/reader

Our floor gets exceptionally dusty whenever we come back from a trip, so the last time we got back I had to mop the floor. I am strangely a perfectionist when I mop the floor, so it prevents me from mopping it often because it feels too draining and tedious. This time around I decided to deliberately do a shoddy job, half-heartedly going over the floor quickly and ignoring the difficult-to-reach areas. I learnt that it takes exponentially less effort to mop the floor this way compared to my regular effort. The floor still felt clean enough.

In response my partner told me that she too started putting our comforter in its sheets haphazardly instead of making sure it is perfectly straight into their corners. At the end of the day, it still does its job.

These examples reminded me that it is better to do what we can instead of always aiming for some ideal state. I think a lot of my procrastination happens because everything feels too daunting and tiring. Knowing how to chunk, pace and dose is key to doing the things we want to do.

Our society has conditioned us to be perfectionists, as though anything done without excellence is not worth doing. So many people don’t even try doing the things they wish to do because they think they will be bad at it. But nobody says we have to be good at doing the things we are interested in doing. Interest and excellence are different. I can be interested in photography but I don’t have to be excellent with it. Depending on our goals, sometimes having fun is more important. Pushing for excellence may not be fun to everybody, especially for someone like me who prefers novelty to specialisation. It is important to understand our own preferences.

I run at at an average 10:00 per km. That’s awfully slow from most people’s point of view. But I enjoy it, it keeps me at a sustainable steady state, and that is my zone 2ish pace. I don’t incur too much oxidative stress or stress hormones. So why do I have to compare myself to other people’s pace or try to break PRs?

Just like I once wrote that there is minimum effective dose for strength training and other beneficial activities, there are also thresholds where doing something is effective enough without it feeling strenuous. Once we breach that threshold the effort:reward ratio becomes dramatically smaller. Continual experimentation is needed to figure out where is that threshold. If 80% is enough we don’t have to go for the 100%. Heck, sometimes even 1% is good enough, because everything compounds.

It is important to figure out where we are and do what we can at our own pace, or we are gatekeeping opportunities and experiences from our selves. It is a skill to do things for just a few minutes with minimum effort, knowing that it all adds up and that it is better than doing nothing at all. There are some instances when doing nothing is better than anything, but as with everything we can learn to make conscious informed decisions versus simply being dismissive and passive.

I am breaking that personal rule because this trend has spread from the blogging world to the world of face-to-face conversations. As I see it, I now have two options: 1) Projectile vomit on the next person who attempts this in conversation or 2) Blog about it. Maybe if I were a stronger, better person I could find some third or fourth option. Too bad. Here we are. 

So, um, listen: 

I care about you but I do not care about the hallucinating robot and I do not care what specific combination of words it glommed up from the dark reaches of Scrapelandia and cobbled together into seeming-sense and bracketed between the servile, saccharine phrasings of a pretend personality and spewed onto the screen at you. 

I like your personality. I like the stuff you make and do. I like how you see the world. I care about your thoughts and feelings. I want to see your imperfect output and your unfinished projects. I’m into your insights and your mundane observations. I care about your art and I enjoy your dumb jokes and I’m curious about your music taste and I want to hear your hot takes. 

But I do not care about the plagiarizing pretend bot or what it told you about your personality or ideas or business or art or future or whatever.

I don’t think AI is the devil. But I know that AI is not your friend. Or your coach. Or your therapist. Or your business partner. Or your dev team. Or your editor. It cannot know and it cannot think and it cannot feel and it cannot even summarize properly.

It is a tool, a piece of tech. It has its uses. 

But it’s not you, it’s not anything like you. It’s not interesting. It’s not alive.

I don’t care about its feedback or opinion or observations because it literally cannot produce any of those things. It is a glorified search engine cobbling together random bits of knowledge from what humans have actually produced, arranging it into a facsimile of conversation. That can be useful but it is not interesting. 

What are you having for dinner? How will you prepare it? How did it turn out? Did you like it? Will you have it again? How much garlic did you use? (Use more next time, trust me.) I care about that. Tell me. But I don’t care what your refrigerator thinks about your dinner selection. And I don’t care what a chatbot says about you. 

Thanks for all the support so far. 🙏

# I've updated /music.

I also don’t like writing on my phone.  I get annoyed. I’m a slow thumb typist. I’m a fast touch typist. My own inefficiency when writing on my tiny iPhone 13 mini screen irritates the heck outta me. I like a bigger horizon. Give me some space. I want to spread out. I want split screen. I want room for long sentences to breathe. 

But I don’t like being on my computer all the time. More accurately, I’m on my computer all the time for work and it is sometimes hard for my brain to accept than I can use my computer for other things. 

So the languishing iPad is perfect. 

I didn’t do anything complicated but I like it and I’m using it.

1. I ordered a case with a bluetooth keyboard. I got a cheap one because I wasn’t sure if I’d actually use the keyboard but I have used it quite often. 

2. The main apps: Orion, Tot, Ivory, Lire, Reader, and Raindrop. 

3. The home screen is just those apps (plus Kindle) and a shortcut to my secretly published blogroll because I like RSS but I also like traipsing through the actual blogs. So much personality. 

4. I set up Orion as the only browser and set up the blocklist and a couple of lenses from Flamed Fury. 

5. I switched to Lire as my RSS reader and organized my feeds in folders so that’s made my brain happy. 

I’m popping the iPad open in the morning and reading blogs. Sometimes I want to make a note so I’ll pop Tot open in split screen and that works beautifully.  

Anyway, nothing complicated here and I’m sure I’ll keep tweaking a bit. Let me know if you have suggestions for cool things I haven’t thought about.  :)

Long live the small web. 

• I have a bad habit of starting the day off with a goof, avoid this
• I like riffing and puns but it can have reply-guy vibes, limit this
• In any conversation you have 3 options: Be rude, Be nice, Say nothing – the latter is usually the most correct answer
• It’s okay to let people be wrong
• Write down the issues you allow yourself to get outraged over
• Read the room before posting
• You can block/mute any person or channel for any reason, it’s fun
• Research suggests it takes 23m15s to resume a task after a distraction!
• Raycast Focus is your friend

On specific social-media apps:

• X is for Nazis and Russian bot nets, avoid.
• FB/Instgram are for family and friends, use on occasion.
• TikTok is a dopamine trap, avoid.
• YouTube is a dopamine trap, but useful.
• Bluesky is fine.
• Mastodon is for quality conversations.
• Discord is for like-minded communities, prioritize intimate ones.
• Log into LinkedIn once a month and give some thumbs-ups. It supports your friends and colleagues in the algorithmic trash fire and that handshakefullness and relationship building might be helpful in the future if you need a job.

I thought all that because I allegedly know how my brain works. And I know that I have a hard time dealing with tasks that drag on for a long time, and prefer seeing short tasks being completed. That’s what I thought. And if there’s one thing we have learned with these weird experiments I’m doing is that, when it comes to the inner workings of my brain, I don’t know shit.

After finishing Tokyo Express by Seicho Matsumoto, it was time to pick a new book. I almost decided to start 4 3 2 1, but decided to go for After Dark by Haruki Murakami. Murakami didn’t keep me occupied for long because I was done reading it 2 days later, and so the brick written by Auster was inexorably creeping upon me. On July 12th, I said to myself “Ok, enough is enough”, and I started reading it. But I had to make a plan because I was convinced that I needed a strategy to tackle that book. “Ok, so the book is structured in 7 sections. Each section is split into 4 parts, so that’s 28 parts. If I read one part a day, I can be done with this in a month”. That was the plan. I started reading the book that day, and 11 days later, I finished it. The strategy was abandoned by day 2.

The book itself is fine. It’s an interesting novel written in a clever way, and I loved the story. But the interesting part was seeing my brain evolving in real time in its approach to reading. That was genuinely surprising to the point where I’m now convinced I can tackle pretty much any book, no problem. And that is not something I would have thought about myself a few weeks ago.

Which brings me to a more interesting question: how many other things are that way in my life? How many other aspects of myself can be changed and flipped this easily? Do I even know myself?

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To paraphrase Sigmund Freud, sometimes a memo is not just a memo. That’s why we have to read between the lines of Satya Nadella’s 1,150-word memo. Microsoft’s chairman and CEO, in his message, tried to rationalize the 9,000-employee layoff. I was interested in how he was positioning the AI-based disruption in the software industry.

This memo is not just about Microsoft. In a way, it’s a weather forecast for the rest of the software industry, which mustconfront the reality of artificial intelligence. Just as rapid automation transformed the industrial economy, we’re poised to see the same with the digital economy. The software business, as it stands today, will bear the brunt of AI’s impact.

Here’s a breakdown of what Nadella’s memo—which may appear to be a pastiche of corporate doublespeak—is trying to convey. Let’s begin with the paragraph that has received the most attention.

By every objective measure, Microsoft is thriving: our market performance, strategic positioning, and growth all point up and to the right. We’re investing more in CapEx than ever before. This is the enigma of success in an industry that has no franchise value. Progress isn’t linear. It’s dynamic, sometimes dissonant, and always demanding. But it’s also a new opportunity for us to shape, lead through, and have greater impact than ever before.

In a more traditional industry, such as healthcare, it would be akin to saying: We are making a ton of money, but we’regoing to layoff nurses and replace them with machines. Or a CEO of a steel factory saying, “Sure, we’re making profits, but we’re going to layoff workers because we’re on the cusp of smart manufacturing.”

Nadella is trying to reconcile two seemingly contradictory realities: How can a company be “more successful than ever” while still eliminating jobs? His narrative framework attempts to make the brutal reality of our AI-driven future psychologically tolerable.

This narrative framework captures the harsh reality that AI, in theory, will make companies more profitable while employing fewer people. It’s great for shareholders but not so good for those who work for technology companies like Microsoft. Satya, and other corporate leaders can’t really say that, so they resort to verbal obfuscation.

The phrase “enigma of success in an industry that has no franchise value” is another bit of rationalization at work. At best,it’s a psychological sleight of hand, as much for himself as for his audience. Nadella’s comparison of the current shift with the 1990s PC revolution is very calculated. It stirs excitement and fear of missing out, while simultaneously normalizing the idea that major technological shifts require human casualties.

Sure, they do.

Having read the memo several times, I attempted to translate what the memo stated and what it actually meant.

• The “transformation is messy but exciting” narrative attempts to reframe the trauma of layoffs as an opportunity. It’s a way to make the current employee base feel less anxious while also feeling special for being part of something historic.
• When he says, “The success we want to achieve will be defined by our ability to go through this difficult process of unlearning and learning,” he’s attempting to shift attention from the immediate challenges to future possibilities. However, this approach glosses over the harsh reality: The pain of today and near future will be brutal.

Microsoft’s leader is essentially saying they laid off employees not due to financial struggles, but because those workers didn’t fit into the company’s AI-focused strategy. The repeated mentions of “unlearning” and “learning” suggest that someemployees’ skills have become outdated. Rather than invest in retraining, the company opted to hire fewer workers with more relevant expertise.

When Nadella uses the phrase “learning,” it isn’t inspirational. It’s a warning disguised as motivation. This harsh realitywill confront many employees.

Like I said at the start, this is not just about Microsoft, but pretty much every software company will be hit hard by this wave of transformation. If you’re an employee at Microsoft (or any other software company), the reality is that you’reonly valuable if you have perceived value in the company’s AI transformation. In other words, adapt, and adapt quickly. Because if you don’t, well, you’re on your own.

The Microsoft memo portends the new reality of the technology industry. For years, the sector has been generous to its employees, offering unheard-of perks and placing a premium on skills such as software development. AI, however,inverts that relationship. As a result, we now face a different set of parameters.

• Loyalty has become a one-way street: Employees must be committed, but technology companies owe only “opportunities,” as and if they deem necessary.
• Layoffs will be used for strategic positioning, regardless of a company’s financial health.
• Profit provides an opportunity to invest in transformation, which sometimes involves eliminating jobs.

Don’t be surprised if normalization of profitable layoffs becomes the next big Silicon Valley export to broader economy. 

That’s really the satya (truth) of Satya’s memo.

July 26, 2025. San Francisco.