Category: Random Thoughts

The theme sucks, but I finally did an update over at probablynot.com. Mainly the update was because I have built and launched two apps, on the web, the iOS and Android versions are still coming.

• lstd – This is a To Do List app. There are tons out there, but this is the only one with the one feature I wanted: infinitely nested lists. Main site: https://lstd.online/ Direct link to app: https://app.lstd.online/
• Workout – I built a tiny app for my own use to track a workout I was doing. Then I expanded it. Direct link to app: https://workout.probablynot.com/

Anyway, outside of Dragon Con and my day job, that’s what I’ve been up to.

I’ll post more later.

Maybe.

I know so many people that love it. But every time I try to use it for any length of time, I just get frustrated and bounce off it.

It’s too big. Much like twitter being like drinking from a firehose, reddit has “too many” people. Yes, there are plenty of smaller communities, and those are possibly better, but most of the subreddits with thousands of members are just chaos which is exacerbated by it’s design.

Unsearchable. It isn’t actually unsearchable, but for whatever reason people don’t search it. So if they go into a subreddit and a thread about the thing they want to talk about isn’t on the first screen or two worth of threads, they just start a new one. So, for example, in a place like /horror this means that the same threads are started new every week or so, sometimes more often. “Unpopular opinion: I didn’t like Barbarian”, “Why is Barbarian so hyped? I thought it was dull”, “Unpopular opinion: Barbarian was the best horror movie in decades”, and so on. This example is dated, because my first draft of this post was a while ago, but the sentiment remains.

Threaded discussion hides discussion. On top of the repeat threads, within a thread, conversations repeat. It almost isn’t worth reading an entire thread because no one else is. The nested nature of the discussion means that if one commenter makes a good comment, and then three or four other people engage in a discussion that explains and expands on it, most people won’t see it. Instead, a few comments later, someone will say the same thing that was already said in a nested comment, and maybe other people nest comments under that. And now in one thread you have two parallel discussions both not following each other. And of course, you get people who do read the nested threads, find a good comment, then copy and paste it as a comment on the original post, un-nested, in order to farm upvotes. Are they doing us a service by surfacing the nested content? Maybe? But since they don’t attribute it and link to the source they don’t surface the discussion around it. A flat structure would be far superior.

Because of the “noise” created by those two issues above, every time I go to some subreddit that I’ve book marked, I feel like I’m just walking a treadmill. The same topics and comments going around and around with very little actual advancement. Maybe I just haven’t found the right communities yet. I don’t know. But for now, I still dislike reddit.

Oddly, reddit is useful if you don’t go to reddit to start. If you go to google and search for something and either look for links to reddit discussions/comments, or you specifically tell google to search reddit for your query, you can get some really good info, because reddit is so vast that it literally includes just about everything.

I closed out the old in the last post, so let’s ring in the new.

My last year of being a Staff Engineer was fruitful in that I undertook projects that I conceived of and brought them to completion. These projects improved performance, added features, increased reliability, and decreased costs. I’d like to think I’m a halfway decent mentor to some of the less experience developers, which is one of the reasons I have tried to avoid implementing AI into my work flow. I’ve heard many describe these AI tools like “having a junior developer in your pocket”, and I don’t doubt that is true, but then if you have a fake junior developer in your pocket, then how do you expect the real junior developers to improve, to become better at being able to spot when the AI tools’ work is crap? In the coming year I hope for more of the same. There is some work on the horizon I wish to undertake, and some I wish to oversee as others take on the work. And I’m going to continue trying to avoid AI where I can.

Because my work is awesome about my ability to vacation, we have 3 booked for this year. JoCo in March, another in June, and then a third in August. The JoCo is exciting, but the August cruise is unique. For that one we are doing an 11-day out of Dover that goes to France, Spain, Portugal, and I think somewhere else. But the real draw is that we will be at sea during the solar eclipse in the path of totality. I’m looking forward to this so much!

I’m looking forward to some improved health in 2026. I should be out of the woods, and my wife should be recovered, and we can both start exercising and other things. I plan to absolutely abuse our health insurance this year, just max it out and take care of every little thing we’ve been overlooking for years. I’ve said that before, but this time I mean it.

I resolve to read more, and write more, and do all the things more. Just more. Just better. And I’m going to make an effort to be more local in my purchasing and other dealings.

Last year’s wish, as covered in the last post, went horribly. So what do I wish for 2026?

Retribution. Comeuppance. I want a full throated revocation of authoritarianism and I want justice, real justice. I’m preparing to not get it though. I’m preparing for a slog. I’m also trying to prepare for these morons to push us into a completely avoidable depression. I’m not sure how I’m going to do that, but I’m going to try.

Happy New Year, folks. I truly do wish the best for all of us. Well, for those of us who aren’t pieces of shit. For them, I hope they get the misery they desire for others. Ten fold.

There was a version of this post that combined my 2025 wrap up and my 2026 kick-off, but after writing it I kept thinking about it and it kept pulling at me.

In the final week of May I came here and lamented not posting. Then I posted a bunch, for about a week, then vanished again. It’s my way. I did decide to abandon Substack without writing another post, and I’ve migrated almost all of my reading to other platforms where available. I figured it was time to stop supporting people and businesses who support Nazis, especially when it is very easy to do so. It’s not always easy because a lot of rich people and business owners are capitulating, which make it hard to avoid them.

This first year of the second Trump administration feels like a decade. I am fighting where I can, amplifying voices where I am able, and challenging “my people” whenever I see them out of line. That last bit means that I am making an effort to call out white dudes where I witness white dudes doing shitty shit.

My work has a bunch of ERGs (Employee Resource Groups) around a number of marginalized and underrepresented groups. None of them apply to me, and yet I have joined every one as an ally, because it is important to me to read about what is important to them on the company Slack. On social media, I seek out diverse voices so that my feed is full of theirs. I hope this helps me, and I plan to keep doing it.

In 2025 I voted so many times. I’m pretty sure they do all these various special elections, run-offs, and other stuff at irregular times, in ones and twos, on purpose to keep the turnout low, so that people don’t know when they need to show up. We had cases where I would go vote, and then later that day I’d get a mailer about an election and notice it wasn’t the one I just voted in, but one happening in a week or two. Anyway, I do my best to keep up, research the candidates, and vote every time the opportunity avails itself.

Last year I wrote:

My wish for 2025: May the worst people get none of what they desire and all of what they deserve. For the rest of us, I hope we can all avoid being collateral damage, and success in our resistances.

The absolutely failure of this wish to be delivered in any way is just so sad. With all the deportations and the rolling back of rights and blowing up fishing boats… sorry, I’m tired of listing things already and I only barely scratched the surface. I didn’t even cover any of the blatant quid-pro-quo and bribery going on. Just… ugh. Only at the end of the year did we finally get something with the release of the Epstein files, though that’s been a bit of a cock-up too, what with all the redacting, failure to redact, inclusion of fake stuff, etc. I’m not sure this is going to matter. You can already see people ignoring it. They are ignoring all the old crimes and the new crimes, it is like crimes don’t matter any more, if you are rich white conservatives anyway. Lots of people are learning that they were just useful idiots to elect the administration, one that is turning their backs on them now.

In part due to the constant barrage of misery, and a couple of personal family issues I’m not going to get into in any detail here right now, 2025 was a pretty unaccomplished year for reading, and writing, and exercise, and a whole lot of things. Think back on it now just reminds me of how much water I treaded, but also amazed that I managed to keep treading water.

It wasn’t all bad though. We took two vacations this year, the wife and I. In March we went on our first JoCo Cruise which was just all around amazing. We loved it so much we booked for 2026 while still on the boat, and we’ve already booked 2027. Assuming 2026 is as good as 2025, we’ll probably be doing these for as long as they have them. We also did an Alaskan cruise, which was incredible, and also sad. It was quite warm in Alaska, and while watching chunks fall off a glacier is awe inspiring, the receding and collapse of the glaciers is heart breaking. But it was beautiful to hike through the Tongass National Forest. We want to go back and do more than just the Inside Passage, maybe in a couple of years.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned it in this year end wraps ups before, but I work for Dragon Con as a volunteer. My wife is the director of Charity Events for the con, and I work as her second. Each year Dragon Con picks a local charity to partner with and then at the convention we hold events, like auctions and a virtual 5k with a medal, and sell items, like a coloring book, and the various programming tracks hold events of their own, and we pool all the money and Dragon Con matches, up to $150,000. We raised over $350,000 for NAMI Georgia in 5 days. It feels good to do that every year. And I’m pretty proud of my wife, who came in to take over Charity Events in 2018, and she has made it better and more successful every year.

My work life in 2025 was pretty great. I like my job, I enjoy the work, I took vacations, and they were very accommodating when I needed a lot of erratic time off and work from home days outside my schedule due to those issues I said I wasn’t going to get into. Other people’s experience may not be the same, but my experience at my work has been pretty much all positive. Except for the push for us to adopt AI tools, but that’s a can of worms for another post.

I’m writing this on Christmas Day, and it’s been a weird one. I’ve been sick, my wife is recovering from one of those things I said I wasn’t going to get into. The decorations got halfway out, and I never carried the empties back to storage so the front room is piled high with totes. But the main room with the tree looks great and we even put the LEGO train around the base of it. Our childhood dreams coming true despite all the weirdness.

Anyway, I’m going to go watch a few last Christmas movies to finish out the season, and the next post will be in the new year.

Merry Christmas.

I made these on my iPad with the intent to get them printed to paste onto cardboard for the No Kings protest, but I ran out of time. Still might do it to prepare for the next protest.

If you stumble on these and need a sign, feel free to swipe these.

Most of the time when someone talks about empathy they talk about understanding another person’s emotions, understanding their feelings. They might also focus on “seeing things from someone else’s point of view”. But that’s advanced stuff.

When we think about empathy, we need to begin at the most basic level. And doing so doesn’t require having another person to try to understand. Empathy begins at home. The most basic step of empathy is understanding that your emotions and feelings, your thoughts and experiences, you, all of that is yours and everyone who isn’t you… aren’t you.

The first step of empathy is realizing that just because you feel and think some way doesn’t mean that everyone, or anyone, feels or thinks exactly the same way. But too many people skip this part of empathy. In fact, humans seem to almost always assume that other people think the way they do.

One of the places you can see this is in politics. Someone who is a lousy person, who thinks other people aren’t worth caring about, sees someone else caring about people and they assume that person is faking it, that they are “virtue signaling”. That person must only be pretending to care about others in order to get something, to win an election, or gain support for another reason. Because if the lousy person doesn’t care about others, and they have colleagues who also don’t care about others, then not caring about others must be normal. Nobody really cares about anybody, and anyone displaying otherwise is lying. Conversely, someone who does actually care about issues and is serious about their viewpoints assumes that their opponents must also be serious about the things they do and say. I hope you can see how this is going to lead to problems. On one hand you have a person advocating about education, and their opponent thinks “they don’t care about education, they are just trying to buy votes!” Going another way, you can have a person who is espousing divisive rhetoric just to pander for votes, and their opponent acts as if those views are deeply held beliefs.

Another example of this are places on the internet like 4chan. There you will find a message board of anonymous posters spewing a lot of racist stuff. I knew a person who hung out there and sarcastically posted racist and sexist “jokes” because it was funny and “nobody is serious”. But some of the people there ARE serious. Very serious. And there is no way to know for sure, being that it’s all anonymous. While the person I knew was just doing it “for the lulz” and assumed everyone else was too, there were clearly other people who very much were racists and sexist and assumed they’d found a community of like-minded individuals. It took a couple of shootings and manifestos for him to finally stop participating.

You have to be careful when you start assuming that everyone around you is thinking and feeling the same way you are for the same reasons you are. And that is the first step of empathy. You need to realize that your positions, your feelings, your experiences, they are yours, and other people don’t necessarily have them, they don’t know where you are coming from.

This leads us to Ted Lasso, and quite possibly one of the finest scenes ever filmed.

“Be curious, not judgmental.” – not Walt Whitman

A system built on the possibility of unlimited profits is guaranteed a foundation of exploitation.

If you own a business and at the end of the year, with all your costs and expenses paid, you are left with a sizable profit, you have failed. Plenty of people will tell you that you are a success, but they are mistaken. They have been deluded by the lure of profiteering and unlimited profits. Because you must understand that these profits are not conjured out of the æther, they come from somewhere.

The two primary sources of “profits” are:

• Overcharging your customers
• Underpaying your employees

The first one is easy. People blame “the market”. They’ll say that they are charging what the market will bear, but in the repurposed words of Dr. Ian Malcolm “so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should”. If everyone is always pushing the upper boundary of what they can charge, this is part of how you get inflation. And everyone will claim they aren’t responsible because the few cents or dollars they upcharge isn’t enough to be a problem. Of course, if everyone is doing it, the aggregate is that it costs a consumer dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of dollars more to exist. You are extracting the profits from the consumers.

Also under the umbrella of overcharging your customers is producing an inferior product. If you make your goods from subpar materials but charge premium prices, you probably think you are a very smart business person, but you are just someone who doesn’t mind exploiting their customers.

The second is also easy, if you want to see it, but hard if you want to pretend that “cutting costs” is always desirable. While I listed it as “Underpaying your employees” it goes beyond simple low wages. You could be cutting corners on safety, or making people share desks, or not improving your working environments when you have the ability to do so. You could have better pay, better benefits, better working conditions for your employees, but you are choosing not to in order to maximize your profits.

All of this comes down to many people being unable to define “enough”.

When I was young, I figured out that if I could just get $3,000,000 and put it in a high yield savings account or index fund investments, and earn 5% per year on that principal, never touching the principal, I’d be making $150,000 a year, which at the time was more than my parents made. I could live the life my parents had – them, three kids, the occasional pet, a house, a couple of cars, a vacation or two a year – and I could have that without working, just relaxing, enjoying life, reading books, writing, etc. It was an amazing idea. And I couldn’t for the life of me understand why there were all these millionaires still working 40+ hour weeks and not spending time with their families and just hoarding more and more money that they weren’t even spending.

My vision hasn’t changed, though the amounts have because inflation has. I want to be there by now, at age 50, but the math hasn’t mathed yet. Another thing that hasn’t changed is that I still see these multi-millionaires and billionaires who continue to keep hoarding more and more money, though maybe I do understand them a little. Maybe they enjoy the work. Maybe they loathe their families. Maybe they don’t like reading or vacations. Maybe what they like is piles of money. And probably power. And I find that kind of sad.

I hope that one day I can retire. And if I don’t, it’s because I run a wildly successful company where I overpay and over-employ and have really nice offices and great benefits, and I’m making enough money to live a good life on, and not a penny more.

I am someone who seeks to be right. I often don’t contribute to conversations on topics I haven’t spent at least some time doing research on. And in my desire to be right, if someone challenges me, I am open to being wrong. I will listen and evaluate, and if I determine that I am either wrong or just not fully correct, I will gladly adjust my position, because I want to be right.

Contrast that with the abundance of people currently on display in the conservative Right in America who are much more obsessed with being “not wrong”. Being “not wrong” is very different than being right. Being “not wrong” means that you will not accept challenges or corrections, you have your position and you will not be moved because you are “not wrong”. In fact, when presented with any information that contradicts your position you will essentially refuse to hear it, and you will double down on your position because you are “not wrong”. Even if someone were to show you that you aren’t at fault for being wrong, but that you have based your position on false information that someone else provided, on lies that someone else told, you will not move because you are “not wrong”. You have internalized that you are “not wrong”, made it your identity, and any suggestion that you are wrong, for any reason, is seen as a personal attack on you, and you will respond by, at minimum, putting your foot down and insisting that you are “not wrong”. You might even lash out at people, and turn things around, stating that clearly the evidence being shown to you must be fake, that the person saying you are wrong has an agenda, some nefarious purpose for convincing other people that your position is wrong when it is “not wrong”.

This is particularly prevalent in the Trump administration. They make decisions, those decisions turn out to be bad, but since they are “not wrong” they don’t reverse course unless they can frame as “part of the plan all along”. Like tariffs. Trump doesn’t understand how to employ tariffs in a good way, partly because he will not accept a situation that is mutually beneficial. He always has to win. And he defines winning as “paying him money”. You cannot explain any of this to him, because he has his (incorrect) understanding of tariffs and he is “not wrong”. When his tariff announcements are received poorly, he doesn’t listen to any of the criticism or analysis because he is “not wrong”. He knows that tariffs are the solution, he knows it, and he is “not wrong”, so anyone suggesting that tariffs are wrong, bad, or not working, they have to be wrong because he is “not wrong”. And further, how could he be wrong when people keep paying him money to get an exception to his tariffs, that they don’t want because they are bad and will ruin companies, so he must be “not wrong” since it is making him money.

Climate change is fake. They know this, and they are “not wrong”. It no longer matters how many studies there are, or how many scientists support it, or even how many wildfires burn, or if the sea levels rise as the glaciers melt, they are “not wrong”.

Masks do not work. They know this, and they are “not wrong”. Any attempt to require masks is a personal attack. It doesn’t matter if you can show that masks do work.

Vaccines make people sick. They know this, and they are “not wrong”. Decades of history with employing vaccines safely, mountains of supporting evidence. We have all the stats showing how many people used to die from various illnesses, and now people aren’t dying. But all that doesn’t matter.

Trans people are dangerous. They know this, and they are “not wrong”. It doesn’t matter how few trans women are actually in women’s sports. It doesn’t matter if every study on gender affirming care shows that it is at worst harmless and reversible, but more often is greatly beneficial.

Illegal immigrants are invading this country, mass murdering people, and stealing all our stuff. They know this, and they are “not wrong”. And no one will inform them otherwise.

I could go on. Every position they hold they are “not wrong”, and they are willing to burn down the whole system, the entire world, before they would ever admit to possibly, maybe, being mistaken.

We can’t go on like this. We will never survive if we keep periodically putting in charge people who are “not wrong”. We need more people who strive to be right.