Using the words that fit

From the blogger Michael Lynch, who was writing about what changed for him when he started to use non-business school terms to describe what he makes.

When I talked about my personal blog, I just called it a blog. There was never a situation where “content” would have conveyed a richer meaning. My website visitors aren’t “traffic”; they’re readers. They don’t “generate engagement”; they send me comments or questions. When I started writing my book, I never called it an “info product.” It’s a book, and I’m its author.

He goes on to say,

I did notice an immediate change, especially with words like “traffic.” Traffic makes me feel like I’m just throwing out flypaper and measuring whatever sticks. When I describe website visitors as “readers,” it reminds me that these are real people who have literally billions of other things they could be reading that day, but they’re choosing to spend some of their limited time with me.

From the first paragraph of this dispatch from Chris Arnade’s Substack.

A friend of mine came out of her “Conquer your fear of Flying!” course even more nervous, saying “They spent hours explaining how an airplane works. Great, now I have hundreds of different details to worry about. All I wanted was for them to tell me ‘It’s magic’ and move on.” That’s me, but with the body.

Yeah. I can relate to that.

I’m trying to figure out how to make time to do the piled-up admin work I need to do.

This is difficult because I will probably need to take some time away from seeing patients to do all the admin stuff, which is how I make money. But when I am with patients, all this unfinished stuff lives rent-free and makes a lot of distracting noise.

So, to do the work that pays me, I need to make time for administrative tasks that don’t.

Yuck.

I read this post on Scripting News today that included this line.

Like a boat, a human being has integrity.

I really liked this.

It got me thinking: if a boat doesn’t have integrity, it starts to sink, and I think the same thing happens with people. If someone acts without integrity, I think it is only a matter of time before they end up in a situation where the holes in who they are and what they do start causing real problems.

I enjoy catching up on my RSS feeds much more than I enjoy catching up on the laundry.

(Note: I’ve got a household of six people, four small kids. It’s a lot of laundry.)

Via FLUX Review No. 251 on phase shifts

An important thing to remember about catalysts is that they cannot cause change on their own. Catalysts only speed up a reaction that’s already happening. The conditions need to be in place to trigger a phase change in the first place.

Yeah!

The rest of the post is very interesting and (in my arrogant opinion) useful.

[This post on Disquiet.com on craft] (https://disquiet.com/2026/09/29/on-craft-process-and-networks/) is so good.

you have an opportunity to stand out, which is simply by doing things, and doing them regularly and publicly. Perform live. Perform online. Post videos of yourself. Post information about your process. Interact with other musicians. Express the connections inherent in your work. Slowly build a timeline. Slowly build a network of collaborators.

Yeah!

Via Casey Newton writing in Platformer

Zuckerberg says Meta plans to fund Muse by taking a cut of transactions, which means that it will soon be some team’s job to massively increase the number of transactions that take place within Muse. (I imagine ads will play a starring role here.)

Yeah.

I’d rather lock a tire than give Meta access to all my iPhone or Mac.

I read this via Michael Tsai today

I’ve been using CharGPT as my go to tech support for different hardware and software issues. I’ve done it to be mostly helpful.

I try to explain the problem clearly, what I want to happen, and what I’ve already tried. Then, I wrap up my prompting by explicitly saying, “please make sure you’re referencing the most recent documentation and making your suggestions concurrently with the recent documentation! In other words, check and make sure what you’re telling me reflects the current software/firmware, or a previous version.”

I’ve been trying to work on some stuff, but I’m tired, in a foul mood, and I find nothing but faults with everything.

I wish I could finance some of this stuff, but it’s time to stop.

Things will probably look different in the light of the daystar tomorrow.

Via Manu’s blog

When you’re mad at a company, figure out who is actually responsible for the things you’re mad about, and be mad at them. Because people can be held accountable.

Yeah.

—-

Manu was writing about how people get mad at companies, when it might be more useful/productive to direct dissatisfaction at the decision-makers within the companies.

As I read the post, my thoughts turned to the way that some people in my life seem to be freaked out about AI, and are talking about what the frontier models are doing, or about the data centers as objects.

Talking about this is fine.

However, I would say that it is vital to remember that the models and the data centers Are things that are created by people? who control large companies, or who have been elected to legislate (regulate?) the action of said companies.

It seems to me that we would get the most bang for our buck if we held the legislators accountable. If we demand they do the things we have elected them to do. One of those things is to make sure large powerful companies can’t just do whatever they want without being held accountable for what goes wrong when they move without concern for the downstream affects of their actions.

There is a post about watching the film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off over on the Infinite Regress blog.

At the very end of the post, there is this point:

What is the message for the your audience? If you are charming enough and don’t behave too too badly you can get away with much shenanigans? Ain’t that the truth.

I read this and thought about something about Freud's thought that I've been saying for a while now. Freud pointed out how, in his day and age, there was a kind of injunction against enjoyment (sexual enjoyment in particular). During this time, people wanted to (1) have fun by doing what was enjoyable and (2) obey the injunction not to enjoy so they wouldn't need to worry about getting in trouble. Being stuck between these two things is a main factor in compromise formation, AKA symptom formation.

After reading Freud seriously for years, I think what Freud was pointing out (but did not directly state) is that the social injunction against enjoyment was actually a demand that people didn't enjoy in public. If they did something enjoyable (i.e., sexual), they had to do it in a way that was very private. If they complied with that demand, they could get away with a lot.

The best example I've seen of this on TV comes from The Crown, where Prince Philip tells Princess Diana not to rock the boat.

He says,

Just be creative. You can break as many rules as you like. You can do whatever you want. You can make whatever arrangements you need to make to find your own happiness. As long as you remember the one condition, the one rule: you remain loyal to your husband and loyal to this family in public."

The bargain, then, is that you can break the rules as long as you publicly uphold them. What has to remain intact is the appearance of obedience.

Is The FLUX Review Ep. 252

Lego, founded in 1932, introduced its modern brick in 1958, but the brick separator wasn’t introduced until 1990.

This is one of those bits of information that strikes me as extremely interesting, but if I had to explain why it’s so interesting, I don’t have any answer ready to go.

I was listening to this podcast while I was riding my bike this morning. One of the points that was made, which Feels very right to me, is that In a world where agentic AI systems become the norm, the things we should be helping our kids develop is judgment.

My attempt to summarize what I heard in the conversation is this: AI systems are going to be very good at making a lot of information available to people. However, we can probably assume that unlike people, AI systems aren’t going to be worried about consequences, because they don’t have bodies that die or that can be incarcerated.

Another way to say this would be that the stakes of making bad decisions, or acting in harmful ways, are higher for human beings than they are for agentic AI systems.

Be that as it may, as agentic AI systems make more information available to human beings, there’s information could help human beings make better judgments that truly in better decisions/actions that affect other human bodies living in the real/material world.

The crux of the argument was that judgment ultimately needs to be something that human beings don’t outsource to agentic AIs too often.

Has I’ve continued to think about this, I think there are a lot of implications for education systems, and family systems, out of which are systems that encourage and discourage children from developing particular skills.

I have four kids. What can I do as a parent to help them develop the best possible judgment skills?

I suspect this is the thing that’s going to be on my mind a lot…

This never gets old.

I woke up early enough to work out, but I’ve ben pushing hard for three days, and even though I want to keep pushing, I know a rest day is a good idea.

As a result, I had some time in the morning to get things done. I planned to focus on just one thing and started to do that, but then got stuck on something. (Grumble…)

Then I jumped to another thing I’ve been working on and made a few small adjustments.

Now: I’ve got two irons in the fire, and they are all heating up slowly… and I’ve got to get to scheduled stuff. The fire will get cold if I can’t tend it, but I guess that’s how it goes sometimes.

I woke up at 4:00 am today because of a thunderstorm, and I couldn’t get back to sleep. I tossed and turned for about an hour, then gave up, made coffee, and did a workout.

Whenever I use YouTube to research a product I’m considering buying, in this case, the difference between a DJI Action 5 Pro and Action 6, the algorithm goes nuts and keeps suggesting other videos that I don’t need or want.

I wish there was something like a just browsing feature I could turn on when I don’t want YouTube to think I really want more information about X thing.

Writing a reaction to an article in The Atlantic by Will Oremus, that doubts that Apple’s iPhone Duo is a good idea, John Gruber writes:

I bet there are a lot more people out there who would rather have a $2500 iPhone and a $700 MacBook Neo than who would want a $2500 MacBook Pro and a $700 iPhone.

So at first I read that, and I think, “Naw dawg.” It seems totally crazy to me that this accurately describes things as they are.

But then I kinda think about it, and I’m like... Maybe...

I know at least one person who has a work laptop that they use only for work stuff. (It’s rather locked down, and can’t easily be used as a personal computer) and uses their iPhone as their primary device for, like, almost everything.

I use my iPhone for a lot, because it’s almost always on me, and it’s convenient. (I’m writing this post in iA Writer on an iPhone 17 Pro Max.) I prefer to use my MacBook Pro, but I love a life where I’m a parent to four small children, and sitting down at the computer to do something isn't something I do if I can do the same thing on my iPhone.

Then, I think about people who use public transport... and how when I’m flying I usually use my phone to watch stuff, because, again, it’s easy and space-efficient.

After that, I think about how I use my iPhone camera rather than a (better) separate camera because I don’t like carrying/reaching for a camera, and why would I when my iPhone camera is as good as it is?

I also record audio for podcasts with a good mic going into my iPhone via USB-C rather than a good mic hooked up to my Zoom H4 or H6 via XLR cables.

Anyway. I still feel that spending that much on a phone is crazy. Be that as it may, I’m less skeptical about Gruber’s point than I was before.

AI, democratized work with machines

In a post on his blog, Brad Barrish writes:

AI really does democratize working with machines in a way that only trained developers could do. It’s incredibly exciting and so weird. It continues to thrill me and also really freak me out. I definitely have mixed feelings about it. That said, I don’t think it’s going to kill us all. I’ve learned not to bring it up with most people, though I do wish I could have nuanced conversations about it with people in my life.

Yeah.

I’ve been working crazy hours on some organizational work for the past few days… I think the work is interesting, and I like it, but I wouldn’t call it “exciting stuff.”

• I’m reviewing the bylaws for an organization I’m on the board of. I’ve found some inconsistencies that I think we need to address.
• Working to create (i.e., document) better governance/decision making policies there too.
• Doing a lot of organizing of files and information.

This is the kind of stuff that (if done well and kept up with) makes organizations function better. I also find it is a great way to learn about an organization’s history and how it gets things done. It also helps me understand an organization’s institutional memory. However, it is not the kind of work people generally volunteer to do.

As a bonus, when I do this, I can return to other stuff I’ve been working on or obsessing over and see it with fresh-ish eyes. I also come up with interesting thoughts about my other stuff when I’m not working on it directly, so I return to it with a few new ideas.

I’ve been sitting in front of a computer doing the things I do in front of a computer for too long. Time to go and move my body.

From Mannu’s blog

I still believe that dialogue is, by far, the best, and probably only, tool we have to make progress on a multitude of societal issues. At the same time, I’m more and more convinced that dialogue, on the internet, using the public digital spaces we have at our disposal, is almost impossible to have.

Yeah.

Sometimes, working in small technical (hardware & software) problems leaves me feeling more frustrated and tired than I think it should.

I deleted five RSS feeds that I’ve been only skimming or skipping for many months now.

My RSS experience keeps getting more the way I want it!