So management can cancel all of last week’s projects when they told us all we had to be using skills because the CEO read about them in the in flight magazine. Routines are the future, baby. DevOps already made a big announcement that they’re centralizing the Routines Hub. If you can’t keep up, we’ll get someone who says they can.

First I went to the Claude web site, because we've all been trained not to click on links promising things, right? Couldn't find anything there so I checked the domain carefully and clicked on the link, which takes me to my settings page with no discernible discount. I am no longer surprised by anything not working, perhaps Claude itself vibe-sent this mass email.

When I was in my 20s I was an insufferable know-it-all who found fault with everything.

I still spot problems and “push back”, but I have the experience now to know how to get people to listen and not just write me off as an annoying prima donna.

Insufferable know-it-alls are easy to steer too. Just look at the DOGE team.

“Cloud to butt” was popular in the early cloud days. It went around Google internally, and caused some… interesting issues.

I remember ridiculing "cloud computing" by calling it "clown computing" decades ago. It's pretty old and well established snark-jargon, like spelling Micro$oft with a dollar sign.

I’ll express my personal preference for VS Code with Cline. I don’t know exactly why, but its workflow feels right even though they’re all almost the same interface. I do like the huge choice of models and payment options. For something I use burstily, it makes sense for me to pay as I go.

I enjoy reading about other people’s approaches to motivation and creativity.

But I very much dislike when they phase it as “you need to” or “this is how it works”. Thinking everyone else’s brain operates the way yours does seems to be a frequent bias among bloggers. And managers.

I encourage those who write about their experiences to keep it in the first person.

> I encourage those who write about their experiences to keep it in the first person.

My therapist gave me this exact criticism our first few sessions. On a more charitable read, writing is as much an exercise for the author as it is for the reader. That you might be the writer talking out loud to themselves, not to you in particular.

In any case, point taken. I will keep that in mind, even though I really would like my writing to have a more assertive tone. There are times one seeks to be told what to do, what to try, rather than having to suffer the tired cliché that "this advice might apply to you, it might not, only you know best."

I agree, I’d much rather someone state their ideas in an assertive tone rather than pad their ideas with a bunch of caveats.

I actually find it annoying and actively skip those parts because they can take paragraphs of text or minutes of a video.

Some people are too quick to make things about themselves.

Not only that. My brain operate differently at different times. I may find that an approach that works for me now doesn't work in a year. It doesn't mean the approach is "wrong" or that I was wrong choosing it a year ago. Maybe it was the right approach for that time, and now I have different needs.

I strongly agree, I find it a sign of a mature writer when they write in the first person about such topics. It's based on reflection that personal truths are subjective and it's better to be more accurate (that these are the individual's experiences and learnings), rather than prescriptive (that these are Universal truths and everyone should fall in line).

Cool, I’ll be sure to adapt all of my writing to adapt to your particular psyche.

At no point in this post did the author assert they knew how your brain worked.

I found a tiny bug in a library. A single, trivial, “the docs say this utility function does X, but it actually does Y”. I’m not even allowed to file a bug report. It took me some time to figure out how to even ask for permission, and they referred it to some committee where it’s in limbo.

LED matrix panels are tons of fun! I strung a bunch of them together to make a marquee across my basement soffit: https://youtu.be/W0_3rzvq9Ks?si=aTT_uOZfOYh9NLUi

I have to resist the urge to tile every surface with blinky lights. I think part of the appeal goes back to why I enjoyed writing programs on my C64 to bounce my name around the screen. It’s a limited playground, and limitations inspire creativity.

This looks fantastic. Your basement really has a nice aesthetic to it, and that marquee looks great in it!

On rare occasions, I use it for the virtual display; it's actually usable to sit outside and work with a giant display on the deck, or to dial myself onto the beach. But it's not exactly comfortable for extended use, and most of the time I'd rather sit at my nice desktop with multiple monitors etc.

I also have a Quest 3 and if I could only own one device, I'd take the Q3 hands-down. The games are fun, they get you up and moving, and although I'm not going to argue that the quality of the screens is the same or anything, it's more than good enough. I'll happily give up the virtual laptop screen in exchange for the library of VR games on the Quest.

I'm not much for consuming media so that aspect is lost on me. Unfortunately, that seems to be the primary use case Apple has focused on, if you can call the anemic dribble of content they've put out focus.

I've been using Clerk and it seems fine. I'm sure there's some drama, because everything comes with drama, but I just want to get on with building stuff.

I haven't tried Clerk, but if the money spent actually makes things easier, then it seems like a good fit for certain projects.

Better Auth didn't take more than an hr to setup in my repo, which is already pretty bare-bones to begin with.