Each Branch has a Root
Wrong Foot Morning
Saturday – from school years, my second favorite day of the week. And yet that’s another semi-wasted day. I ended Friday with 2 leftovers of Bourne series (legacy and Jason is succession). It’s shit, but I wanted a mental checkbox on that one, similar how I had never seen Craig’s 007 several years ago.. Regardless, 1PM I’m in bed, but forgot to cancel 8AM alarm.
So at 8AM I’m swirling to cancel that fucker, take a leak, spill some on the floor, because I did not want to wake my eyes yet and did not use light… Cleanup, bring phone to bedside and I don’t feel like sleeping anymore.
Scroll time, of course. Over 1h of Twitter “Following” feed and at the end of it I was completely honest with my self: not only it’s fucked up way to start the day, worse – I can barely remember anything I saw. Writing in evening, I can assert that’s absolute truth. Caveats apply, but…
Day
With breakfast I prepared a comfy Saturday seat to lax my back with a plate of fruits and (still) ad-free youtube watch list. I still have 3 episodes of local on entrepreneurship shows backlog, each 1h40m of length on average. It’s ~110 episode. I have seen them all. They are among the rest ~130 15min-7h videos in watch later list.
Then comes some dev related vids, then ominous exploration I grabbed from socials – 30min story of horrific sinking of “Arctic [some number]” in 1850s. Then hour of Turkeys history and stance with EU, NATO and neighbors.
Lunch was another plate, meat leftovers from last dinner this time. Then I did something actually productive – read two sections of a book I’m tormening for this whole goddamn 2023 year (75% complete). US dawg retells a week-long meetup with Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu. Bishop from South Africa had his fair share of suffering, but dude has a wife. I may be conservative, but spiritual leader that fucks … Don’t know man. Anyway, book was a present and it sat on a shelf for too many years and I know for a fact – 2023 will be the first and last year I only read (still if) a single book.
Surrounding the Wire
In a typical manner, before disclosing the intention I want to touch on several things first.
Amateur Works
The project I talked about in last post is alive and well, but I’m not pushing the roadmap, neither is client. Before Christmas I believe they are seasonally swamped. Why wouldn’t I though? Second project is on a horizon. End of February is the answer – will it get financing or not. If it does. I will only have ~15months max to level up production system with e-shop-like parts exposed parts to B2B clients, inventory, project management, bunch of custom requests and a desert – CAD part, which I already spent over a week learning to control 3D models from standalone script.
I wanted to learn something new – tried using tailwind – seemingly industry standard today. Got it setup with flask and docker, but gave up, because I will have enough headaches without frontend if this project flies.
Anyways, I’ve been setting up dev environment, improving base template, plugging in database, migrations… Needless to say, when there’s still uncertainty in the air, motivation to invest time is not high. So I have time, finally.
I read internet a lot. After Dolomites, week later we had to attend friend’s wedding in Krakow. Only several weeks ago I managed to finally get get my newsletters’ inbox, that peaked at ~75 after Alta Via trekk to finally show 0 – that’s after ~1.5 months of coping through backlog.
Digital Shit
Internet decline is well documented. Active user might be accustomed to it’s gradual decline, but it’s obvious. I blame javascript for starters.
I got biased by Unix and FOSS in recent years, not going to deny it, even before touching javascript hands on. Interactivity and especially design became primary drivers of web interfaces. Unfortunately not the content. Case in point: Berkshire Hathaway homepage. Crawlers could not index everything anymore. Search decline started.
I’m getting sad just thinking about it. Never mind. Paywalls, mountains of ads., search that you can’t rely anymore, because some dicks SEO’ed their way into 1st result with hallucinated LLM answer and on top of that, an open fight at browser level on ad-blockers. You get the picture.
Social Media x’ed
Mark – messenger is enough. The dark patterns I’ve encountered there and UX on android browser tells a lot. Near-zero feed control. Once in 2023 I counted, each 5th post was an ad. Sometimes for whole sequences of posts I would not see anything from anyone I actually follow. Threads? How about something original, Mark? Anything?
Insta/Tiktok – competing for a generation I don’t want growing up and even thinking of ruling anything beyond their bicycle.
Reddit/HN – never learned to love these.
When founder left, some spirit of last redemption died with Titter.. Elon built some crazy things, but I had to unfollow him a month or so after “Twitter files”. Guy was just so drastically looking to start media fires, drive engagement. Pattern may be familiar to students of Game. Desperate look. A lot of fintwit from 2019-2021 accounts stopped posting. AI hype several months ago on main feed was terribly bad. Crypto bots tagging, fake followers.. And I don’t even have scale, so what about high profile accounts? What’s their UX like? Community notes? Ain’t effective when note is approved 2 days after viral misinfo had spread. Putin trolls like Hinke outright buy followers in hundred thousands. For past year – a wave of growth hackers with purchased blue checks now spam high profile account replies with GPT written explainers or summaries.
For past months, most of the times I would visit 2-3 profiles directly by URL, not the feed.
In one of best accidents of 2023, I saw Ben Evan’s tweet with link to his blog “Leaving Twitter“. It did not plant an idea, that was already there, but it was water.
And There’s NOSTR
“Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted through Relays”. I wanted to write about it, but thought, what do I know. I don’t even run a relay. But that’s not today’s topic. Energy is the topic. And energy on nostr is overwhelmingly positive, contrary to other platforms. Because space is filled with bitcoiners and builders, and especially because Bitcoin and nostr are underdogs rocking their corresponding boats, space is tingling with energy of potential. Potential to bring a better world.
I don’t think it has enough thematic diversity, but I’m doing my part. Find me there, by the way.
Energy Slippage
This morning, although I could barely remember anything meaningful, I clearly felt a lot of bytes had done their way on me. Want it or not, exposure to data feeds the brain, that subconsciously filters incoming data for alerts for danger/interest. Even if signal is not triggered, parsing takes its toll.
From mid 2019 to ~2023 July I read all Bloomberg headlines That account used to churn 20-50(?) messages daily. From 2022 Ukraine war I started following several OSINT accounts. From Oct 7 attacks on Israel I read every tweet by 2 OSINT accounts for month, later replaced one, still following, reading every tweet.
My newsletter subscriptions, which I had none in 2015 are raking up ~10-15 articles / blogposts a week. Some of them contain material, that forks into more bookmarks, not to mention bookmarks accumulating throughout week from organic social feeds and dev related readings.
Upside
I like to be informed. I particularly found it interesting in past 5 or so years to understand motives of nation state actors, how in times of crises masks slip a little and you get a glimpse of who’s playing what game.
I like to have an opinion on markets, sentiment, price levels. I like to be of value. Parsing hours of trash to get a picture of current state of affairs and change over times definitely has an upside, but I’m tired. I’m very very tired, to be honest.
New Years Goals
For 2023 I had mostly a single goal. It’s personal, but throughout the years I did these:
- Wear a rubber band on wrist for – whole year;
- 30 pull-ups in 3×10 series – train as long as it takes to perform once;
- No video games – whole year;
- No porno – whole year;
- ~20 000 pushups min. 45 daily – whole year;
- No alcohol – whole year;
- No alcohol and nothing else – whole year;
- Only new movies – whole year (would like to share!);
- Meditate once a day – whole year;
Only one link, eh? Why you think that is? The lesson I learned when I did month without internet was… There’s an ocean of time at your disposal. Everything around me passively points me to direction of peace from social media.
Capturing Time Thieve
I’m still mentally sketching out the format, still not sure if it’s going to be full 2024 year, but my mind is set on regaining control on conscious media consumption by quitting mindless scrolling of social media feeds.
I already cancelled all my newsletters, still thinking whether to include Baltic market announcements as it’s actual for screener updating, unsubscribe from all youtube channels actively growing my watch list. Access information directly – when I need it (actual, not addict need), no hurry, no pile of unparsed material.
Goal is simple: reduce number of things requiring attention. Especially feel of need to know. In real sense – let go of control. Be okay not knowing. Practice humility. Read more paper books.
Reduced Activity
I will still open media accounts to share stuff I learned, observed, but again – directly, for producing, not consuming. Hopefully will write more here too.
This inevitably means, that my social media activity will drop and may even deviate unpredictably. Now this is not cord cutting I did previously, but cutting social media feeds will give back some precious resource – Time. Last time I did something similar I was very pleased with my time allocation.
Below I will list email newsletters and youtube subscriptions for my self-reference.
Cancelled 2023-12
Substacks
- Cloud Infrastructure
- Clouded Judgement
- Concoda
- Devil’s Advocate
- Fabricated Knowledge
- Fairly Deep
- Front Month
- Global Quality Investing
- Liberty’s Highlights
- Mule’s Musings
- Nongaap Investing
- Scuttlebutt
- SemiAnalysis
- The Transcript
- Whalewisdom
Other newsletters
Will continue to update if forgotten providers drop emails. So far:
- Bloomberg Opinion
- hhhypergrowth
- Pandora AS IR
- Linas Agro Group IR (Akola)
- Auga Group IR
- Chartr
- Avory Research
- Reset [email protected]. Reconfigure for followed companies only
- Nacionalinis Kauno dramos teatras
- PrettyPrinted
- Investing City
- freecodecamp
- Business Breakdowns
- Norstatpanel
Youtube Subscriptions
I got 233 channel subscriptions, of course most of them are inactive anymore and I won’t bother with most of them. Besides I want to keep artists, music, art related channels.
- @electronicsrepairschool
- @lexfridman
- @AswathDamodaranonValuation
- @ZiniuTV
- @BNNBloomberg
- @CiovaccoCapital
- @GoldmanSachs
- @centreforeasternstudies
- @LastWeekTonight
- @FSCDems
- @Worldcryptonetwork
- @3blue1brown
- @TheEconomicClubofNewYork
- @wsj
- @FinancialTimes
- @yetanothervaluechannel6876
- @business
- @YannicKilcher
- @BessemerVenturePartners
- @CNBC
- @dwnews
- @RealLifeLore
Incomplete. I will update the list towards 2023 end.
Written 2023-12-09; list compiled 2023-12-10, youtube unsubscribed list updating till 2023-12-30.
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