Al Tenhundfeld ▙▚▘ ▖ ▘ ▗

I’ll close with a quote I try to hold in my heart, imperfectly. “To be beautiful means to be yourself. You don't need to be accepted by others. You need to accept yourself.”

@sjeangilles @tom_morganKCP I actually don’t take intentional rest days. I have active recovery days where I don’t lift and instead just do something like a nice 30min Peloton ride or walk a few miles. Between family events and work travel, rest days happen occasionally. No need to plan them.

@Alric @tom_morganKCP Do you have any rest days?

Per Peter Thiel: “What important TRUTH do very few people agree with you on?”

It looks like the ban is permanent for Tweetbot, et al. So I’m taking a break from Twitter. 🤷 I’ll miss interacting with authors & niche celebrities. Oh well. For IRL friends, I’m rarely on Mastodon (in bio) – more active on LinkedIn, Be Real, Peloton. Hit me up for lunch. 👋

I’d almost forgotten how much I dislike using the official Twitter app. I hope they fix 3rd party app auth soon. I just want to see my friends tweets in chronological order. I’ll pay, but I don’t want another algorithm feeding me distractions. Give me back my Tweetbot. 😥

I started playing with Peloton on my non-lifting days. I’ve never liked group classes, but I am enjoying some of these instructors, especially Tunde. It’s nice to just let her tell me what to do, sometimes. If you’re on Peloton, let’s be friends; send me your username.

@tom_morganKCP I used to think VR/AR was going to have a huge impact on society, in the 2020s and 2030s. I still think it could eventually, but it’ll require several major breakthroughs that seem multiple decades away, at a minimum.

What belief or opinion did you used to hold, that you are now slightly ashamed of?

@shreyas Likewise with generosity. One can often negotiate harder, give a smaller raise, squeeze a vendor a little more, etc. I may appear a chump occasionally, but I’m okay with that. A mindset of abundance makes life more enjoyable in short-term and more fruitful long-term, I think.

People who mistake kindness for weakness end up with a lifetime of self-inflicted pain in their relationships, business & personal.

I’m sitting here with tears streaming down my face… This NY Times profile of children who died from gun violence. It’s just too much. The sardonic little Girl Scout who loved Minecraft… damn it. I recommend reading it, but brace yourself. nytimes.com/interactive/20…

I get how it can feel that tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day. But also… I don’t know… tomorrow is never promised, for anyone. You know? We must pursue life with urgency, try to suck the marrow out of this fleeting blink of existence.

I went down a sad rabbit hole reading tributes to Stephen Boss, aka tWitch. It’s such a hard thing to accept. Seeing pictures of his bright smiling kids, reading of awesome projects in development. How someone ends that existence… it just doesn’t fit into my map of reality.

Dear Teachers, As some of you may know, if you have any students in your class who identify as Christian, they may ask to be excused from school to observe the Christian holiday of “Christmas,” more popularly referred to as Yom Christmas or Nittel. 1/x

I’ve always liked Chris Isaak’s Wicked Game, but I stumbled on this clip of a recent Tenacious D cover… and whoa, I think it hits even harder than the original. youtu.be/snT1Y-VLnuI

This article is great but doesn’t inspire short-term hope. “We’ve been digging ourselves into this situation for 40 years, and it’s likely going to take us 40 years to get out.” Long-term answer is policy, but for now, the wisest expert answer seems to be… better shelters? 😟

“In a 2021 poll conducted in LA, 94% of respondents said homelessness was a serious or very serious problem. To put that near unanimity into perspective, just 75 percent said the same about traffic congestion – in Los Angeles!” theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…

@shreyas Excellent advice. Relevant framing Qs: - Am I making my manager’s job easier or harder? - What am I taking off their plate? Managers want to delegate a slice of their purview and trust you to handle it, which includes escalation, surfacing bad news and wins to share up, etc.

- Seek your manager’s input on your next career milestone (and ask for advocacy) - Communicate your wins (and ask if they should be shared with upper management) - Don’t bury bad news, don’t sugarcoat / blame - Exude sincerity, ownership Not for everyone, but useful for some.

How to “manage up”, with integrity: - Align on expectations (macro & micro) - Ask about your manager’s priorities (offer to help) - Share the hard challenges you face (even if you have them under control) - Escalate when necessary (view escalation as a feature, not a bug)

@tom_morganKCP But I also feel myself thinking in circles a bit and using flawed analogies. So I might get to where you, just taking a little longer.

@tom_morganKCP Maybe a vocab difference. For example, I know: - pace of fleet vehicle electrification is accelerating - pace of transmission grid expansion is fixed in short-term If I combine those into the insight that this is a market opportunity, did I discard either piece of source info?

Idea I can’t stop thinking about: “the value of a piece of information is determined by the volume of information DISCARDED to produce it.”

@waitbutwhy Eh, have you actually looked at these questions though? Is it liberal to to say that experts usually make better decisions in their subject or that the government should be separate from religion?

This should sound your alarm bells no matter what your politics are. I'd like the AI of the future to distinguish between the objective and subjective. For the subjective, the protocol should be for the AI to explain what the range of views is, not to present opinions as facts.

In other words, the supposition is that my formative experience of reality, all of my societal heuristics and pattern-matching… it’s all obsolete. That’s a tough idea to accept, but as this clever post argues, the world does not care if we are ready. neckar.substack.com/p/the-herald-o…

I haven’t read @PeterZeihan, but this excerpt got my attention. “… the period of 1980–2015 in particular has simply been a unique, isolated, blessed moment in time. A moment that has ended. A moment that will certainly not come again in our lifetimes.” zeihan.com/end-of-the-wor…