I’ve spent way too much time productivity hacking and fiddling with the perfect PKM (personal knowledge management) system. And I’d increasingly been coming to the same conclusions as Joan Westenberg, whose recent blog post, I Deleted My Second Brain, has been making the rounds.

I haven’t gone so far as to delete everything, but I can see the cathartic value in it. I’ll quote from Joan:

But over time, my second brain became a mausoleum. A dusty collection of old selves, old interests, old compulsions, piled on top of each other like geological strata. Instead of accelerating my thinking, it began to replace it. Instead of aiding memory, it froze my curiosity into static categories.

In my case, it sometimes literally stopped me from reading because I dreaded the “need” to take and organise notes.

Worse, the architecture began to shape my attention. I started reading to extract. Listening to summarize. Thinking in formats I could file. Every experience became fodder. I stopped wondering and started processing.

I felt like I needed to always be archiving things, storing random internet posts for who knows what.

That’s not to say that I don’t still use Obsidian and iA Writer for specific tasks. My Buddhist Studies vault is handy for my MA programme and related research projects. But the difference between that and how most chronically online types are doing second brains is the specific focus. I’m not logging and analysing every minute I meditate. I’m not web clipping every single vaguely interesting site I visit.

I have a still fluid vault concept in progress that’s more of a diary than anything else. It’s not productivity focused; it’s just tidbits here and there. Some days I feel like a diary style daily note. I type out some blog posts, notes to clarify my own thinking on something, or just an idea. If I really like something, I’ll clip it and save it—but that’s the exception.

I also find it handy to have project folders just hanging out on my desktop for sorting through very in-progress stuff like buying a car, home improvement projects, etc. But this isn’t systematic or a second brain. It’s just slightly less chaotic.

For better or worse, my whole extended family uses iPhones. Group folders on Apple Notes is really the best way to handle shared text and archives.

The thing is, none of this is attempting to make a holistic attempt at capturing everything or being able to reference anything in the future. Once you accept these limitations, then software like Obsidian becomes curiously more powerful.

By switching away from wanting an all encompassing software solution to managing knowledge to just having a few practical notes for specific tasks, this point of Joan’s comes to the fore:

In trying to remember everything, I outsourced the act of reflection. I didn’t revisit ideas. I didn’t interrogate them. I filed them away and trusted the structure. But a structure is not thinking. A tag is not an insight. And an idea not re-encountered might as well have never been had.

Sometimes really thinking about something is spending an afternoon staring into space, working in the garden, cleaning the house, and working through some difficult ideas. You can’t just add a tag and call it a day.

And one last point about memory. The Pāli word sati, usually translated at mindfulness could with equal validity be translated as memory. Our society has lost the connection between awareness, active recall, and that memory is a present recreation rather than a faithful archive. Hence:

There is a Hebrew word: “zakhor.” It means both memory and action. To remember, in this tradition, is not to recall a fact. It is to fulfill an ethical obligation. To make the past present through attention.

This all aligns with my other goal of simply looking at screens less.

I’ve previously written about how there’s something creepy and very sexual lurking behind a lot of the people into “AI”, primarily men who can’t handle being told no.

Others have noticed this trend. The latest I’ve come across is from Laura Bates in The Guardian:

It is worth asking who is benefiting from this headlong rush, and at whose expense. One developer, who only goes by the name Lore in their communications with the media, described the open-source release of the large language model (LLM) Llama as creating a “ gold rush-type of scenario ”. He used Llama to build Chub AI, a website where users can chat with AI bots and roleplay violent and illegal acts. For as little as $5 a month, users can access a “brothel” staffed by girls below the age of 15, described on the site as a “world without feminism”.

I can’t find statistics, but I suspect this sort of thing is far more prevalent than most advocates of LLMs would be comfortable admitting. Something about the way how LLMs works brings this out in people, both abusive sexual fantasies and the idea of a worker that obediently jumps through whatever pointless hoops you dream up.

And Bates continues with a look at the recent past:

Women are at risk of being dragged back to the dark ages by precisely the same technology that promises to catapult men into a shiny new future. This has all happened before. Very recently, in fact. Cast your mind back to the early days of social media. It started out the same way: a new idea harnessed by privileged white men, its origins in the patriarchal objectification of women. (Mark Zuckerberg started out with a website called FaceMash, which allowed users to rank the attractiveness of female Harvard students … a concept he now says had nothing to do with the origins of Facebook.)

Technology is certainly not neutral. An entire world view is inherent to the tools we use.

From my friend and former colleague Autumn:

AI can’t replace Content Designers. Not now, and maybe not ever.

But.

That’s not what actually matters. What matters is whether your hiring manager, C-suite, or other stakeholder thinks it can.

I see this type of frustration growing among my UX peers. We’re being asked to do more and more at a higher quality than ever while constantly being having to justify the very existence of our jobs. And, as Autumn points out the people who wield power over us are the furthest removed from our day-to-day work and most susceptible to hype cycles, reminiscent of deep-sea mining.

And the most salient point is that AI only does the easy part of UX, such as picking out obvious components or writing simple copy:

What AI will never do is question whether my question is the right one to be asking. In this example, the AI didn’t suggest that, possibly, an error message isn’t necessary at all.

If I’m designing an appointment selector, it makes sense to only show the user what’s available. Why would I allow them to click on something that is only going to throw an error?

Of course there’s nuance to this. Maybe I want my customers to know that I usually have a 4PM slot. Fine: it can be grayed out with an explanation on hover, or it can be explained in a subtitle before the selections appear. But that’s the point: it depends on how the entire feature flows.

In other words, An LLM’s not going to tell you no.

The Dutch government recommends that people not eat eggs from backyard chickens:

RIVM scientists assessed the PFAS content in eggs from 60 different locations across the country and found that eggs from 31 of them contained so much PFAS that eating less than one egg a week would exceed official limits. At a further 10 locations, people could eat at most one egg per week without exceeding the limit.

This was buried in the news but should be making headlines. We could slowly be getting to the point where much of the earth is too toxic to produce food safely.

I think this also demonstrates why the environmental movement has made a huge mistake by becoming almost singularly focused on carbon emissions. They are abstract, absolutely necessary to sustain the world’s population for now, and the effect is going to largely beyond our lifetimes. Instead, focusing on toxic chemicals, microplastics, and other things in the here and now is a far easier sell for the environmental movement and far less wrapped up in partisan politics.

The company Boom is working to build a new supersonic airliner. In a recent interview, the founder extolled saving a few hours of flight time:

When I call Blake Scholl from New York, he says it’s a shame we couldn’t have met at his office in Colorado. If only there were a supersonic jet that could cruise at 1.7 times the speed of sound, and get me there two hours quicker than the typical JFK-to-Denver route.

That true, from a certain point of view. It’s also indicative of tech bro thinking. Of all the places to shave time off of a transcontinental flight, the speed of the airplane is an odd place to look. But the tech bros approach everything as an engineering problem to be solved rather than a community issue that multiple stakeholder can address.

Getting to JFK is a transportation nightmare. Instead of direct trains to the airport, you have to get to Jamaica station first and then take a slow “people mover” to actually get to the airport. Improving public transportation would also improve driving times as there would be less traffic. That’s an easy way to save half an hour or more and would apply to nearly every major airport in the US.

The main reason you have to get to the airport so early is for the security theatre. If they stopped the nonsense with the shoes and upselling “faster” screening, and instead simply staffed the airport well enough to allow passengers to get through this in a few minutes, you’d save another hour.

Of course, the rebuttal is that there’s no funding for either of these radical ideas. But isn’t it odd that building a functional train from Manhattan to JFK or hiring a few more low-paid staff is impossible but building supersonic luxury jets is a practical solution?

It’s spring, which means it’s time for some garden inspiration and to get to work. I’ve really come to like the sort of no-lawn, more natural meadow style approach, and it’s perfect for the tiny garden we have. It’s not like we’re going to play a game of football on a five square meter lawn. Instead, we’re going to sit outside, enjoy the sunshine, have fun watching all the critters around—something green and living sure beats the cement pavers that are (were?) so popular in the Netherlands.

So I naturally looked to YouTube and Reddit for some ideas, and it really just shows the problems with American society. The UK channels are about gardening. People get excited when their little wildlife pond attracts some dragonflies. And that’s it.

The American channels go on about how evil late stage capitalism is, that lawns are an example of systemic racism, and use these ten affiliate links to buy things. That’s all well and good, but that’s not what I’m here for. It’s also bizarre to see Americans on Reddit going bananas over UK posters planting “non-native” species, not seeming to get that it’s a relative designation. Things like bugleweed, which, incidentally, I ended planting along my shady northern edge, are very much native to this part of the world. Or there’s a whole group screaming that Dutch clover isn’t truly a “no lawn” plant—which I planted in my sunny corner.

This sort of parochialism, hostility, and drive for ideological purity that’s divorced from reality has come to define the MAGA movement, but when looking at US culture from the outside, is clearly just what much of American culture has become. It’s just weird that even completely non-political hobbies are dragged into the culture wars and turned into soapboxes for grandstanding. It’s also hard to avoid because of the size of the US and there simply being more resources for many things in English. My only way around this has been to try and limit search results to the UK.

To leave on a high note, this has become one of my favourite channels. Enjoy!

From the Guardian:

Police have raided a Quaker meeting house and arrested six women attending a gathering of the protest group Youth Demand.

More than 20 uniformed police, some equipped with Tasers, forced their way into the Westminster meeting house at 7.15pm, according to a statement by the Quakers.

“No one has been arrested in a Quaker meeting house in living memory,” said Paul Parker, the recording clerk for Quakers in Britain.

“This aggressive violation of our place of worship and the forceful removal of young people holding a protest group meeting clearly shows what happens when a society criminalises protest.

“Freedom of speech, assembly, and fair trials are an essential part of free public debate which underpins democracy.”

I hope this sparks a deeper discussion of the role of religion, ethics, and how those values should be manifested in society.

Even though it’s a right-wing talking point, anarcho-tyranny is a relevant concept. The police don’t have the resources to stop obvious and blatant crime on the streets, yet they have the resources to raid a church to arrest youngsters planning a protest.

Amod Lele makes a strong argument for disengaged Buddhism:

The Cakkavatti, it seems to me, is tremendously inspiring in times like these. It reminds us to avoid the kind of hope I had dashed in the late 2010s, that a better world was around the corner. It warns us that things will get worse before they get better – and that the getting better may well not be in our lifetimes. Yet it also reminds us that material well-being is not necessary for moral improvement. The pessimistic slogan that comes out of it is “things will get worse before they get better”. The optimistic slogan, though, is “things will get worse but I can be better”.

If you step back and take a longer view of history, things get worse and better then worse and really bad and a bit better. There’s not much point in getting worked up over the big things.

But, there are a lot of little things on a personal level, at the family level, in an office, in a neighbourhood that you can do. It seems like the more someone is worked up about the big things, the less they even see the possibilities on the small scale.

You can have values and positions without watching the news constantly. Low effort social media posts aren’t going to solve anything and are reminiscent of Bonhoeffer’s cheap grace.

When I talk about values, I means how cruelty and vindictiveness have become default emotional states. And it’s not just the obvious side engaging in this—there’s positive glee from many Democrats I know at the pain of people who have engaged in wrongthink.

Andy Rotman has a fascinating book about hungry ghosts, in which he explores how Buddhist ethics have dealt with meanness, being nasty, or in his own words, “being an asshole”. I recommend this talk about it.

John Gruber and others have finally moved back to critical thinking after years of being fanboys repeating Apple Marketing. Hence: Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino. In short, the early “Apple Intelligence” claims simply don’t add up, they aren’t being released, and one can only wonder if they ever will be.

Going beyond “Apple Intelligence”, Apple’s other major “innovation” of late has been those silly goggles that everyone promptly forgot about. Then there’s the car that never got out the door.

I think there’s a clear and obvious reason why companies aren’t particularly innovative anymore, to quote Robert Reich:

Apple now spends twice as much on stock buybacks as on R&D. Over the last fiscal year, Apple doled out $78 billion on buybacks.

Even Apple has turned to the trinity of American business: hype, dark patterns, and buybacks to make money on paper. And thus it’s not surprising to see what’s happened to the company.

Of course, massive companies don’t implode at the same speed across the organization. The m-series MacBooks are fantastic. That same article gives a plausible reason for why Intel fell so far behind and is not longer producing chips for Apple:

Intel, the largest chip maker in America, with revenues last year of $54 billion, was recently awarded an $8.5 billion grant from the federal CHIPS and Science Act, plus $11 billion in subsidized loans.

But Intel fritters away its profits on stock buybacks. Its website proudly touts that it has spent $152 billion on stock buybacks since 1990.

The private equity mindset has infected most big companies in the US, stifling innovation. Instead, they’re riding on the coattails of previous generations while playing games in spreadsheets to create artificial value. Sooner or later, the chickens are going to come home to roost.

I remember back during the whole kneeling during the national anthem thing that the right-wing word de jure was ungrateful. Only half paying attention to American politics, I thought it was weird but never really put it together.

Doing a simple internet search, I found a nice explainer: If You Can’t Say Unqualified, Say Ungrateful. It’s not long and a few quotes won’t do it justice anyway. The thrust of it is that if someone outside of the in-power group is successful, that success has to be at the behest and benevolence of the in-power group—according to the logic of the in-power group, of course. And thus a successful outsider to the in-power group must live in constant acknowledgement of a sort of debt and fealty to the in-power group. To do otherwise is to be ungrateful, or to remove the dog whistle: a threat to the current power hierarchy because that person is living proof of its wrongness.

I specifically avoided using “white” and “black” in my summary, because I think this dynamic applies beyond racism in America. I think this explains that current obsession with “saying thanks” and claiming someone is ungrateful even after one has, in fact, said thanks. It’s not about the literal word thanks or even actual gratitude. It’s about acknowledging the asymmetrical power dynamic and acquiescing to your own servitude.

I’m not a fan of banned word lists and canceling someone that tweeted the word ungrateful 20 years ago. That’s a distraction. What’s relevant now is be on the lookout for these sorts of dog whistles and try to dig into what they really mean. More importantly, don’t use them yourself and if you hear one, follow up—well, what do you mean by ungrateful, could you give some specific examples? Just don’t expect a coherent response.