I was traveling a couple of weeks ago and Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea was in the room. I picked it up and read it in a single setting, something I haven't done in a long time. It was an excellent afternoon read.
Before reading the book, I had the sense that Old Man and the Sea was off peak Hemingway and that perhaps it was a bit self indulgent. It was much more enjoyable than its reputation led me to believe. I had a sense for where it had to be going and I still enjoyed the journey.
Just like The Road is actually a book about parenting, this book is about aging and not going quietly into the night. One's own courage is it's own reward.
A bonus is that it’s short. I finished in about 90 minutes, which makes it much more immersive.
While reading it, I realized that I've unintentionally read more of Hemingway's corpus more intently than any other author. The only other author that potentially comes close is Shakespeare and I've definitely read a smaller percentage of his work... although I hope to get to all of it in time.
Our oldest child started first grade at the local public school earlier this year. Much to her excitement, she’ll be taking the bus now.
The bus picks up and drops off a short walk from our house, 0.2 miles according to Google Maps, with a sidewalk the entire way.
We signed the release for daughter to be able to get off the bus and walk home by herself, thinking we could teach her to walk it and that she might enjoy the freedom.
Signing this form prompted two calls from the district to make sure we understood what we were signing and were truly comfortable with it. I obviously can’t know this for sure, but in one of the calls they gently indicated to us that we were the only parents who allow this for a child so young.
For clarity, I don’t blame the school here. They’re trying to do right by us and our daughter and if we’re making an unusual choice, calling to confirm is a reasonable thing to do. Still… this is a very restrictive default setting. No wonder 50% of 9-11 year olds don’t get to walk down grocery aisles by themselves!
Why isn't your codebase in English? Holden and I had a great time chatting with Kasey Klimes, who is really thinking deeply about how AI changes software development.
Worth your time
A colorized photo of Central Park during the Great Depression, New York (1933) pic.twitter.com/FIWjMvZON6
"Every artifact that can be elongated is, by people who do not read what they produce, for readers who do not read what they receive." Appearing Productive in the Workplace Not so at Good Tokens.
Megan Gafford on Brutalism. Perhaps I'm imagining it, but it seems to me there's something Puritan about the modernist drive to remove ornamentation.
It's moments like these when I wish I was reading books in a book club or an English class so I would be able to complain about them to other people. Instead I have you!
This is the most divided I’ve felt about a book in the past 10 years (since A Little Life).
There is some absolutely intoxicating writing in this book. There are characters and scenes that I will probably never forget. The hint of a mystical evil lurking in the background is so well done.
At the same time, this book is sprawling to the point of distraction. I almost quit this book on multiple occasions because I had grown so interested in parts of the story just to be dropped in another location and time to start over again. To the authors credit, the final portion of the book does make an effort to tie the threads of the story together but so much is left disconnected.
It reminds me of Michelangelo’s Slaves. Obviously the work of a master… and yet unfinished.
This edition of Good Tokens is best enjoyed while listening to the Phil Collins version of You Can't Hurry Love.
Shameless Self Promotion
Introducing AgentCAD: About a month ago I became obsessed with the idea of a command line tool for creating CAD drawings as a way to empower coding agents (Claude, Codex, etc) to be better at designing 3D objects. The first version of it is here and I'd be lying if I didn't say I had a delightful time building it. Try it out by firing up your favorite coding agent, grabbing the starter prompt from here, and giving it something to design for you. You and your agent can send me feedback directly from the CLI app or email me here: hello@jdilla.xyz
Dangerously Skip Permissions: In other command line news, my friend Rami, the head of Product for Stripe's new command line product Projects.dev stopped by Dangerously Skip Permissions to talk about CLI tools and what it's like to be a PM in the age of AI. If you need any more reason to check it out, Rami is one of the 5 best PMs I've witnessed up close. Full episode is here or a taster is here.
The Kranz Dictum: If this one doesn't get you going, please have someone check your pulse because you might be dead.
The Creation of Instant Coffee I always love a good "how X came to be" piece. I was surprised by how many of these chemical processes I recognized from my time at Macro Oceans.
Rented Virtue The connection between culture and value creation is underrated. So are the Quakers!
There's only one European company more valuable than Home Depot, which is itself only the number-four American retail company.
During Pangea, whole sections of the earth went without rain for thousands of years. The megamonsoon cut off the interior from atmospheric moisture for stretches of geological time.
Consumers aged 55+ now drive 45.3% of all U.S. spending (Unusual Whales).
Musings
"Such is the blindness of men, that they even glory in their blindness." — Augustine
"The life of man is like a game with dice; if you don't get the throw you want, you must show your skill in making the best of the throw you get." — Terence. Literature and History continues to delight me.
Agentalent.ai: A marketplace where companies hire verified, human-supervised AI agents. Each agent has a human handler. It's like a staffing agency for AI. The future is weird and it's already here.
ElevenLabs Secures AI Agent Insurance: First AIUC-1-backed insurance policy covering AI voice agents. They passed 5,000+ adversarial simulations to get it. This is a big deal for enterprise adoption — insuring against hallucinations and unauthorized actions is the kind of boring infrastructure that actually unlocks deployment.