Rehab
Someone close to me has struggled with drug addiction for the last 15 years. Thursday, he finally admitted he needed help by admitting himself to inpatient rehab.
This is by no means the end of a painful journey, but the seed of a new beginning. Whether he’s able to build a new life or relapse is up to him. Still, the relief I’m experiencing is hard to describe. I have to be careful not to attach too much hope to this because addictions are insanely sneaky.
I’ll allow myself to indulge this feeling for a moment.
Relationships Relationships Relationships
Loved the CTO Lunches Podcast with Dan Moore, especially the advice that it’s more important than ever to lean into relationships (especially IRL), given the avalanche of AI spam and slop out there.
In short, be more human! Call people. Go to meetups. Schedule lunch with former colleagues.
Schrodingers Startup
I’ve used this term for the last 3-4 years.
The intoxicating and terrifying part about startups is that you’re always one right move from a 10-100X jump in success, and you’re one wrong move away from death.
I’m experiencing a different flavor right now.
My work in AI has opened up 3-4 new career opportunities. It’s a quality problem for sure! However, I’m stuck in a superposition of all of them at once, which can be exhausting. I’m eager for this wave function to collapse into a singular focus in 2027.
My First 30 Second Commercial?
I’ve never been big into video, but this trailer has inspired me to give it a shot.
I already had a wild idea to create a Thanksgiving-themed 30-second commercial for Omarchy Linux. Since I can now do this for under $50 and a few hours with Venice AI, I’m going to give it a shot.
Memorandum of Understanding (MOU)
Michael Girdley posted this invaluable framework for starting new partnerships off on the right foot.
Given the 3-4 opportunities I noted above, I decided to use AI to automate this process. It’s now a Claude Skill and available at https://github.com/rickmanelius/skills.
Now I have AI interview me to get the basic details, and I can get a solid 2-pager in under 30 minutes.
Get Backups
With all the cyber attacks, it’s important to have redundancy.
I now have a backup phone (Android), a backup computer (M1 MacBook with Omarchy Linux), and a backup internet provider (Starlink).
The cost of acquiring these backups was less than $200 (I already had an old laptop). The benefit is that if there’s a zero-day exploit in one ecosystem, there’s a good chance it won’t affect the other at the same time.
Book Pro Tip: Quiz Yourself
I’m currently going through Mike Taylor’s book Context Engineering with DSPy. It’s not overly difficult to read, but the concepts require a lot of thinking to internalize.
So I’ve been screenshotting the chapters and feeding them into Grok Bot to create end-of-chapter tests. This forces me to repeat back the learnings in my own words, which can be challenging at times.
It’s been rewarding as well. I’m already feeling like the lessons are sticking as I try to apply these eval techniques for two of my consulting clients.
OCU’s Brilliant Marketing Move
No notes. Well played.
And yet another reason I love living in Oklahoma.