it’s hard to overstate the extent to which all the participants of that site do not like this post, or what it represents. both the average nobody and the thought leader alike, they hate this post in equal measure. it’s hard to get everyone to agree on something, so they say... and yet, here we are.

if only everyone wasn’t wrong.

i actually don’t want this to be an “AI art is good” think-piece. (i want this to be a “why doesn’t anyone think for themself?” think-piece.) as such, i don’t seek here to undertake an exacting defense of the specific matter at hand. but i’ll give a quick overview.

there is an app that no one uses called Meta AI. the company formerly known as facebook has done pretty poorly in the AI race, hence why i’ve never heard of anyone using it. but what they unveiled was a feature of that app… the one that no one uses. it’s a scrollable vertical video feed except all of the content is AI generated, right there, within the app.

here’s how Business Insider describes it, lightly edited:

So what is Vibes? It’s an almost endless feed of random AI-generated video clips. For now, the feed doesn’t seem personal — it’s just a random grab bag of videos (according to Meta’s press release, the feed will eventually get personalized).

While theoretically anyone can post to the feed, Meta seeds a decent amount of the videos (look for accounts with the “AI” tag in their bio — that’s a Meta-created account).

But the Vibes feed is just clips with nothing deeper behind them. The focus of the app seems to be the feed itself, with its sheer volume and randomness — Vikings next to cartoon ducks next to a beautiful woman — displaying a chaotic showcase of AI’s possibilities, rather than an experience you’d enjoy.

Look, I would love to come to some counterintuitive conclusion here other than: This is an AI slop feed that no one wants. For now, that is exactly what this looks like.

and everyone, apparently, across the internet hates this.

here are some posts i saw today:

you get the idea.

but for me, i thought the idea was cool, and i thought there was potential in there being a social aspect. (i think there is, but it’s very half baked.) but i imagined a world where people could gain an audience by being good at prompting. for the creation side of things, it uses midjourney under the hood, which is the tool i use for AI images (and sometimes video) anyway. altogether, it seemed like an interesting idea with a lot of potential.

i went into the decision with a default open state. (maybe i’m abnormally high in “openness” or something, i have no idea.) from my perspective, other people just default to “no” on all things. (then, when ideas later become mainstream, they trick themselves into believing they always thought it was a good idea.)

i think a small number of internet thought leaders do this, and then everyone else just got in line. for the masses, i suspect not a lot of analysis is happening, period. they just agree with whatever smarty pants funny guy they read while they poop says.

i felt this exact same way during the Cracker Barrel logo controversy. the thought leaders hated it early. i actually saw that 5min after it dropped. thought it was a solid improvement, much cleaner, tweeted as much. live reaction: solid improvement. then, i saw NO ONE that agreed with me for the next week and a half.

but getting back to the Vibes app. the thing that really irks me is a certain species of complaint. you see this a lot both online and at the proverbial water cooler.

“why does this exist?”

alternatively:

“why do we need this?”

i’ve always loathed this particular remark. i’ve never had that feeling. so far out of my world view, the phrase is, that it’s befuddling. and grappling with this has made me realize a while ago that i’m different. (i honestly don’t know when this was… could be a year, a decade, or my whole life.)

but why does it irk me so?

i just don’t understand why something you don’t like existing is so bad. if you don’t want it, don’t use it. there are many things i don’t like, that i simply don’t use. i would never wish them out of existence. “not for me”, one says. that’s a phrase we all know. (except lately, it’s gone AWOL.)

it’s just hard to place myself in the head of someone who thinks “not only do i not like that, but i don’t like it to such a degree… that i don’t want anyone to have it”.

i feel this is central to the concept of “capitalism” which has remained (arguably) the thing i will defend the most of all things. i am team capitalism. it’s dismaying that society has started to turn away from capitalism as a concept to hold sacred. these days, being in favor of capitalism makes you right wing or some shit. and that’s such a shame.

but let’s just break this down.

if you don’t like something, just don’t use it. if literally no one likes it, then market forces will cause it to no longer exist. it shouldn’t bother you that other people like a thing that you don’t personally like.

that’s what i think, anyway.

my revulsion to, and the ubiquity of “i don’t like something so much that no one gets to have it”, are in combination, somewhat depressing. i remember the 90s somewhat, and the early 2000s pretty well, and people were not this way back then. not to this degree.

one other thought i keep having is how much i would hate myself if i was typing up the same take as everyone else. don’t people want to apply their own spin to things? isn’t that the point of life, in a way?

a lifetime of being in my own head has provided what i think the answer is: most other people don’t want to be different. or, they do want that feeling, but their fear of being labeled “different” outweighs it. i don’t know which thing it is.

maybe, most people don’t care either way. they just want to fit in.

i guess that’s probably it.

but i’m not this way on purpose, i swear.

A brief personal history

I heard about TikTok back in 2017-2019, and never gave much thought to trying it out. In 2020, during COVID lockdowns… well I also didn’t install it then. It took me until my second stint of living in Singapore to finally say “okay, let’s try this out”.

Actually, now that I think about it, it was an old friend who messaged me saying “Remember your old DJ mixes? Most of those songs are not on TikTok and I wish they were.” So, I installed it to figure out if I could get any of those songs on there. I never did figure that out, but I also wanted to see how it all worked.

I’d heard things like “the algorithm is really good”, and “it just gets to know what you like just by scrolling, even if you don’t favorite anything.” And, the algorithm was really impressive. It started with location-based videos. This content was cute, though not really within the bounds of my sense of humor or interest sphere. (Over time, it did indeed zero in on these coordinates.) I launched the app occasionally, but mostly… I kind of forgot about it.

A few months later, we had moved back to the United States. Sadly, that spring was a time of personal family tragedy, which meant I got to see my immediate family for the first time in years. At one point in those somber weeks, my little sister asked me if I used “the app TikTok”. Why yes, I replied, I had just installed it recently. She sent me some memes. I sent her some memes.

At my mom’s house later that week, a TikTok video about someone dying made me sad, and I started crying. I don’t actually cry that much. I hadn’t cried at all during the funeral. The relevant video was intended as a joke, but was “accidentally” sad.

Broadly, that’s the backstory. I never really wanted to download it in the first place, but ultimately became fond of it. It became the one app that left me with a smile after using it. While it could suck up 20 minute increments of my life, I almost always enjoyed those minutes.

“No tik tok”

So through the next few years, when I’d see a really funny meme, I’d save them to a collection of “all time funniest”. I’d actually come up with dozens of categories like this, but for that one in particular, I’d often post them in my group chat. My friends fucking hated this. They would reply “No tik tok” and either claim not to watch, or call the videos terrible. Undeterred, I continued to troll them. The videos were so funny, but they couldn’t admit that. They had to pretend they hated them, for societal conformity reasons, etc. TikTok is actually bad, don’t you know?

My friend’s reactions fit neatly into an undercurrent of sentiment I was constantly hearing in the population at large. One frequent complaint was “TikTok is a Chinese spy app” which is listening to you at all times. I’d always tell this complainer that all the social media apps do this, and LinkedIn is apparently the worst. It made no difference.

Another complaint was “it’s a waste of time, and it’s designed to be as addictive as possible”. I always felt befuddled when I heard this. You’re going to need self-discipline for literally everything in life. Can’t you just set your own limits? And TikTok is not at all unique in this area.

How about this one: “it’s only for teenagers”. That was perhaps true at one point, but by the point I’d signed up (4 years ago now), that totally wasn’t true. To be fair, it did skew a bit young, and I have a youthful energy about me even in my mid-30s, so I’ll agree with some of that complaint.

I’ve witnessed society do this, over and over, throughout my life. It becomes “cool” (actually conformist and lame) to hate something popular and new. Twitter was like this in 2009: “it’s only for techies.” Or, “you can only write 140 characters, which means you have no attention span.” (Many similar complaints for TikTok, btw.) It doesn’t matter the actual validity of the reason that you’re supposed to hate something popular and new, okay? What really matters is that we all hate that thing. You need to hate this thing with us if you want to be normal like all of us.

Regarding attention span… I guess that’s true? What’s preventing you from also reading a book? Again, it’s self-discipline, and it’s all personal choice. You’re angry about low-attention-span content existing? Is someone is forcing you to engage with it? (I mean, yeah, I did force my friends to engage with it, but that was just for the meme, ok?) And if you do choose to engage with it, can’t you also engage with other kinds of content? Is it really ruining your brain? How are you so certain? Finally, wouldn’t TikTok be considered a symptom of this broad shift in attention span, rather than a cause?

The self-policing societal rules around something don’t need to follow any logic. Liking TikTok makes you one of those people, but other short-form video platforms are somehow not taboo. Which brings me to the elephant in the room with “TikTok bad” complainers…

Instagram Reels

So many TikTok haters seem to have no problem with a shittier clone of it, Instagram Reels. The same people who’s blood boil the second they see that TikTok blue and pink watermark on a video will repeatedly send me insanely corny, insanely unfunny copies of 3-month-old TikTok memes, and then have the temerity to become angry with me for only watching the first 15 seconds of it.

Meta was able to copy many aspects of TikTok, but they’ve always fallen flat on the algorithm front… theirs has always felt markedly worse at finding out what actually makes me smile.

The content itself is also just different. It makes me feel like I’m watching a late-night talk show, having more so-called “clap-ter” than “laughter”. Based on how much copied memes I saw, it’s always felt like the IG Reels system was capable of regurgitating worse versions of TikTok memes, but not generating new ones. (We’ll see if this changes when TikTok is banned.) TikTok was able to gather a creative and optimistic audience, somehow. (For what it’s worth, TikTok has gone downhill in this area over the 4 years I’ve been using it.)

The whole thing reminds me of vaping, in a way. Back in 2017, every 20-something urbanite knowledge worker was buying and using a certain brand of vape called Juul. They were ubiquitous, at least in San Francisco. When the authorities later banned Juul on the grounds that kids were getting their hands on them, what happened? Did vaping go away in general?

Nope, instead everyone moved to disposable vapes like Elfbar and Flum Pebble. Now, instead of throwing out tiny little cartridges, people are throwing out entire electronic devices—USB-C port and all. E-waste? Can’t be bothered… into the trash it goes. 10,000 puffs per device? That should last you a week and a half. Once it starts to taste bad, you can still puff it for a while, despite the fact that you’re just breathing microplastics at that point. But these things are expensive, and you can’t afford $30 for a new one this week, now can you?

In case it isn’t clear, Instagram Reels is the disposable vapes of this analogy… a worse version of a foolishly banned thing that replaces the banned thing. It turns out pearl-clutching and screeching “won’t you think of the kids?” leads to worse outcomes for not only the kids, but climate change as well.

Throwing the plebs a bone

When you’re scrolling through videos on TikTok, you can see how many likes each piece got. You’ll get things with all sorts of like counts, from millions, to thousands, to sometimes under ten likes. In short, this is how they’re able to make such good memes; they realized that people with no audience still deserve a shot. Anything you upload will get a few dozen to a few hundred views, at least.

It’s worth examining this in a bit more detail. TikTok realized that they needed to steal a bit of value from the viewing audience to give to their creating audience. Which, in turn, leads to better content in the viewing audience in the long run. I’ve mostly been in the audience portion of that equation for these 4 years, with a notable exception…

I had an idea for a TikTok channel. I registered a new account and made a piece of content I knew would do well on the algorithm. This account had 0 followers. I uploaded the piece of content, found two accounts that were similar and left a few comments on their videos. This was just so a few people would click my name.

I returned to the app a day later to find the video had blown up. It had hundreds of thousands of views. The next two days, I made two more videos, each of them gaining a lot of views. I amassed 30,000 followers over the course of a week. The problem was that I was entirely uninterested in the channel topic. So, I abandoned it shortly thereafter, with the initial three videos. This was in early 2022. Every now and then I log into that account, where thousands of notifications always await me. Last time, one commenter had left me a comment “make more content, asshole.” Deepest apologies, dear sir.

My point of this story is that content that is actually good gets surfaced to the top, even from nobodies. Most other social media platforms do not do this. X does not. Instagram, including Reels, do not. YouTube did not do this for the longest time, but I believe they have started doing it recently. It’s painful to think about all the YouTube videos I made from 2014 to 2018 that sat at 0 views, demoralizing me to the point of abandoning various pursuits. Maybe that content was actually bad (this is likely). But couldn’t you have given me a few dozen sympathy views?

I will miss this aspect of TikTok.

Energy and optimism

I’ll miss the overall energy of TikTok. It’s always felt light, happy, energetic, and optimistic. To boil it all down to a single word: fun. You just don’t see that many other places.

Returning to my thought about things that everyone hates because society has decided to hate that thing, TikTok’s energy fits right into other things like this. From the outside, it sucks. On the inside, everyone is having fun. Things of this category that spring to mind: Fortnite, Burning Man, certain genres of music (YeeDM and Kawaii Future Bass for two), certain genres of entertainment (cringe shows like “Nathan For You” for one). The list goes on.

Goddamnit, I’m sad

I’m getting wistful as I write this. I feel genuinely sad. Writing this post was supposed to make me feel better, but I actually feel worse now.

Enjoy your victory, society. Congrats… you won.

We all have that one friend who says, “I had the idea for eBay. If only I had acted on it, I'd be a billionaire!” That logic is pathetic and delusional. Having the idea for eBay has nothing to do with actually creating eBay. What you do is what matters, not what you think or say or plan.

Think your idea's that valuable? Then go try to sell it and see what you get for it. Not much is probably the answer. Until you actually start making something, your brilliant idea is just that, an idea. And everyone's got one of those.

I see where this quote is coming from, but I don’t think it’s right.

I’ve been intermixed—deeply, I might add—in the world of early-stage startups these last 15 years. I’ve also moved around a lot in my career… I’ve had a lot of jobs. Look, it’s not ideal. It doesn’t look great on my resume. I’m also the kind of person that obsesses over the idea of ideas. And based on all that, it’s been obvious that:

Bad ideas don’t work.

It’s not even a controversial statement. I think most people would agree. And yes, that would be the thing I’ve seen firsthand, at many jobs. In order:

1. I’m hired by driven people with the wrong idea.

2. I work there for a year or two.

3. I leave the company. (Reasons vary… maybe a future post.)

4. Between 6 and 18 months pass.

5. I see on LinkedIn that the company has folded.

(This has happened to me a lot.)

But wait, you might ask, how can I be certain “bad idea” was the real reason for the company’s downfall?

In response to that… I’m not implying “bad idea” was always the sole factor, but I personally witnessed the whole journey as an uphill battle.

For the record, I think a lot of my ideas, in the past, through my current eyes, were doomed in this same way.

If bad ideas don’t work, it follows that ideas have a non-zero market value.

In my opinion, they’re just extremely illiquid. It’s an interesting thought, if a person has ever literally sold an idea to another person. I wonder… I really wonder.

The thrust of the quote (the one I started with) seems to say “Any old idea will do… just start grinding.” I find that advice quite revolting. Maybe it’s not saying that… but it sure feels like it is.

A new objection might go like:

“What if ‘having a good idea’ is a bar one needs to get over? ‘Having a good idea’ is merely a necessary precondition?”

That doesn’t seem true either. Think about a good idea versus a great idea. The value just scales upwards.

So, should a pure “idea guy” be considered a valuable member of a startup?

I don’t know about that one. I should say I do support it, to strengthen my argument, but I don’t like that idea either. And it’s definitely not me… I get shit done.

But, I just don’t like this idea that ideas are not valuable.

They are.

Aspect 2, on the other hand, is a sports fan. In the context of my life, sports haven’t aged well. After watching a game on television, I don’t feel fulfilled the way I do when I check an item off its checklist. Though I do feel something else, which is also desirable. I’m not the right person to argue “being a sports fan is good” here, at least in this article. After all, it would be difficult to explain sports fandom to an extra terrestrial.

What I will say is this: it’s pseudo religious. You root for a team because you grew up rooting for a team. When the team is bad, that stinks, because you're stuck with them. But the “being stuck” part is critical to this equation; that’s part of the allure.

So, I’ve made my peace with devoting a portion of my life force to “staring at a TV while desiring that the uniforms I grew up rooting for have more points than the uniforms I grew up rooting against.” However, we need limits on this.

For that reason, I made a subconscious (or maybe direct, I don’t remember) decision to pare down my sports-watching diet; to only follow the one sport I liked best, the National Football League.

“At least”, I reasoned, “the football season is only a third of the year”. My favorite team only has 17 games a year. As a middle ground, I do think “only pro football” fits the bill. (“Only college football” works too.)

I mostly stay true to this, albeit with a small yearly exception for March Madness, and an every-four-years exception for the World Cup.

Self-contained though it is, it’s still a big sacrifice when it comes to time. Not only do I have a favorite team, I also follow (the storylines of) all 32 teams. I listen to NFL podcasts. Regarding the games themselves, there’s Thursday, Sunday, and Monday night football (3.5 hours each per week), and then of course NFL Sunday (7 hours a week). Combined, that’s 17.5 hours a week.

In the before times, I didn’t usually watch this much football, though 10 hours wasn’t unusual. Looking at it soberly, giving up 10 hours a week, 17 weeks a year, is a major thing. I’m not even counting the playoffs in those calculations.

So let’s cut to the chase. I’m going to present some techniques that have enabled me to have it all. To be a part of the conversation without sacrificing too too much.

[Beginner] Limit your investment

Starting off here, I’ve often sought to reduce the overall amount of time and mental energy spent on something that supposed to be a fun past time.

Watching all the games of my favorite team is one thing. Watching all the games of every team… now that’s a “sometimes food”, usually only at the start of the season. I can’t do it regularly, even with the techniques outlined later in this article.

I tried fantasy football for a couple years, and it had some fun elements to it, but one of the major drawbacks is the time investment. I would be on a walk, or doing some other mundane activity, and I’d start strategizing about my fantasy team. I don’t like insidiously “always on” hobbies like that. I like hobbies that I can pick up and put down, and fantasy just wasn’t that.

I have a couple of NFL football podcasts I enjoy. One is more comedy-focused, and one is more Xs-and-Os analysis. At one time, I probably had 6 or 7, for which I’d listen to every darn episode. (Playing fantasy made this even worse.) So mostly, I just do the two, now. There are too many other interests that I shouldn’t neglect.

These are more meta-level things, let’s move on to more tactical time-saving techniques:

[Intermediate] Start the game late, with a DVR

When the Lions made the playoffs in 2011, I asked a friend if I could watch it at his apartment. He told me yes, but that he wanted to start watching the game late, intentionally. I wasn’t super familiar with DVRs back then, but agreed to his offer. I think that was probably my first time watching games that way, and it definitely worked.

Obvious though it may be, this should still be stated: commercials are the enemy. I could go on many rants about advertisements on NFL games, but instead I’ll describe them with a single word: repetitive.

Fast forward to early 2018 and, on a whim, I signed up for YouTube TV. The selling point was something called “Cloud DVR” – basically unlimited recordings, and seamless switching from live to delay. This became the main way I’d watch games. Before long, I found myself intentionally making my stream 5 to 30 minutes behind the real broadcast.

Regarding this “delayed on purpose” concept, I have a couple big picture things to say.

Firstly, you'll need to get used to being a little offset from the actual live happenings. The truth of the matter is that there’s already a slight delay when watching a “live” event on television. Putting that “well actually” aside though, this technique can lead to getting spoiled by friends’ text messages, or absent-mindedly refreshing social media.

It’s less than ideal, but what you lose in this spoilage potential is massively outweighed by “you don’t have to watch ads.” No ads. Did I mention no ads?

Secondly, beyond just ads, sometimes I want to skip the in-between-plays stuff. The “skip 15 seconds forward” button on the YouTube TV app can be really good at this specifically for American football. I’ll see a player starting to get tackled, I can tell the play is about to be blown dead, and I’ll just skip forward (usually twice) at this point. They’ll already be lining up for the next play. Yes, this is all very A.D.D., but I’ll remind you that the goal of all this hubbub is saving our precious time.

Injuries and penalties, while sometimes intriguing, usually induce boredom. It’s nice to be able to skip right through those.

This is all leading into the next hack:

[Hard] Wait until 30 minutes after the broadcast, then watch condensed mode

In 2014, I got a free trial of “NFL Game Rewind”, a service which lets you watch entire games after they aired. I liked being able to watch random out-of-market games. Back in those days, you needed DirectV to get every game live, and I definitely wasn’t about to start paying for that.

Roughly around 2016, the service (now named “NFL GamePass”) introduced “condensed mode.” If you click this option, you’ll see an edited broadcast, with only the actual plays, reducing the normal 3.5 hours to 40 minutes. What an idea!

This takes some getting used to, but it’s so much more time efficient, and the increased density means you’re glued to your seat the whole time. I love the feeling of listening to a podcast the day after a game, and the hosts are talking about that same game… which they clearly watched the long way. Whereas for yours truly, I only donated 40 minutes of my life, but I still know every reference. In short, it 100% feels like you “watched” the game.

At first I did this for other, tangential games – not for my primary rooting interests. A few years later, I began experimenting with new ideas. I decided to deliberately not look up the score of a given game until after it concluded, and then watch the condensed broadcast blind. Later, I even did this for the games I cared most about.

Some weeks in 2020, I watched an entire regular season week (all 16 games!) this way. (To be fair, I was located in Singapore back then, where the games start at 2am local time.)

How did all this stuff work? Amazingly. To be completely caught up on everything, and to be able to hold a conversation about every team, but not needing to spend an entire weekend watching television, felt like an insane hack.

The NFL’s service for this keeps changing names, and these days it’s “NFL+”. I think the NFL is aware of people like me, because they’ve added features to help me. For one, they offer a feature to blur the scores of all games. I love that they added that. Truly, hats off. I’m saluting, bowing, and sobbing. A+ feature.

Sans features like that, you have to be very vigilant about not accidentally seeing the score of a game. To this end, I set up a special wallpaper on my phone: a bright yellow image with the text “don’t look at scores or check social media”. I’ve definitely needed to be vigilant with this. It requires discipline.

Wrapping up

Did I really just write 1,500 words on the best way to feel productive while caring about pro football? I suppose I did.

Welcome to this blog, where I care about very niche things. If you’re new here, please drop me a follow. I would really appreciate that.

I’m still pondering a name change for this publication. Feel free to give suggestions in the comments. I think something with the word “productive” in it. That particular word is something of a through-line for me.

Anyhoo… see you next week.

In true “paint the bullseye on the target after you shoot the shot” fashion, I will now proclaim “not more than 2 weeks between posts” as the new rule. I’ve stayed true to that thus far.

Anyway, let’s make this one a paywalled post; an update on my life and this blog.

Read more

I’m moving to a weekly pace for these blog posts. I’m also going to try keeping them shorter, with a few longer thinkpiece-y articles mixed in there.

See you next week.

-Phil

I’m an idea guy. I love ideas. Ideas come to me when I’m living my life... I wouldn’t be able to sit down and say, “time for some ideas!” if I wanted to. Ideas worth considering have to come to me, unrequested and out of the ether.

Stereotypically, the shower is the place for ideas. This used to be more true for me than it is now that I do cold showers. “Shower thoughts” still happen for me, but these days they mostly happen while doing chores, playing video games, and commuting on the train.

Over time, I’ve cultivated a set of rules for handling my ideas.

First, I need to write them down before I forget them. So, I open Obsidian, come up with a quick title, and start writing. My heart is usually racing at this point, because I’m excited by the idea and also because I’m legitimately scared the idea will evaporate before it reaches text format.

Some of my ideas are for blog articles that make it here later. Seriously, I’ve been saving a list of “future blog posts” for the better part of a decade. For this category of idea, I’ll try to continue confabulating onto the page for as long as time allows. The longer I write, the more raw source material I have to work with later. And then I check off “journaling” from my daily task list. I don’t check this off every day – not even close – but if I do spend 5 or 10 minutes doing this, I’ll feel good for the rest of the day.

A lot of my ideas are for creative projects, e.g. “it would be cool if I made an app where X thing happens.” That’s where the rules become really important. You see, in this enthusiastic state, I often have the urge to start working on the idea right then and there. Back in my early twenties, I fell into this trap extremely frequently, and it was a huge mistake.

The thing is, at that point, you don’t know whether your idea is any good or not. If it’s good, you’ll keep thinking about it as you go about your life.

So the rule is that I’m not allowed to act on any idea for at least one week, but preferably longer. If a decent amount of time has passed and I’m still hyped on it, only then can I start making plans for making it a reality.

I forget where I got this rule, but it’s not original. It was likely either a podcast or a Reddit comment. Regardless, this mental framework has been a godsend. Time is the only truly non-renewable resource we have, and this system saves a lot of (potentially) wasted time.

Quite frequently, I stumble upon the document later only to regard it as (as the kids say) ‘mid’. Perhaps I’ve lost enthusiasm, perhaps I’ve realized the undertaking would not be super feasible, or perhaps I just think it’s not worthy of my precious energy.

To any self-styled ‘idea person’ reading this, I implore you to enact this safeguard.

Really good ideas not only return to you, they gnaw at you. Trust me on this; you’ll thank me later.

So, firstly, what does my app do? Let’s say you’re the author of a blog. You find my site and sign up for an account. First, you’ll be asked for the URL of your blog. Our servers will then fetch your blog (making sure it’s really a blog) and present a list of your posts, on our site, in a podcast-looking feed.

You’ll want to select an AI voice to use, by default. I’m a fan of old British male voices (thank you epic fantasy audiobooks for that fetish), but that doesn’t have to be true for you. Lots and lots of options there.

For any posts that you want turned into a podcast episode, you’ll click a little button to prepare it. (Later versions of this will be more automated.) This makes our servers fetch the individual article in order to do a few things.

Obviously, we need the content. What we have is text in HTML format, so we have to do some operations to extract just the important part. That means removing pictures, links, tweets, and other things like that. This step is actually pretty complicated. Thankfully, I’ve been experimenting with the best way to do this since 2020 – even having authored an open-source JavaScript package to do just this.

Beyond that, we need to figure out how to split up the content. Sure, maybe you (the author) have split it neatly into paragraphs, but those alone aren’t sufficient. This is where the custom model I’ve trained comes in. It knows when and where to add a 1.15-second pause, mid-paragraph, for dramatic effect.

It also knows how to handle things like headings and bulleted lists. Mostly, both of those typographical elements don’t end with punctuation, and this does funny things to AI voices. Sometimes it’s as simple as adding periods to the end of text, and sometimes it’s a little more complicated.

One-paragraph digression on a pet peeve of mine… Have you used the voice chat function on the ChatGPT app? It is impressive, but one thing that drives me nuts is how the default responses format (for many of these LLMs) is to present things in list form. Why? Who prefers it this way? It’s not how humans communicate with each other when speaking to each other, and I find it greatly reduces my ability to comprehend.

Once my fine-tuned AI model processes the article, you now have access to an edit page which contains a list of segments. A segment is sort of like a paragraph, and each one displays the amount of silence will follow it. Scrolling through this list, you can double-check my model’s calculations. For example, perhaps you need to delete an advertisement that got accidentally ingested. You can also choose a different voice for a certain segment, say, a quote.

Once my music-adding functionality is implemented, you’ll also be able to see where the model thinks music should go. Of course, you’ll be able to modify that stuff as well; though hopefully you won’t need to do that too much.

Finally, you can click a button to have the server convert it to a podcast episode. I’ve experimented with various ways to do this. Presently, I’m just using ElevenLabs’ API for this because their voices are just a cut above the rest. I can easily swap this out in the future, once the open-source models have caught up. ElevenLabs is quite expensive: a 10-minute article will cost at least a couple dollars to generate.

Once our servers generate the audio clips for each segment and stitch them together into a .mp3 file, it’s added to your podcast feed. We give you a link to add your podcast to any of the major podcast platforms, which you can share with your audience. So anyone subscribed to your podcast will get your new episode in their podcast app.

New developments in the world of AI text-to-speech

So, I found out about ElevenLabs’ “Reader” app this week, and I installed it. Holy crap, it’s good. It does a lot of what my app is trying to do, albeit in a far less automated way.

You can copy and paste any text – or provide any website via the “share” interface – to the app, choose a voice, and have it read to you. This is amazing in combination with the Substack app. You find any article that lacks voiceover, share it to Reader, and listen to it while you do chores.

Crazily enough, it’s temporarily free – they’re calling this a beta test or some such thing. That means instead of paying hundreds of dollars for the hours of content I’ve already listened to (or what it would cost right now via their API), I’ve paid nothing.

So, how is my app different? First of all, the lack of intelligent pauses is noticeable, and… stressful? I don’t understand how no one gets that part right. Let the sentences breathe! I’m guessing they’ll figure that out eventually, but that’s one way I’m ahead of the curve.

Another big way it’s different is automation: both the notion of pulling from your blog’s feed once you make a new post, and the notion of automatically adding the resultant audio file to your podcast feed. I don’t think they’ll add that anytime soon, but Substack certainly might.

Finally, the notion of adding music for only certain portions of the episode (I always reference The Sunday Read as my aim, here) makes my app unique. If Substack were to offer this functionality, I don’t think they’d have that feature.

The elephant in the room, so to speak, is whether I’m wasting my weekends working on this app, given these developments. It’s possible. I’d like to think I’m mature enough to see the writing on the wall, at this point in my “solopreneur” journey… if the permanent marker really has been brandished.

If nothing else, this project has given me an excuse to learn how to fine-tune LLMs, and that alone will be valuable in the future.

So that’s where I stand and how it’s been going. I hope you found this interesting.

Similar to last time, I’ve been working on another post which is almost ready, but not quite. I want to marinate on it for a bit longer. It’s about fantasy football and my checkered relationship with that storied recreational activity.

Overall, it would be fair to describe my mode of operation as “mired in procrastination”. Once again, I’m going to free-write a thousand words or two. It’s the right thing to do, given my self-imposed deadline.

Read more

Hi, welcome back.

This essay will present an argument that voice chat – specifically for the purpose of playing multiplayer video games – has the potential for something whimsical, nostalgic, and wholesome.

For my first trick, however, I will take on a different (and quite possibly harder) challenge. It will be apparent what that is. I promise not to spend too much time on it. It’s not my main point.

But… look, I get a kick out of defending the indefensible. And I can’t resist a “twofor”.

See ya in 2 weeks.

-Phil

I’m going to name three video games, and I would like you to try to think of a through line between them. There’s more than one valid answer, but I’m thinking of a certain commonality. Even if you aren’t a gamer, you might be able to get this. Here we go:

• Grand Theft Auto 3

• World of Warcraft

• Fortnite

I’ll pause here and you think of an answer.

One valid answer is that they’re all successful games. Mega successful, the lot of them. They’re some of the highest grossing and most played games of all time.

Also, all of them are mega addictive; and now we’re getting closer to my answer, which is that for all three, they generated a media blitz because of how “harmful” they were.

For GTA3, I remember a ton of press about how teenagers to were being trained to steal cars, pick up hookers, and murder people… in real life. Yes, really. People argued that.

There was also a big hubbub surrounding a deleted scene which was mistakenly left in (an expansion of) the game. The scene was sexually suggestive, but it wasn’t really all that racy by modern standards. In retrospect, it’s hilarious that that story blew up like it did.

For WoW, all the news stories were about addiction, and honestly, the media were correct about that one. A lot of people got addicted, including me. I really struggled in my first semester of freshman year, back in 2005, and it was largely to do with WoW. Those memories are going be important, later in this article.

For Fortnite, it was much of the same as it was with WoW: parents were proclaiming their kids hadn’t gone outside in months. Lost girlfriends, failed schoolwork… stuff like that.

I once heard someone talking about this very matter:

“Anytime the media says you shouldn’t play a game, that’s a sign that the game is actually really good, and you should play it immediately.”

In my opinion, that’s very true. Which is why I’ll come out of the closet here… Fortnite is good.

A lighthearted defense of Fortnite

Generally, Fortnite is seen as “kids’ game”. Meanwhile, I’m a grown-ass man, and I love it. So why is it good?

For one, I really appreciate the loud, cartoonish, overly-saturated graphics. They fit my personal taste.

It’s an immensely satisfying game. The creators know how to pull you in with lots of stuff to unlock. Many seasons, I buy the “Battle Pass” and try to make it to the end, meaning I’m constantly receiving new rewards over the course of months.

But mostly, I love the combat, which is not only fun, but also forgiving. If someone ambushes you, you don’t die immediately (like you do in Call of Duty, say). You have a moment to gather your thoughts, figure out where the enemy is, and then try to kill them back. It’s sort of like Halo (another great series) in that way.

Perhaps because it’s got a relatively young audience, it’s also easy. Mostly. I’m not that good at a lot of competitive online games, but I do well on Fortnite. If I decide to really focus, I’m able to get a lot of eliminations, and I routinely win games. For the layperson, that means out of the 100 players in the match, I played the best.

If I’m not really focusing, it’s still just fun. It’s a great podcast game. I love listening to tech/entrepreneur/politics YouTube while I play. I’ll play a little worse, but it’s supremely relaxing.

To be clear, I like other games too – I’ll exclusively play other games for months (or years) at a time – but eventually, I always reinstall Fortnite. You could definitely call it “comfort food.” Nothing else lights up my brain in the same way.

Branching out and grouping up

I used to only play the solo variant. Myself and 99 other players drop into an arena, a and a free-for-all battle ensues, concluding with only one a single player left. That’s solo.

In the past few months, I began playing the 4-player team mode – a little at first, and then almost always.

The game has a really good “ping” system, by which you can use the controller to communicate with your team. You press a certain button on your controller, and a location dot is sent to the other members of your team: “I want to go here” or “I just saw an enemy combatant over here.” Stuff like that.

I didn’t want to use a microphone while I played, so I just pinged. Eventually, though, I got a random urge to play with other people, as a team.

Ideally, my real-life friends would fill this role. But, I’ve given up hope on that front a long time ago – on the order of “decades ago.” Convincing my friends to play Fortnite would be like convincing my friends to enjoy my music taste. (My music taste is obscure and polarizing.)

I pondered whether or not I could find teammates on Discord, a gamer-focused communication app. To this end, I happened upon a Discord server called “Fortnite Looking for Group”, and started posting modern-day personal ads.

My first Fortnite friend

A few hours after my first post, I got a DM: “Wanna play?” followed by “How old r u?”

“old as shit”, I reply, then “you?" (Editor’s note: I’m 37.)

The reply comes: “Why u talk like a scared kid 😭… 20”.

I reply “i'm a youthful person ok”. (Editor’s note: I do identify as a youthful person.)

Instantly, this young man wants to chat on Discord voice chat. That wasn’t part of my plan. I just wanted to “ping”. But, fine, why not.

We have something basically equivalent to a phone call, then launch into a few games. While playing, I ask about his life. Turns out he lives in Canada, just moved into his first apartment a few weeks ago, and is already in trouble (with his building management) for putting a piece of cardboard in the wrong location.

I give him some life advice: you should tell them you’re sorry, and that “you just moved in and are still figuring out the ropes.” He’s super appreciative of the advice.

Over the next few weeks, we play more games together. He always want to do voice chat. At the same time, I get more DMs on Discord, and the process plays out similarly. That’s when I start to become fascinated by the concept of meeting people this way.

A cross-section of western North America

As I continue to meet people on Discord, these people introduce me to other friends of theirs in the game. The network is expanding.

Many of them ask me to switch to in-game voice chat. Again, this was something I initially wasn’t open to doing. And anyway, my microphone is attached to my computer, not my PS5. Maybe there’s a way to make that work, though? I’ll just have to order some $10 adaptors on Amazon. Why not?

Fast forward a few more weeks, and I’ve met oodles of people – now almost entirely within the game itself.

I have my server preference as “North America West”, so it’s almost entirely people from California, Oregon, Washington, B.C., and Arizona. (I’m still not sure why, but there’s an over-represented number of people from Arizona.)

Regarding age, it runs the gamut from 17 to 40, with a notable cluster around age 27. On gender, it’s probably 70-30 male versus female; which is not what I would have predicted.

In getting to know all these people, I’m continually fascinated by little nuggets of their lives one can glean over voice alone – because, keep in mind, I don’t know what any of them actually look like.

But you do hear about a fishing trip someone is getting ready to take, what it’s like being the fifth out of six siblings in a Mexican family in southern California, and other random things of this nature.

One new friend, an Amazon delivery driver in Oregon, also has “a crystal business and I flip things as well.” Wait, I ask, “crystal the drug, or crystals the spiritual coffee table item?" Thankfully, it’s the latter. Over Discord DMs, he sends pictures of all his shiny, semi-translucent wares.

These are people I would never have met otherwise. Never. And that’s why it’s so interesting to observe what little I can, about real Americans (and Canadians), living out their real lives. If you really wanted to get a pulse of society, this is a better way than most.

Who’s on?

I realize nothing is new about this state of affairs. Voice chat has been around a long time. If anything, I’ve just fallen out of this way of doing things for the last couple decades. But honestly, it reminds me a lot of the days of World of Warcraft. For me, that’s 2004-2008. But really, the days that remind me of this are 2005 and 2006.

Those years, I was in a WoW guild. We communicated on a technology known as “vent” (short for Ventrilo). A few times a week, the guild would gather up for a “raid”, which was 40 people on a big group call. (By the way… for 2005, that’s an impressive feat of technology.)

Mostly, though, there were far fewer than 40 on the communal call. We’re talking 5, maybe 3 people, most of the time. I would come back to my dorm room after class, hop in front of my computer, and then get excited, because I wanted to know who was on.

I’m finding similar feeling right now with random Fortnite voice chat. I kinda want to know who’s on. There’s actually a feeling of – dare I say – friendship?

It’s got a vibe to it, not unlike that one elementary school friend’s house, for people that were lucky enough to have that.

For me, I had one friend whose house was the communal hang out. A random assortment of people would be there. When I rode my bike over there on afternoons in 1998, I knew it was going to be chill. Because it was always chill.

Your other name

Another similarity with WoW is the usage of your in-game name. “Sparky, come save me!” or “I’ve got something for you, Bird.”

My name on PS5 is “RhinoFuture”, so everyone calls me “Rhino”. That’s fine. I actually love rhinos; they’re practically my favorite animal, which is why I chose that name. (I just added “future” to it because I like the concept of the future, and it sounded cool.)

But because I never really planned to do online voice chat, I never expected other people to say it aloud. (That particular handle is far newer than the last time I did online voice chat.) As such, I’m always a little taken aback when I hear it spoken. “Rhino? No… I’m Phil,” goes off in my head.

Overall, I find the use of online names in spoken conversation to be rather cute. To wit, the same thing happens at Burning Man, with their version being “Playa names”. It adds a whimsy to things. It’s fun. In the case of games like Fortnite, it’s a feature not a bug, because it gives you anonymity.

There have been times I’ve exchanged first names with someone, but we continued to use each other’s online names. This is exactly like WoW. You become your online persona, in at least one narrow way.

There’s something interesting happening here

Do you have any relationships – friends, spouses, etc – which would never have begun in the first place if you hadn’t done a certain random thing, on a certain random day?

For example, perhaps it’s an invite to a bar, 10 years ago, and if you hadn’t gone to it, you’d have a dozen less friends today. Not that you would’ve met all twelve at that party, but maybe one friend led to more friends, gradually over time.

I think about that kind of thing all the time. So much of my life is like that.

The text message I sent to a tangential acquaintance in 2012 that turned into a lifelong best friend. The text exchange between my ex-girlfriend and her yoga friend, that led to 50 new friends, including my current wife. I’ve had so many serendipitous moments like that.

For some of the random people I’m meeting on Fortnite, I wonder if online voice chat isn’t the only window they have open. That is to say: maybe, just maybe, I’m getting a better conversation with that person than their own mom is getting.

In some ways, with some people, it feels that way. For some of my original Discord friends, we actually check in on each other, even after months of not playing together. When one of them said he wasn’t doing too well with mental health lately, I made a point to follow up, and he was thoroughly appreciative. It’s all so very wholesome.

A treasure trove, of sorts

One of my darker thoughts on the matter is that this medium would be a gold mine for people peddling pyramid schemes. Suddenly, the annoying fuckers that do that stuff aren’t limited to their high school friends on Facebook (that they haven’t talked to in 15 years) – now they have a renewable resource.

A more positive – yet still conniving – thought is the idea of building an online audience this way. Use random squadmates as the top of your sales funnel. I mean, I already did send this very publication to a few of them.

Hell, you could probably build a cult on the back of gamer voice chat.

Looking at it this way, I’m positioning this as untouched wilderness, ripe for exploitation. I don’t really want to linger on the exploitation aspect, other than to draw attention to the fact that it’s untouched wilderness in the first place.

Wrapping up

Fortnite voice chat is not that great. Video game voice chat, generally, is not that great. Don’t get me wrong on that. It can definitely be toxic at times.

But, there is something really pure, here, too. And, that’s all I have to say right now.

Find within, a paywalled post. I’m going to give you the inside scoop of:

• the first 3 months of writing this publication

• the concept of commuting

• my procrastination (or lack thereof)

• upcoming posts on this blog

I'd thought this would be fun. You giving me $5. Sounds fun… don’t you think?

Read more

The reason for this, we’re told, is scientific. Those are the equinoxes and solstices. It has to do with the Earth’s position while it revolves around the sun.

But in culture, we also care a lot about the seasons societally.

You hear about “Hot Girl Summer." You hear people excitedly celebrating the start of “PSL (Pumpkin Spice Latte) season” at the start of fall. You hear about the sexual tension flowing through the NYC air, once Daylight Savings begins in the spring. There are tons of these cultural touchstones built around the seasons.

I had a realization on this topic recently, and I would like to pitch you on this idea, my dear readership.

Some thought experiments

I want to start by giving you a few dates, and I want you to think in your head what season they belong in.

Let’s start with June 1st. It happens to be one of my best friend’s birthday. It’s also just a few days after Memorial Day. What season is that in?

Okay, how about September 8th. The start of the NFL season (roughly) most years. School is back in session for many students. What season do you think of that as?

Alright, how about December 15th. Back in college, this was the end of the fall semester, when you are wrapping up the last of your last final exams. What season does December 15 feel like?

Finally, let’s think about March 16th. That was “Selection Sunday” this last year (which kicks off March Madness, the NCAA basketball tournament). What season does it feel like?

The scientific seasons are not the cultural seasons

I’ll give you my answers to the previous section: Summer, Fall, Winter, Spring. Notice that those are – all four – incorrect? Funny, isn’t it?

Now let’s pretend that the official seasons started on the first of their respective months. What we’d end up with is:

• March, April, and May are spring

• June, July, and August are summer

• September, October, and November are fall

• December, January, and February are winter

This works. Holy shit, this works. Let’s just go with that, as a society.

That’s all I’ve got

I wish I had more thoughts to add – related diatribes and whatnot – but I don’t have anything extra this week. Have a happy Fourth!

I don’t remember the exact day I first took a cold shower, but I know it was in 2012. I don’t remember the exact reason I decided to try it, but it was probably my self-improvement-heavy YouTube diet of the era.

While I didn’t know it at the time, my first cold shower was a big moment in my life. Very few things in life embody the correct mindset – across multiple different domains - the way cold showers do.

This is a blog post that I’ve been wanting to write. This publication has been giving me the ability to talk at length about something, for as long as I want – whereas an in-person rant to friends or family would probably leave them annoyed.

On this particular topic, when I’ve brought it up to people, I've mostly received the same reaction from everyone:

“Oh! That’s great that you do that! But I could never do that.”

So, here’s my chance. This is my opportunity to sell the concept. Maybe I’ll send this to people as a reference point.

I know cold exposure therapy is in the zeitgeist right now. I don’t love that – I’m trying to be an iconoclast here. But, in true hipster fashion, I can honestly say that I “liked it before it was cool”… and I will continue this practice when it’s uncool again.

How I do them

It’s 7am and my alarm goes off. I snooze once. (I’m a everyday “snooze-once” kind of guy.) Nine minutes later, and I’m walking to the bathroom.

I walk into the bathroom, immediately open the shower door, and get in (with the shower off), closing the door behind me. My just-woke-up brainfog actually helps me here – there’s simply not enough brain cells actively operating to form a protest. This is all automatic.

Then, the big moment. I say aloud my personal mantra (more on that later), audibly count down “5, 4, 3, 2, 1”, and then turn the handle to the coldest setting.

Freezing cold water – which I can only assume was chilling out in the pipes of my apartment building – blasts onto my chest. I spin around rather quickly and try to get my whole body wet.

There’s a fresh blast of cold when I finally get my hair wet. There's something about the feeling of the cold water hitting the top of your head that is just a whole new level of shock.

Applying soap to my body is easy, because we usually stock up on a big-ole bottle of soap. Sadly, our shampoo and conditioner bottles are more fiddly. But, all that stuff happens fast. All told, the shower itself is about 3 minutes.

I turn the handle to off. The air in the bathroom – which prior to the shower induced shivers – now feels warm, believe it or not. Not to say I’m warm by any means, but I’m immediately starting to warm up.

Then, a zippy dash to my clothes. As I’m getting dressed, I realize all my brain fog is gone. The mental clarity is beginning to kick in. It feels so good – better than anything a pill could provide.

Mental clarity, skin, and hair

The natural high after a cold shower is amazing. It’s hard to really convey that in text form, so you’ll have to take my word for it. I’ve read some scientific papers showing that the hormone adiponectin is triggered by a cold-water response, and that completely tracks, for me.

I heard on a podcast recently that cold exposure was prescribed for melancholy, in the not-too-distant past. This also tracks – it’s hard to imagine feeling “down” after getting really cold and then warming up.

In addition, it’s a 2-hour hangover killer. That is to say: if I’m really hungover, and take a cold shower at 10am, my hangover will be gone until 12pm.

My skin also feels very supple after a cold shower; to the point where I don’t need lotion at all. I’ve always hated how long and annoying it is to apply lotion to your whole body.

I grew up in Michigan where winters are cold, meaning you’re in heated rooms for four or five months. Throughout every level of school, including college, I had the driest skin. I wish I had known about cold showers back then. It drove me nuts constantly. I had an “easy” solution right there but didn’t know about it.

My hair after a normal, hot shower always tends toward frizz. After cold showers, my hair is much smoother. Furthermore, my scalp isn’t itchy, which is a big boon to my hair.

The next best thing

There have been periods – a great many, actually – where I take normal, hot showers. Sometimes, it’s for years. I still try to end those showers cold; usually for the last 30 seconds.

This conveys some, but not all of the benefits. My skin will be a little dry, but not as much. My hair will be a bit frizzy, but again, not as much. The mental effects are there, but perhaps 20% as strong.

It’s something. It’s better than nothing.

Versus ice baths

I can’t really compare to ice baths, which are more commonly talked about in the culture, because I’ve honestly never tried an ice bath. Right now, we don’t have a bathtub in our apartment, but even when we did… they’ve always seemed like so much more effort than a cold shower.

You have to go buy a bag of ice from the gas station or grocery store. (Not just one bag either, I would think.) I don’t know why you’d go through all that effort when there’s an easier, cheaper way that just requires turning the shower handle.

I’ve seen some rich people have a specialty device in their house that does this, and I’m sure those are the best you can get. Personally, I hope I can get to that level of wealth someday. But for now, cold showers accomplish the goal well enough.

Starting your day with something difficult

Remember how most people react with “I could never do that” to the proposition?

For me, I like that it’s difficult – it’s a feature, not a bug. I’m affirming to myself that life will undoubtedly throw some uncomfortable things my way today, and that I’ll be able to handle them all the same.

Cold showers exist in the realm of “things that are difficult to start, but once you start, you’re fine.” So many things in life – and these are the truly important things – fall into that category.

The countdown from five is not unimportant, here. In my mid 20s, I trained myself to approach difficult things (at the time, mostly dating stuff) with the “countdown from five” method. When I reach “two”, there’s an adrenaline rush, along with an accompanying thought that goes something like “let’s see how this goes!”

I still use the countdown for uncomfortable moments, and it’s nice to set the tone for my day with one such situation.

My mantra

I mentioned having a mantra that I say aloud before turning the shower handle. Fine, I’ll say it publicly.

“Don’t be a pussy.”

Yep, there it is, in its full crassness. I actually try to live by this, at every moment. I have it on a sticky note by my computer. If I were to get a tattoo (I have none currently), it might be something that symbolizes that phrase.

I could reword my mantra into something more positive such as “be courageous”, but I like it better in its raw, uncouth form. It conjures something more visceral that way, in keeping with the metaphorical bloodsport that life mostly always is.

I read a book recently called “The Courage to be Disliked” which builds a pseudo life philosophy around the idea of courage. That’s a real banger of a book. I’d recommend it to anyone. (Also, the book is structured in a unique and intuitive way.)

I don’t always say my mantra before turning the handle, but if my brain puts up a little last-minute resistance, saying it aloud always gets me over the finish line.

Wrapping up

Will this essay convince anyone to try a cold shower? I’m dubious.

One has to arrive here at their own volition. One has to be bold.

All I can do is state the following, once again: cold showers have been a profound force for good in my life.

Welcome to post number two of this here new publication.

This is certainly a topic I’ve been noodling on for a good long while. It’ll be interesting to see if my thoughts here are universal, or just a result of me being me.

See you in two weeks.

-Phil

As human on planet earth, there’s a decent chance you’re in at least one group chat. I certainly am. My chats break down as follows:

• I’ve got my three best friends in a WhatsApp thread

• I’ve have my cousins on a Facebook Messenger group thread

• I also have various (overlapping) permutations of friends on iMessage threads

Over the years, I’ve noticed there’s something majorly different about group chats as compared to social media and 1-on-1 DMs.

So, in this piece, I’d like to rant, rave, confabulate, and bloviate about the concept of group texts. There something that hasn’t aged well about them. Sometimes I wonder why we put up with this shit.

But first, I’d like to describe the landscape of present-day digital social interaction.

Imagine the following 

You get invited to a party. The person who invited you is somewhere between “friend” and “acquaintance” – the two of you used to be better friends, but you haven’t seen each other in a while. You know full well that you’re not going to know anyone else at this party, but that’s okay. It’s an opportunity to meet some new people.

The evening of the party arrives. Laden with a six-pack of colorfully-labeled IPAs, you request an Uber to your friend’s apartment.

At the party, you start talking to one of the host’s friends. Turns out you have a lot in common… similar interests, similar job titles, the whole nine yards. Importantly, the two of you find each other cool. (Note: that’s a prereq to any new friendship, in my personal opinion.)

Forty-five minutes later, this friend-of-a-friend must unfortunately head home. No worries… let’s exchange contact info. But how do we do that, these days?

Less than a decade ago, trading phone number was the clear choice. I mean, it wasn’t even a debate; an open and shut case.  Phone number, please.

Nowadays?  You pull out your smartphone, open Instagram, tap the search field, and then hand them your phone whilst uttering the phrase “yo, search for yourself.”

In 2024, trading “IG follows” is not only better than trading phone numbers, it’s like five times better.

Why is it better?

So first of all, when you “get someone’s IG”, you still have the ability to text them, as if you had gotten their number. The Instagram messaging interface is super slick, but that’s not the important part here.

In my view, the genius lies in all the other things that grease the wheels of social interaction. You’re letting each other into your respective lives… in subtle, gradual ways.

Sometime, in roughly 2019, a change happened on Instagram. Collectively, everyone realized that no one was making posts anymore, and no one missed them – everyone was just creating stories. Moreover, something interesting was happening with the combination of stories and messaging.

I would argue that the interaction between stories and messaging form the entire core of Instagram, and why people keep coming back to it. Here’s how it works, by my telling:

1. Alice is walking her dog and passes a new frozen yogurt shop.

2. She snaps a picture and adds it to her story, with the caption “There’s a new froyo shop here? Hell yeah.”

3. Alice’s friend Bob is using Instagram. He sees a circular profile picture at the top of the app: Alice’s avatar with a little orange ring around it. He taps it and views her story.

4. Bob knows about that frozen yogurt establishment. He taps the reply field and types out “just had it last week, it’s amazing."

5. Twenty minutes later, Alice sees Bob’s reply, and taps back “oh nice, I’m gonna try it soon!”

6. Bob, seeing this, replies “yeah, I’ve always like froyo better than ice cream.”

7. Alice, seeing this, replies back “I know!! froyo is way better.”

Okay, that was a silly example. But consider how easy that whole thing was.

Why it just works

So here’s a breakdown of why I think this combination works so well:

• People remind their friends where they physically live on the earth.  This is often non-obvious on other social media sites.

• Mostly, people are still using stories for day-to-day aspects of their life.  (Some people do post BuzzFeed-adjacent chuckle content, but that percentage seems stable and not rising, in my estimation.)

• Relatedly, and unlike most other social media, Instagram is largely non-political. That makes it feel safe and loving.

• Stories feels opt-in.  Your friends are actively deciding to view your stories, armed with a guilt-free skip button.

• Stories disappear in 24 hours. This temporary nature keeps the anxiety demons away.  Posting a story feels noncommittal in the same way that hanging out with a friend is noncommittal.

• Stories don’t have public comments. As such, there’s no risk of getting bandwagoned if someone expresses a contentious thought, for example.

• As a viewer of a story, it’s extremely easy to drop a 1-5 word reply, which is then added to the corresponding DMs.  The two parties then find themselves discussing a topic that both are (by definition) interested in.  Basically, stories are icebreakers.

All of these things combined to manufacture a social lubricant slick enough to make ExxonMobil salivate.   

A worse version of the best we have

But maybe you don’t like Instagram.  Maybe you like X, or (shudder) Meta Threads.  Whichever app you think does the best job of the thing I just described, imagine that as a part one of an analogy.

Let’s say that app is equivalent to real-life life conversation with a friend. (I know it isn’t, but just bear with me.) 

To me, a group chat under this comparison would be like saying something out loud, in a room of your friends – hoping it’s a clever thing to say – and no one even reacts to it.  It’s like no one was even listening. Silence.

No one reads my shit

I often find myself getting pissed in my group chats because it feels like no one reads my shit. My thoughts just go right by, like a drop of water in a mountain waterfall.

Then I remind myself that:

• It’s not as if I react to everyone else’s stuff 24-7.

• The way content is displayed in a chronological order plays into this a lot.

• The way people view the medium, in their heads, matters here

A dumpster for spare thoughts

There’s a hierarchy, in my head.

A thought pops up in my head, and for me to even take note of it, it must feel at least a little profound. Ok, so now we have the thought. Where where do I put this thought?

One place it might go is a note-taking app – I prefer Obsidian for that purpose. So I create a new note, give it some rough title, and start typing.

I’ve started becoming much more active on X in the last year. Some thoughts feel like tweets. So maybe, I will open a new browser tab, load X, and starting typing out a tweet.

Let’s say the thought is: “I’m enjoying a certain book, and feel that not enough people are aware of the genre.” That happened recently, and I made an Instagram story to that effect. (It was a banger of a story, actually.)

But then there are silly thoughts, or even edgy thoughts. Especially edgy thoughts.

Edgy stuff – that you can’t put on social media, but it's funny to you – and you want to tell someone… that is where your “inner circle” group chat is the obvious place. The prototypical safe space.

But the thought doesn’t even have to be edgy… it might just be too boring for social media. That’s why group chats have become a dumping ground for them.

Because of this “thoughts not good enough for social media” aspect, it’s automatically subpar content. That's ok, though. Group chats should fill that niche. They’re supposed to be a casual conversation with your close friends. You’re not trying to be careful with your words.

But you still wish someone would react to your boring thoughts, and often, no one does.

When I quit group chats

Sometimes, I’ve quit group chats. I’ll be either in a rage, or feeling slightly peeved about something. Sometimes, my reason for leaving is because of the very thing I just complained about – that no one seems to be reading or reacting to my loose brainfarts.

So, in these times, it’s not like I’ve ended any friendships with individual people in said group chat. I’m still talking to my friends in 1-on-1 DMs.

But now, because I don’t have that aforementioned “dumping ground” for edgy thoughts, where do I put them?

I’ll send a DM, to one specific person, of the same random thought – the exact same content that I would’ve posted to the group chat. And you know what happens?

The person replies. Almost always.

There’s something interesting about the human psychology that this phenomenon implies. It says something about the headspace of the reader of thoughts; we’re especially interested in the things that our friends want to tell to us personally.

Overall, I find this fact to be endearing and uplifting, though it makes me want to invest less and less into group chats.

Aggression and posturing

I want to open this section by talking about one random pet peeve of mine. On iMessage threads, they only let you react with 5 different emojis, and one of them is “emphasized.”

I hate that emote. It always strikes me as little hostile.

But, to talk about the broader thing here, in group chats of straight guys, you’ll get guys dunking on each other a lot. It’s the spectacle of it all – guys knowing they have an audience.

You can call it toxic masculinity, but I don’t ascribe to that concept. I think it’s just human nature. This sort stuff can be fun and funny. It can also be mean and negative.

1-on-1, people don’t go for the dunk. 1-on-1 DMs have “intimate” and “loving” as their default setting.

Extending friendships past their due dates

Sometimes group chats extend something which shouldn't be extended. You end up keeping someone in the friend group who no longer belongs there, and this leads to all sorts of problems.

There is something better about what it means to reach out individually, or to respond individually, to a DM. There’s an intentionality with the friendship. You’re both subtly saying "I want this friendship to continue".

The tribe has spoken

There’s a meme I saw at least a decade ago, and it’s both funny and dark. The top text reads:

“When someone creates a new group chat that’s exactly the same, but minus one person”

Then there’s a picture from the TV show Survivor, with a contestant’s flame being extinguished. (If you've never seen the show, that means they were voted off the island by their peers.)

The bottom text reads:

“The tribe has spoken”

This phenomenon absolutely happens all the damn time. It’s happened to me – more than once. And yet, I still laugh, because it’s so, so true.

But don’t get too sad, because I have a lot of thoughts about why this isn’t a big deal.

A digression about how I feel about "friend groups"

Over the years, I’ve come to a broader vision of how I feel about friend groups. This has been shaped by my personal experiences of the last 12 years, in which time I've been a real-life adult. It goes like the following:

Friend groups are fragile. If you ever worry about your friend group breaking up, don’t bother…. because it’s basically inevitable.

Friend groups, as an entity, belong to a specific spacetime. The friend group is a constellation of specific people – at a specific time – having specific moments in each of their own lives. Not only do people change – getting married, having kids, and moving away all spring to mind – but relationships also change.

People can (and do) “nope out” of friend groups. You might have an explosive fight due to a fantasy football trade, which leads to two friends not talking for multiple years. (Definitely not speaking from experience here. Nope. Not my friend group.)

If there are six constituents in a group of friends, there are fifteen 1-on-1 relationships within that group. One out of those fifteen tuples going awry can torpedo the whole thing. (Or in the least, it can totally shift the vibe.)

Why I no longer worry about friend groups

My approach, the last half-decade or two, has been to focus on my own individual friendships. If I have strong 1-on-1 friendships with all other the members of the group, it doesn’t matter what random drama arises in the body politic, because I know I’m not going to stop being friends with anyone. To be honest, this is a deeply comforting feeling.

It’s also why I don’t feel shame when I’m the one who “nopes” out of a group chat. Yeah, I’ll miss out on some of the banter, but I’m not sacrificing anything real.

Group chats and friend groups

Astute (and wondrous) readers of this publication might be thinking;

“wait a minute... are you conflating group chats and friend groups?”

I’m definitely trying not to do that. In fact, exiting a group chat (as mentioned just above) is not leaving a friend group.

What group chats and friend groups have in common is their temporal and (extremely) mortal natures. While they aren’t the same thing, they are somewhat linked, almost uncomfortably so, in ways.

My main friend group largely started when I added 6 of my friends – many of whom didn’t know each other – to the same GroupMe chat in 2014. The rest is history.

One of the 6 people spent the first two days bullying me, and telling me – despite the fact that I had made the group – I wasn’t the leader of the group. (Don't worry, it's funny now… a little less so then.)

That particular chat has gone through many iterations – caused by an untold number of dramas – at times has ceased to exist entirely, and at times has excluded people (including me), without that person knowing. But it endures.

So, my personal friend group has been somewhat tied to the concept of a group chat, and I’d wager other friend groups operate this way as well.

What to do with those spare edgy thoughts

Let’s say you leave a group chat. You’re doing the dishes and then, *boom*. Out of the ether, an edgy and/or funny thought pops into existence. What do you do?

We’ve already talked about individual DMs; pick the person who would find it funniest, and send it to them directly.

What about your notes app of choice? (I like Obsidian, but literally any text editor will do.) Write it down for your future self. This can easily turn into journaling, and that’s a good thing. I mean, that’s sort of the genesis of this blog.

What I’ve found is that most thoughts like this are actually pretty bad (when you go back and read them later), so it’s good to not bother your friends with them anyway. But, some might be pretty good. Profound, even.

I guess I’m just extremely “team” journaling. (The word I use internally is free-writing, but same thing.) I can’t tell you how many times in life I’ve felt uncertain of my own future – unstable in some way, broadly – and the subsequent soothing relief of getting that stress out of your head. (I also love talk therapy for this same reason.)

Also, try to categorize your thoughts, and then figure out what to do with buckets of related ones. Maybe there’s a medium that they'd fit well on. (Again, *cough*, this blog right here.)

Wrapping things up

If there’s a unifying theme to this blog post, it’s to focus on individual relationships. Focus on your friends one-on-one, enjoy your group chat and/or friend group while it lasts, but don’t get too peeved when it becomes dysfunctional or ceases to exist entirely.

And Apple, please? Get rid of that darn “emphasized” emote.
(Actually, just let us react with any emoji like WhatsApp does.)

Welcome to the first post of this brand-new publication.

Today’s topic is somewhat niche: job searching specifically within software development. These ideas happen to be presently top of mind. Also, it’s what my brain wanted to write about first, for some reason.

This publication will cover a range of topics that I find interesting and under-discussed. I don’t intend to talk about either job searching or software development all that often.

-Phil

Imagine you are a software developer, and you're looking for a job at a startup. You find one you like, apply, and make it through the first few screening calls. They seem to like you, you like them; it's all trending in a promising direction. Then you hear the following:

"We regrouped on our end and would love to move forward to the final stage of our process! This involves a quick take-home project."

This is a situation that many job seekers find themselves in.

So let's take a look at the concept of take-home projects: what's good about them, what sucks about them, and then attempt to put a positive spin on the entire situation.

Sound good?

So what exactly is a take-home project?

Take-home projects are a small assignment given by companies, to candidates, to evaluate programming aptitude. They're similar, in many ways, to projects that students are assigned while studying computer science. They usually take between 2 and 8 hours to complete.

Here are some examples:

• "Make a single-page React app, in which you call a weather API, and then display the current weather condition for your present location. Include an text input field, where you can fill in any location. Make the design as beautiful as you can."

• "Build a dashboard which displays the security investigations contained within this JSON file. You can use any framework you like. Make the design as simple as possible. Bonus points for adding end-to-end testing"

• "Here is a codebase. We need a certain feature added. Create a pull request against the codebase which adds that feature."

Sometimes, they'll say "spend no more than X hours on this project." Much more often, they'll say "we think this should take around than X hours."

Often, these assignments will have requirements such as "you must use this framework", or "don't use any libraries - only do it with vanilla Javascript." Once or twice, I've encountered requirements like "you can only use a routing library, but nothing else."

Often, the instructions say "keep us updated, and inform us if you get stuck."

Through these assignments, companies are judging candidates how much they care; how much are they're willing to invest in this opportunity. And obviously, they want to know how good candidates are at actually writing code.

The job-seeker's dilemma

So you're sitting at your computer, reading these instructions. What do you do?

In theory, if you perform well against these instructions, putting in the time, writing good code... you'll make it through the next round. So is it worth the investment?

Personally, I don't hate it when I'm assigned a take-home project. Given the choice between one of these projects, and a brainteaser question during a live interview, I’d always take the former.

My own tendencies give me an advantage on take-homes — mostly because I’m really good at spinning up new projects — but also for the same reasons that I was good at projects in school and terrible on tests. As such, there is a part of me that relishes the opportunity to show my prowess.

However, there’s a lot more to the story.

Reasons to groan

When assigned a take-home, I do groan a little bit. Actually… I groan a lot.

So let's talk about the underlying reasons for these groans.

Unpaid labor

The vast majority of take-home assignments are unpaid. By default (i.e. unless explicitly stated), you’re not going to get paid.

I have run into a few rare, beautiful, shining-city-on-a-mountaintop companies who offer to pay. I absolutely love this model, and I really hope it becomes the norm. Sadly, as of early 2024, this is well and truly not the norm.

If our suitor company says "this should take no longer than six hours," and I (the developer) can go out and get $50 / hour in the market, the company is saying "in order to (maybe) proceed, you need to pay us $300." It's almost a tautology — just a rephrasing of the ask.

Keep in mind, this is a time when candidates usually need money. Whether we’ve just been laid off, or they were fired 3 months ago, we're desperate at this point. (Granted, many people are better than me at job searching while they still have a job. I've never been good at that.)

Not only that, this is a point in the interview process when we've already invested multiple hours into the opportunity. So, it's ever so easy for sunk-cost fallacies to start to creep into our brains.

We're grinding, hustling, broke, and desperate. That's a big part of why the entire concept of take-homes often feels tone-deaf and unfair.

However, let's be fair to startups here… they're also striving to make it; trying to survive in a marketplace of their peers, just like we are.

But, when you think about the unit economics, $300 is much more money to you than it is them, by an order or two of magnitude.

At the end of the day, this is labor. People deserve to be compensated for their labor.

Opportunity cost

Job searching is an exhausting process. I've often thought that it's more taxing than day-to-day job work, by an order of magnitude. Something about juggling multiple conversations, always putting your very best face forward, having to talk yourself up constantly, and frequently being under intense pressure to perform — it really wears on you.

The entire process of working on a take-home is similar; you need to be "on" the whole time.

But it's also time you can't be talking to other companies, polishing your resume, improving your personal website, cruising the job boards, or any number of other important tasks.

To complete a take-home assignment, you are usually sacrificing a whole day of normal job searching, and that is not insignificant.

Time limits

Remember how the company gave us a time constraint at the outset? It was in one of the following forms:

• “We think this should take no more than X hours.”

• “You should spend no longer than X hours on this.”

So what happens when you get to X hours, and you're not quite done? Are you going to stop, and simply turn it in?

Turning in an incomplete project is a surefire way to not make it to the next round. And you're really throwing those X hours away, then. What an “email of shame” that would be: "I didn't get to it all, but here you go."

I'm fairly certain no one does this.

Job seekers know that other job seekers exist, and they know other job seekers wouldn't do this. So what do candidates actually do?

They keep working on it, of course.

Ultimately, there's no enforcement mechanism for time limits. (I suppose they could look at the timestamps of each commit, but I mostly doubt they actually do. Also, would they really hold it against candidates for spending more time than requested?)

All of this means that the time estimates are basically meaningless, mostly serving as lower bounds on the amount of free labor being asked.

Two loud, inescapable voices

When I'm working on a take-home, there are two loud voices in my head who directly oppose each other.

The first voice says something like the following:

Let's make this as good as possible. I like this company. I'm good at what they asked me to do. Let's add a ton of polish. "Extra credit" requirements? Of course I'm going to do them — every single one. Automated testing? You bet. I'm being evaluated against a legion of other hungry candidates, and I need to stand out.

The second voice says:

Let's spend as little time as is necessary for this. The company might fixate on a superficial flaw of my code, and then use that as justification to reject me. If they do that, this time is wasted. So let's optimize for completing this as quickly as possible. What corners can I cut? I need to be applying for more jobs. We're not getting paid here. Go faster.

The cruel equation

To me, this cruel equation forms the central issue with take-home projects. It's an algebra equation — maybe calculus (an area under a curve or something?) — that causes constant stress for the candidate throughout the process.

You're being watched

Usually at the end of these, you'll be asked to share a private GitHub repo with the company.

That mean that all your commits are going to be in there. The cul-de-sacs that ended in failure, and might alert them that you're actually stupid. (And we can’t have that.)

In a real job environment, no one will look at your code until it's in pull request form, and that point, GitHub displays just the net difference.

Is the company actually going to look at your commits individually? I would say probably not, but they could. (To tell you the truth, as an evaluator of take-homes, I actually have.) And that's even more stress. It means you have to be even more careful while coding.

What are they really looking for?

There's often a question of how you'll be evaluated that borders on unknowable.

Let's take an example of dark mode. Personally, I implement a dark/light mode switcher on all my side projects. In my preferred tech stack, I can add this functionality in around 15 minutes of effort, but in other tech stacks, it can be an hour or two.

This is one things that shows an attention for detail, a dedication to craft, and a willingness to go the extra mile.

But will the reviewer give a shit? It can be so hard to know the answer to that question.

Sure, you can ask. But there's no guarantee the answerer of that question is the same person as the reviewer of the completed assignment. When you submit the project, very rarely do you get meaningful, direct feedback on your submission. It's mostly just a pass-fail.

This is even more the case with things you don't do, that the reviewer wishes you had… but they weren't explicitly stated. They just wish you were that kind of programmer who finds it obvious. And these can be very superficial things.

Maybe they really didn't like that you used single quotes instead of double quotes in your JavaScript.

That's a completely meaningless difference for the website that gets loaded, but people have feelings, and it would not surprise me if candidates have gotten rejected for things as petty as that.

I know the last few paragraphs were extremely cynical — forgive me for that — but I do think meaningless things like that are in play here… if a little less extreme.

You've just gotta get lucky on these sort of things. You can’t ask 100 questions. I’ve been on the other side of the table a lot, and a candidate who asks 100 questions is annoying and not getting hired.

In summary, the “fog of war” elements here are quite cruel, and they all cut against the candidate.

Bending the rules

In a real-life job as a working developer, you often get a chance to refine the requirements before starting. An advantage of hiring a senior developer is that they have the experience to say "Ok, you want me to do that… I can do that, but I could also give you 90% of that for 10% of the effort, if we slightly change the requirements." Mostly, you don't get to do that with take-home assignments.

Even still, you can bend the rules a little, in similar ways, but it's a guessing game whether or not the reviewer will reject your submission for such changes. A tiny rule-bend, which saves you an hour and a half of unpaid labor, which you can then apply to time spent job searching, can often be the correct move.

Still, the "black box" nature the assignment makes this inherently risky.

Ready-made resentment

Let's say you go all out on project, bending the rules a tiny bit (as described above), and submit it. A few days later, you get an email.

"While we acknowledge your effort and investment, we were looking for solutions that adhered a little closer to the instructions provided. Unfortunately, your submission did not fully meet our expectations." (That is a typical response that candidates receive.)

Reading that email, having invested so much effort, it is such a challenge to not feel resentful. Personally, I've been there more than a few times, and calling it “soul crushing” would be an understatement.

Getting over it

But dear reader, at this point, you might be saying:

"That's something you have to work out with yourself. Life is tough... get over it."

To that, I’d reply:

"Yeah... fair. Get back up on that horse and keep going. I agree with that."

But isn't the ability of a system to create such feelings — so easily — a sign that the system is broken?

Record scratch.

Spinning this around

Alright... enough bitching and/or moaning. (I actually don't hate take-homes, remember?)

How can we approach this differently, from the outset, so as to mitigate these issues?

Salvaging something good

In order to not feel like we've wasted our time, we should reframe things. What if we enjoyed the process of making the project? Would you still feel resentful if you enjoyed it?

That question that begs another question... how do we enjoy this?

Everyone will be different here, but for me, I enjoy learning. I get immense satisfaction in the feeling of expanding my knowledge — gaining another feather to put in my developer cap.

So, when planning out your project, read the instructions carefully and think to yourself:

"What part of these requirements is a chance to learn something new?"

Maybe it's a new UI framework you've been avoiding, or a new database something-or-other that everyone has been jabbering about in your timeline. Maybe you’ve been meaning to add automated testing to your side projects, but you’ve always been a little too lazy. Maybe this project is an opportunity to figure out how to set that sort of thing up.

Doing something of this sort transforms the endeavor into a win-win. No matter what happens, you won't be walking away empty-handed.

Remembering why you show up

Do you enjoy coding? Or is it just something you do because it pays well?

There's a well-known thought experiment that goes something like this:

"Imagine you have all the money you need; you don't need to work any longer for money. What would you do with your time?"

Whatever the answer to that question is, that is supposedly what you should do for your career.

I guess I'm lucky... I'm already aligned there. I love coding. I code for work and I code for fun. I just get a lot of enjoyment out of the act.

So, if that's true for you too, definitely remind yourself of that — especially after you get rejected on a take-home project.

Asking the hard questions up front

At the point you get the first email asking you to complete a take-home, it's uncomfortable, but try asking to get paid.

Perhaps you can make it clear that payment isn't a deal-breaker for you... but gee whiz gee golly… what a nice gesture that would be, don’t you think?

You can also ask for an exception:

• Can your open source project take the place of this? (Being involved in open source is great optics for job searching anyway.)

• Can you use a previous take-home project take the place of this? (Definitely get permission from the prior company first.)

• If you’re senior, can we simply skip it? (I think take-homes already make more sense for juniors than seniors.)

Finally, ask for a commitment to be given real, meaningful feedback — as opposed to a simple pass-fail — upon completion. I mean… ask for an 8-step rubric, for fuck’s sake. Ask it however you want. Just make it clear that “nope, you didn’t get it, smell ya later!” isn’t an acceptable response to 6 hours of unpaid labor. If the company isn’t willing to do that, you might want to voluntarily pull out of the process.

Importantly, ask these things up front. (This is the part I’ve personally been bad at.)

Growing from real feedback

This can be another hard thing to deal with, but maybe you did sort of mess up on one of the requirements, and maybe they actually gave real feedback to that effect.

If that's the case, try to internalize that. Feel it in your bones, and challenge yourself to do better next time.

Advice for companies

I’ve been through this process many times both as a candidate and as a company. With that said, here are my personal unwritten rules of administering take-home projects.

1. Let the candidates use whatever tech stack they want.

   1. Tech stacks aren't that hard to pick up. Once they have the job, and they know they're going to be working in your exact tech stack for the foreseeable future… only then should they be forced to adopt your own esoteric stack. Which leads me to the next rule...

2. Don't give candidates your own codebase, asking them to add a feature.

   1. This requires a level of mental ramp-up which will be almost entirely wasted time for the candidate, should they not receive an offer. Which leads me to next rule...

3. Consider paying candidates for their time.

   1. If you do, you can definitely break the previous rule.

4. Be extremely nice about superficial things in the code (or design) that aren't pleasing to your personal eye, but may just be a difference in aesthetic taste.

5. Give candidates meaningful feedback. Enough of the "we're afraid of a lawsuit" talk. If you're asking for free labor, it's the right thing to do.

   1. How many lawsuits have really come from giving meaningful feedback? I suspect it's one of those "razor blades in the halloween candy" thing that happened literally one time and now everyone suffers.

6. This is an experimental idea I’m trying out, but… offer candidates an iterative process:

   1. candidate submit code

   2. company reviews code

   3. candidate fixes code

   4. company gives final review

7. Allow candidates alternative options such as open-source contributions, or reusing take-homes for previous companies.

   1. Even better, inform candidates it's perfectly okay to reuse your take-home for other companies.

Wrapping things up

The cruel equation I outlined above isn’t going anywhere, any time soon. So, my main message for candidates is simply to make the best of it.

To the companies looking to find the best candidates, I implore you to allow candidates to make the best of it.

Job searching is stressful enough as is.

I’m a software developer currently based in San Francisco (though, I’ve lived a whole bunch of far-flung places in the last 5 years).

The phrase “in the best possible way” fits my desired personal brand perfectly. I get a lot satisfaction in presenting commonly-disliked things in a positive light. Sort of:

You know that thing you probably don’t like? What if it was awesome?

So that’s what I’d thought I’d call this place.

I used to write a blog called “Phil Travels”, back when I was 22 years old, traveling Europe by myself. It felt so good, back then, to crystalize my thoughts onto the page. I’ve taken that blog down, literally over a decade ago. I have the archives, but I’m embarrassed a lot about my youthful naivety during that era.

I was exuberant, sure, but also dumb. Do others feel that way about their 22-year-old selves? There’s no better word than “dumb” to describe that person. That’s kind of why I love getting older… you slowly learn not to be dumb.

I’ve always thought of myself as a “good” writer, but these last few weeks, while starting to write some articles for this publication, I’ve realized the following:

• how rusty I am at writing long-form content

• how difficult it is to sit down and write

Nevertheless! New year, new me. (I mean, yeah… it’s late May already. Shut up.)

New posts every other Wednesday, starting May 22.

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