Joy of Reading

Working Hard

Vishnu Mohandas — Thu, 14 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Before podcasts were a thing, Bill Simmons would trade e-mails with somebody successful for his piece on ESPN called “The Curious Guy”.

I ran into this exchange with Malcolm Gladwell from 2006, where Gladwell broke down the risks of working hard.

The (short) answer is that it’s really risky to work hard, because then if you fail you can no longer say that you failed because you didn’t work hard. It’s a form of self-protection. I swear that’s why Mickelson has that almost absurdly calm demeanor. If he loses, he can always say: Well, I could have practiced more, and maybe next year I will and I’ll win then. When Tiger loses, what does he tell himself? He worked as hard as he possibly could. He prepared like no one else in the game and he still lost. That has to be devastating, and dealing with that kind of conclusion takes a very special and rare kind of resilience. Most of the psychological research on this is focused on why some kids don’t study for tests — which is a much more serious version of the same problem. If you get drunk the night before an exam instead of studying and you fail, then the problem is that you got drunk. If you do study and you fail, the problem is that you’re stupid — and stupid, for a student, is a death sentence. The point is that it is far more psychologically dangerous and difficult to prepare for a task than not to prepare. People think that Tiger is tougher than Mickelson because he works harder. Wrong: Tiger is tougher than Mickelson and because of that he works harder.

Do you let the world assume that you’re a prodigy? Or do you admit to the hours you put in?

After all, it is talent that makes hard work play.

Five barns worth burning

Manav Rathi — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Last time we talked of how libraries are more than just books, they become a thing in itself.

Nick Trombley demonstrates this with his digital notebook, barnsworthburning.

You can start from anywhere; still, here’s a cove from which you can start surfing — The signature:

It has long been understood that striving for originality as an end in itself is the mark of an inferior artist.

Worlds Within This One

Manav Rathi — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Talita writes about the thirteen years she spent learning how to be a librarian.

The post is a love letter disguised as a warning. The first time I read it, I felt it was reframed sadness. But rereading it today while drafting this post, I found myself chuckling at her rants, and finding inspiration in her finding her world within this one.

Two wisps in particular stay with me. The first was:

That a collection of documents is greater than the sum of its parts. … And that it would only reward you if you could be among it alone, in silence, and over an undetermined length of time. … I cared very little about information, I cared about documents.

This is, I think, the first time I see how a library is not just a collection of books, it is a thing in its own right.

And the second is the one she leaves us with:

There are many worlds hidden within this one, and all one really has to do is look. But that there is little tangible reward for those who do look, except, maybe, that it is the only thing worth doing.

Or, as the lines from Fernando Pessoa’s Mar Português she quotes put it:

Valeu a pena? Tudo vale a pena
Se a alma não é pequena.

“Was it worth it? Everything is worth it / If the soul is not small.”

What Remains

Manav Rathi — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Frogs don’t see like us. They don’t see things that stay still. They will starve to death surrounded by food if it is not moving. They only see things that move, things that change.

Sean Costello recounts how he has developed his own way to selectively cultivate such Frog Vision.

However, the most important factor for me is that I have heard “Tom’s Diner” so many times that I no longer hear it. Like frog vision, I no longer notice what remains the same, only what has changed. I don’t hear the song anymore, just the different ways that my DSP algorithms respond to it.

I find this interesting, not just as a practical technique, but as a general principle, for times when we should not focus on what is, but what has changed.

Am I my Algorithm?

Manav Rathi — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Siddharth wonders, Am I my algorithm?

Now every playlist Spotify makes is drenched in melancholy. Even my ‘workout mix’ sounds like I should be crying on a treadmill.

He concludes: No.

Your algorithm isn’t a reflection of you. It’s a prediction of who you will be in the future, configured from past data. A portrait based on your past self, a bygone era, the guy from yesterday who spent an hour watching random video rabbit holes, a guy who no longer exists.

Broadsheet

Manav Rathi — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I just loved the design of Chase McCoy’s page, Broadsheet.

(Broadsheets is a term for newspapers, a contrast with the smaller sized tabloids)

It is a columnar listing of their bookmarks, Mastodon favorites, read laters, and other highlights. Enough rabbit holes to get lost into for hours, and more.

As one specific, I’ll teleport you to their entry: Every day is science fiction

It is considered essential to be in a properly alert and rested state of mind when using a computer. Even to seasoned users, every session is special, and the purpose of the session must be clear in mind before sitting down.

…

As she sat there, lost in her work, she knew that she would never leave this place, this sacred space where the computers whispered secrets to those who knew how to listen. She would be here always, she thought, a part of this ancient tradition, a keeper of the flame of knowledge. And in that moment, she knew that she had found her true home.

Here’s to all those who know how to listen.

Waiting at the Sin City Airport

Manav Rathi — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I was a bit surprised when reading James Reeves’s website - the prose had an unexpectedly well-written quality (and the site beautiful). For example, here is a note from their notebook, dated Wednesday, January 7:

We had our first conversation when we were eighteen years old. Thirty years later, I’m still amazed that I can share a stray thought with her and an hour later we’re still chattering away about all kinds of things.

Then I read their about page, and indeed, they are a writer (and designer) by profession, with 2 published books. That explains it.

I’m not sure which of their posts to link to - there isn’t a overarching point I’d want point to, but to general and ambient sense of joy of reading what they’ve written. So here’s a somewhat arbitrary but interesting-for-me pick, in which they write about waiting at the Sin City airport:

I scanned the faces that passed by, each defined by the simple fact of not belonging to her. When I finally spotted her at the other end of the terminal, she gave a little wave, and time resumed again.

Sitting with Unanswered Questions

Manav Rathi — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

When observing the processes that drive his exploration, Alexander Obenauer mentions many things, but what stood out most for me is his ability to sit for long times with unanswered questions:

A bias towards divergence can be hard to hold. People often have a natural inclination to converge new thinking and ideas as soon as they pop up; to settle them, relate them to previously settled ideas (and by doing so, declare these new ones also settled), or to make them immediately fit into one storyline that coheres all the related thinking, discarding anything that doesn’t immediately fit.

There’s a real power in sitting with a diverse, expanding corpus of conflicting ideas and thinking, and letting the ideas show the way forward.

Some people have a particularly hard time sitting with unanswered questions. They will interpret curiosity as ignorance, and optimism as naivety. They hold their convictions strongly, and when faced with someone who holds their curiosity strongly, they will argue — and win. That doesn’t mean they’re right. It often only means they care more about the answers than questions.

One tip in particular he gave was new for me: give at least two solutions to a problem you pose (zero and people question the question, one and people critique the solution. With two, people compare and contrast, which often leads to higher-level thought and divergence).

Unstructured Play is not Boredom

Manav Rathi — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

As adults, many of us have lost the ability to engage in unstructured play. We vaguely recall a period of childhood where we used to do it, but since we have lost the ability to get back into those states we assume it arose of idleness and boredom.

We also vaguely recall those periods as having been “good”, so we then try to induce children over which we have control to “turn off” - sit idle, “be bored for a while”.

Rachel Thomas, cofounder of fast.ai, argues that this is not just mistaken, it is actively harmful. Boredom is not good, unstructured play is. Stop Saying Boredom is Good for Kids, she explains.

Play is a keystone of childhood. It is crucial for children to have unstructured free time in which they figure out what they want to do. Left alone, my daughter has come up with all sorts of fun ideas– building homes for her stuffed animals out of empty kleenex boxes, hand-drawing a series of mazes of varying difficulty, and inventing a murder mystery game for her matchbox cars. My daughter isn’t bored when she does these things!

Young children have an endless appetite for new information, one that is too large and deep for parents to fill just by reading books aloud.

Joy will now be published twice a month, on alternate Thursdays. If you have friends you think will enjoy reading Joy, do spread the word!

Long Giraffe

Manav Rathi — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

It is often, and for very good reasons, that people start with a name that names an idea, and then work towards manifesting it. For example, when building a web service, find the domain first, and then implement. Or when creating a YouTube video, write down the title and create a sketch of the thumbnail first before getting down to the actual content. Or when writing a blog, write down the title first, and the rest becomes easy.

Alejandro AR recommends going the other way. Don’t name your projects, he says.

When I name the project or idea ahead of time, the idea becomes entangled with the name. This doesn’t make sense at this stage because the name should adapt to the idea, not the other way around.

Now, I’ve started using code names for my projects, using a generator until something feels right and fun. Examples include: European Toad, Quick Whale, Long Giraffe.

It is not for me to judicate which approach is better, but Alejandro’s approach does sound more fun and freeing, and I know for myself that I’ll be trying it out for the next few things I want to build!

How Experts Learn Faster

Manav Rathi — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve often thought of the code of itself as not being valuable, but the people who have a mental map of that codebase as bringing the value.

Reading through Jimmy Koppel’s explanation of The Benjamin Franklin Method, I could relate his exposition to that thought:

Expertise is a process of building mental representations; expert minds store knowledge in a compressed fashion. … This is possible because music and chess positions have structure that makes them look very different from a page of random notes or a random permutation of pieces. Technically speaking, they have lower perplexity than random noise. So, even though there are 26 letters in the English alphabet, Claude Shannon showed that the information content of English is about 1 bit per letter: given a random prefix of a paragraph, people can guess the next letter about half the time.

I don’t think there is a practical takeaway directly - very few read programming books nowadays. But it still illuminates how the better ones amongst us end up being more effective. The mental representations they form (whether of language, music, chess, or code) are better!

CV of Failures

Manav Rathi — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Jia-Bin Huang is not the first one to do it, but I found it oddly inspiring, his CV of failures.

It has been a great year. Wishing you all an even better upcoming one. See you all on the other side!

Decisions

Manav Rathi — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Some questions do not have right or wrong answers; only different ones.

In although of course you end up becoming yourself, Chris Peterson describes how each answer is a future self.

This is unnerving, a trolley problem, killing countless future selves to engender the current one. And there is no way to trianglate what the alternative choices would’ve lead to. But there is a way of going about it by making “well-made” decisions that arise not from analysis but desire.

In any case though,

No matter how you decided, you will be different, and you will be fine. From among the endless, infinite, impossible yous, you will, in time, become yourself; become, at least in this world, the only you that you could have ever really been.

Creativity and Truth

Manav Rathi — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

“Fear of error and fear of truth are one and the same thing” — Alexandre Grothendieck

Is there a tension between creativity and accuracy?

Yes, Michael Nielsen concludes, because of two things. Energy, and cocoons. To explain the energy, he cites Feynman:

I told myself: “They’re on the wrong track: I’m got the track!” Now, in the end, I had to give up those ideas and go over to their ideas of retarded action and so on — my original idea of electrons not acting on themselves disappeared, but because I had been working so hard I found something. So, as long as I can drive myself one way or the other, it’s okay. Even if it’s an illusion, it still makes me go, and this is the kind of thing that keeps me going through the depths.

It’s like the African savages who are going into battle — first they have to gather around and beat drums and jump up and down to build up their energy to fight. I feel the same way, building up my energy by talking to myself and telling myself, “They are trying to do it this way, I’m going to do it that way” and then I get excited and I can go back to work again.

And to explain cocoons, he cites Jobs and Ive.

Branching Histories

Manav Rathi — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

It is a very long post. It is also about politics, in a country different from mine, and about a referendum where I didn’t have a side. Still, I learned a lot from reading it so I’d like to share Dominic Cummings’s behind the scenes into what goes behind a public influence campaign: Branching histories of the 2016 referendum and ‘the frogs before the storm’.

Reality has branching histories, not a big why. The branching histories are forgotten and the actual branch taken, often because of some relatively trivial event, seems overwhemingly probable. We evolved to make sense of this nonlinear and unpredictable world with stories - stories that often obscure the branching history of reality, stories that become the primary way history is told.

Such stories oversimplify and limit thinking about the much richer reality of branching histories.

The result was an emergent property of many individual actions playing out amid a combination of three big forces. If just about 1% of voters had decided differently, IN would’ve won. Anybody who says ‘I always knew X would win’ is fooling themselves. What actually happened was one of many branching histories and in many other branches of this network — branches that almost happened and still seem almost real to me — we lost.

He talks about various things, like the importance of a clear marketing imperative (“Vote Leave”) instead of inconcreteness (“Go Global”); about how adverts are more effective the closer to the decision moment they hit the brain; and how:

In general big mistakes cause defeat more often than excellent moves cause victory. An analysis of chess … reveals how

The best computers make moves that preserve the widest possible choices in the future (Bismark’s ‘keep two irons in the fire’)

Even great humans are distinguishable from great computers by their propensity to make clear tactical errors occasionally amid the fog of war.

He ends his post by attributing a part of success to effective operations:

I am not clever, I have hopeless memory, and have almost no proper circle of competence. I made a lot of mistakes in the campaign. I have had success in building and managing teams. This success has not relied on a single original insight of any kind. It comes from applying what Charlie Munger calls unrecognized simplicities of effective action.

Effective because they work reliably, simple enough that even I could implement them, and unrecognized because they are hiding in plain sight but are rarely stolen and used. I found 10-15 highly motivated people who knew what they were doing and largely left tme to get on with it while stopping people who did not know what they were doing interfering with them, we worked out a psychologically compelling simple story, and applied simple management principles.

Adulthood is Awesome

Manav Rathi — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

It is a common refrain that childhood was great, and things have go downhill since.

Collisteru disagrees! Adulthood is awesome, actually, he explains:

Adulthood is objectively better than childhood. Everything boils down to freedom, the golden gift of adulthood.

I don’t think the average person realizes their own freedom. Most adults in the United States could at any time, if they really wanted to, cut all ties to their home country and move to India… Children live under a dictatorship, however benevolent. The charming thing about childhood, however bad, is that it’s temporary. You’re liberated in the end.

They go on to give a few more reasons, and none of them really vibe with me. But they are absolutely correct about freedom.

I’ve often felt a little thrill on Friday nights, when I realize I could drive miles to the Wyoming-Colorado border right at that moment just for fun. No one and nothing would stop me. No one and nothing! Isn’t that so cool? I am utterly free to adventure.

Karpathy's One Text Note

Manav Rathi — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I’m fairly minimalistic when it comes to note taking. Or so I thought, until I was schooled by Andrej Karpathy’s full-on animal mode: He uses a single note!

Any time any idea or any todo or anything else comes to mind, I append it to the note on top, simply as text.

As things get added to the top, everything else starts to sink towards the bottom almost as if under gravity. Every now and then, I fish through the notes by scrolling downwards and skimming. If I find anything that deserves to not leave my attention, I rescue it towards the top by simply copy pasting. Sometimes I merge, process, group or modify notes when they seem related. I delete a note only rarely. Notes that repeatedly don’t deserve attention will naturally continue to sink. They are never lost, they just don’t deserve the top of mind.

My note has grown quite giant over the last few years.

One text note ftw.

I love his approach. I don’t know if I’ll follow it to the letter — he has kept the same note for years, while I crave more impermanence — but I will try his append/review and gravity-as-an-organizing-principle mechanisms, perhaps periodically yeeting that file. Or let’s see, maybe I’ll keep it.

Regardless, I found the entire exposition interesting, and surprisingly, energizing! The simplicity of his note taking process is not the causation of his prodigiousness, but there certainly might be some correlation.

Is Work Enough?

Manav Rathi — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Is work enough?, asks Emma Pierson.

It’s as if you’re sitting at an elegant restaurant with a spear through your chest and waiters keep bringing you beautiful courses. One asks you how your food is.

“It’s lovely,” you say, “but I’ve got this large hole in my ribcage…”

I don’t have an answer to her question, but I do understand it.

He finally found peace, as so many others had done, in the abstract architecture of Bach, occasionally ornamented with Mozart. And so Discovery drove on toward Saturn, as often as not pulsating with the cool music of the harpsichord, the frozen thoughts of a brain that had been dust for twice a hundred years.

Am I Having a Good Time?

Manav Rathi — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Am I having a Good Time™?

Michael Dickens argues that it is hard to tell!

Reflecting on an experience changes the experience. Fundamentally, it is impossible for me to check how I feel while I’m engrossed, because then I wouldn’t be engrossed.

Learning from Machine Learning

Manav Rathi — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Reinforcement learning, often abbreviated RL, is a way for a machine to learn by interacting with an environment, receiving rewards or penalties as feedback, and eventually learn to take actions in a way that maximizes cumulative rewards over time. Think of it the way one teaches a dog to sit by offering them treats.

Jason Wei, in his post Life lessons from reinforcement learning, talks of the ways in which teaching machines how to learn this way has taught him lessons for his own life:

But even after I graduated school, I had a habit of studying how other people found success and trying to imitate them. Sometimes it worked, but eventually I realized that I would never surpass the full ability of someone else because they were playing to their strengths which I didn’t have. … Beating the teacher requires walking your own path.

or as Bashō said:

“Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise; seek what they sought.”

Becoming a Magician

Manav Rathi — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

In order to write the new version of this life description, I need to imagine a version of myself who, by definition, I cannot understand. If I understood her she wouldn’t be magical.

Anonymous, in not many more words, goes on to describe her approach to become a seemingly unattainable, nonlinearly better, version of herself. That is, her approach to becoming a magician:

Surround yourself with people who look like magicians to you. Then imagine yourself as one in great detail. Imagine yourself as the person you would be afraid to say you want to be out loud to others, because it seems so ridiculously impossible right now. Write it down in great clarity and detail, then forget it.

If you liked this post, share it with your friends.

Books

Manav Rathi — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Every dichotomy contains within it the seeds of a debate, and that between “Rationalism” and “Traditionalism” is one of the more fertile.

So in that sense, there isn’t anything particularly new about Gavin Leech’s viewpoints on this topic - Rats and trads. It is well written and an enjoyable read (his site has more!), but that’s not why I bring it to you today. I bring it to you because of a quote that the post quotes:

At the coming of evening, I return to my house and enter my study… I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them with affection, I feed on that food which is mine only and which I was born for; I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their kindness answer me; and for four hours of time I do not feel boredom, forget every trouble, do not dread poverty, am not frightened by death; entirely I give myself over to them.

— Machiavelli

I’d never expected such heart-wrenchingly beautiful feelings to get named by such maligned a man as Machiavelli. The nectar he got from books, alone in his study, is the nectar I’ve also swam in (and I think you all too, at various times in your life), yet never had it occurred to me to name the feeling, nor realize how privileged I am whenever I get to swim therein.

If you like reading Joy, please recommend it to your friends. Having an audience helps.

Be Impatient

Manav Rathi — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

While I think Ben Kuhn could’ve come up with a better title, I agree with the contents of his post: Be Impatient.

Once you have figured out what to do, be unstoppable about getting your small handful of priorities accomplished quickly. I have yet to meet a slow-moving person who is very successful.

Other posts by Ben have an opposite effect on me - I like the succinct and clear titles he comes up with. They’re too good in some sense, since they convey the full force of his (good) argument, making the post itself parenthetical: “No one can teach you to have conviction”, “You don’t need to work on hard problems”, “To listen well, get curious”, “Staring into the abyss as a core life skill”.

Back to the impatience - the advice here is to have a bias towards action.

You have to be decisive. … Work on things that seem small but move really quickly.

The way this mechanism works is not by doing “more”, but by processing information more quickly. The decisive and relentlessly fast executors just get more, and more accurate, shots at the goal.

If you enjoy reading Joy, please share us with your friends.

Rest In Motion

Manav Rathi — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

One of the counterintuitive things I’ve found in my life on this planet is that working harder gives me more energy than resting. Doing things in energizing.

This is not to say that one shouldn’t take pleasure in just existing. That is fine, and a great use of time. And of course some amount of rest is essential to get a baseline level of energy. However, if one intends to gain more energy, a replenishable and exhaustible source of energy, the cycle of doing is what is needed, not rest.

Nate Soares’s essay, Rest in Motion is slightly different take on the same idea.

The ground state is in motion. The easiest state to maintain isn’t a motionless state, it’s the state where you’re out there doing what needs doing at a sustainable state.

We were built to move, and we have things to do.

Leverage Points

Manav Rathi — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

What if I told you I can give you the entire gist of systems thinking in one post that will take you 30 minutes to read?

Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System is just that.

Written by the mother of systems thinking, Donella Meadows, herself, it will give you an executive summary of systems thinking (without ever using the phrase “systems thinking”).

My favorite takeaway:

You don’t waste time with reactionaries; rather you work with active change agents with the vast middle group of people who are open-minded.

Navigating the Anxiety Vortex

Manav Rathi — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Usually I have something to say about the core message in the link I share.

Navigating the Anxiety Vortex is where I just wish to share the enjoyment of reading the words, regardless of the message within. I can try to briefly summarize what Peter Welch was trying to say in his essay - we have different levels of anxiety - social, mundane, philosophical, and the abyss - which need to be handled differently, but what his conclusion was, I still don’t know, and nor do I care, because I had fun reading whatever it was that he wrote.

Bad enough I can’t figure why my phone keeps switching to focus mode; now there are multiple working methodologies for determining truth and the physicists misplaced nine tenths of the universe.

This sort of absurdist writing is hard to get right, because it becomes formulaic after a while, but the post held my attention the entire while, Douglas Adams like.

Growth vs Fixed Mindset

Manav Rathi — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Living Proof contains stories from mathematicians who felt that they didn’t belong when they started out in their journey, illustrating the internal reframing, or external encouragement, that helped them get over their impostor syndrome.

I particularly liked the story of Laura Taalman, Hitting the Wall:

Having to work so hard that semester and develop a thick skin for feeling stupid all the time really helped me in my career. I don’t think mathematics was ever “easy” for me again after I got to college; it was always a struggle. College math courses were all hard, graduate school was hard, and researching and writing my thesis was hard, too. But at each step, it was a struggle that I loved working through. I didn’t mind being stuck and feeling dumb. I knew I could get through it if I kept plugging away. In today’s language, I would say I was lucky to have formed a “growth mindset” about learning math — I was willing to work on hard problems to find success — rather than a “fixed mindset”, where I judged myself harshly when I didn’t know something.

To this day, I still benefit from this mindset, and I’ve basically made a career out of trying new things what I don’t know anything about. It’s in the process of making mistakes and figuring out how to make progress where the real fun begins.

Ostensibly these stories are for and by mathematicians, but I felt there is something in there for all of us.

The Space Between

Manav Rathi — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

The 200 pages of Man’s Search for Meaning have stayed with me ever since I read them because they showed me how we have absolute freedom to do anything we want (though sometimes the freedom being taken away is needed for us to realize that we had that freedom in the first place)

The space between by Adam Newbold highlights another flashlight from those 200 pages:

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

Adam is also the person behind the delightful omg.lol

Personal Agency

Manav Rathi — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

In Andrew Lisi’s book review, Dan Koe’s Purpose & Profit — After 10 Years of Living It, I’d come across a phrase that has stuck with me since. Personal agency.

Andrew talks of and highlights multiple things from Purpose & Profit, putting them in the context of his own journey

Koe’s counterproposal is grounded in personal agency. Purpose is built—not found—by taking action, solving problems, and developing competence in service of others.

The book invites you to stop obsessing over purpose and start designing systems of motion: solve small problems, build in public, ship often, and earn alignment through repetition.

You create for survival or status. But once you taste mastery and contribution, you create to give.

There are two different threads Andrew, and Koe, are weaving here - of personal agency, and iteration. I knew of the power of iteration, it was the personal agency bit that I’d not consciously given into until then.

I can do whatever I want. Really. There are practical constraints stopping me, yes, but they can be overcome iteratively, one by one, slowly, in an utterly deterministic manner. I have personal agency.

On Wizards and Sorcerers

Manav Rathi — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT

In Wizards and Sorcerers, Viktor Löfgren describes two ways in which people approach the task of getting computers to do one’s bidding (a.k.a. programming).

There are many such dichotomies, but this one resonated with me since I’d recently tried a transition between these dichotomies. My natural inclination has been what Viktor describes as a Wizard, but a few months ago, just for experiment’s sake, I forced myself to work in a pattern that, on reading his post, feels like a Sorcerer.

I don’t have an outcome of experiment to state (other than remarking it has been fun!). I feel both these ways are valid, in fact in a team one wants a mixture of both since the best search algorithm is usually a mixture of both breadth and depth first search, with a sprinkling of heuristics atop.

Viktor runs Marginalia, a search engine that specializes in indexing what has variously been described as the old web, the indie web, the small web. Marginalia also has an explore page that you can use as a gateway to countless hours of surfing, similar to Joy’s rabbit holes.

Weaponizing Hyperfocus

Manav Rathi — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Computers are a means of individual expression and liberation. Computers can turn your weakness into strength, and allow you to live your life on your own terms.

In Weaponizing hyperfocus: Becoming the first DevRel at Tailscale, Xe laso describes how they turned an IRL weakness into a strength, and do things their peers can’t.

You might know Xe from the Anubis, the DDoS protector they created, the one with the anime character on the loading page.

Xe describes a form of ADHD, which I don’t have (I think), and the role they carved for themselves was a reframed form of DevRel, a parka I’ve donned when needed but is not something I wear day to day. So in terms of specifics I can’t relate to their story.

What I can relate and attest to is how computers give us the freedom to live a life that is tuned to our personality, our strength, our mental quirks, our eccentricities. Computers level the playing field; people who would’ve been ostracised and unable to find meaningful employment, and a general sense of meaning in their life, even a few decades ago can now leverage computers to live their life to their fullest potential.

Hard work is needed, yes, but what really helps get one on the road is a creative reframing of the circumstance. Xe’s specific story is a concrete example of how one might go about doing that.

Man may tolerate the rain for awhile
but soon he looks for shelter
while ducks quack happily for
rainwater is their sustenance

— Rumi

FOSS: Don't Plan, Just Do

Manav Rathi — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Open Advice FOSS - What We Wish We Had Known When We Started is a collection of anecdotes from people in the trenches of open source - Founders, Admins, Programmers, QA, UX, Artists, Packagers, Documentors, Evangelists, Conference organizers, even Business people and Lawyers.

The thing I like the most about this book is not the content but its reaffirmation that open source is not just about code. Developers are only one part of the story. At its heart, open source is a social movement, not a technological one, and that all of us, irrespective of our strengths, has a potential role to play if we agree with the overall direction.

That said, the content is no slouch. There were many things I liked, but to avoid inundating you with all my personal choices I’ll just leave with you with the following excerpt from Big Plans Don’t Work by Jos Poortvliet:

So instead of planning big things, find something small, doable and useful in itself. Not a wiki page with a plan, but the first step of what you aim for. And then, lead by doing. Make a rough first draft of an article. Make a first version of a folder. Copy-paste from whatever exists, or improve something which is already available. Then present the results, drafty as it is, to the team and ask if someone wants to make it better. Do something small and it will work.

Don’t plan, just do.

So how do you do something as big as the university student plan? You don’t! At least, not directly. Discussing this with the whole team, planning — it will surely make for a fun discussion which can last weeks. But it will not get you far. Instead, keep the plan to yourself. Seriously.

I am not saying you should not talk about it — you can. Share the ambition with whoever is interested. And it is is ok if they give suggestions. But do not rely on it, do not make plans which go much further than the first 1-2 steps. Instead, execute.

Build on what is there so that people can, slowly, start using it.

In community marketing, strategy is not on the wiki. It is not in a plan nor a time line. Neither is it discussed every week with the whole team. It is part of a vision which has grown over time. It is carried by a few central people and inspires the short-term plans and objectives. And it is shared by the team. But it has no time line and it can not fail. It is flexible and does not depend on anything or anyone in particular. And it will always be a pie in the sky…

So if you want to lead in Free Software community marketing effort, keep that big picture a big picture. Do not plan too much, but get things done!

Jos is now head of marketing at Nextcloud (and a co-founder).

Playing to Win (How I learnt to stop worrying and not be a scrub)

Manav Rathi — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT

In his classic articulation of what sets competitive gamers and amateurs apart, David Sirlin distills it down to mentality, not skill. The professionals play to win.

The scrub mentality is to be so shackled by self-imposed handicaps as to never have any hope of being truly good at a game. You can practice forever, but if you can’t get over these common hangups, in a sense you’ve lost before you even started. You’ve lost before you even picked which game to play. You aren’t playing to win.

A scrub would disagree with this though. They’d say they are trying very hard. The problem is they are only trying hard within a construct of fictitious rules that prevent them from ever truly competing.

The articulation is short and convincing, there is nothing I can add to it. However, it is easy to misunderstand, which is why a clarifying note might be helpful.

When Max Verstappen came on the scene, I disliked him for his arrogant bending of rules, brutish disregard of “gentlemen’s agreements”, and his cold conviction.

Now I am a fan. I feel fortunate to witness a fellow human reach new peaks of perfection - his arrogant confidence backed by results, his brutish ability to put a car where it doesn’t belong, his cold calculated laser sharp focus to do one thing and one thing only: win.

He has, as Sirlin describes, unlocked a new level in the sport where others will follow and expand on.

Notice that the good players are reaching higher and higher levels of play. They found the “cheap stuff” and abused it. They know how to stop the cheap stuff. They know how to stop the other player from stopping it so they can keep doing it.

The experts are having a great deal of fun on a higher level than the scrub can imagine.

This is a hallmark of true champions before him too - the Sennas, the Schumachers.

Closer to home and more mundanely, I find myself often trapped in the scrub mindset when using computers to solve my, and as a professional engineer, other’s problems. But by preemptively restricting my universe based on arbitrary self imposed rules, I am not able to use either my brain or my weapon, the computer, to their full potential.

Legacy Systems as Old Cities

Manav Rathi — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Federico Mena Quintero, the co-creator of GNOME, shares his vision of how software is like cities.

Does long-lived software have the same patterns of change as cities and physical artifacts? Can we learn from the building trades and urbanism for maintaining software in the long term? Could we turn legacy software into a good legacy?

The analogy focuses on not just how any software is like any city, but on how software that have been around for a while, sometimes uncharitably called legacy software, is like old cities.

This doesn’t happen automatically, as he points out:

Like many things, real integration instead of haphazard development started to happen once money was put into GNOME. Red Hat formed a team to work exclusively on GNOME.

But once such systems cross a threshold, they start becoming like cities.

There is a long history of software which is loved enough, or useful enough, that people maintain it and slowly upgrade it to newer infrastructure.

He ends by quoting Jane Jacob (paraphrased here for length):

Being human is itself difficult, and therefore all kinds of settlements have problems, big cities moreso. But vital cities are not helpless or passive victims of circumstance, nor are they different from nature.

Dull, inert cities contain the seeds of their own destruction and little else. But lively, diverse, intense cities contain innate ability to invent what is required to combat their difficulties; they contain the seeds of their own regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves.

JJ - A Better Git

Manav Rathi — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I came across a tool that solved a problem I had, but I didn’t know anybody else also had, so was a bit surprised when I found it had been solved. I’m talking of jj, which I’ve been recently been giving a whirl as a frontend for Git.

This is not a tutorial. I’ll describe the problem, and how jj solves it. Then I’ll leave you with some links should this interest you.

I like Git. For me, it serves not just as a means of preserving and sharing code, but also as a way of thinking about changes. Such an approach is not always correct — many seedlings have been stifled by being caged in a git repository before they unfurled their first green — but once the plant is big enough, having it live in a git repository is usually helpful.

I also like the Git command line. Over years, I developed the following workflow.

I would begin by creating an empty commit that described what I was about to do.

git commit --allow-empty

Then I would edit some files. Once my first, rough sketch was done, I would take a pause mentally. This would also be a great time to commit.

git add -p && git commit --amend -C HEAD

Then I would go back to editing the code. Making the code compile, filling in the blanks, handling scenarios I’d omitted, etc. At natural pauses in the middle, I’d come up for air, and update my commit.

git add -p && git commit --amend -C HEAD

This cycle would continue, until the task was done.

So far so good, but it is a lot of typing for something I need to do around a hundred times on a productive day.

There are two ways of handling this repetitiveness - Using one of the alternative Git interfaces, and defining aliases.

For most people the alternative Git interfaces do the trick, but they didn’t for me (although since writing this, I’ve also found gitu - a Magit implementation outside of emacs - that seems promising).

So that leaves aliases. The problem with aliases is that the ideal workflow never happened as cleanly as I’m describing.

While sometimes I know beforehand what I’m about to do, sometimes I only discover it in the middle.
Git often makes it painful to do things. If I create a new file, then git add -p doesn’t add it, I need to a git add --intent-to-add first.
Fixing up minor typos in prior commits after I’ve moved a couple of steps ahead is frequent enough that uses of git rebase is another dimension that my aliases need to cater to.

And I’ve never been able to come up with an orthogonal set of aliases that describe the actions I need to perform. That leaves a combinatorial explosion (gccm anyone?) that eventually breaks down, and at the end of all attempts at defining composable aliases I find myself going back to the original approach of Ctrl-R-ing through history and tweaking the last closest matching incantation.

jj is a new tool for interacting with Git. Somewhat surprisingly, it seems to have been built around a workflow that I’d organically landed on.

Let us say I’m about to make a change. I start with telling jj about my intent.

jj new

I can tell jj about what I’m going to do either immediately (jj new -m), or at any time later (jj describe). Doing the change is orthogonal to adding the commit message.

Now I do my changes. Well, there is no step 2!

All changes I’ve done are already part of the latest “commit”. Of course, I can view them in detail to proofread my work

jj diff

But I don’t need to “commit” them.

At some point, when I’m doing with ironing out the changes and am ready to move on to the next thing, I can do

jj new

and that’s it.

There is a lot more to say about jj, and their vision is much more expansive than just being a Git frontend. I’ll leave you with the following links if feel curious to explore more.

The official tutorial is short but gives a good initial taste. From Git history (!), it seems to trace back to the introduction by the original author of jj, Martin von Zweigbergk.
There is a a new longer tutorial by Steve Klabnik, the (co-)author of The Rust Programming book.
And there is a middle length introduction by Chris Krycho (who has a beautiful website, and is also the co-author of the upcoming 2025 edition of The Rust Programming book).

The project README is also well put together, if you’re short of time and just want to explore at a high level. It also tells us about the origin of the name:

The command-line tool is called jj for now because it’s easy to type and easy to replace (rare in English). The project is called “Jujutsu” because it matches “jj”.