastroianni argues that the data doesn't show we're lonelier than we used to be. What it does show is that we're more alone: time with friends on weekends has roughly halved in the US over 20 years, and isolation is linked to depression, heart trouble, and dying sooner. And like scurvy, we can't feel this deficiency the way we feel hunger, so we never go looking for the cure. 'If you don’t get enough vitamin C, you’ll start to feel tired and weak, your joints will hurt, your legs will swell, you’ll get spots on your skin, your teeth will fall out, you’ll feel grumpy all the time (understandably), and eventually, you’ll die... You can see where I’m going with this: we are not living through an epidemic of loneliness. We are living through an epidemic of social scurvy.' I think the real answer here is to make an extra effort to connect with others in meaningful ways.
  • Seneca on True and False Friendship. A nice companion piece to the scurvy piece above. Maria Popova looks at what Seneca says about the kind of friendships worth having. 'One who seeks friendship for favourable occasions, strips it of all its nobility.'
  • How to Stop Having Ideas. Ooof. This one hits home. I always fall into this trap of having new ideas and should really take this one to heart and stop handing them to the team. Ideas are cheap, and I should stop adding to the pile. I also really liked how Russell adapted Brandolini's law from 'The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.' into 'The amount of energy needed to refute an idea from your boss is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.' Note to self: listen first.
  • The Aesthetic-Usability Effect. 'The aesthetic-usability effect refers to user's tendency to perceive attractive products as more usable. People tend to believe that things that look better will work better - even if they aren’t actually more effective or efficient.' An interesting idea that if a design is pleasing, then users will ignore minor usability flaws. I'm a big fan of calm and beautiful user interfaces, but now I'm starting to think that slapping lipstick on a pig can also be a huge cause of premium mediocre.
  • Magazines Are Superior Products to Newsletters. 'We need to abandon most Substack-style newsletters where the writer only writes without any editorial thinking. Although Substack-like platforms reduced the friction in writing, that friction was necessary. Perhaps all writers should have their own website and think about how to structure content and build a digital reading experience, not just a single article.' I totally get the irony of linking to this one from a newsletter, especially since he calls out curation newsletters specifically as "sourcing machines". I think there's an interesting idea in here, and maybe it's why I've been so thrilled by magazines like Geezer. While I get tons of feedback about the links I've been sharing, I wonder if each week should carry a theme instead of just a stack of links.
  • I Am a Flat-Rate Monthly Responsibility Service. Maybe this is a clue to Why Is Everyone In Tech So Sad? Solving puzzles requires curiosity and creative thinking: 'I tolerated a lot of the ridiculous bullshit of the tech industry because, at the end of the day, I got to return to my endless series of puzzles. Stand-ups. Meetings with investors. Retros. Kanban boards. Agile vs Waterfall. Endless discussions over pull request formatting. Decision syncs. People saying stupid things like "don't let perfect be the enemy of good". Ground-up rewrites because a new language is the fashion. Those were the tolls I paid in order to do the interesting part in the back of the house.' But with all the AI wackiness, the job is turning into something else. 'In reality, I am a SaaS provider, and the service I provide is responsibility. I am a flat-rate monthly responsibility service that agrees to assume full liability for the output of the robot.'
  • The Law of Leaky Abstractions. I can't remember where, but I was reminded this week of a classic 2002 post from Joel on Software about leaky abstractions. His definition of an abstraction is 'a simplification of something much more complicated that is going on under the covers', but more importantly — and yes, this human likes em dashes — all of them are leaky. 'Abstractions fail. Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. There’s leakage. Things go wrong.' But the real nugget is here: 'The law of leaky abstractions means that whenever somebody comes up with a wizzy new code-generation tool that is supposed to make us all ever-so-efficient, you hear a lot of people saying “learn how to do it manually first, then use the wizzy tool to save time.” Code generation tools which pretend to abstract out something, like all abstractions, leak, and the only way to deal with the leaks competently is to learn about how the abstractions work and what they are abstracting. So the abstractions save us time working, but they don’t save us time learning. And all this means that paradoxically, even as we have higher and higher level programming tools with better and better abstractions, becoming a proficient programmer is getting harder and harder.' Sounds a lot like the latest discourse on AI coding tools.
  • Bottlenecks Get a Bad Rap. I've said it time and time again: through constraint you find freedom.
  • The Convergence Trap. What I love about this post is that it not only taps into the question of whether we're solving the right problem, but also explores how group thinking can lead you down the wrong path. 'When we think together, our thinking becomes a system where systems theory applies. Ideas cause other ideas, people influence other people, and even the order of thoughts makes a difference. A wrong assumption made by one person can become the starting point for the next person’s reasoning, which then becomes evidence for someone else. Like a domino effect. The blast radius isn’t, in that case, one person’s thinking. It is the thinking of everyone who comes after them.' The solution? Protect independent thinking before the group converges on an aligned direction.
  • Running My Second Marathon as a Hollow Man. This marathon recap is full of things I'd never considered. But the line that struck me was about fatigue: 'fatigue does not always feel fatiguing in the moment, it is also the accumulation of time.' The same goes for warnings from the body. Two days before my first heart attack, my Apple Watch flagged something and I shrugged it off with a 'well, that's weird.' Warnings don't always feel like warnings in the moment. These days, I try to make a conscious effort to listen to the small stuff before it turns into the loud stuff.
  • On Not Becoming a Cyborg. Webster defines a cyborg as 'a person whose body contains mechanical or electrical devices and whose abilities are greater than the abilities of normal humans.' I've always felt contact lenses, heart stents, LINX devices, and hearing aids all count. But I never really considered the effects on language. Nolan noticed that Claude-isms like "load-bearing" and "belt-and-suspenders" are working their way into his own writing. You are what you eat, I guess. :)
  • How the Oregon Trail Became a Generational Icon. I remember being in school playing The Oregon Trail. From its origin as a board game in 1971, to how it transformed into a video game, I really enjoyed learning a bit more about a game that was one of my first introductions to computers. But I never knew that failure was deliberately part of the game's design. As the designers put it, the learning loop of decision → consequence → failure → hypothesis → new strategy → replay was there as a way to encourage experimenting and learning. For nostalgia's sake, you can play it online here if curious.

Amor Fati ✌🏻