The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is probably the perfect book for this moment in software, because it is basically about trying to survive inside a universe that is absurd, bureaucratic, overconfident, badly documented, and somehow still convinced it is operating according to a plan. Douglas Adams understood that sometimes the systems around you are not secretly intelligent, they are just stupid at a scale too large for the human brain to process.

Douglas Adams was so ahead of the curve, from predicting how annoying gesture based computing could be, to outlining how insanely reckless fast-evolving code would be to how programming is like teaching a very dumb student (and when done right, sharpens the teacher's understanding more than the student's) and how many of us can share the vibe of being "rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand"

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AHAHAHAHA 113 members of Peter "Antichrist Hunter" Thiel's super-sekrit "dialog" group were leaked via the group's own website. Total amateur hour. Some interesting names there.

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man. i honestly thought we were more or less past this stage, or it was at least tough to provoke this kind of hallucination

The Orange

At lunchtime I bought a huge orange--
The size of it made us all laugh.
I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave--
They got quarters and I had a half.

And that orange, it made me so happy,
As ordinary things often do
Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the park.
This is peace and contentment. It's new.

The rest of the day was quite easy.
I did all the jobs on my list
And enjoyed them and had some time over.
I love you. I'm glad I exist.

via via Gladdest Thing I should read more there A Stoic's Guide To Not Being Annoying: 8 Steps Even You Could Follow - I still try to juggle my feelings about Stoicism against Epicureanism. I prefer the latter, but maybe not its advice to turn your back to the greater world and only focus on your local friend and family group. But I don't feel quite as called to virtue as Stoicism would have me be.

I've never had any love for "lets draw the American flag in black and white to look bad ass" but the Trump Phone removing 2 stripes to make way for "Trump Mobile" branding, on this incredibly chintzy phone? Very on brand for how this guy thinks of the USA.

Ethan Mollick‪@emollick.bsky.social‬
Fable: "write me a rhyming poem with six four line stanzas, each stanza removes another vowel. the first has no u, the second no u or i, etc."