Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2026/02/04/superbowl-dread/
There is a cloud of dread I can sense in the Bay Area. A shadow ahead of the Super Bowl, which will be hosted this Sunday a few miles from my house. Today it was the “nuke sniffing helicopter” zig zagging around a colleague’s house. Another friend reported that their car was searched by dogs on the way to the UPS store, as they live near the stadium. There’s a general dread of ICE and a surge of Federal Law Enforcement conducting raids while they are in town for game security. Now there are reports of pro-ICE billboards having gone up in San Francisco.
Today I headed home from the office not long after lunch, as I had some tasks to complete at the datacenter. I returned to the office for a spell because Caltrain was effectively shut down. I recognized a familiar pattern: delay due to police activity and single-tracking at the two stations in Palo Alto. I dreaded what that meant: another young person had succumbed to the worst decision they could make. The dread was later confirmed via Reddit.
Keep your eyes open for your neighbors. Ask for help when you need it. Be kind.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2026/02/11/one-liners-2/
“We used to have billionaires that collected books. Now we have, like, the chainsaw guy.” –Ben Levi Ross
“At first, I was amazed at the idea of a social media site for AI bots, but then I remembered that LinkedIn has been around for a long time.” —Jerry
The Matrix isn’t Virtual Reality; it is lonely people holding smartphones close to their faces for gentle loyalty-inducing dopamine injections into their eyeballs. A scruffy group of Resistors persist in The Real World, which is actually pretty nice and totally worth fighting for. Welcome, Neo, to the Real World.
“Too many people in my country don’t even understand what politics are. They conflate it with partisanship and assume all discussions of politics are team sports nonsense that only some folks have to pay attention to.” —Alec Watson
God bless America
Doesn’t matter if it’s Chile, Argentina
Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia
Perú, Ecuador, Brasil, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana
Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras
El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico
Cuba, Dominican Republic
Jamaica, Haiti, the Antilles
United States, Canada
And my motherland, my homeland: Puerto Rico
We’re still here
Now!
–Bad Bunny, via genius.com
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2026/02/20/work-around-work-around/
A software person reflects on the Self:
Tagging a bug “Won’t Fix” doesn’t mean it isn’t real and it doesn’t mean nobody noticed; it means the cost of fixing it exceeds the benefit, or the fix would introduce worse instabilities elsewhere, or the system has already built so many dependencies around the bug that it’s become, functionally, a feature. Every codebase of sufficient age accumulates these. They’re documented, acknowledged, and largely left alone so the engineers can go build something useful.
Note (and this is important): you are a codebase of sufficient age.
[…]
Won’t Fix is the practice of questioning the specification. Most of the things you’re trying to fix about yourself are only problems relative to some imagined ideal of a person you were never going to be. Your distractibility is a bug in the “focused knowledge worker” spec but might be a feature in the “person who notices interesting things and connects them unexpectedly” spec. Your sensitivity and your stubbornness, your tendency to monologue about niche topics at parties: all Won’t Fix, and all load-bearing, and all probably okay in the big, heat-death-of-the-universe scheme of all things.
Joan Westenberg
“Won’t Fix” Self Help
I remember a quote I can’t find, the gist of which was that “prior to the advent of modern psychology, people’s personality disorders were just their personalities.” Older folks are unlikely to “rewrite” their core functionality, but you can tweak around the surfaces of the system to ensure better compatibility. We can also learn not to take other folks’ unintuitive quirks personally.
I have long noticed that I am interested in things for somewhere between three days to three months at a time before my interests move elsewhere. The light of my attention blinks in and out, so I try to bring it around like a lighthouse in hopes that the various ships can course correct before they crash into the boulders.
Anyway, even if you’re not going to rewrite your Being from scratch, you can always work at experimenting with new features. I know some folks like to try a new idea for a month at a time, and evaluate whether this new could-be habit is worth trying to perpetuate. One month is a decent time to road test an idea and also to begin forming a habit, if that is a habit you want to have.
Feedback Welcome
