Things I enjoyed reading in 2025

The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.

But I look at these guys that’ve been here six, seven years, eight years, still suffering, hurt, beat up, so tired, just like I feel tired and suffer, I feel this what, dread, this dread, I see seven or eight years of unhappiness every day and day after day of tiredness and stress and suffering stretching ahead, and for what, for a chance at a like a pro career that I’m starting to get this dready feeling a career in the Show means even more suffering, if I’m skeletally stressed from all the grueling here by the time I get there.

It’s snowing on the goddamn map, not the territory, you dick!

Abiding. No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was the second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering. […] It’s too much to think about. To Abide there. But none of it’s as of now real. […] He could just hunker down in the space between each heartbeat and make each heartbeat a wall and live in there. Not let his head look over. What’s unendurable is what his own head could make of it all. What his head could report to him, looking over and ahead and reporting. But he could choose not to listen; he could treat his head like G. Day or R. Lenz: clueless noise.

“consistently delivers strategic value and innovative process optimization. the most reliably creative problem-solver we’ve ever punched in the stomach.”

Several thumbs-down are put forward. You quickly scan the group to get an informal poll of the overall sentiment and feign your own response: a disappointed head shake. Actually, part of your response is genuine; these people all seemed so competent and fulfilled when you first interviewed with them. In actuality, though, they are hollowed-out husks of what may have at one time been a spark of human potential.

“I’m having a little trouble understanding how this work fits into the broader picture.” Chris nods but says nothing. “You know, like, um, who our stakeholders are.”

“Ah. Well, as I’m sure you know, this company has multiple verticals and business units. Some of us work on the direct-to-consumer and e-commerce products, the folks at West Campus are mainly focused on B2B operations, and every team relies on the stuff that Internal Tooling and DX puts out. So there really is no single stakeholder. Case in point, that whole half of the floor is the Next Initiative team.” Chris gestures in the approximate direction of absolutely nothing. “They’re working on compliance and auditing for the Information Security org.”

“Meow,” I said, lifting branches to look under the bushes. “Come here, cat. You wouldn’t want to destroy the space-time continuum, would you? Meow. Meow.”

“How many fingers am I holding up?”

Slowness in Answering or not, this question required some thought. Two was the most likely number, being easily confused with both three and one, but she might have chosen five to confuse me, and if that was the case, should I answer four, since the thumb isn’t technically a finger? Or might she be holding her hand behind her back?

“Five,” I said finally.

And Four, that the reason Victorian society was so restricted and repressed was that it was impossible to move without knocking something over.

He looks like he can snap the cables with a flick of his fingers. Instead, he weaves in and out of them with grace.

On the way back, it sinks in that no one noticed. Well, except maybe Sweatshirt Guy. The color of the day is forest green. One sweatshirt or another is always failing to hide his muscles. His sweatshirts all bulge and contort in ways they never do over a typical body. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

His words include an apology, a please, and the formal you. The construction is in such a formal register that it snaps me out of my mental fugue.

“Oh, that’s way too polite. Sorry, I understood you the first time.”

Annabella: Ada must never become poetical! Only one thing has the power to subdue poetry… mathematics!!

Queen Victoria: Good morning, loyal subjects!

Lovelace: Welcome, your majesty! We cannot express how delighted we are to—

Queen Victoria: Please do not—it does not matter what you think of Us, but what We think of you!

Lovelace: Do you think we’re qualified to fight crime?

Babbage: Of course! You’re the brains and I’m the—

Babbage: —brains.

Lovelace: I think you perceive the difficulty.

Praise it without going into detail. An author does not expect a summary or a rational analysis of his book, and would even prefer you not to attempt such a thing. He expects only that, while maintaining the greatest possible degree of ambiguity, you will tell him that you like what he wrote.

We might further speculate that every writer is driven by the attempt to discover and give form to his inner book and is perpetually dissatisfied with the actual books he encounters, including his own, however polished they may be.

And it is also unsurprising that their comments—however far removed from the initial text (but what, in fact, might it mean to be close?)—bring to the encounter an originality that they would undoubtedly have lacked had they undertaken to read the book.

Perhaps the possibility of an easy fix reduces his own vexed life to a sort of gratuitous Sisyphean labor. A cure doesn’t offer hope so much as it discredits the work he’s already done—exhausting every possible option, proving each one ineffectual.

He’s furious at everyone: the woman who tutored Jessie for his GED, the people who say the justice system is corrupt, the people who say the justice system isn’t corrupt. He’s furious at an ever-shifting they. His life is lived toward them. They haunt him. They haunts him.

He acknowledges explicitly what others simply enact: the problem of tragedy without a vector, anger without object or container.

When we criticize sentimentality, perhaps part of what we fear is the possibility that it allows us to usurp the texts we read, insert ourselves and our emotional needs too aggressively into their narratives, clog their situations and their syntax with our tears. Which brings us back to the danger that we’re mainly crying for ourselves, or at least to feel ourselves cry.

It occurred to me that mental work is like sex in certain respects, although at first it seemed a bizarre comparison.

After opting for quantity of time rather than quantity of work, I needed a figure. I talked about it with J, the man I live with, and he suggested three hours. Three hours! The very thought gave me an anxiety attack. How about two hours? Two hours! The very thought… One hour? More reasonable, but still not possible. Half an hour? Getting closer but still too much. Fifteen minutes? Fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes. Now there was a figure I could imagine. A nice solid amount of time, an amount of time I knew I could live through every day.

When I approached the end of a project, I not only was afraid (as I will discuss later) that there would be nothing to take its place, but also feared the opposite: that the project I was about to complete was just one in a long series of endless tasks, Why should I finish this project when I’d just get another to take its place? […] This minor resentment was related to a larger one, namely, why is anything ever expected of me anyway?

Generally speaking, we’re taught that we should conserve resources. We’re told not to waste things. […] Stop that, now. Reject a mindset of scarcity—and, hence, hoarding—and embrace a mindset of plenty. The thinking should be, “Even if this one does not work out, there’s a line of thousands standing behind it that I need to get to.”

In most of your professional interactions, you probably achieve some semblance of your goal most of the time[…] This is definitely not the case in sales. You’re going to get shot down most of the time—you will not close the deal on that particular pass through the pipeline. […] Depending on your industry, and the point at which sales gets a prospect in the funnel, if yours is a new, innovative solution, a 20–30% win rate is solid.

One of the biggest issues founders and first-time salespeople have is trying to sell to people who don’t have the problem their solution solves. Instead they prioritize other characteristics—availability being the biggest temptation—when identifying prospects. You see this when founders sell to their incubator-mates or people they know from prior companies, or even friends and family.

We enjoy programming so much that we are willing to spend enormous time, thought, and effort working on programming systems precisely to free ourselves from the tortuous burden of writing programs.

My point is simply that programs are not rote algorithms, and the act of programming is not primarily characterized by algorithmic thinking. Rather, programming is fundamentally a game of domain modeling and system design, with bits of algorithmic logic inserted here and there to glue the whole thing together.

I like writing software. It is strange how radical a statement that sometimes feels. So many programmers seem to practically despise what they do for a living, at least as you’d hear them describe it.