#life

When life gives you switches... (Conway's game of life on a big grid of illuminated momentary switches)

So. 12,768 days ahead. Here are fifty-five things the journey has confirmed so far.

Although we don’t deserve it, and have done nothing to merit it, we have been offered a glorious ride on this planet, if only we accept it. To receive the gift requires the same humble position a hitchhiker gets into when he stands shivering on the side of the empty highway, cardboard sign flapping in the cold wind, and says, “How will the miracle happen today?”

Last week, we talked about one huge question, “How the hell are you supposed to have a career in tech in 2026?” That’s pretty specific to this current moment, but there are some timeless, more perennial questions I've been sharing with friends for years that I wanted to give to all of you. They're a short list of questions that help you judge whether a job that you’re considering is going to crush your soul or not.

So apparently all of that exhausting, red-faced, full-on push-push-push I had been doing had given me only a 4 percent boost. I could just take it easy and get 96 percent of the results.

Employers are so terrified at the prospect of their employees not working or thinking about work that they would risk cutting into their profit margins. Perhaps they are right to be afraid. If people weren’t locked up in offices for eight to ten hours a day, they might have time to take care of themselves. They might have time to reflect on whether their jobs actually bring them happiness or contribute meaningfully to the world. They might have time to discover other ways of experiencing pleasure beyond the fleeting dopamine hits occasioned by retail therapy. Instead of buying things to fill the voids in their lives, they might make art, they might experiment sexually, they might organize a protest, they might read a book, or they might spend time caramelizing onions for a leisurely dinner with their friends—and God, what a frightful world that would be.

So what good is there in being a part of a community? It seems almost too obvious to say. I could talk about how there are practical advantages in terms of mutual support. I could point to how communities are engines of trust, which we need for society to function. Or I could recognise how community bestows a sense of belonging or identity as we float through an empty, meaningless, godless, universe. But this would hardly be revelatory.

You'll spend an afternoon doing something that cannot be made faster, producing something that you could have bought for four dollars, and in the process you'll recover some capacity for patience that the attention economy has been methodically stripping away.

If you could take a pill that would make cheap wine taste exactly as good to you as expensive wine, would you take it?

With this rule, Life is just an experience, I’m suggesting an alternative. The goal isn’t to achieve great things (although that can be nice). Nor is it to be remembered (although helping future generations is a lovely goal). Instead it’s to experience all of the different kinds of experiences that life allows. In a previous rule, I described this as living to make stories.

What I've found works is to do my planning working backwards from my deadline, I break the goal into roughly fixed size tasks. So if the goal is "clean the house by this Saturday" I estimate (more on this in a second) how long cleaning a bedroom, the kitchen, bathroom, etc take. If one of those is much larger than others I try to break it it up to get closer to the same size. If something is much smaller, then I try to group it with other small things. This sometimes takes multiple rounds. Once I've done this, I work backwards. This tells me when I need to start working on the tasks. When I've finished about half the tasks, then I know I'm about half-way to the deadline. I don't need to think about the actual time of the deadline most of the time. If someone asks if I'll meet the deadline I just look at my list and I'll have my answer.

If I could change one thing, it would be for companies to remember that humans aren’t an infinite resource. Yes, I know we’re all replaceable in the most pragmatic sense, but there’s still a cost to burning people out and swapping them for someone new. It’s a cost measured in institutional knowledge lost, in creativity dulled, in trust eroded. I’m still learning how to balance the reality that protecting my own time and energy is part of how I protect my team’s, and that stepping back doesn’t have to mean stepping away.

Getting older isn’t a bad thing. It’s when things get interesting. But no matter how old you are, stay curious. That’s the only thing worth clinging to.

You are not the problem. The system was never built for you. And you don’t have to shrink yourself to survive it.

Once you overcome your desire to compete with others, you can actually just sit back and enjoy the outcomes that others compete to produce for you. Read great books, watch interesting movies, dance to the music, use latest gadgets, and eat good food.

Why does nobody care about anything? The world is full of stuff that could be excellent with just 1% more effort. But people don't care.

Select any pattern that can be built in Life – for example, the Waterbear. Begin with a small number of gliders (now 15) in an otherwise empty Game of Life universe. After enough time goes by, those gliders need to build that pattern. No extra leftover debris, no stray scaffolding, just a pure synthesis of whatever you chose.

Select any pattern that can be built in Life – for example, the Waterbear. Begin with a small number of gliders (now 15) in an otherwise empty Game of Life universe. After enough time goes by, those gliders need to build that pattern. No extra leftover debris, no stray scaffolding, just a pure synthesis of whatever you chose.

So, you made a mistake. You gave a porny presentation at a technology conference, or you made a sexist blog post, or you organized a conference with 0.00% female speakers. And, you got called out on it. What can you do?

If you're not drowning, you're a lifeguard.

Maybe your goal is best met by building a stable yet undemanding career that leaves plenty of time for family, friends, community, and self improvement.

If you simply remember how to do something, then all you can do is use it the same way over and over, but if you understand how it works, you can reason about it. Once you can reason about something in your mind you can contemplate why it is the way it is, you can apply your entire creative mind to making the most of it, and you can implement and question improvement – you own it intellectually.

A habit decision is my made-up term for a sentence you write that describes a change in behavior that you intend on applying to yourself. If we were computers, this would be the script you ran on yourself to change yourself in some real way.

I’m going to go and work with people who make Mozilla not just a job, who have made this my home for 7 years, and who are as passionate about Mozilla & the Open Web as I am.

I’d be surprised if a policy like this didn’t make teams more productive. I’m going to try it.

"Old farts" are often excluded from that culture, not because we're lousy coders but because we won't put up with that shit. We have lives, we have families, we have other things that are important to us. We're not about to sleep at our desks and trade watching our kids grow up for the promise of striking it rich. Especially when the people who really strike it rich aren't the ones writing code.

Robinson writes: “If they came to work that drunk, we’d fire them — we’d rightly see them as a manifest risk to our enterprise, our data, our capital equipment, us and themselves. But we don’t think twice about making an equivalent level of sleep deprivation a condition of continued employment.”

Robinson writes: “If they came to work that drunk, we’d fire them — we’d rightly see them as a manifest risk to our enterprise, our data, our capital equipment, us and themselves. But we don’t think twice about making an equivalent level of sleep deprivation a condition of continued employment.”

He's telling you the story of, "If you bust your ass and don't sleep, you'll get rich" because the only way that people in his line of work get richer is if young, poorly-socialized, naive geniuses believe that story! Without those coat-tails to ride, VCs might have to work for a living. Once that kid burns out, they'll just slot a new one in.

Scientists play detective after 20 "perfectly intact skeletons" of ancient sea mammals are found thousands of feet away from the Pacific Ocean

As a developer, you are sitting on a goldmine. Do you even realize it? No, seriously, a @#$% goldmine! Never in modern history has it been so easy to create something from scratch, with little or no capital and a marketing model that is limited only by your imagination.

Don't worry—if we do find evidence of Martians, it will still be on Mars, we'll probably just have to dig a little deeper to find it. A new NASA study has concluded that if life ever thrived on the Red Planet, it probably did so underground, just below the planet's surface. In other words, life...

"This devotion to an idea is one of the amazing things about being human, but you're not much good to the rest of us until you're on to your 3rd."

"If you aren’t familiar with MultiBasing you can read more about it on my wiki. It’s a term I coined a few years back to try and describe a lifestyle that a few friends and I were increasingly inching towards where rather than living in one single place, we frequently traveled between several global locations, all of which were home in one way or another. In an essence we had multiple bases. Initially there was a lot of discussion about how to enable more of this but over the years it’s become more of a descriptive term for things we were already doing. Some more than others of course."

"Science is a way of life. Science is a perspective. Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding in a manner that’s precise, predictive and reliable — a transformation, for those lucky enough to experience it, that is empoweri

"If you’re stressed out over 5,000 RSS feeds chances are good you’d be stressed by any profession you chose."

"It’s about reimagining adulthood as a period defined by promise, rather than compromise. And who can’t relate to that?"

"My business plan is: 1. Create high-quality content. 2. Tell people about it. 3. Profit."

"So a generalist pays the rent, in the end, by having a reputation (social capital) and a wide-ranging interest (intellectual capital) and trading those for money."

"Xiang Yu was a Chinese general in the third century B.C. who took his troops across the Yangtze River into enemy territory and performed an experiment in decision making. He crushed his troops’ cooking pots and burned their ships."

"That is the real message of alonetime, and it is through that profound self-awareness, that inner aloneness, that our lives will flower."

"You never simply quit something, you do something else instead."

"I think of my time as a valuable currency that must be earned by anyone who wants me to exchange it for whatever they’re selling."

"Men in search of true happiness should steer clear of bimbos and dumb blondes: research shows men are happiest if they marry smart women."

"A happier life calls for a little grasshopper with your ant."

"Since we already know that a fat bank balance or a Porsche is not the key to happiness, we are searching elsewhere for fulfilment"

"The fact that our existence has no purpose outside that existence is completely irrelevant to the way we live our lives, since we are inside our existence."

"When the door to a new business opportunity opens, some fortunate people seem to step through it easily and pick up a new life on the other side."

"In the nearly ten years since the publication of Behe’s book, by contrast, I.D. has inspired no nontrivial experiments and has provided no surprising insights into biology."

"So last night, right around 11:30pm, a big power surge rippled through your mid-Cambridge neighbourhood."

"Use the relative quiet of the comfort zone to get organized for the next big push toward your ultimate goal."