Now—July 2026
Integration, studies, parenthood, the small things
Derek Kedziora
Notes about tech, design, culture, and faith
Latest posts
The company you keep
The internet is going to be remembered as a giant petri dish of social contagion.
Physical constraints and enjoyment
I’m back to thinking about constraints. This time, Terry Godier’s great video The Feeling Music Used to Give You (hat tip to Robert). Having what amounts to an infinite library of background music was fixing the wrong constraint. And that’s why streaming music hasn’t increased enjoyment of music.
Of God and mammon
There’s a longstanding criticism of Buddhism in the West as McMindfulness™, a watered-down and commodified version of the real thing. And it’s certainly disheartening to see how few Buddhist groups charge nothing for the teachings and look like little more than New Age inspired money-making schemes.
Revisiting the closed canon
A post I wrote in 2023, the closing of the canon, predicted that LLM answers would replace search results, dramatically lowering traffic to individual sites, thereby removing the incentives to even write along with building and maintaining websites. Unfortunately, this is proving to be true. I recommend reading AI is killing All About Berlin by Nicolas Bouliane, who runs a helpful site for expats…
Solar power in Amsterdam: the numbers
There’s promise, potential, and some reality checks if you want to go all in on solar power in famously unsunny places like Amsterdam
Constraints and intellectual work
I keep quoting him, but here’s another Cal Newport podcast that I can’t stop thinking about: Why do better tools make me worse at my job?. To save you a long listen: when you think about the theory of constraints, the bottlenecks facing personal or professional productivity are rarely solved by AI or other slick tool.
Design fads
Not surprisingly, Apple is pulling the plug on their silly VR goggles or whatever they’re called. At least they didn’t rename the company after the goggles. But, Apple did sacrifice the usability of their main products, phones and computers, for the sake of a virtual-reality aesthetic in the whole liquid glass thing. Clearly, both Facebook and Apple leadership expected goggles to be the future of…
Foundations for discussion
From an aside of a much longer essay from Tom Forth:
Prompting
I’ve noticed lately that more people are writing forum postings and Reddit questions as if they were writing a prompt for an LLM. Here’s an example from a Buddhist forum I lurk on: