In response to my 2025 Things I learned post, my friend Mark tells me “You should do a meta post on how you come up with this list.”
Frequent readers of this blog probably know the answer to this already, but I’ll spell it out in more detail here. I’ve been very influenced by my friend / mentor Alex Komoroske who has an essential google doc called Bits & Bobs.
I more or less have copied what he does but adapted it for who I am and what I’m interested in.
Thought the week each week I keep a running note in Bear called Good Tokens YYYY-MM-DD.
I throw things in here throughout my day: links I like, observations, ideas baked and unbaked.
On Thursdays or Fridays, I go through and I process through that list. About 75% of it ends up as my weekly Good Tokens post and the rest of it gets sorted somewhere else or thrown out and then I post it to my blog here.
Whenever I post something, I have OpenAI tag it for me. Then starting about November 1st, I start going back through and looking at the posts tagged things I learned.
I dump all of these into a doc in chronological order and then start cleaning up the formatting and reading through them. As I do that, I start to see themes and then group and regroup them until I’ve got the post. I am to put it out more or less on December 1st.
Perhaps a better question would be why I do this. One answer is that I enjoy it. Another is that I really do find that it builds a habit for me of looking out into the world and considering it. A third is that it has helped me crystalize what I’m uniquely interested in and where I want to spend my time — which is a funny thing to say considering how weird and wide ranging these posts are, but the act of reflecting on it on a weekly basis does help me see patterns. A final reason is that I do think that the creative act is contagious. Like running, the hardest step is the first one and so having a habit of creation keeps me in the flow.
The U.S. Mint estimates that there are 300 billion pennies in circulation, about 3 times more than the number stars in the Milky Way Galaxy — The Atlantic
Coca Cola didn’t became cocaine free until 1929 — the Associated Press via Stan Veuger. No wonder the market crashed!
There are more people under the age of 25 today in Africa than there are in all of Europe — Stephen Kotkin
Shows like MTV’s 16 and pregnant led to a 5.7 percent decrease in teen births, 1/3 of the decline in teen births during the period — Liam Delaney
International adoptions in the US are down 94% since the peak in 2004 — Pew
Japan now produces more diapers for incontinent adults than for infants — London Review of Books
There are more senior citizens than children in 11 states and half of the counties in the US — US Census
The under 20 population in the United States is 20% smaller than it was in 1990 — Aaron Becker via Cremiux
For the first time in 35 years, there are no rap songs are in the top 40 — Rolling Stone
“In 2022, adults spent an additional 99 minutes at home on any given day compared with 2003.” —Derek Thompson via Bucco Capital
Monarch butterflies produce a super generation that live 8 times as long as the other generations and allow them to complete their migratory cycle — Country Living. Could you imagine if once every four generations, you had a set of humans that lived more than 500 years??
Brand Mascots can measurably influence the eating behavior of children — Obesity Review
The more males and females of a bird species look alike (e.g. cranes), the more likely they are to mate for life. The more males and females of a bird species look dissimilar (e.g. mallards), the more likely they are to be promiscuous — my friend Oriana
A group of kangaroos is called a mob. A group of jaguars is a shadow — Brevard Zoo via ChatGPT
Costco’s Kirkland Brand drives more revenue than all of Procter and Gamble combined — Eric Ries
Silicon Valley companies will cross reference each other’s patents more when their employees frequent the same coffee shops — National Bureau of Economic Research. See also Austin’s 3 types of luck.
Non-linear ethnic niches: 90% of grocery stores in Detroit are owned by Chaldeans; 95% of Dunkin Donuts stores in the Midwest are owned by Indians; 90% of the liquor stores in Baltimore are owned by Koreans; 60% of Dunkin’ Donuts stores in New England and New York are operated by Portuguese immigrants — Aporia Magazine. I guess you file this under the importance of networks, tacit knowledge, and the availability bias?
The only right protected in the main body of the US Constitution is the right to intellectual property — ChinaTalk. Bonus: The first patent examiner for the United States was Thomas Jefferson.
Peacock is the name of the males only; the female are peahens. The species is called peafowl— The Animal Book
We call them piggy banks because of the type of clay (pygg) that was used to make jars for holding coins. Shaping them like pigs was a visual pun (probably) — BBC
The air that the dinosaurs breathed had substantially more oxygen in it than the air we breathe. Jurassic Park couldn’t happen because the dinosaurs would asphyxiate — John Cramer
Saturn’s rings are younger than the dinosaurs — Rohit
Squirrels in Berkeley and Oakland are becoming carnivorous — Smithsonian Magazine
In Switzerland, you are never more than 16km from a lake — About Switzerland
The English Monarchy asserted a claim to the French Monarchy until 1801, only releasing it after Napoleon had become dictator — The Rest Is History. Some would say it’s been all downhill for France since then 🤣.
12.3M hectares of US cropland was abandoned between 1986 and 2018 — Environmental Research Letters. Note that this figure does not include cropland taken out of use via urbanization or development.
More than 98% of new vehicle sales in Norway this September were EVs — Elective via Anton
79% of American adults report making at least one drunk purchase in the past year; the average amount of drunk spending was $444 per year — The Hustle
The value of returned purchases in the United States would make it the 16th largest economy in the world — Rohit
D.A.R.E. anti-drug interventions in schools seem to have have increased drug use among suburban students — Drug Library via Atoms vs. Bits
Holding back students in the 3rd grade improves long term performance for the students who were held back — The 74 million
More Romans were killed at Cannae than Americans in the entire Vietnam War — The Rest is History
The distance elasticity of trade (the rate at which trade between two cities drops off as they get farther away from each other) seems to be the same today as it was in ancient Assyria — Maximum Progress
The oldest bond in the world dates from December 10, 1624; pays €13.61 of interest a year — the Financial Times via The Browser
Pine needle tea has more vitamin C in it than orange juice — Nautilus
All of the world’s gold is estimated to fit in one 20 meter cube — BBC
Eyes have evolved more than 50 times — Salon via Rohit
The largest newspaper in California by subscribers is the New York Times —Ezra Klein
Walmart takes 25% of all SNAP dollars — Kyla Scanlon
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Most of my professional energy right now is spent on how AI changes creative work and the electric tech stack. If either of these is of interest to you or if you just think we’d have a good conversation, drop me a note (hello @ jdilla.xyz) or put time on my calendar).
The number of Americans taking GLP-1 drugs continues to grow substantially. There’s no official tally, but Circana believes that 23% of US households — about 30 million — had at least one GLP-1 user in September, suggesting there are tens of millions of users. By 2030, five years from now, it expects GLP-1 households to purchase 35% of food sold in the US (measured by units), up from 24% today.
Japan now produces more nappies for incontinent adults than for infants. Also, the top ten states for fertility are all red states; the bottom ten are all blue states (Vermont is last, chased by Oregon — London Review of Books.
The US mint estimates that there are 300 billion pennies in circulation, more than 3x as many stars as there are in the Milky Way — Pennies Are Trash Now
Many respondents have been regular porn viewers since the fourth grade; few were older than twelve when they picked up the habit.
This seems like an unsustainable equilibrium.
I’m trying to get better at building in public and at celebrating projects that end up as dead ends. Take this in that spirit.
What it was
Papagei Terminal allowed a user to spin up virtual machines like they were slack channels to make it easier to use >1 Claude Code instance at the same time and make it easier to use Claude in --dangerously-skip-permissions mode.
Here is an early prototype. Future versions were way better!
What went well
I think I had a really clear idea of who this was for and the need that it was serving.
This is by far the most ambitious technical project I’ve built. I was able to use it to make meaningful code changes across several projects. I learned a bunch about working with AWS and with agents.
I actually got to the point where a tool I built was able to make code changes to other projects. That was really motivating.
Why it didn’t work / why I’m shutting it down
At the beginning of the summer, there really wasn’t a product that allowed you to use more than one Claude Code at the same time without putting real effort into understanding Git Worktrees. Conductor was experimenting here, but it was all local.
Between May when I started working on this seriously and when I got it to the point where I was really starting to enjoy using it, everyone launched a version of this and I was no longer convinced that I had something unique to bring here.
What I learned / what I would do differently next time
Realistically I probably started building this too late. I also don’t think I am embedded enough in the community of software developers to get a following here.
I wasn’t active enough in recruiting early users.