min effort, max effect
In this day and age with prompt to code being twenty a month, writing about your side project is like the old meme “let me sing you the song of my people”. So, yea, let me tell you about my side project … My side project is called Hisohiso and it’s hosted at https://www.hisohiso.org. Hisohiso is [ ]
This sentence is bullshit. Weaponized bullshit. Yet, repeated ad nauseam. People regret more what they didn’t do, than what they did? Oh, hell no. Generally, people don’t avoid doing things because they’re cowards or lazy. They avoid doing things because we built a world that requires self-repression and punishes self-expression. You didn’t skip the thing [ ]
There are two kinds of supermarket shelves: the dead ones (salt), and the ones that look like a minor religion formed around them (toilet paper). There is a rush to differentiate toilet paper brands. Not sure what that is about but toilet paper is one of the healthiest retail shelves many brands from many [ ]
When I left my old job, I had two options:go work somewhere else, or team up with someone for a start-up.I chose the first. Somewhere else.Some time later I ran into my former boss. Smiling, curious, he asked:“So, how’s the start-up?”I told him I didn’t start one.At that moment in my life, I needed stability, [ ]
Work–life balance leaves no room for civic life. In chasing equilibrium, we outsourced the public to the private, expecting some magical force to handle what we no longer have time for. Those who cannot find balance—because “life” includes work, family, and citizenship alike—begin to long for an automated savior: an AI government, an algorithmic society [ ]
Product theory is full of competing commandments. “Build an MVP.” “Cross the chasm.” “Disrupt yourself.” “Bundle or unbundle.” Product managers, founders, and leadership in general, juggle them, quoting whichever one fits the current deck. The theories are great: most are drawn from empirical evidence. A problem I noticed in time is that we treat them [ ]
Inflation is more than numbers on a graph. It’s the signal that money itself is rotting. The bills in your pocket shrink in power not only because of “policy” or “markets,” but because what they buy has already been emptied of worth. Look around: so much of what we purchase bears no resemblance to what [ ]
We’ve all heard the advice: “If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.” It sounds noble, almost like wisdom: surround yourself with brighter people, absorb their brilliance, and you’ll grow. But here’s the twist: the mantra is less wisdom and more manipulation. It’s the kind of advice that benefits power [ ]
Democracy worked. Not works, worked. Because that’s the fate of all complex systems: they demand more and more complication to function until no one can hold them end to end. Take physics. Any person with a healthy IQ can grasp Newton’s laws of mechanics. A slope, a block, two forces, a neat little diagram – [ ]
The people who shout “you only live once” the loudest are the ones acting as if they don’t believe it. They gamble, binge, burn themselves out, chase hollow thrills—living as if there’s some cosmic afterparty where they’ll brag about how “wild” they were. But if you truly believe you only live once, if you take [ ]
They didn’t fake the money. That was important. They built things. Start-ups. Battery co-ops, carbon offsets, urban mushroom farms. Real businesses. They paid Earth taxes. They issued payrolls. Filed for permits. Spoke on panels. No quantum scams, no alien tech giveaways. Just efficient capitalism with a better work ethic. The profits — real, earned, admired [ ]
The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason. G.K. Chesterton One million years ago, nature made an absurd wager: that a large brain, slow-maturing offspring, and high-maintenance social bonding could outcompete claws, venom, and speed. Homo sapiens, born defenceless and [ ]
I’ve posted in the past about what it means to be customer-centric. This is about a related, but more wide reaching topic. I am sure y’all have heard this a gazillion times before: “the customer is always right”. However, I can bet many of the contexts were comedic. There’s some random person making weird demands. The [ ]
The way forward has always been to ignore the perils and keep pushing. The current meme saying if we only knew, we d never have started is a symptom of this.
Ukraine is the cause of the swift dismissal of progressivism not gender theory! Trumpism won because Ukraine lost. The true failure of unbridled left of the last decades is rooted in its counterproductive gobbling up on resources. The need for Ukraine to exist as a step to gobble up what results from decolonizing Russia is [ ]
We live in the ruins of the 1st networks. Facebook, X, Instagram, Telegram, TikTok are the modern equivalent of ancient giant architecture that sank civilisations. They are the 1st networks. They did great things but their time has ended. They are the proverbial Easter Island statues that destroyed Easter Island, built for abundance, resulted in [ ]
The political spectacle of this year is in full force. So many elections on the same topics that say nothing about problems and all about manipulating people to agree on made up problems. With Trump apparently securing the win only a dubious turn of events could change this, again it so clear now [ ]
Being customer centric means to internalize, to believe faithfully, that your money comes from real people who are genuinely helped by your work. It’s very hard to be customer centric! We have ourselves, family, friends, colleagues, acquaintances to worry about. There is little room to also bring in “customers” as real people. Most advice revolves [ ]
This week I ve seen three friends. One talked to me about their drop-shipping startup and his woes with Romanian e-commerce. Another one has a supplement production facility and talked to me about his plans to grow online sales, and his woes with offline deals depending so much on networking and so little on product quality. [ ]
I ve been through layoffs before, but never through buyouts. I gotta say, it hits different. Remember when I said Automattic is peak job? It is. Nevertheless, this week 159 people left, all at once, following Matt s idea of ensuring alignment briefly put: here is a strong safety net, take the jump if you must [ ]