It’s a weird state to be in with my work feeling like a vocation. I love doing it, I love making progress on Pika, and I’m super grateful to be in this position. Yet there are some things I enjoy in life that I can’t seem to find time to do these days. I see movies, but not as many as I’d like. I’d like to spin some records and just listen. Ironically I’m having trouble finding time to blog. Etc.

I wonder if I should start a blogging series about watching all of, say, the AFI 100 movies or maybe Ebert’s The Great Movies since I have his first book on my shelf? But…the idea of such a blogging series makes me want to build an integrated movie posting/collection feature into Pika. 🤔

Try to deliver your tech-job application in person, I dare you!

Could you leave your application at the loading bay? Behind the building, where the trucks bring things... because that's where physical things go...

I did a telehealth call this week about some third-party blood test results. As with most things in your forties, the cure is to lose some weight, exercise, and get better sleep. For whatever reason I feel like this might be the year I pull it off. 🤞

My brother-in-law told me about a woman who was arrested and jailed for over five months based on AI facial recognition. I definitely was listening to him talk about it and saying, “There must be more to this.” Nope, it appears there is no more to it. Yet. There’s gotta be more to it, doesn’t there? Please?!

At the moment I’m choosing to be blissfully unaware of the politics around any of this and just enjoying the pictures.

The lunar surface fills the frame in sharp detail, as seen during the Artemis II lunar flyby, while a distant Earth sets in the background. This image was captured at 6:41 p.m. EDT, on April 6, 2026, just three minutes before the Orion spacecraft and its crew went behind the Moon and lost contact with Earth for 40 minutes before emerging on the other side. In this image, the dark portion of Earth is experiencing nighttime, while on its day side, swirling clouds are visible over the Australia and Oceania region. In the foreground, Ohm crater shows terraced edges and a relatively flat floor marked by central peaks — formed when the surface rebounded upward during the impact that created the crater. — A setting earth (c/o NASA)

Short, and late, rendition of Friday this week as I’m traveling.

We took a spring break to Phoenix and were able to fit in a Project Hail Mary IMAX screening. It was excellent! Two of us have read the book, and we enjoyed both versions of the story on their own terms.

We got in to Phoenix late on a Friday, stayed at a hotel, and kicked around the city proper on Saturday before checking into our VRBO. Out of nowhere I found an afternoon performance of Come From Away at The Phoenix Theatre. It was our first time seeing the musical, and it was fantastic. Lots of memories flooded back for those of us who lived through 9/11.

Come From Away program in the Phoenix Theatre.

If you are even a mild St. Vincent fan, I recommend her fantastic new live album:

Delta Air Lines…responded to the continuing shutdown by suspending special services for members of Congress, including airport escorts and red coat services.

I applaud Delta for doing this, but why the heck do members of congress get special services in the first place? Sure, for certain situations I could see it, but generally they should be in the airport mixed in with the rest of us citizens. Pat them down!

Related, we’re flying out of Des Moines today, heading down to Phoenix. With some time to kill we took some inspiration from the Thingelstads:

Barry, Jesse, and Emma posing after finishing The Kidnapping escape room. — We had…a few clues

Ava is traveling and shared this from the Victoria and Albert Museum:

A plaque in a museum that says: Good Enough 1900–Now The idea of frugal innovation or jugaad (as it is termed in Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi) can be loosely translated as ‘hack’ or ‘quick fix’. It describes how designs can be redeployed or optimised for diverse circumstances. Jugaad has gained momentum in an increasingly globalised world where peoples’ needs vary greatly. People have sought a quick fix or made things that are ‘good enough’ throughout the 20th century and continue to do so today. Limited access to materials and financial constraints have posed challenges that designers, makers, architects and engineers have met with imaginative solutions. Technologically-engaged yet energy- and infrastructure-scarce communities are innovating for themselves. To meet their specific needs, they are creating gadgets and appliances to enable better access to light, power and digital connectivity.

A lengthy, imperfect article on how much Minnesota mattered this winter. (archive)

The challenge of this work week has been trying to figure out a way to streamline the moderating Pika blog posts. With only two of us on the team, it’s impractical for us to read every blog post and look for rules violations. Especially when you consider that there are many blogs on the platform with hundreds and thousands of posts. Choosing posts or blogs that we’d rather not include in the soon-to-return Pika Pulse is an even more subtle and nuanced task.

It seems obvious that LLMs could be engaged to help us with this, and in testing in my local development environment it is absolutely true that it would be a big help. We are still strong believers in not training AIs on Pika blogs. The terms published by APIs for these services are clear that when sending anything to them the default position is to not train on that content. You must opt-in.

Do we trust them? Not exactly. So we’re going to keep looking for alternatives that stay away from LLM cloud services. 🤔 I have a Mac Mini lying around here that could maybe run an LLM that has no access to these motherships…

This time of year I do a lot of working from my couch with basketball games on TV. It’s not nearly as compelling these days with NIL and players constantly transferring between schools, but old habits die hard.

Johnny.Decimal

I learned about Johnny.Decimal from Pika blogger Michael Borland. The last post on his blog clued me in. Sadly he has since passed away. RIP Michael. ❤

I’ve dipped in and out of Getting Things Done (GTD) many times over the years. The most organized I’ve felt in life is when I was truly adhering to the process, including physical tickler folders in a filing cabinet. A filing cabinet!

Today Johnny.Decimal came across my view, and I think I might give it a go. The current state I’m in is this:

My work has been all-consuming, in a good way.
- My work is not organized, but rather little note papers on the desk, a million Basecamp to-dos, and a general trust that the most important things will remain in my brain or come to the fore as necessary.
- With the productivity power of LLMs, I’m putting more and more balls in the air every day.
- While I know I can’t copy-paste a personal system onto our work to-dos, I hope Johnny.Decimal can help bridge that gap.
My home projects are abandoned.
- There are papers piling up on my office floor, awaiting organization.
- My office is a mess.
- I’m daily making small decisions about what is important to get done (pay the bills) and what isn’t (scan the documents).
- I have notes and reminders spread across Things, Apple Reminders, Apple Notes, and Obsidian.
- I’ve uncharacteristically missed some important tasks over the past year. Late estimated tax payments being one glaring example.
- There are little projects to do, but my system has become disorganized and overwhelming. So any spare moments with energy I generally pour down the drain of internet distraction.
- I have lots of woodworking ideas that I can’t work on now, but I suspect I’ll pick back up in the next decade.

At this point in life I’m not seeking to be an efficiency master. I’m well aware that I’ll never get everything done. I’m happy to sit and read a book or watch a movie. Yet I would like to feel that my ideas and projects are organized in a way that I can find (or be reminded of them) again later. I’ve had that feeling before and it was the first year after starting GTD.

I’m watching some introduction videos now, and I might actually pony up for the course to get my bearings. If only I could justify the time…

I’ve been sick for half of this past week, so not much drivel to share this Friday.

The core of my love for reading grew through affordable mass market paperbacks. While it’s not new news, it’s a little sad to see them leaving. Still, I really would prefer not to read that tiny, cramped print these days.

I saw this a few places, so now you get to see this:

Previously on “A Writing Workstation”

A couple months ago I put together a fairly lengthy post about getting an old MacBook set up to be a writing machine. It was pretty encouraging, the idea of having a machine that would just be for one thing. At the time of writing that post I was diving pretty deep into my work and I realized I was not in a “writing mode,” but I was also hopeful a little writing would happen with this new, old laptop.

I’m not going to blame it all on this one thing, but at the end of that post I said:

I hate the feeling of typing on this thing enough that I’m considering an inexpensive Keychron keyboard to sit on my lap while I write. That doesn’t seem conducive to actually writing, though.

I wrote once with that laptop and never went back.

So I’ve been on the lookout for a different option. My finger has hovered over the order buttons for both a Freewrite Traveler and a used MacBook One. With the Freewrite, I was hesitant about the lag between typing and the screen, and lets not talk about the price versus general utility. For the latter, I suspected I would dislike the keyboard as much as I dislike the keyboard on my old MacBook Air.

Then came the Neo. With the education price¹, I could get the Neo for less than the Freewrite Traveler. I don’t mind typing on my work MacBook Pro at all, so I’m pretty confident I’d be happy with the Neo keyboard. No reviews thus far have suggested keyboard problems.

So I decided to give it a shot, clicking the trade-in button for that MacBook Air in the process. I initially felt like embracing the low end and rolling with an Indigo 256 GB with no Touch ID. In the end, though, I figured I’d save my future self a few headaches with the 512 GB.

TIL at checkout: Education savings: Available to current and newly accepted college students and their parents, as well as faculty, staff, and homeschool teachers of all grade levels.

The Discernment Gap

I really enjoyed Justin Duke’s thoughts in “The death of software, the A24 of software”.

A24 didn't succeed despite the streaming era — they succeeded because of it. The explosion of mediocre content created a vacuum for taste, for curation, for a brand that stood for something. When everything is abundant and most of it is forgettable, the scarce thing is discernment.

Yes!

We are fortunate at Good Enough to be given these powerful LLM tools at a perfect time in our careers. (I have more to say about that timing, but not today.) We can guide agents very successfully given our breadth of experience in programming and design. Perhaps more importantly we have also developed a deep level of taste for the way interfaces work, and honed our attention-to-detail muscles to a fine degree. And our belief in human (humane?) customer service runs completely counter to million/billion dollar companies that ship you to an algorithm and don’t want to talk to you person-to-person unless you embarrass them online (archive).

Household-name status isn’t what we’re after, so the A24 comparison isn’t really apt for us, but there is a lot of room in the marketplace of software products for those teams that are able to stand out based on heaps of quality. I just hope discovery tools continue evolving so that regular folks are able to find the excellent software that is going be made.

It’s snowing and I’m doing taxes.

I’ve mentioned the photographs of Ragnar Axelsson (Rax) a couple of times here in the past. I recently discovered the availability of the short BBC documentary featuring him: Last Days of the Arctic. Having studied hundreds of his pictures by this point, it was fascinating to see him and his subjects moving through the very environments where the photos were captured.

Please contribute to Number Research (via Shawn).

If you want a new song that feels thrown back to the 80’s, I recommend “be the girl!” by hemlocke springs.

Thank you, Mike O. Thank you.

It’s Not Better Yet

We mourn our craft:

The worst fact about these tools is that they work. They can write code better than you or I can, and if you don’t believe me, wait six months.

This point stuck out to me. I’m going to take it completely out of context to make my own point. I haven’t yet found an LLM that is writing code better than I can. I guess it depends on how you define “better.” It’s better in many ways:

It can write code faster
It can write code more effectively than I can in languages with which I’m unfamiliar
At my descriptive prompting, it can quickly give me code design ideas that I hadn’t thought of yet
It can be used by novices and non-programmers to build software that solves at least some of the target problem space

Yet when it comes to implementing a non-trivial feature in Ruby on Rails, I’ve never seen a LLM put together something that I felt was better than what I would put together. I’ve not seen it in a “Yeah, that’s how I would have done it” way nor a “Woah, why didn’t I think of that?” way. This is, of course, a subjective statement, but it seems like a lot of people are lamenting the loss of that subjective view of beautiful code. I haven’t found that loss to have arrived yet.

It’ll probably happen at some point soon, though. Or maybe, like most things programming, 80% of the work will be in delivering the last 20% of the potential of LLMs. For me, I’m thankful that I happen to be one of those programmers who loves the higher-level building of creative solutions more than the act of typing lines of code. On most days I find the process of leading the LLM to the code I think is best to be a pretty satisfying experience.

The Blog Question Challenge

I haven’t done one of these in a bit. It’s time to take on the blog question challenge from Alexandra.

Why did you make a blog in the first place?

If I’m to believe my own writing from 2004:

[T]he goal I have is just to keep honing those all important writing and communication skills. Additionally, I think this blog/journal will help me to retain thoughts and opinions over time.

At the time friends were firing up blogs, and I really got into the network of blogs about the Minnesota Twins. I ended up writing a fair bit about the Twins in those early years.

Why did you choose your platform? (Blogger/Wordpress/Bear Blog/Pika)

My platform, Pika, chose me. My likeness is illustrated on the home page after all!

One day after posting “Better Sleep in Ten Days” I ate junk food, had a beer, watched Olympics until 10:15, got a good length of sleep, but it was not restful.

All of these things together were probably not good choices. 😆

Searching for a hotel. Yay or nay?

A hotel search result that says "Nice home in a nice quiet community. Come over and stay as long as you need. please!

The picture is of a sidewalk, a bit grainy, with perhaps an American flag on a pole in the distant background. A glaring light from an apartment building entryway shines on the right side of the picture.

It's a creepy scene.

Excellent Bugonia Easter egg, Letterboxd. (I’m not sure what I thought of the movie, but I like the font!)

I’ve got Peacock for the month (go Olympics!), and now I realize it just might have all of the Yorgos Lanthimos movies. Can one brain handle catching up on Bugonia, Kinds of Kindness, The Favourite, and The Killing of a Sacred Deer in just a few weeks?

Japan's largest toilet maker is an "undervalued and overlooked" AI play, according to a UK-based activist investor.

– Financial Times (via Mike O)

Excited to have learned of this new RSS reader, Current. The author, Terry Godier, shared a very detailed accounting of their thought process. I really appreciate when someone takes the time to do this sort of writing.

A few months ago I shared an idea with some similar aspects with Good Enough. Thankfully I hadn’t put any work into the idea yet. With the existence of Current, maybe I’ll never have to, and instead I can spend some of that time talking about Current.

Better Sleep in Ten Days

I’ve certainly said it before: I haven’t slept well for years. I believe it’s been five or six or seven years, but it’s all blurry now to the point that I could also be convinced my poor sleep has existed for all the years.

My cycle in recent history has been to distract myself away from sleep with YouTube or browsing the internet. (Here’s where I’d typically link to all the posts talking about my personal struggles with internet addiction. Then I realized you can just scroll back a few pages in my blog and read all about it. Seems that it’s become a sad theme of my blog.) Alongside this I feel anxiety, as we all do day-to-day. After behaving in this way for so long, I got to thinking: Is lack of sleep a contributor to or a symptom of my anxiety?

It is pretty clear that lack of sleep isn’t going to help one’s anxiety. And finding a way to get more sleep will probably allow one to better manage one’s anxiety. And finding a way to get more sleep will allow one to better understand if lack of sleep was a major contributor to one’s anxiety.

That all assumes you can figure out how to get more sleep in the midst of it all. Thankfully I did, at least for now.

AI Fatigue

Weekly Thing 341 brings up AI fatigue:

With that though our ability to do more fills with more things that we wished we could do. No matter what, there is still only so much time and energy in the day. The fact that Claude is there at 2am while you cannot sleep can be a problem. The fact that you can have five projects going on with different agents is neat, but you still are coordinating them!

The "just one more prompt" trap is real.

It sure is!

With a small team at Good Enough, there is way more work (and ideas) than there is time. It's so tempting to fire up claude.ai/code (literally in a web browser on my phone) and send it ten different tasks that need to be done. In fact, I have sent it ten different tasks…times two or three. I sent these tasks almost exclusively between midnight and two in the morning on nights when I couldn’t sleep.

When I woke up the next morning I got that familiar feeling like I’m managing a clutch of junior developers. I’m spending time reviewing some mediocre and incomplete code. Largely this has been a beneficial process. Even though none of this LLM-produced code has been deployable, the process has unlocked my mind on a few different long-standing to-dos.

After twenty draft pull requests were built up in late January, I decided to cancel my Claude subscription. Maybe after I catch up on finalizing each of those pull requests, I’ll open up the claude.ai/code spigot for another month.

Don’t worry, it’s not as if I’m using no LLMs for development. I have the growing Windsurf bills to prove it.

Stevie Nicks with a Stella Harmony guitar, 1960s via Reddit

As you know if you’ve been following along at all, my daughters are huge K-pop fans. Pink Floyd has always been my favorite band, so it feels right that we now have a pretty great cover of “Wish You Were Here” by FIFTY FIFTY.

What a Super Bowl halftime show. I teared up from the middle during the wedding celebration to the end. Bad Bunny, NBC and the NFL just made a giant statement about humanity and love to those that are doing such bad things to our country.

Do all the online recipe and influencer chefs really prefer Better Than Bouillon? Or have we all been slow-played by the company?