Category: 3 Threads
From Shelter to Side Hustles – Profit Took Over Our Lives
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What happens to life when basic needs, like housing, becomes an investment vehicle? How does you life change when the joy of watching sports is tied up with the idolization of gambling? What do we do with our leisure time when so much of the push around us asks us to monetize our hobbies calling
Reclaiming Ownership – From Plain Text Tasks to Headphones and Book Reviews
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If you like this content, become a member or purchase my book Analogue Productivity. This helps the content continue. For the love of plain text Over the last two years I’ve taken ownership of much of my media. I own movies on discs that are placed on my server that are streamed via Jellyfin to
Friction, Focus, and the Fight to Feel Human
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Today’s issue of 3 Threads ended up being all about the value of friction. Far from being something to avoid, it acts as a filtering function to help us decide what is valuable to us. Booking Time Should Require Friction I’ve long thought that friction is a filtering force in all aspects of your life.
What are you optimizing life for?
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Optimize for what you care about Because, at the risk of sounding a little fruity, I believe that a life in which we habitually abandon the known Good Things in order to helplessly stab at “”managing”” a nebulous morass of chaoses that we can never control is not much of a life at all. –
AI, Quantum Computing, Automation – All the Hype that Money Can Buy
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Want to keep this newsletter coming become a member. Anyone know the name of the music album this blog post title refers to? No looking it up. Quantum Computer’s Aren’t Real While I had heard of this paper debunking the breathless media headlines about quantum factorization I admit it was above my head but luckily
Dehumanizing Safety Gear
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Two friends got run over by a car this week while riding their bikes. One is doing fine, the other was likely on his last ride. I’ve been on the radio this week and talking to a number of my non-cycling friends about bike and pedestrian safety this week and I wanted to share a
Tranquility Over The Trend of Complexity
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Next week is vacation so I doubt I’ll be writing anything. Instead I’ll be enjoying a cabin in Northern BC. In Search of Novelty There’s another reason simplicity offends. It’s boring. And boredom is culturally taboo in high-status circles. – The Cult of Hard Mode I think about this idea regularly, we look for new
Thinking in Edges – Boundaries for the Modern Mind
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Adding Edges to Consumption Caitlin Dewey spent this great article exploring how to have guardrails on media consumption. Social media sites aren’t going to do it for you. The algorithms on Facebook and X and Reddit are designed to keep feeding you shit that keeps you interested by focusing on stuff that makes you emotional.
Building Better Systems by Owning What You Want and How You Work
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I’m spending next weekend away racing bikes. Don’t expect an email but have an excellent weekend. Notebooks for Coders I learned very early on in my career that I’m not very good at thinking when I’m at a computer. When I have my code editor open, I’m in a “function mode” where I write stuff
Good Books, Deep Rest, Enough Work
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Get this in your inbox by joining the email list. Workload and Rest Cal Newport brought up a few studies that looked at the four-day work week to show that productivity barely decreases, if it decreases at all, when you reduce work by an entire day. But Alex Pang spent two books examining this idea.