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Food For Thought

Here are five lessons I have personally learned this year that I feel are worth sharing as advice. Many of these are quite unique, or at least, not very likely to surface on other listicles about crushing 2024 by getting cliche habits in order. Feel free to test them in your own lives, and see what conclusions you are able to draw.

The advice that follows is ordered from most to least practical and become increasingly philosophical come true over a much longer window of opportunity.

1) Discipline is upstream of willpower

The term "discipline" is often married to the Puritan ideals of "work ethic". While discipline does indeed include stubborn effort towards a goal, discipline itself is a much more nuanced construct than raw, back-breaking effort towards something difficult. There is an attendant guilt that comes along with "keeping up with the Joneses'" style of discipline that is managed for the sake of appearances, causing discipline to become less about ethic and more about haranguing limited quantities of willpower. These metrics of time spent sweating are easily comparable, as people brag or lament on how many hours they dedicated to the God of the Grind.

2023 taught me that discipline is much more effective when it is implemented higher up the chain of decision making. Instead of trying to force yourself to hammer out a presentation, or chase some goal that has you competing directly with peers, it is better to implement disciplines at the root level of your systems and ask what your goal is with the presentation in the first place – to convince this one person of something, or to clarify your knowledge on a subject, etc?

In other words, everyone suffers from something unique list of tasks and responsibilities. Discipline is better mobilized at the level of systemic changes that create downstream value automatically.

For example, perhaps the YouTube sidebar keeps you locked in for hours at a time? Block it with an extension. Or maybe you find yourself checking email compulsively at dinner because your meetings during the day go too long? Block your email from the hours of 6-8pm. Find that your sink piles up with dishes every weekend? Get rid of copies of your dishes so you have to wash your singular set before you eat your next meal.

Tools like Freedom (below) and PKM systems are becoming so popular because people are waking up to notion that the frenetic systems we have of the modern era simply can't be tamed by willpower or the grind.

Willpower is insufficient in the face of computation. Only computation can face computation head on.

A systemic relationship with technology discipline involves using technology against itself. Don't beat yourself up for playing a different game. Put discipline into the upstream, and the downstream comes included. Become disciplined about the holistic system, not just a particular part. Think of your systems as systems of time and systems of space, and implement disciplines at those layers.

Freedom: Internet, App and Website Blocker

Easily block distracting websites and apps on any device. The original and best distraction blocker, Freedom helps you be more focused and productive.

Freedom

2) Own your domain

As the landscape of social media continues to devolve into an utter shitshow, fragmenting as groups of people migrate to different apps where they feel the most belonging (Discord, IG, TikTok, LinkedIn, etc.) – social media becomes less about connection between loose networks and more about delivering constant feeds of entertainment and escapism directly to the hippocampus.

Due to this, in a extremely rare case of a positive externality from something negative, this massive expansion of social media and importance of online life has created a new opportunity. The world is now fully Internet connected (94% of the global population as of 2021 has mobile phones), which means everyone has access to a device that can communicate over the HTTP layer. In other words, in virtue of everyone getting a device to go on TikTok can now access the entire web from the same device, and more places and more people than ever are connected.

In 2023, there has never been a better time to own your own domain and take it seriously.

The current version of this blog was made as a birthday gift to myself in late January 2023. The newsletter didn't have its first issue until March. As of writing on December 31, 2023, the newsletter has 150 members, and makes >~$40 MRR (not much, and basically breaks even with hosting costs but I'm very grateful!). In addition, the website has landed me clients for consulting, and interview requests. This is without any active advertising.

Much more importantly, bramadams.dev has served as the perfect playground for my creative desires. In between poetry, short stories, image dumps, long thoughtpiece essays, shitposts, zettels (a zettelkasten note, singular), creative coding, tutorials, newsletters, and more, I have never felt more free as a creative than on my own site.

(excuse my language here, but) Fuck websites that tell you your creativity is constrained to 280 characters. Fuck websites that tell you that you can only upload photos in a certain dimension to fit the rest of the site's CSS. Fuck websites that use their networks of likes and comments to change how you think, speak, and create. Fuck sub splits with the website owner because you happen to be renting a handle on their platform. Fuck the narrative you can't grow an audience because Twitbooktube has hoovered up all the curious minds on the Internet and trapped them in their feeds to scroll forever. FUCK ALLLL THAT.

If you wish to express yourself, in an era where publishing is cheaper than it has ever been since the rise of the printing press, while also slowly building a art gallery of your mind and a work portfolio and a business, own your domain.

Ghost vs Obsidian Publish

Goals: * To publish as much, and as as frequently as possible * To keep things as close to the core Obsidian System as possible, simple text MD files with good linking * To make money * To have a really high quality UX Ghost * Paid option and tiers * Newsletter built in * Beautiful * GitHub

Bram AdamsBram Adams

3) Books are linear – the knowledge inside is not

From building my biggest contiguous project of the year, commonplace bot, I have learned that the real value of books comes long after their initial consumption. Ideas swell and tangle amongst one another, competing for contextual dominance, niches that will allow them to continue to surface again and again.

Any author of any individual book is like a focused laser, etching deeply their field of narrow expertise into the mind of the reader. But it is only later, after the mind has cooled to the topic, does the value of what was read begin to show. You might find yourself referencing an idea in conversation, or remember a fact that saves you a bunch of time in thinking on how to spend your day.

Books are phenomenal, from practical advice to dense philosophies. You never know how ideas will engage in isolation or outside of their source context, and you especially can't predict what will happen when they come together.

Being well read is not simply reading a lot. It is reading well.

I'm shocked how often in semantic search applications how quotes from different authors hold the same emotionality or core concepts. But perhaps it is not that shocking at all. Many of the world's best (and worst) ideas have been revisited over and over, seen from slightly different viewpoints. Some ideas are literally as old as dirt... while others are brand new. Ex nihilo nihil fit.

Set up a third party trusted system where you can capture the best ideas you come across, and return to them separated from their parent context.

Perhaps enable it with LLM tools, if you're feeling spicy. But paper works too.

7 Books I Read In 2023 That Live In My Head Rent Free

as a Creative Technologist

Bram AdamsBram Adams

4) Most code hasn’t been written

As a creative technologist, this is the most exciting piece of news to me.

With as dominant as software is in the 21st century, and how omnipresent our phones and interconnectivity devices are, it can be hard to conceptualize this truth, and yet, it is the case. Most code has yet to be written. Fortran (1954), the arguably first modern programming language was created after the discovery of DNA (1953 (1869?)).

2023 has been extra special, thanks to tools like Copilot, Cursor, and ChatGPT.

Earlier this year, I released a series called "Chats with GPT" where I followed a very simple formula:

1. Find a random quote from a book I think is interesting
2. Ask GPT to write three potential app ideas about said quote
3. Choose favorite app idea from list, ask GPT to pseudocode it out
4. (optional) take pseudocode to an IDE and actually code the app

I am shocked at how the above steps had nearly 100% success rate. This modality shifting from text to code, just... worked. LLMs have no qualms converting from one space to another, and this is great help for human collaboration in new tools and ideas. Sure, many of the ideas were simplistic, and perhaps even obvious, but were great starting points that again revealed a deeper truth to me, that I will quote a second time for emphasis:

Most code has yet to be written.

We have merely scratched the surface of the programs that will exist in the near and far future. 2023 and 2024 is a great time to leverage LLMs and modern programming languages to express ourselves in an arena where we get to decide how logic plays out.

Scheduling Your Way to Wellness: Using GPT to Turn a Quote into an App

Struggling to fit exercise and meditation into your schedule? Me too! Let’s put GPT to the task to discover how an NP-hard computer science problem called the scheduling problem can help us!

Bram AdamsBram Adams

5) Information self-catalyzes – but evades crystallization

This year started with my 10,000 word summary of a few years of PKM work in Obsidian with my BHOV. From there, I've learned more about the sources of information, as well as the basins for information; anything from to-do lists strewn about the apartment, to long form unfinished manuscripts about the history and future of computing.

GitHub - bramses/bramses-highly-opinionated-vault-2023: A highly opinionated, fully featured Obsidian vault that can get you from Zero to Zettelkasten lickety split!

A highly opinionated, fully featured Obsidian vault that can get you from Zero to Zettelkasten lickety split! - GitHub - bramses/bramses-highly-opinionated-vault-2023: A highly opinionated, fully f…

GitHubbramses

In addition, through work on my meditation practice, 2023 helped me realize that it is not the flow of information that is scarce – if anything, the constant noise of ideas and stimulus from internal and external loci are damn near impossible to stop – it is the concentration of reliable, worthwhile information that is difficult to acquire.

In the latter half of 2023, I put a deliberate amount of energy into creating passive capture nodes for my work. These flywheels and arbitrage allow for value to be introduced from the very beginning of the projects. The process reveals gold nuggets that only play out before the deliverable layer.

2023 has been great for tools like OBS, as well as digital storage becoming readily cheap, both locally and in the cloud (compared to compute that is). The value of being present with our deep work is more reliable than ever.

To capture our best ideas is to work on eliminating noise from other people's lives from our minds while also highlighting the best of our own life's work.

Running a Zero Waste Flywheel

Put your dollars to work!

Bram AdamsBram Adams

Predictions for 2024 (just for fun!)

Here are my predictions for 2024 – these predictions are "out there" on purpose; I did not want to go with obvious predictions like "more crazy weather events" or "news about obvious thing happening from some world government". That said, I could see each of the following actually happening in the next 365 days.

• the Apple Vision Pro flops commercially, but succeeds in birthing a developer who will change the AR/VR game in less than 3 years. They will reference the Vision Pro as their inspiration and the Vision Pro will become mainstream at that point (similar story to the iPad)
• Twitter goes bankrupt, but does not disappear
• GPT agents begin to pop up in places QR menus and PoS iPads exist, people get used to talking to agents in a variety of scenarios (high confidence)
• the 2024 US election causes the Republican Party to officially fracture
• TikTok banned by White House or Congress in a bid to gain mindshare back from the Gen Alpha community, overturned by Supreme Court
• self help books become less passion focused and more PKM focused in a bid to get people more realistic about happiness (high confidence)
• being a YouTuber becomes much less profitable career path than it was pre Covid-2022 as the ad bubble runs into inflation, the direct competition of short videos eliminating community building because of 15 second memes and saturation of sponsors (high confidence)
  • as such, low cost high value info products like podcasts and blogs become more popular

And finally, a very sincere thank you all for reading in 2023. It has been a lovely journey and I really appreciate it! Happy New Year, and see you next Sunday! In 2024!

ars longa, vita brevis,

Bram

P.S. If you like what you read on this newsletter, forward it to a friend! It really helps!

< Previous Issue

Food For Thought

Welcome to part one of the ho-ho-holidays issue of the newsletter! As 2023 comes to a close, it is traditional to acknowledge the special nature of the last few weeks of the calendar year, to "kiss the ring of Father Christmas" as it was. I could of course use this week's newsletter to talk about themes of joy, gratitude, snowflakes and cocoa, or the nuclear family, but you would probably be better off watching one of the 42 new Hallmark Christmas movies produced in 2023 alone for that kind of thing. This is a Bram Adams' newsletter after all, so you can bet your mistletoe that I'll be using this issue to unnecessarily deep dive into an aspect of the holidays that no one else cares to opine about.

No, instead of those usual thematic elements, I'd like to use this issue to discuss a concept particular to the holiday season that is often suppressed consciously and therefore causes a constant and vicious subconscious deluge for ~2 months leading up to and including the holidays: overload.

In my mind, there is nary a week in the calendar year filled with so many juxtapositions, social acrobatic maneuvers to "make things work", forced positivity, and the reminders of the friction of modern life's requirements vs our imagined ideal selves than the last few weeks of December. We will be examining three phenotype expressions of this holiday overload: that of relationships, economics, and virtues (there are many more types of holiday overload, this is a non-exhaustive list(*)). Let's start with the first overload of the holiday season: relationship overload.

Relationship Overload

The presumptive nuclear family is an artifact of civilization, where unwed mothers have for centuries been abandoned at best, shamed and even murdered at worst. When male-female relations were reframed in newly agricultural societies, the mutual respect and autonomy characteristic of foragers were replaced by something closer to a master-slave dynamic. This tragic and lasting collapse of human dignity was largely driven by a demand for paternity certainty among newly possessive males who now wanted to know who was going to inherit their accumulated wealth.

-- Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress (affiliate link)

Holidays are notorious for bringing (read: forcing) families together. Despite the societal messaging that family is of non-negotiable importance to the point of removing any amount of moral ambiguity, it is a fact that some families simply operate better when they aren't physically together. The nuclear family relationships of the modern world are canonized and imaged to the point where people begin to rate their value and the success of their family unit by how "shown up" people are, how present they were, how well they played their role as father, son, mother, daughter, brother, sister. This strain, especially when families spend the rest of the year apart, causes acute stressors or painful memories to also show up on the front porch. That thing you got pissed off about 13 years ago? Yep, still there. The values disagreement you have with that one family member? You betcha.

The ability to choose how you want to spend your two holiday weeks of PTO like you control the other 50 weeks is peer pressured out of the conversation. Many family members, due to circumstance or passivity, don't have the convenience to say that they would rather treat December 25 like April 25, or any other day.

Ergo, the real (well, kind of real) risk of ostracization from the family unit drives travel prices through the roof, as people rush home to save face. In this way, holidays are a forcing function, compressing time from years of baggage into a single exhausting, a-therapists-nightmare-scenario single week.

Economic Overload

Let's set the scene: you open a gift. But it's not what you wanted. Or perhaps it is. It's the thought that counts, you tell yourself. To a point, this is the case. People like to know that they are being thought of by others in their life the way they see themselves. A "thoughtful" gift usually invokes some combination of nostalgia and "knowingness of need". But under the gift wrapping paper, there be monsters of yore.

Under the auspices of gift giving, there are the realities of the greater economy and prices of items increasing due to inflation and wage stagnation, causing many gift givers to increase the rate of their debt obligations to fulfill the role of a "good" gift giver. I was a child in the midst of the Tickle Me Elmo crisis, and I remember firsthand that the winners and losers of the gifters and the giftees were those who could arraign their resources to get the doll over some other kid having it. It was the scarcity of the Elmo that hyper inflated its value. And from the scarcity came the anxiety that to be a good gifter, you must, you simply must, buy the best gift.

But how quickly status moves on! The genius of mankind is not captured in its artifacts, it is in its ability to produce artifacts.

Additionally, people take off work for holidays, but in a similar manner to how there are a litany of reasons as to why teenagers should be excused from early school start times, it is errant to expect that the last week of the year is the optimal time for everyone to take off work.

One clear reason as to why – when everyone is off, no one is. Especially in white collar, you can hear/see people quietly compare themselves to their peers, sizing up who will be the first and who will be the last to return to the office. In addition to this hidden prisoners dilemma, you are expected to return to the office "recharged"...but is such a thing possible from one of the most stress inducing weeks of the year?

Virtue Overload

Finally there is a cultural overload of virtues crammed into the holiday season. Every positive human virtue of piety, gratitude, joy, etc. is forcibly squeezed into the holiday like the crammed luggage of passengers tiredly catching the third leg of their flight across the country, causing people who might have a strained relationship with the emotion of happiness on even the most relaxing of summer beach days to suffer extra on a day where they are told that happiness is basically a mandate.

For any who suffer from some sort of depression or anxiety, negative feelings are intensified by the forced positivity aspects of the holiday season, increasing the likelihood of feeling sadness, failure, or the cold, callous passage of time.

And speaking of cold, seasonal affective disorder is very much a thing! There is a reason Christmas is known as the loneliest day of the year, even when, and sometimes because of, being surrounded by people we love.

After all, being told to feel a certain way is a way to not feel that feeling for certain.

Be happy!! (Yeah, right!!)

The Fix

I bring up the above not to lambast the entire practice of the holiday season or to be a Grinch/Scrooge McDuck, but to paint a scene of the quiet inner turmoil we all face to some level during the holiday season.

These are the questions we must face head on for future Christmases: Can we plan and automate our way out of the stress of the holiday season? Can we know what (or who) during the holiday season drive the most stress, and preemptively defuse those bombs?

I think the first and most important element about these elements of overload is to have candid conversations with ourselves and those we love and trust to counter the gravitas/weight of the holiday deluge. If people don't/can't travel, it is important that we try our best to be aware and care, about ourselves and others. We need to use realism as a salve for reality.

The next pragmatic step would be to spread out the holidays across the other 364 days, to decrease the gravitational pull of Dec 25. Perhaps a family dinner day on Dec 12, a friends day on Dec 19, and gift giving on Dec 25.

Next, we need to edify our work PTO to not be so rushed for end of year work, and then expect everyone to disappear for a few days. A spread out holiday season means more "shifts" people can take off. Perhaps a holiday PTO voucher, which can be spent at any time of the year?

Christmas and the end of year holiday season has a long history, and it will have an even longer future. By doing the work to alleviate the painful realities of the holiday season for so many, we can make it a week we actually look forward to.

On My Nightstand - What I'm Reading

Don't keep items in life that you don't want someone to remember you by in death.

Presents are not “things” but a means for conveying someone’s feelings. When viewed from this perspective, you don’t need to feel guilty for parting with a gift.

-- The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing (affiliate link)

Even ye olde peasantry got lit on occassion! P.S. I want to bring back the lambing holiday.

This same essential idea remained intact across centuries of subsequent historical upheaval: that leisure was life’s center of gravity, the default state to which work was a sometimes inevitable interruption. Even the onerous lives of medieval English peasants were suffused with leisure: they unfolded according to a calendar that was dominated by religious holidays and saints’ days, along with multiday village festivals, known as “ales,” to mark momentous occasions such as marriages and deaths. (Or less momentous ones, like the annual lambing, the season when ewes give birth—any excuse to get drunk.) Some historians claim that the average country-dweller in the sixteenth century would have worked for only about 150 days each year, and while those figures are disputed, nobody doubts that leisure lay near the heart of almost every life.

-- Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (affiliate link)

It's the small things, or rather, their juxtapositions with the struggling aspects of life, that bring the purest forms of joy. Much like indulgence in sugar, happiness can be "too sweet".

CHRISTMAS GREETINGS FROM MAX VANDENBURG “Often I wish this would all be over, Liesel, but then somehow you do something like walk down the basement steps with a snowman in your hands.”

-- The Book Thief (affiliate link)

Next week will be my reflection issue looking back on 2023! Happy Holidays!

* one could easily add physical overload from flu season abounding, or time overload from trying to schedule events where they plainly don't fit into a calendar, etc

Thanks for reading, and see you next Sunday!

ars longa, vita brevis,

Bram

P.S. If you like what you read on this newsletter, forward it to a friend! It really helps!

< Previous Issue

Food For Thought

Thanks to reading books like Napoleon by Andrew Roberts and Black Rednecks & White Liberals by Andrew Sowell, I've kind of been on a "nuance kick" lately. Basically, I've been interested in not just treating knowledge about popular, complicated, or hairy topics like Napoleon and his wars or the foundations of slavery and it's impact in today's race relations I get from common sense or social media thought a priori and instead use reasoning to tease out my own analysis of the subject at hand.

<SOCKRATES> The more uncomfortable your analysis, the likelier you are to be learning something new.

Last issue, I tackled the subject of surveillance, and drew up an argument that not all surveillance is bad, via negativa. This issue, I'd like to flip the script and discuss something that only gets "good" press – open source.

Being a part of the hacker/developer community at large requires one to have an understanding of what open source is and why it continues to sticks around. Because of the motivations and leadership of the open source community, the words that "open source" generally hangs out with are words like: non-profit, community, volunteering, free, sharing, equality, education. All of these words sound pleasant, but I'll make the point that they are explicitly chosen, these "word neighbors" are largely marketing. As an open source contributor and user, here are some other words that can be associated with open source: bullying, two party system, virtue signaling, free labor economics, sleight of hand, subprime markets.

As of late, we are in a societal moment where the failures of the web3/crypto movement, the power accretion of billion dollar training runs from giant GPU farms for LLMs and wealth inequality reaching all time highs in the market have people on edge about power imbalances. Over and over, new technologies come along that promise to "democratize" the (insert whatever new hype thing here) and make the world(*) more equitable. People "below" the water line of wealth are eager to tip the scales in their favor, people "above" it want to keep the systems in place that are netting them profit. Both of these desires are logically founded, and often it is not outright malice that make the rich richer and the poor poorer, but tragedy of the commons type market effects: better access to knowledge, more money to spend on riskier opportunities, connections, etc. that propel the market to reward those who have previously been rewarded.

<RAVENLOL> I was always taught as a young chick how important it is to crow your wealth over time.

So you might reasonably ask, why-oh-why would you come after something like open source? What about the open source movement could be bad? Isn't it doing the work to make the world more fair for developers, and for users of applications?

Well,... maybe.

Bullying, the Two Party System, and Virtue Signaling

The first bone to pick with the open source movement is that leans heavily in favor of itself. In other words, the open source movement operates similarly to an ideal that can never be truly reached. The truest open source is a godhead, an unknowable and unreachable place. People will argue in forums for months about the minute differences between the Apache and MIT licenses, or nitpick the idea of attribution via forking or cloning, or drive a wedge in the leadership of communities because "they rely on the tool" or establish a "benevolent dictator for life" (Linus, Guido, etc.). This is because the term open source resists definition for it's own purposes, and is reactive to the technology of its era.

<LEDA> Some things, like art, resist definition because they are emblematic of their era. Art is a generality turned specific. Open source is the opposite. Born out of group's morality, and expanded generally.

This is more true than ever in a world of LLMs, where the open source movement now is more than just a "weird thing" that the developer community does, it is "necessary" to guarantee the future of the world's safety. There is a lot to unpack there, but the short of it is that people want open source data sets from models and they want to know exactly how these models were built.

Since the people who are leading this charge of driving the open source movement forward have no financial or time/energy stake in these operations (skin in the game for any of you Taleb fans out there), they do what they can: they politically pressure (read: bully) developers and organizations to publicly share all of their research.

This bullying process largely takes place in the modern agora of Hacker News comment sections or Twitter feeds, where people will just attack organizations until they "get what they want". See for example, this tweet below, where one of the founders of Mistral replies to a user.

The way Far El writes here, and the way Arthur Mensch responds are both extremely telling. Far El's use of ellipses here is damn near criminal, and you can almost hear the venom-like sarcasm and judgement dripping off of his tongue. Here is a comparison analogy to drive the point, which any Southerners from the US will immediately recognize:

"Oh, you're just sweet as a peach cobbler. Bless your heart.............."

<RAVENLOL> Et tu, Judy?

The point of Far El posting this on social media was to bully an organization he is not a part of into doing something that he wants by accruing social attention.

Arthur's response is no better. Here, he is responding, on the same platform, for positive valence advertising in the other direction. Truly, he may just be doing for Mistral what is on the masthead of their company website, but it could very well be...marketing.

In a way, both people here are virtue signaling their commitment to the god of "open". They are both "for the cause", but who is more "for the cause": the maintainer? Or the user?

These social media guerilla tactics and the unattainable idealism of open source slowly create a two party system, a binary. You are either open source == good, or closed source == bad. The gradations of what can be shared, or indeed asking what should be shared, wither away with each new release, each attack that further tribalizes closed source software vs open.

See why we need to apply some nuance?

<LEDA> I just want to apply some salsa to this burrito I'm eating!

Free Labor Economics, Sleight of Hand, Subprime Markets

This issue would be incomplete without talking about money. Money is indeed the underlying driver of technology as a whole, or rather, the cultural expectations of the continued development of technology. There are many, many, many routes I could address here, but I'll leave a list to study at the bottom if you are so interested(**). Instead, I'll address two that are close to my heart: working for free, and fake money in the water supply.

Working for Free

I love Obsidian. It is a great piece of technology. Scratch that, it is a phenomenal piece of technology. But what makes Obsidian truly great is not it's core functionality – it is the extensibility of the software. The community of Obsidian has done great work to turn Obsidian into a thriving ecosystem of calendars, Kanbans, queries that go across your entire vault, and more! However, while the user experience may be awesome due to the great developer community, the developer experience is not.

I've spoken to other popular plugin developers and behind closed doors, many of us feel the same way: we got the short end of the stick. The community just straight up won't pay for anything, even with a donation button available ont the site. GitHub stars don't put food on the table.

<RAVENLOL> The Obsidian community developers really took that "means of production" argument to heart, it seems.

This is worse when issues start to flood in, when the community asks for features they want for you to do. In other words, free work. This causes the maintainer undue stress, as all of a sudden people rely on them to do work. This reliance causes the very natural state of human altruism to kick in, and so the maintainer will want to do this work. It's not true parasitism of course, and I would never go so far to claim that it is, but there are similarities in taking advantage of a process that is innate to get something else done. This is good locally, perhaps, but bad globally.

Creativity is quelled when developers have no sure promise that their work will be rewarded. And in fact this causes many of the open source repos we see "trend" on GitHub to be versions of "socially validated technology x but open source". Their marketing angle is, hey, you like this tech – what if it was open source? In the short term these projects collect small wins like upvotes/social validation by basically copycatting, but in the long term the developers of these projects lose because they will 1) have to maintain their new offering for free ad infinitum, and 2) they will always be playing catch up with the source code and feature offerings of the closed source code they copied to stay at parity. E.g. whenever Instagram changes its UI, all the open source copycat repos will need to update as well.

<LEDA> It's the developer equivalent of hopping on a TikTok trend, basically.

Fake Money in the Water Supply

Above, I showed a tweet from one of the founders of Mistral replying to a Twitter user. Did you know that Mistral raised over $400 million? Don't you think that this money serves as a role of a safety net for Mistral to play the long game of the social signal of the very noisy and hyper competitive AI space right now (Microsoft, OpenAI, google, your neighbor's dog, Stability, etc.) while working on their technology, or that its VCs (like A16z) won't eventually come knocking for some type of return on their money? Remember:

GitHub Stars don't put food on the table.

The economy of VC money and advertising effectively prop up the free part of open source. Developers don't need to charge for their software because they get money from deep patronage pockets or massive advertising auction networks (this is epidemic in the creator economy as well). This inflates the value of network effect software from companies like Meta who get to release models like Llama for free to get good marketing and to find developer talent to hire or stress test their models for them for free. Simultaneously this free money deflates the value of indie developers who try to fairly price their work and get told that the most anyone will pay is free thanks again to companies that can outcompete at the level of paying their devs.

<LEDA> In my hometown of Florence, the Medici's were a family you could see walking down the street at least. Modern VC banks like a16z don't even attempt to hide the fact that they'll invest in schemes like Axie Infinity while saying they're doing "societal good".

Watch this talk below from Evan Czaplicki of Elm fame to learn more about the uniquely weird economics of software.

So, I ask you again, don't you think the idea of the virtues of open source require a bit of nuance?

On My Nightstand - What I'm Reading

In addition to marginal costs, software also requires ongoing maintenance to continue running successfully, regardless of how many people use it. Rather than a function of use, these costs are a function of entropy: the inevitable decay of systems over time. It’s not just code itself that requires maintenance either, but all the supporting knowledge that surrounds it. When code changes, its documentation must also change.

-- Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software (affiliate link)

In the most general sense, it involves the steady flow of software developers who will leave organizations that regard them as cost centers and fungible commodities. Those organizations tend to believe you need two categories of people to implement software: business people who think, and grunts who, as James Grenning suggested, do low-level translation of natural language instructions into source code. And historically, we’ve proven them right to an extent. There are plenty of reasonably well-compensated programmers out there who content themselves with this golden coffin arrangement. But here’s the thing. That approach produces inferior software. The agile software movement suggested that we break down the barriers between business folks and IT folks so they can work more effectively together. I say we reject that premise in its entirety and go forward believing that business folks and IT folks should be the same people. This is, of course, a disconcerting proposition for the business folks. Managers and former developers will need to come face-to-face with an uncomfortable question, and that’s “What do you need me for, then?” My honest answer to that is, “I don’t know. You’ll probably figure something out.”

-- Developer Hegemony: The Future of Labor (affiliate link)

While most open-source developers do not intrinsically object to others profiting from their gifts, most also demand that no party (with the possible exception of the originator of a piece of code) be in a privileged position to extract profits.

-- The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary (affiliate link)

There is good reason to believe that the financial foundations of the web are perhaps shakier than we think, maybe even producing the conditions for a “subprime” crisis in attention, similar to the dynamics that brought down the global economy in 2008. Examining these parallels is a key step toward thinking about how society, if it’s not too late, might want to re-architect the web for the better, and about whether the web as we understand it will endure.

-- Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet (FSG Originals x Logic)

The software that matters most is the most hidden, the least revealed. Guess what? BUMMER software usually runs on a foundation of free and open software (like the Linux/Apache stack). But no one can know what is done on top of that free and open foundation. The open-software movement failed absolutely in the quest to foster openness and transparency in the code that now runs our lives.

-- Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (affiliate link)

Poem

Habitual drivers, driving habits/

a day at a time, each day to do one/

the gluttony of moderation, the immoderation of scarcity/

a habit not started is not one undone

* though it's never really stated if it's the world that the creators envision, or the one they live in in reality

** List: the drama of open source organizations like npm or React, the blow up moment of leftpad, the anti-trust cases against Microsoft, the "I just want to know I can get my hands on it, someone else will verify if it's safe" security holes of many pieces of open source software

Thanks for reading, and see you next Sunday!

ars longa, vita brevis,

Bram

P.S. If you like what you read on this newsletter, forward it to a friend! It really helps!

< Previous Issue

Food For Thought

The word "surveillance" has rightly earned it's negative connotation in the modern world of cameras and always-on gadgets. The concern that at any moment, any mistake you make, or words you might say in haste (especially on planes, due to their stressful societal connotations) will be blasted around the world instantly is not unfounded. Virality seems to be the meta popular song of our era. It changes it's face, but it is always playing on the front pages of our news websites and social media feeds. Worse yet, the viewers of these surveil style videos will generally (and nearly immediately) do a subject-object replacement, in which you as a complex human subject who has lived an entire life are replaced by an objective set of (generally negative) attributes. In other words, after five seconds, the viewer has already made the locked in decision if you are hero or villain. The suspension of disbelief only goes as far for people we believe to be in our in-group. Everyone else is fair game to be a victim of game theory; as the public becomes judge, jury, and executioner in the comment sections.

In this issue, I'd like to make a short argument in favor of another type of surveillance – surveillance of the self.

The etymology of the word "surveillance" comes from the French words "sur" (over) "veiller" (watch) – to watch over. Surveillance has a much more positive connotation sibling word – vigilance. Vigilance is generally seen as a positive trait, and we conflate vigilance as a healthy habit: to be vigilant of our health, of our finances, of the status of our relationships. Vigilance is intentionally keeping sober, the attempt to make good decisions in the face of a world that has bad options always within an arms reach – sugar, distraction, inebriation, escapism.

Another, more automatic version of surveillance is homeostasis. Homeostasis is the role of every living being to be "vigilant" of its vitals: temperature, exhaustion, oxygen levels, etc. A creature is exposed to change constantly, and the role of the systems that govern homeostasis is to ameliorate those changes, to use internal resources to reflect the external state changes. When it's cold, we shiver. When it's hot, we sweat. Without these automatic systems, a creature quickly snowballs, and dies. In fact, these systems cost energy themselves to run, which means that all creatures realize the importance of homeostasis in survival and reproduction, despite its costs.

This high-level, nuanced look at the concept of surveillance is critical. Instead of a binary between privacy and everything being publicized widely, it shows us that surveillance is in reality a spectrum. To decide if a type of surveillance is good or bad, we need to look at what its end goals are: to help or to harm. Inside this gradient exist many forms: the idea of a God always watching you sin even when you're alone, to the role of entertaining a silent text box of chat messages on websites like Twitch for hundreds to thousands of other people aslo sitting behind computer screens, to journaling/reflecting on what you've spent your day doing.

I define modern self-surveillance as the art of mobilizing your camera technology to increase your efficacy. In issue #35, I wrote a piece about the role of zero-cost flywheels, and how integral they are to the solo entrepreneur's toolkit. The process is relatively straightforward. When you plan to lock in for a block of deep work, you turn on the screen recording feature on your computer on, and possibly your camera and microphone if you so desire. The reasoning is as follows: you focus deeper just by knowing that you are keeping watch over your own actions (the cost of context switching on camera will prevent you from fooling around nearly as much meaning that you finish the work you set out to do), you increase the "revenue" of your work for no extra work cost (knowledge work is abstract, but the process is very real – so having record of it is valuable. In addition you get to work on deliberate practice and spaced repetition), and you get "better" at the skill of being on camera (so you won't be surprised when someone whips out a camera in your face in public).

Each of the above could be its own essay, but in the spirit of time, I'll leave them at their top level forms. This self-surveillance is cheap, and costs minimal computer resources and storage in a world where we punt terabytes of data on giant info logs.

It is important to note that this means that these videos can be stored, and destroyed, locally on your machines. And if you wish, you can easily convert into sharing in a venue that benefits you and aligns with your values and goals.

In sum, if you do what I do (write, code, think), and you were planning on doing all that stuff anyway, consider screen recording and turning on your camera while you do your deep work.

To put my money where my mouth is, here is a short video of me writing this literal newsletter issue you are reading in my bed (I like to laze while writing). Hi!

On My Nightstand - What I'm Reading

To "fight" homeostasis, is to only cause a stronger allergic response in the swing back of the pendulum. The goal of good habit building is to slowly change what homeostasis means in your body. A new normal is a marathon of right moves, not a sprint.

Homeostasis, remember, doesn’t distinguish between what you would call change for the better and change for the worse. It resists all change.

-- Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment (affiliate link)

<LEDA> when the sun goes up, we study. when it goes down...we study!

Even with what was said above in the Food for Thought section, the goal of being always on can quickly devolve into hoarding. Keep in mind the slight nuance between surveillance for harm and vigilance for good. Choose wisely.

She was allowed to turn off the SeeChange cameras in the room, but she found she rarely did. She knew that the footage she might gather, herself, for instance about movements during sleep, could be valuable someday, so she left the cameras on. It had taken a few weeks to get used to sleeping with her wrist monitors—she’d scratched her face one night, and cracked her right screen another—but Circle engineers had improved the design, replacing the rigid screens with more flexible, unbreakable ones, and now she felt incomplete without them.

-- The Circle (affiliate link)

This fine line of good/bad surveillance becomes a clear, bright red one when it comes to companies making their way into our lives for their profit. This is why companies leverage popularity as metric, it is simply guaranteed profit, through the conversation of mega fans, and those who can be converted. More eyes = more ads. The art of self-surveillance, while not entirely distinct, is separated from the sole goal of profit motivation. The goal is to make more intentional actions with a realistic set of data. The goal is not the highlight reel, but to find meaning in what we already do.

In America, before the internet, the division between our public and private lives was usually tied to our physical location—our work and our home. The context in which we were communicating with our friends and family was clear. At work, we were professionals, and at home we were husbands, wives, sons, or daughters. On the internet, we organize information by its popularity in an attempt to determine its validity. If a website has been referenced by many other websites, then it is generally determined to be more valuable or accurate. Feelings expressed on social media are quantified, validated, and distributed in a similar fashion. Popular expression becomes the most valuable expression. Social media businesses represent an aggressive expansion of capitalism into our personal relationships. We are asked to perform for our friends, to create things they like, to work on a “personal brand”—and brands teach us that authenticity is the result of consistency. We must honor our “true self” and represent the same self to all of our friends or risk being discredited. But humanity cannot be true or false. We are full of contradictions and we change. That is the joy of human life. We are not brands; it is simply not in our nature.

-- How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story (affiliate link)

<RAVENLOL> as the most popular crow in my murder, i have 1000s of loyal followers. however, the squawking of my fans does make it hard to stay asleep, at times

Poem

If he finds himself backing himself into a corner /

The room itself must be so, so small /

Because if in his own volition he can become claustrophobic /

Then the landscape of his mind was not expansive at all

Thanks for reading, and see you next Sunday!

ars longa, vita brevis,

Bram

P.S. If you like what you read on this newsletter, forward it to a friend! It really helps!