Made my own pizza dough for the first time using this fantastic recipe.. It is so gratifying to make something so common from scratch, almost like I’m finally understanding properly what I’ve been eating all those years when eating pizza.

The other day I realized just how often my emotions dictate my conclusions instead of the other way around. An emotion like worry or rage subjectively seems to always arise from worrisome or enraging situations. That can be the case, but just as often in my experience is the reality the other way around: I’m worried or pissed and those emotions latch onto whatever situation I’m in. The emotion comes first, the rationalization for that emotion second.

Can’t wait for someone like Michael Lewis to eventually write The Big Ourobouros in a few years.

So that site is not…neutral and a bit lazy (copy pasting the Reddit screenshot), but yeah I stopped trusting the metrics of web traffic sellers when I noticed how abysmally low the app install rate was from social media to the app I was involved in making a few years ago. Made the marketing person in my team dislike me for it, but I’m sorry ma’m the numbers don’t lie and we’re spending a few grand to acquire but a few users.

I think it was Hank Green (not that it matters) who said that if the AI business model ends up being advertising, which is what SlopTok and their Pulse seem to indicate OpenAI is moving towards, then they are absolutely not worth the entire pharmaceutical industry combined. There is such a delta between a valuation based on crushing something like a third of the jobs market and FUCKING ADS it isn't even funny anymore.

At least it seems like the bursting will mostly hurt the rich, riiiight?

Took the plunge this week and got myself the Elektron Digitakt. The OG, not the mark II, because I could get a pretty good deal on it used. I am very impressed with it, as it’s both very easy and intuitive to start using. It has the right amount of depth and options to enable endless exploration of all the combinations, but it’s also entirely optional so if you just want to put eight samples in a pattern you can go ham.

It came down to the wire, but all 12 government executive boards have now signed onto my/our bikeshare system! Huzzah. This project has given me a new...look into the legal profession. Mostly in how extremely shaky said profession appears, considering the nigh impossibility of doing anything with legal text such that other lawyers can't raise objections. I've had enough "ask 3 lawyers and you get 4 opinions" situations over the past year that I'm genuinely starting to wonder what on earth the point of the profession is beyond verbose perfectionism.

My bikesharing project is coming to the finish line (for me) in the next week or two, so it’s all I’m focusing on. Getting all twelve government-shaped ducks in a row is hard; it’s a lesson in both vigilance and letting go. But I love how this project runs entirely on internal motivation. I’m very motivated to make it work because how cool will it be to have a regional bikesharing system out there in the real world next year with my hard work and vision behind it?

Last week I had a small bout of fever. Not enough that I felt bad for myself but it enough to fog my mind up and anchor me to the couch in various blankets. I watched an ungodly amount of YouTube music gear reviews because I’ve been toying around with the idea of getting some kind of DAWless groovebox in an attempt to hone in on the fun of making music. I just wanna sit on the couch with headphones in layering drums and electronic melodies on top of each other. I’m on the fence as to how easy I want (or need!) my learning curve to be. Right now I’m eyeing a Roland MC-101 because it’s both compact, capable and has every Roland sound I could ever want. But it’s not as ez pz as a Circuit Tracks. Elektron’s Digitakt/-tone look more dope than those two but also a lot more complicated and (maybe?) better suited to music for hip Berlin industrial nightclubs than, say, trying to make something Boards of Canada-y. I’m hoping to find a store somewhere to just fiddle around with these - play to find out so to speak.

It’s abundantly clear that social media is misaligned AI and that people are starting to care, I just wish it would go faster so the web can look more like an infinite patchwork of small communities (again). Personally I’ve already replaced all of my time on the infinite feeds of Reddit and Instagram with a handful of communities (here, two telegram groups, a good ole forum and 4 discord servers) and I don’t miss it.

It seems like autumn has quietly arrived, as the weather here has gone from "almost no rain for four months straight" to "every day is rainy and/or dreary". At least temps are still nice.

Solbiati had a bad summer, or so my tailor told me, so after months of waiting my two new linen suits are finally here. I love the jackets but I adore the pants, as I now finally have some good fitting stylish high-rise pants, which are nigh impossible to find out in the wild. One's in a light neutral sand colour, the other in a pastel brown, so I can combine them with quite a lot and feel good walking out the door. Spending an objectively large sum on clothes the past year has forced me to explore to what degree I do so to appease my ego. Am I doing this to look good to others, to prop my ego up? Meditation is helping me become more aware of my ego and my preliminary conclusion is that yes, I am (still) highly sensitive to what others think of me, but no, I just really like to express a particular vibe on a particular day through what I wear. It's not like there are any expectations from my colleagues or peers that I feel a need to adhere to. The clothes make me feel good and make me feel closer to who I am in a way that I think it's justified to invest in good, timeless style that last.

In other news, my wife handed in her resignation letter today. I'm happy for her that she did. There's no animosity, it's a fish-climbing-trees situation, but my wife isn't one to give up fast so it took a while for her to accept she might be the proverbial fish. There's no new job yet but after five years there she could use a break, if only for some necessary soul-searching for what's next.

Some easy home improvements the past weeks. We finally replace the ground floor windows from eighties thin double pane to much better R-value stuff this week. We isolated the crawlspace with foil thermocushionst a few months ago so together we should be able to keep heat in much better this coming winter. Hopefully well enough that our heat pump can get it warmer than 19C on its own. As a nice bonus both the new windows, underfloor isolation, solar and heat pump have all been neatly subsidized about 20-30% each so yay sustainability.

We also finally got ourselves a nice all wood seating for in the garden, which had exploded with bee-friendly local plants over the summer. I’m really enjoying sitting outside more. Here’s to hope the summer won’t end just yet.