dan murphy

Why the fuck would you not want to protect this

@mikulaja I can’t even open the app without getting a headache lol. Too many clicks to get what you want/need. Bad design

Bilt users are PISSED. Delayed or bounced rent payments. Customer service from unhelpful AI bots with human agents seemingly missing in action. Any info on what’s happening? My DMs are open.

There’s a lot we can learn from Buddhism. We should avoid Samsara (continuous life and death cycles, where one is optimizing and always trying to “climb the ladder higher”). It’s unfulfilling. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to improve, it means you should be methodical about how you do it.

NEW blog post is up! The Self-Help Trap: What 20+ Years of “Optimizing” Has Taught Me The older I get, the more I think that self-help can be a trap. Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease. I say this after ~20 years of writing self-help and a lifetime of consuming it. Spend enough time in the world of “improvement,” and you’ll notice something strange: The people most obsessed with self-help are often the least helped by it. Behind the smiles and motivational quotes, behind closed doors and after a drink or two, the truth is that they’re not able to outsmart their worries. On one hand, perhaps this unhappiness is precisely what lands one in self-development in the first place, right? I long assumed this about myself, and it’s partially true. On the other hand, what if self-help itself is actually creating or amplifying unhappiness? Modern self-help contains an in-built flaw: To continually improve yourself, you must continually locate the ways you are broken. Fortunately, there are a few perspective shifts that make all the difference. It took me embarrassingly long to figure them out. To get started, let’s take a fresh look at an old concept. See the link below to the full blog post 👇

One of the most important threads you'll read. The West is drying out and it's an existential threat. Water is a civilizational resource -- you literally can't sustain civilization without it. More to come soon on ACC's water policy agenda. This is mission-critical.

We destroy the things that matter just so we can build more things that are meaningless. Why?

BLM Announces Plan to Fell Oregon's Last Great Forests One billion board feet per year... 20 days to make your voice heard. They filter drinking water for downstream communities. They hold soil on steep slopes above salmon streams that are already in crisis. They’re home to the northern spotted owl, the marbled murrelet, coho salmon, steelhead, and hundreds of species that evolved over millennia in conditions you can’t replicate by planting seedlings in rows. morethanjustparks.substack.com/p/blm-announce…

Dario Amodei just gave his first interview since the Pentagon blacklisted his company. The toll is visible on his face. He was asked one question. What would you say to the President right now? He didn’t hesitate. Amodei: “We are patriotic Americans. Everything we have done has been for the sake of this country.” Anthropic built their models to defend America. They were the first AI lab cleared for classified military systems. They wanted to help the warfighter. But the Pentagon demanded unrestricted access to fully autonomous weapons and mass surveillance of American citizens. Amodei drew the line. The government responded with emergency Cold War powers. A supply chain designation normally reserved for foreign adversaries. A six-month federal phaseout ordered from Truth Social. Amodei: “When we were threatened with supply chain designation and Defense Production Act, which are unprecedented intrusions into the private economy, we exercised our classic First Amendment rights to speak up and disagree with the government.” The administration framed Anthropic’s refusal as anti-American. Amodei’s response dismantled that framing in one sentence. Amodei: “Disagreeing with the government is the most American thing in the world.” Here is the deeper paradox nobody in Washington wants to say out loud. We are in a geopolitical race against autocratic adversaries who use AI for mass surveillance of their own citizens and autonomous weapons with no human oversight. The Pentagon demanded that Anthropic build those exact capabilities for America. Amodei: “The red lines we have drawn, we drew because we believe that crossing those red lines is contrary to American values.” You cannot defeat authoritarianism by adopting its methods. You cannot defend the open society by forcing private companies to build its antithesis under threat of wartime emergency powers. Anthropic held the line. Got blacklisted for it. And came out the other side saying the same thing they said going in. That is what it actually looks like to mean it.

@Ike_Saul This is very important. Thanks for posting about it

When I was 14 years old, I traveled to the Big Bend region of West Texas for the first time. My extended family had lived along the U.S.–Mexico border since the 1970s, but this was my first time visiting them. As a suburban kid from Philadelphia, I’d never seen anything quite like it. Counties more than twice the size of Delaware held no more than a couple thousand permanent residents. Mountains, rivers, desert arroyos, cattle ranches — miles and miles of wild, untouched land stretched out in every direction, mostly unobstructed. The land is populated by ocotillo and agave plants, pig-like mammals called javelinas, coyotes, mountain lions, bears, snakes, deer and (more recently) majestic mountain sheep called aoudads. It was and remains the Western Frontier — alive and well, still unmarred by oil fields or residential buildings or government overreach. After my first summer working for my cousin in Big Bend, I went back every summer until I was 18 years old. I learned to drive manual transmission cars, dirtbikes, forklifts, and backhoes; I learned to shoot guns, ride horses, hike, camp, make fires, run rivers, and tow a trailer. I learned to work — backbreaking, hard work in the 115-degree sun. I was surrounded by people who knew how to live off the land, fix their own cars, and make ends meet with the bare minimum in a place where jobs (along with water, food, and people) were sparse. After I went to college, I kept coming back — usually once or twice a year, often for weeks or months at a time, until a few years ago when I finally bought a 10-acre plot of dirt and started construction on an adobe home for my family, which was completed last year. It is, without exaggeration, my favorite place in the world. My happy place. My getaway spot. My hope, with any luck, is that in a few decades my son will be inheriting the home and the land, shepherding it, and passing it along to his own children. And now, once again, I’m facing the prospect of President Donald Trump building a border wall through our backyard. This is not a drill. DHS is notifying residents and property owners about 30-foot, steel barricades going up throughout this pristine land. 30x30 foot shelters for fiber optic cable, surveillance, and CBP agents all along the border. Miles of 12-24 foot wide roads in land that has never had anything but dirtbike and horseback trails. It's coming and it could be happening as soon as this summer. I want to be clear: Building a wall here will 1) Destroy jobs in the region, cutting off river guides and horseback outfitters from the water and trails they use now, and thus reducing tourism, thus crushing the hotel/Airbnb/food industry that feeds people throughout Big Bend. 2) It will hand control of the river over to Mexico, basically cutting Americans off from the most precious natural resource in all of West Texas. 3) It will irreversibly damage the wild West, the last remaining truly untouched land in the lower 48, and 4) It won't actually reduce border crossings. In Fiscal Year 2024, just 0.32% of all crossings happened in the 517 mile Big Bend sector. Just 3,000 encounters happened in all of 2025. That's less than the number of encounters in NORTH DAKOTA in 2024. And all of this would cost hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars. This is what it looks like on the border in Big Bend. This region is one of the most remote, unnavigable terrains in all of the United States. Border crossers aren’t going to be more dissuaded by a 30-foot wall than the thousand-foot sheer cliffs that already litter the Mexican landscape south of the Rio Grande River. Supposing desperate border crossers also happened to be experienced rock climbers who trudged up from Central America with gear to navigate the mountains, cliffs and arroyos, they’re still likely to die of heat exhaustion or thirst in a place where the temperature routinely exceeds 100 degrees Fahrenheit from April to October. And if they come in the winter, well, they’re liable to get hypothermia in the desert night, when the temperatures routinely drop below 40 degrees. That’s to say nothing of finding water or food in an area where locals with wells, rain catchment systems, and city lines are frequently struggling to collect potable drinking water; and the arid desert provides no easily accessible sources of food on such a journey. And if they make it through all that, they're just turning themselves in or being found half-dead near the border. It's just totally unnecessary. Again: This is one of the last remaining truly untouched, open, wild, and free lands in the U.S. Much of it is public, and a lot of it is privately owned by environmentalist-minded people who are simply preserving it (and now may have their land stolen via eminent domain by the government).

@ilyasut “OpenAI has taken a similar stance” is this true? Altman’s tweet seems to indicate otherwise

It’s extremely good that Anthropic has not backed down, and it’s siginficant that OpenAI has taken a similar stance. In the future, there will be much more challenging situations of this nature, and it will be critical for the relevant leaders to rise up to the occasion, for fierce competitors to put their differences aside. Good to see that happen today.

Most people don’t appreciate at all how beautiful the world is.

Solar and renewable energy are critical to the future of the US, but where we site these projects matters enormously. Much of this land that looks ‘empty’ is actively used as wildlife migration corridors for pronghorn, mule deer, and migratory birds. Large-scale industrial development fragments these corridors in ways that can be detrimental to wildlife. There’s enormous potential on already-disturbed lands as well; I.e. rooftops, parking lots, and brownfields.

So much of the Western United States looks like this. Why aren't we carpeting it with solar farms and colocating data centers & grid-scale batteries?

Joy is a competitive super power. Alysa Liu retired from figure skating at 16. She was tired of not not having fun, tired of being consumed by her sport. She came back two years later with a new goal: to have as much fun on the ice as possible. And now she’s an Olympic gold medalist. Liu won her first national title when she was just 13. But by 16, after competing in the 2022 Olympics, she decided she’d had enough and stepped away. She said pressure and losing her identity trying to be an elite athlete made it all miserable. But then, she said she went on a ski trip that reminded her just how much fun she could have doing a sport. Something in her brain clicked. Maybe she could bring fun to figure skating. Maybe she could approach it in a way that could be full of joy and life and love. She unretired at 18 and won a world championship the next year. At 20, she was ready to face these Olympic games differently than in 2022. Liu went into the women’s figure skating final in third place. After her short program, she said: “Even if I mess up and fall, that’s totally okay, too. I’m fine with any outcome, as long as I’m out there.” One of the greatest competitive advantages is having fun. People love to romanticize the athlete, artist, or entrepreneur who has a chip on their shoulder, fueled by anger and resentment. But the truth is that if you’re not having fun, you are not going to last long at whatever it is you do, and you certainly won’t get the best out of yourself. There’s a foolish idea that you either have to be full of intensity or full of joy. But that’s nonsense. It’s no surprise one of the first things out of Alysa’s mouth after her free skate was: “That was so much fun!” Joy and intensity can coexist, and in the best performers, they almost always do. Alysa is unapologetically authentic and true to her values. She has said where she used to skate to win and be technically perfect, she now uses competition as a chance to show her art, to have fun, and to put herself out there. She’s a fierce athlete with an infectious sense of joy in her sport. And she broke USA's 24-year gold medal draught in women’s figure skating doing it. Excellence requires focus, determination, a little bit of crazy, at times obsession, and living a mundane lifestyle that many people would find boring. But excellence also requires that you find deep joy in your craft, that you learn how to have fun while working hard. What makes for excellence—and not just in sports, but in anything—is the combination of intensity and joy. It’s the latter that makes the former sustainable.

An Optimization Mindset says: “If I optimize every aspect of my life, then I’ll be happy.” A Happiness Mindset says: “If I learn how to be happy, then I’ll naturally function in an optimal way.” A Happiness Mindset ime outputs more happiness and, actually, more success in life

I recommend reading The Way of Zen. It’s fantastic and will probably change the way you look at life

@shadcn Nice! I’ve been doing this too. I pass arguments to the skill, so that I can specify file names, directories, etc… it works nicely

I've been on/off Obsidian too but one thing that has been working well for me lately is: I created a /done skill that I run after every session. It takes everything that was discussed, key decisions, questions, follow-ups, dumps it into a .md file with the claude session id and branch name. Helpful when I need context later.

Taste has always been a core skill.

Solar will utterly dominate future electricity production

We're committing to cover electricity price increases from our data centers. To ensure ratepayers aren’t picking up the tab, we'll pay 100% of grid upgrade costs, work to bring new power online, and invest in systems to reduce grid strain. Read more: anthropic.com/news/covering-…