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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: November 20th, 2025

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  • Physical feedback becomes un-ignorable.

    If I’m not standing or moving enough, my body tells me because my back, legs, or knees hurt. Drink too much or too late? I’ll wake up at like 3am and not be able to go back to sleep. Haven’t worked out lately? Everyday tasks are perceptively harder and I’ll sleep like trash. Eat too much or not healthy enough? Tummy ache.

    Feeling good is simply being kind to my future self and I actively know when I’m mortgaging my short term future.

    Now if I could just figure out how to do the same thing with work obligations…








  • I didn’t truly enjoy reading until my early adulthood. Now I love it, even though I read for a living (working in fintech). My rules that lead to being a book lover:

    1. Read 20 min a night before bed. It’s relaxing and makes me tired. I leverage that.
    2. Read what you like. Read the first third of as many different genres as possible. Libraries help with this, but used books are also dirt cheap. I prefer “hard sci fi”, where physics is obeyed. Also, I love a good “dude with amnesia” story because it puts you in the same place as the narrator.
    3. Don’t guilt yourself for not completing a book. Who cares? Learn to enjoy the process, not the payoff. Bored of the book? Put it down. Move on.
    4. There’s no test at the end. Don’t read like you need to know everything. Just try to absorb the story.

    These work for me. I finish about 3-7 books a year but start many more.

    Benefits I’ve noticed:

    • Better attention span. As others have said here, books demand more commitment than other media.
    • Extensive vocabulary.
    • Gets me away from screens. Working in tech means I use a screen 8-12hrs/day. Going home to use screens for entertainment is a bummer to me.
    • I connect with wisdom imparted by books. IMO, “The Daily Stoic” wouldn’t connect as deeply for me if it wasn’t presented in that packaging.
    • The social aspect. I promise sharing the books you love with others will kindle relationships, and sometimes life long. That benefit exists whether or not you like the same genres as them.
      • Related: books are never lent; they’re given, and ideally have a long lineage of owners.

    These are my opinions, not statements of fact.

    Like most things in life, there’s no “right” answer. It just needs to be right for you at that time. Be patient and try to not judge yourself harshly for the things you do or don’t like, but do try as much as you have appetite for.

    I recommend Andy Wier (The Martian, Project Hail Mary) and Blake Crouch (Dark Matter, Recursion) to anyone looking to read more engaging fiction.










  • Enterprise Architect here.

    This is the answer. All the way.

    At my job, employees haven’t written code since the asp classic days and it was garbage back then. This meant almost all new code is written by contractors, which is often garbage. And slow, expensive garbage at that.

    Now, AI can at least make better code than the contractors at a fraction of the price.

    It also tightens the feedback loop between getting half-assed requirements and getting the deliverables back to those who requested them so they can say how it’s not what they asked for. That process used to take months, now it takes like a day between iterations.

    I honestly don’t know where people are working where they say they have tight control of first party deliverables and clear requirements with a cogent SDLC. All companies I’ve worked for have been about 1-2k employees. Are these people working in 10k large organizations where people can afford to be an expert in only one thing and camp on it their whole career?

    Also, remember those debugger skills because we’ll all need it.