When I'm at a co-working space, I wear earbuds, the kind with wires. The other end isn't even plugged into anything. It's just my way of saying "don't talk to me".

I live in a hyperconnected world. I am connected to so many people, digitally, constantly, unceasingly. Every week, I fend off attempts to befriend me. Please, no new friends! I don't have enough time for the friends I have. For the family I miss.

So, no, I don't want to talk. I want to be left alone for a couple minutes so I can think. Or not think.

And if that makes you sad, go call your friends and family who probably miss you.

Oh, the fiat transfer situation is even worse than that. My bank is a credit union. They're going to hold that check when it comes in for close to two weeks because that's the policy with six-figure checks. If only I could get paid in bitcoin.

Plan C is an opportunity that has nothing to do with my new business. I'm in talks with a company to join their management team. I've been lightly advising their CEO for free for a few months as we try to find a role. Maybe I'm fooling myself that I can run two of my own companies and join their team, but for the moment, I'm keeping my options open, if only to diversify risk.

My business is pivoting. We have identified a new phase 2. Phase 1 was to get our first client and lock in some revenue. That phase is done except the ink is still wet and we are waiting on first wire transfer.

Phase 2 was going to be me turning some short-term advantages into a few hundred grand so we can power forward. But those sales have been tough and they are a TON of work to service. If we do that we don't get to prep for phase 3 because we're running 12 hour shifts to service customers. That seems like a path to short-term gain with no followup plan. So we pivoted.

Phase 2 is now rushing out a new product by October. There's a specific moment when we think it will make sense with a particular set of customers. We're dumping most of our early revenue into some one-time fixed costs and building this product, so this is once again do or die.

The new product has high upfront costs and then generates annual revenue with minimal overhead for a decent projected project lifespan. It has decent margins. It scales well, fits the team's skillset, and I know how to sell it. I've spent the last two weeks working 12 hours a day on it, which I really couldn't do if I was heads down on my first phase 2 plan.

Meanwhile, my other business is doing ok but it's not going to grow very fast and might even get destroyed by changing business environment. I'm not trying that hard to save it, just because I need to pour energy into the new venture. I guess I should just be grateful I have a Plan B and C.

Fingers crossed! We're so late on this project... going to be a rush when it comes through. It's weird. The contract is like 18 months long but most of the work and the money are in the first quarter.

Today I redid our website so it looks less amateurish. I was getting compliments on our logo but not the site, so I kept the logo and redesigned around it.

I finally signed a contract with my new client. You would think this would be time to celebrate, but the contract is just the MSA. Now we need to sign an SOW. Work was supposed to begin at the start of July. I'm glad I didn't staff up yet!

I am not great at marketing. Sales I can do in my sleep. Marketing not so much. I deal with this by (a) having other people to handle marketing and (b) doing marketing experiments. I have wasted a lot of money on ineffective marketing at times, so the experimental approach lets me gather evidence before committing. Good luck!

This is awesome. congrats on nearing that finish line!

I hope so. My last company ran on infrastructure we built and it was amazingly good for me and maybe less so for the team. This time around, I am trying to design for less tech-savvy teams as this venture is not just hiring developers. Still, I am looking forward to having the revenue to staff it properly!

Speaking of such, contract negotiations are almost done. Trying not to count these chickens before they're hatched, but it's tempting when I am 99% sure I will get a six-figure check next week.

One of my big blockers is setting up infrastructure for the new business. I'm doing it myself instead of paying my usual IT person because I won't have that first check for a few more weeks.

Setting up a wiki, a file server, a secrets manager, etc. I haven't been my own sysadmin for years and I am re-learning a bunch of pieces.

Why don't I just pay $10/user/month for each service I need? Mostly because the recurring costs of carrying people is a poor fit for my structure. My businesses tend to carry a lot of people who don't do much. They're in the system but inactive until I need them. We use a lot of contractors. Paying $100 a year X however many services X a bunch of barely active people is fine when you're flush. Then the business hits a rough patch and you're clawing for savings.

So here I am deploying docker and building new workflows.

I generally don't eat breakfast. My body just doesn't want food in the morning. I usually break my fast in the afternoon. But I'm not strict about it and it's not intentional.

I've had some digestive issues that I solved with diet. When I eat poorly, they reappear. Fasting reset all of that. My intention is to not stray from the plan. Avoiding the stuff that provokes my digestion makes a huge difference in how I feel.

I have a lot of control over my diet --- I do my own cooking and work from home. Things fall apart when I travel, so that's where I want to put some of my intentional energy. I'm going to try meal-planning my travel a bit, which is difficult but might really pay off in keeping me on my food plan.

And I need to get back to movement. I had a nasty injury, but it's been healed for a couple months. It twinges but doesn't hurt. Time to stop using it as an excuse.

The original idea was forcing people to save for retirement, providing a risk-free program, and reducing the public problem of broke old people. It was a good solution in that a lot of people really don't have much of anything saved.

The reason to give older folks their social security is that it's the return on their investment from when they were younger. Not giving it to them would break the promise. And those payments are built into people's retirement plans. You want to not pay them out, then you gotta refund all the money they put in. With interest.

And we do, btw, claw it back from rich people. We tax social security benefits (something Trump wants to eliminate) and people with higher income get taxed at a higher rate. If you're rich, your retirement income is still high as you liquidate investments for living expenses, so you're paying high tax rates on that income. Perhaps you're also living in a high-tax state. That's even more clawback.

But the real reason not to change the program is that it just pays the elderly poor, it becomes a target, just like SNAP. All the lies and machinations designed to kill the social safety net will apply to social security. And pretty soon, we'll have a program that's been trimmed and trimmed and trimmed until it is only used by our poorest and least powerful. And then some asshole will kill it off entirely because preventing people from starving looks like "waste" to people with no empathy.

Thanks! There is so much to do and too little margin to hire enough people to do it, so I'm going to be busy until the end of the year when we get the bulk of the money in the back half of the contract.

This thing is in stages, and we have to prove we can execute with a small piece and then ramp up next year. It's good in that it gives me time to grow. It's bad in that I will be paying a ton of fixed start-up costs from a small bit of revenue.

I am not following any particular protocol. I am eating 100 to 300 calories a day. I'm doing that instead of fasting strictly because I don't think I would enjoy the all-water diet. And I don't think I would stick to it easily.

I like food. My body craves it. Giving in just a little is what lets me get through this. It also fends off the worst of the pangs and perhaps some of the body issues. I feel great today. No aches and pains, no brain fog, no dizziness. Just hunger, but I can handle that.

I will say that today and yesterday, I ate a little more. And a little compulsively too. Still small quantities and still not much overall, but my resistance is weaker and so I am giving in a little more.

Maybe some day I'll try a water fast. For the moment, though, I feel boosted using my current approach and that's good enough.

In previous threads, I mentioned putting in a bid on a project. Just found out we won the bid. This will be enough revenue to get us through 2026, let us invest in a new product, and avoid an early raise. I can even afford to pay myself. If all goes well, I'll make another sale or two and bootstrap this to a few million in annual revenue within 2 years. Then I'll need to find money for the next stage.

As a new company, we bid low. Margins will be tight. But still. I always say you're not a real business until you have revenue. You're not real until that first dollar hits. I don't care how much your investors think you're worth on paper. It's not a business if it has zero revenue.

Now to get the contract finalized and then the real work begins...

Hard to argue with that when I'm sitting here with a cup of it in my hand!

I'm no expert on general-purpose AI summaries. I don't use AI for that much. My clients are using it to, e.g., summarize applications so a reviewer can get high-level context. We pull out the info we most care about, which isn't usually duplicative of what the application includes in its intro.

I don't agree that summaries will replace reading the full doc for a lot of people. People already read headlines instead of articles. Now maybe they'll read headline+summary instead of article. That's not terrible.

And writers are already writing tl;dr. Look at Axios. It is popular because it leads with the takeaways. They offer training in how to write like this as a service to corporate customers. If more humans did that, we might need less AI summarizing.

I am so sick of articles that spend a thousand words painting a picture of how the writer came to care about the topic, describing the great-grandparents of the subject of the piece, and musing on the feathers of a bird they saw they day. Get to the point!

I would like a firefox plugin "summarize this page". I haven't installed on yet, but I bet it exists and maybe I should try it.

That string evaluates to falsy. He ded.

Having built AI summary interfaces for clients, I can say this stuff is not as simplistic as people think. And only the most simplistic analysis could conclude that a summary is equivalent to a full treatment.

A document might serve many audiences, some of whom want more or less detail. Sometimes the summary is enough but you want the detail there in case you want to dive in on some aspect or another.

Maybe you want the summary to know if it's worth reading in full.

And summaries are not one-size-fits-all. When I ask AI to summarize something, I ask it to pull out specific things I care about. You might summarize it differently because you care about other things.

A summary is a lens. It distorts. It also magnifies. Lensed views are useful, but they are not the original.