Whenever I remember to stop trying to have time, and instead focus on having worthwhile intentions, time seems more abundant. It seems to show up as needed when I’ve got a good intention going.

This makes sense, because the feeling of not having enough time doesn’t come from not having enough time. It can’t, because you always have zero time. It comes from the pain of valuing wishes and hopes over intentions, and what happens to you over who you are.

Every time I post a new behavioral experiment, or share a personal resolution of some kind, I get a few emails telling me not to be so strict with myself.

They always say something like “It’s not good to be so hard on yourself!” or “We shouldn’t be forcing ourselves to do things!”

This is a common thing to hear in our improvement-focused culture. I used to think it was a reasonable caution, but now I think it’s generally bad advice.

It seems well-meaning in most cases—people sometimes do go overboard with exercise, frugality, and personal efficiency. But I think it’s much more common for people to go under-board in some or all of those areas, and you can bet the person giving you a hard time is one of them.

We often hear about the importance of “balance” in our self-improvement efforts. But what exactly are we balancing? Good behaviors and bad ones? Are we looking for lives that are equal parts wisdom and recklessness?

Can you imagine someone saying “I don’t think we should force ourselves to brush our teeth every day. You have to live a little!”

Experiment 5

Goal: Go 21 straight days without complaining or uttering non-constructive criticism. (If I catch myself doing it, I must start again at day zero.)

This was inspired by Will Bowen’s book A Complaint Free World, in which he claims that if you stop pronouncing your negative thoughts, you stop having those kinds of thoughts, and that if everyone did this the world would change completely.

What happened: It took 55 days to get 21 complaint-free days in a row, but I did it. This experiment really does teach you not to complain, and I think everyone should do it once in their lives. But it didn’t create much of an inner change. My negative thoughts were unaffected, I just got more polite about whether to pass them on to others. Complaining can even be a worthwhile form of bonding, as I learned while I was working a painful manual labor job with new friends, and could never join in on the lighthearted griping. Still, it’s better to never complain than to complain freely.

Where I am with it today: Even though the exercise didn’t eliminate internal negativity like the book promised, the experiment left me much more conscious about expressing needless negativity, and I am pretty good at keeping it to myself most of the time. I’m also more patient with others when they’re complaining. This is one experiment I would recommend to almost anybody.

Пример, как можно сделать свой режим в Емаксе, привязать его к конкретным файлам и назначить свои шорткаты только для этого режима.

About compound interest

Most people’s financial decisions are driven by what the people around them decide — which, in this culture, typically ranges from thoughtless to completely backwards — and conscious thought about the getting the best deal on happiness doesn’t enter the picture. Would you rather have five all-expenses-paid years off to spend with your family, learn a language or build a business — or drive a big car instead of a small car? It’s shockingly normal for people to choose the latter, because they have no idea that they’re making that choice at all.

...

I am way happier already. In the three months since I’ve been smarter about my spending, I’ve saved three months’ worth of living expenses, which has an immediate stress-reducing effect. I could get laid off or fired and have plenty of time to figure out what to do, so there’s much less day-to-day stress about my job performance, which has actually led to an effortless improvement in job performance. I have a sense of control over my life that I’ve never felt before. These intangible dividends are immediate, and they don’t cost a cent because the money is still mine.

About consumption speed

When I want a thrill, I walk to the corner store without my phone.

The worst hobby

Bad things happen when you combine the self-affirming nature of beliefs with a habit of consuming lots of morally-charged content.

Many people make a daily routine of consuming large quantities of highly partisan content about “what’s going on” in “the” “world.” Enthusiasts of this hobby call it “staying informed,” and insist it isn’t just a personal habit but a civic duty.

This content consists of new beliefs (“news” for short) about what happened today or yesterday, presented with an authoritative tone and little moral ambiguity. They identify clear villains and clear implications. They often give instructions from hand-selected experts on how smart people should think about this.

Clean Code doesn't work—not because the principles are wrong, but because the real world is dirty, chaotic, unpredictable, and asynchronous. The best code I’ve ever seen violated a good half of Clean Code’s commandments.

If a developer claims the badge of mid-level-plus but doesn’t feel at ease in at least the five principal paradigms—they are a pompous fool, and you should show them the door.

Little language inspired by Rust that compiles to Go.

Some degree of ownership over the code you write is inevitable and probably healthy. You should care about the things you build! But that doesn’t mean you have any actual ownership. The codebase you spend time on at work is the company’s codebase, and they can do whatever they want with it. You should communicate the risks and consequences of decisions, but ultimately it’s not your call.

The Color Theory Behind Industrial Seafoam Green

Pretty pictures! Reminds of Merveilles' seafoam green and of Soviet half-wall-tall colouring. Due to the latter, this colour also bears additional doomer connotations.

I wonder if this colour could work well in computer UIs? Does it work the same on glowing screens?

Create a QR code with a picture

you don’t have to sign your kids up to do expensive things in order for them to reach their full potential

Смотрелка заметок для осма

OpenStreetMap surveyor app

Финансовый дзен мониторинг: наблюдение за курсами доллара, евро и нефти. Медитация. Релаксация.

An overview of what makes modern CSS so awesome.

The 2025 Go Developer Survey results, focused on developer sentiment towards Go, use cases, challenges, and developer environments.

Доклад о том, как и почему интерфейсы портятся и что нужно, чтобы они не портились.

Looking at the first principles of icon design—and how Apple failed to apply all of them in macOS Tahoe

Platypus is a developer tool that creates native Mac applications from command line scripts such as shell scripts or Python, Perl, Ruby, Tcl, JavaScript and PHP programs. This is done by wrapping the script in a macOS application bundle along with an app binary that runs the script.

Case study: it's possible to live on one income, and to raise kids in shared housing.

Beautiful, Modern & Opinionated Linux by DHH

We backed up Spotify (metadata and music files). It’s distributed in bulk torrents (~300TB). It’s the world’s first “preservation archive” for music which is fully open (meaning it can easily be mirrored by anyone with enough disk space), with 86 million music files, representing around 99.6% of listens.

Following are the main red flags in test assignments that should be avoided:

• The assignment was read and understood in full.

• All parts are implemented.

• Industry-standard tools and frameworks are used.

• The code is split into small, readable functions.

• Variables have descriptive names.

• Complex parts have comments.

• Errors are handled, error messages are easy to follow.

• Source files are organized reasonably.

• The web interface looks nice.

• There are tests.

Avoid these AI giveaways and spread the word!

We used to use software; now software started to use us

По итогам теста выяснилось, что разница в деградации батарей между моделями с ультрабыстрой (120 Вт) и стандартной (18 Вт) зарядкой составила в среднем всего 0,3 %. Это позволяет сделать вывод, что использование мощных зарядных устройств практически не влияет на износ аккумулятора в долгосрочной перспективе.

Во второй серии тестов проверялось, насколько полезно поддерживать уровень заряда в диапазоне от 30 % до 80 %. Сравнение с режимом полной разрядки до 0 % и зарядки до 100 % показало преимущество «умеренного» режима. При этом разница в состоянии батарей составила 2,5 %.

Automatic headphone equalization

I've written a number of little scripts over the years, many of which I use every day. Here's a little collection.