Notes - January 2026

2 years in SLO. We’re making it work and starting to know how to enjoy the central coast our way. I still feel like remote tech work doesn’t quite belong here. Like being a gardener in NYC, doable, but misaligned.

Everyone was sick. It was grandma’s birthday. We knew cake was not a great idea on everyone's immune system, even grandma acknowledged it was poor timing. Alternative to dairy heavy cakes were considered half seriously. Cheesecake won. It was not light nor subtle but it made everyone feel good about the situation.

I also learned that (some) Chinese count years from conception so it’s n+1.

Our vacations at the parents houses are a pilgrimage, not a proper vacation. There’s nothing to be found at destination, only a vantage point to assess the passage of time. The journey back home is cathartic.

I’m the kind of guy who’s too busy doing nothing to set up Christmas lights or any kind of seasonal ornament.

Long COVID, superflue, loneliness epidemic, collective indignation... we’re really trying to believe that life is harder than ever. I don’t deny any of these but the coverage is so heavy. Maybe it’s just the volume.

“Nice, dude” - “now put on some pants” My wife to our 15 months old dancing on the balcony

Stuck in traffic in the back of the car entertaining the baby. The driver picks up the phone. She struggles for a few minutes to get the Bluetooth working. The topic is important, a family member is hospitalized. Baby giggles as I give him bits of chocolate bar strategically. I’m pretending that my head and tummy are fine. They are talking about a medical report. After 10min of back and forth between voice messages and calls, conversation stops, followed by a frantic attempt to chatGPT medical jargon. Thanks to AI, the depressing stream of fast food plazas seems harmless.

Little dude pooped on the couch the day we listed it for sale. We sold it the same day.

Some people think technology is the greatest lever for human progress. A lot of my peers think design is. A lot of artists say the world needs more art. My step dad (who’s a baker) used to say the world would be a better place if there were more competent bakers.

We all need to believe there is some value in our participation. At least for the sake of sanity.

As I bought yet another smartwatch. My wife rightfully exasperated asked if I was not already disappointed by the entire category yet.

A decade ago I got into bikes. I still love bikes. I just don’t keep in touch with the bike world. I don’t know what’s the latest model or products, nor who won the Tour Divide or Tour de France or whatever is the latest trendy event or rider. I do school pickups and occasional trainer sessions. That’s my relationship with bikes at the moment. I can’t un-know all the stuff so I shiver when I see $5K+ bike in my neighborhood.

I like watches for the same reason a lot of people do. Gear acquisition syndrome with some utility and reasonable clutter and cost. Plus it pairs perfectly with my overtraining issues. I’ve «tested» so many by now I know the category is not relevant to me anymore. It’s too tight, too tacky, too bulky, crappy UI, battery life sucks… my wife heard it all. Holiday sales bamboozled me again.

«Buy something you don’t want at a price you can afford» joked Ram Das 30 years ago.

You should see me adjusting the time on my microwave. How I use my printer, or washing machine, or try to navigate CarPlay. You wouldn’t believe I have a career in tech. When I hear AI enthusiasts talking about how everyone will soon have their own AI cloud setup at home…

Most of the old folks in my family are comfortable with their accumulated stuff. Nothing absurd but definitely more than they would realistically deal with before passing. Their stuff is going to be someone else’s problem once they’re gone (probably myself). That fact is upsetting but also reassuring. We all leave stuff behind. That’s arguably an undesirable trait of consumer society. Unresolved business needs to be dropped to get on the next. Be it simply taking a nap, or passing away. I’m way too concerned by not being a burden to others. But I also sweat, staring at my in-laws' garage or thinking of my dad’s barn…

“Due to causes and conditions, this is it, right here right now, it will change” I tried to keep this formula in mind as much as possible. It’s sticking.

Physical scale is always a compelling way to convey perspective. Not the most creative image, but compelling. Too bad for my cryptic metaphors. All the zen parables really got me thinking I could crack up a poetic and humorous story to illustrate how everything is relatively real.

Try eating without shitting. You’re going to have problems. The shitting and eating are one process. - James Low

J is having a hard time on the bike
I told him no ride is perfectly smooth

J wrote about how optimism is a hard but worthy choice
I told him no ride is perfectly smooth

J is upset by the spread of ugliness
I told him no ride is perfectly smooth

J is excited to build robots to help humanity
I told him no ride is perfectly smooth

I’m trying to cultivate some dharma
I remember no ride is perfectly smooth

If someone is willing to pay for a thing, it has monetary value. Even if on an ethical scale is has negative value. That’s because we’ve all accepted money as livelihood and shoved integrity under the rug. I feel that every time I pass I’m front of a homeless while I have a protein bar in my bag.

D say good marketing is education. That sounds agreeable, but… the problem of marketing is not its relevance but the relevance of what it promotes. In my tech bubble, marketing is often a tool asking for a job. Needless to say that a job asking for a tool would be more desirable, that’s R&D.

I try to stay in touch with reality by taking on small freelance projects: weird crypto, random logo design, old school wordpress maintenance jobs, and lately AI cleanup. All of them require a different kind of creativity. One not focused on innovation but table stakes. The last one is especially tedious. AI generated design always requires a complete rebuild.

I’ve come back to an old Wordpress site I built in 2018. The thing was falling apart. Wordpress is such a piece of crap in today’s standard. Unmaintained plugins had littered the backend and the server permissions were all jacked up, amongst many other bugs. I turned everything off, removed all the plugins and cleaned up the content manually. I felt emboldened and did a quick refresh. It didn’t land well and had to roll back. The perfect reality check. I probably needed it.

In one of the nearby streets, everyone owns a large pickup truck. Today I crashed into a conversation between two neighbors on truck st. They were talking trucks. He got a new one. Apparently very expensive but both agreed, worth it. I couldn’t help but looking at Mr new truck’s missing tooth. I immediately thought that he should have gotten a new tooth instead of a truck. In a few minutes I was out of the conversation. I obviously had little to bring besides “nice truck dude”. Now I needed a few deep breaths to get out of the judgement zone and weird conversation sweat.

Second episode of hand foot mouth disease. Our youngest had it comically bad. His feet and hands were covered in bubbly sores, like cartoon trolls. He handled it quite well considering the look of it. My wife got a few sores, far from him but was a lot more affected. I got nothing. Maybe because my immune system was warmed up by weeks of getting sneezed in the face.

- Thoughts about a third kid:

a car upgrade will likely be necessary and we dread it. At the same time we don’t want this to be a deciding factor. The minimalist millennial mindset is deeply ingrained.
The final decision is always coming from mom. It sounds like a cop out from the dad but the pain of a third pregnancy is something I can’t really understand nor fully empathize with.
Being outnumbered is a silly fear.
Many older people who expressed regrets to not have had a third kid all seemed not existentially bothered.
I don’t think I’d be a crappier dad to 3 than to 2. Less attention for each kid is not a bad thing. 3 kids seems like a whole different dynamic. We only repeated the same playbook for number 2. That won’t cut it for a third.
On bad days we both question our ability to be able to take it. At the same time we reflect on our past selves who would have never guessed we’d be able to handle something like today. 3 is just a potential next stage. 2 is also fine and will come with its challenges.
This moment reveals an element of absurdity in life. We can’t grasp “life” and yet at some point we try to conceptualize it. Having a baby is not the most hopeful thing one can do, it’s also an opportunity to see the whole game.
I need some third kid energy (I’m a first kid)

Small solar powered outdoor night lights are everywhere, mostly not doing anything useful aside decaying, littering the landscape.

I love when my wife lovingly hates on my post. Especially the ones talking about her.

“A storm in a tea cup” is such a beautiful image for anger.

Our youngest has been resisting the naps. When trying to put him down, he rolls and jumps endlessly, energized by the soft blankets and cool room. But when I put him in the stroller, the harsh early afternoon sun delivers the message. He goes down in a few minutes with a blessed look on his face as he rubs the sun shade.

I’ve heard the expression “educated guess” a lot lately. It’s always trying to one up “a hunch” or “my 2 cents”. Whether you are absolutely sure or not, it’s always to the best of one ability which depends on everything that came before.

Around my neighborhood there’s a bunch of newly planted trees. Most of them are struggling. Some badly. Unfortunately a lot around my house looks quite sad. The more modest shrubs and sage bushes are making it work. The busted, poorly setup irrigation keeps the landscaping running. The underpaid Mexican crew comes very often and does a rough maintenance job. The older trees are pruned less often. They resist admirably. The big ones are relentless. New branches have emerged since my arrival. Large pieces of bark detach from the blue gum trees. They’re made for this. Not all plants share the same vitality. I see my sons growing. Which ones are they? Thriving shrubs? Struggling young trees?

Bright provocative tshirt reads: “thriving out of spite”.

Me: Don’t make me think about how you want me to think about you.

A lot of essays on AI refer to taste as an educated conception of what is “good”. It’s often a personal blend of abstraction and curation, breaking taste into attributes that machines can act upon. I sympathize with the merits of noodling on this. But I can’t shrug off that taste is an elusive attribute of humanity, nulling much of the philosophical value of any AI output.

“There’s nothing quite like it, at the same time there’s not much to it” said a college about a piece of software. If this was a riddle, I would have suggested the mind or a smile, definitely not software.

The unique joy of debugging and AI coding, comes from the limited context. IRL nothing is.

You can’t step in the same river twice, says the proverb. You can dip in the same code infinitely.

The immense satisfaction of excavating earwax out of a dirty toddler’s ears.

If the internet was like drinking from the fire hose, then AI is trying to chug the ocean. With my dwarf ability in pragmatic inquisition, I’m trying to drink the largest soup with a fork. I feel more overstimulated by AI than my kids.

It’s normal to cringe when thinking of your 18 year old self. It’s hard for me to not let that fact tint my relationship with 18 year olds.

“Being one thought away from life” is my Ram Dass nugget of the moment. What an image. Reminds me of the zen version: “satori is like ordinary life, just 2 inches of the ground”.

Maybe an appreciation for this kind of stuff is a humble beginning.

Is my monthly note flush better than all those AI wearables note takers? The old school blog format and refusal of AI (as writing assistance) makes it sound like I’m virtue signaling. Look at me doing things properly!

A car arrives and parks. The driver, a middle aged lady, comes out, waves at me and my kid playing on the side, then walks away. Halfway through the parking lot, she reverts to pickup a grocery bag from her trunk.

My mental crowd immediately judges the situation. My wife would say that she is on autopilot, easily distracted, risky, no good. My mother in law would see neurodegeneration (like she often points out in her husband). My father in law would speculate on the content of the bag. My mom would point out she wears a really cool tunic. And my dad would appreciate her perfect parking for her age and gender.

Crowdsourcing judgement to my mental crowd is fun. It’s becoming a greater part of my worldview. Soon my kids will enter the game.

I see an old lady who forgot stuff in her trunk.

“If you do nothing waiting for clarity, history says you’ll likely buy higher, not lower.” I heard the dollar cost averaging gospel a few times by now. Today I heard it from a dude clearly using it as an excuse to justify a bike purchase.

I heard of the maritime lore proverb: “he who goes at sea learns to pray”.

Every time I step into an airplane or sit in a dentist chair, I have something very similar circling in my head.

My modern experiences are nothing close to the perils of 17th century sailors but I sense the lack of control in my gut. That’s where my agnostic butt gets closest to god. I’m expecting to have more and more of these moments. Perhaps that is how faith develops for some.

The countless stories about friendship don’t speak to me. According to the English dictionary, I don’t have friends. Never had. Since having kids I don’t foresee any changes. My social and communication skills have ripened dramatically over the last decade. I’m more at ease around people in general. But I remain uninterested in friendship. I have my fair share of community with my own family. I’m not “a local” nor a “global citizen”. I’m just chilling. Sometimes I hate it.

In a book box in my neighborhood, the Bhagavad Gita, the communist manifesto and a statistics textbook were peacefully gathering dust together.

I bought shoes one size above my usual (intentionally). It feels similar to when I double my estimate for a project. I go slower intuitively.

“Rushing into a left turn” is a great starter for an essay I’ll never write, but maybe you will.

— Published on 2026-02-01

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