The literary critic Edward Said expanded on the notion in his posthumous book On Late Style, discussing how some artists, when facing impending mortality, reject traditional artistic closure and instead embrace fragmentation and unresolved tension.

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And with that, they rest their case. I suppose that’s where some people do end up: completely, even plainly, at ease with their work. To know it’s possible, someday, perhaps, is a balm.

I enjoyed this essay about Go, comparing its verbose style to neoclassicism and its authors desires as a kind of closure of their careers in programming.

it's a good anti-perfectionist manifesto, as avoiding things you can't do well enough to present for credit is stultifying. but moderation is key.

the secret to SOFA may be to STFU about it, as if you're the person who talks about things they've maybe done once or are going to do but never finished, you're kind of dumb, but if you just do stuff, you end up having some surprising skills.

the effect of not talking about it also creates an attribution bias in your favour, where after pulling a few surprise rabbits out of hats, you become the magic hat guy. if you talk about all the things you have kind of done, you're just opinionated. I've been both, and after more than a decade of being conscious of mostly STFU'ing, I can say that some humility can be a superpower.

As someone who recently made a fan-fare about starting a thing, then left it four months in, there's a lot to be said for not announcing your intentions until you know it's going to pan out (if then!)

Customization is the equivalent of a coat of paint or rearranging the furniture; it’s certainly not poking holes in walls and running new wiring.

Low Road tools aren’t just customizable. They are also extensible. To borrow from Dan Hill, their “seams” are purposefully exposed.

Extensibility implies the ability to change a software’s capabilities in amount, but not necessarily in kind. An extensible software architecture typically provides an API surface upon which extensions may be built. Such API surface carefully limits the scope of what can and cannot be done.

How have I found time for all this reading? I paused YouTube for 20 days. And thanks to severing my brain from the sticky tendrils of its video vortex, I’ve rediscovered the blessing that is my Kindle Paperwhite — especially in the black of night.

One of the immediate things I did after reading Atomic Habits on holiday was to switch to reading (paper or epaper) in the gaps I might watch a video. (Bus, bath, whatever). It's the One Weird Trick to read more books than usual this year.

What does it do to the people in the organization and the organization as a whole when the CEO jumps in and changes a decision in someone’s area of expertise? Even if the CEO is right, in the sense that the change increases the chances of survival?

Damage. Damage that needs to be repaired in order to restore an organization prepared to make good decisions next time.

A Kent Beck take on Founder Mode that I liked. Not partisan, but worried about the (very real) effect of learned helplessness caused by micro-management.

Micromanagement is bad. But getting into the details is great, even necessary. It only becomes micromanagement when you insist on dictating the details, especially over the objections of people with more context and domain knowledge.

Dave Feldman, a successful founder, on the straw-man arguments from the Founder Mode essay.

Aaron was, in a sense, my generation’s equivalent of Woz. It isn’t a perfect analogy. But as archtypes go, it fits well enough. They don’t even try to produce Aarons anymore. Everyone is trying to be Sam frickin’ Altman now.

Dave Karpf's take on Founder Mode -- that the hacker ethic has been relegated to the back and that it's now only the business people who get lauded in SV.

If you are hiring “professional fakers” that means you are a poor manager. One of the most important thing that leaders focus on is hiring the right people, and that takes experience, or training, or both. Founders tend to lack all of these things, so of course they don’t always hire great people. [...] As Allison Morrow puts it, founder mode is just another way of telling toxic bosses they are really great. And lord knows, that is not what Silicon Valley needs right now.

Ian Betteridge with not just an anti-pg post but a bit of sadness about how tech is not as exciting (unless you want to get rich) as it used to feel.

Maybe it’s ok to have multiple homes. I already knew before writing this that home isn’t defined by a location, or the time spent there. Home can mean different things to different people, and that’s perfectly okay.

I like it when an author goes to write one thing and ends up in a different place, but it's still coherent.

I used to rankle at the idea of Ireland as "home" -- that being such an ex-pat stereotype. I never had (and still never have) intentions of moving back there, so it felt silly to call it home. Even if it's where I grew up and have some family. I have family in England and Canada too, and I raised them in those places. Ottawa feels like home, for now.

But then I went back to Dublin last year and that felt like a kind of home, too. Although after my second trip it also felt like I was saying good bye to it.

We got to the first production version of IP, and have been trying for the past 20 years to switch to a second production version of IP with limited success. We got to HTTP version 1.1 in 1997, and have been stuck there until now. Likewise, SMTP, IRC, DNS, XMPP, are all similarly frozen in time circa the late 1990s. To answer his question, that’s how far the internet got. It got to the late 90s.