//Nano banana got me good

Why this List?

I was looking to add an article about playing table tennis to the previous lists of 30 about playing Disc Golf:

And playing poker:

To my surprise, I didn’t write one for TT (my first love)! Looking back at my old seelemons site, I realized that I only wrote a dinky non-list-of-30 blog post in 2011 before my Lists of 30 challenges. To right this wrong, here’s my advice for those who love table tennis. I don’t really get to play in-person as much anymore, but this is what I loved back in my 20s when we played at Spin NY on 23rd and took advantage of those happy hour beers and free table memberships.

1. Get the basics right - Everyone has their own style, but to get to the next level, you must consistently return shots and read spin. When I think about life, I am always trying to reinvent things to solidify good foundations.

2. Learn the game - Obviously, know the rules, but also think about the strategy. We’re all playing the same game with the same rules for fun. House rules can also apply.

3. Reset and be ready - Each serve comes with a sequence of expected returns. The underspin serve with a long push leading to a third ball loop. The short push return leading to a third ball flick. I’ve got a list of pretty well trained expected ball placement shots for the first 5 exchanges. In your work life, always expect the next move from your colleagues. Things will always need to work in parallel for efficient productivity.

4. Get into the zone (AutoZone - old joke) - Mentally visualize your win. High-level players all have shots they can make flawlessly, so it’s the strategy that separates the best. In work, block out time in your calendar for “deep work” without meeting interruptions.

5. Play to your strengths / Play to their weaknesses - Analyze the other person’s weaknesses and memorize the combinations that get the point. Variation in serves is what wins as you keep the person guessing what next moves will come up. In management, see everyone’s potential and give people the chance to improve on their weaknesses.

6. Don’t underestimate your opponent - Treat your opponent as your equal to keep the fight going. Never get complacent because of a perceived gap in skill. It’s also just a game, so you can play to not win.

7. Ignore the score by playing it one point at a time - Points are won one at a time. If you don’t take your lead seriously, you will lose careless points. Focus on the present task, not the mounting pressure of the deadline.

8. Motivate yourself - Coach yourself between points. Give yourself a pep talk to keep your energy up for a positive approach. Some players like to “cho” really loud to get their adrenaline pumping. Visualization makes a massive difference in execution.

9. Footwork is the foundation - You can have a world-class backhand, but if your feet aren’t in position, the shot falls apart. Get to the ball and then do the shot. In your career, “footwork” is your preparation. If you aren’t positioned correctly with the right data, your execution will be shaky.

10. The equipment doesn’t make the player - Master the craft before you blame the tools. You can also get too caught up in the experimentation of different blades and rubber. In tech, don’t get distracted by a “shiny new stack” if you haven’t mastered the underlying logic.

11. Master the short game - Sometimes a soft drop shot or a heavy push sets up the win. There’s this guy I play that likes to do the chicken wing backhand shot that gives some side-top spin. It messes me up all the time. In business, the “short game” is the small talk and networking that builds trust before the big deal.

12. Respect the spin - You have to account for hidden rotation. Life is full of “spin” with hidden agendas and market shifts. If you don’t acknowledge the spin, the ball will fly off the table every time.

13. Stay loose - Tension is the enemy of speed. A tight grip kills the “feeling” of the ball. When you’re doing your loop or backhand, you need that snap coming from the tendons rather than the brute force. Whether at the table or in a boardroom, if you’re too rigid, you can’t react to the unexpected.

14. Record your sessions - Watching yourself on film is a necessary reality check. Audit your own work. Self-awareness is the only real shortcut to improvement.

15. Remember to apologize if you hit the net or edge - Sometimes the ball clips the table edge and there’s nothing you can do about it except say “touchy”. That’s luck. Acknowledge the fluke, move on, and win the next point.

16. Control the middle - Attacking the “crossover point” (the opponent’s elbow) forces indecision. Musa always says “to the body” because it’s harder to move into the right direction to make the shot. In negotiations, find the friction point where the other side is most undecided.

17. Warm up properly - You can’t go from 0 to 100 without a warm-up. Start with basics to get the blood flowing. A few stretches makes a difference especially if you’re twisting a lot for your forehands. In work, clear the small tasks to find your rhythm before attacking high-stakes projects.

18. Find a coach or an equal level playing partner - You can only get so far by hitting against a robot. If you’re playing consistently with another player that’s also bad, you will also get better, but much slower. You need an outside eye to teach the proper technique. Mentorship is a requirement for those who want to lead.

19. Change the pace - If you play at the same speed all game, your opponent will time you and you’d get more predictable. I think it’s actually pretty important to switch things up and change tactics every game. Varying your intensity in project management prevents burnout and keeps the competition guessing.

20. Watch the paddle, not the ball (this is harder in VR) - The angle of the racket tells you where the ball is going before it leaves their side. I do agree that I’ve lost some of my personal sense of ball movement because I play against these bodyless VR figures. Anticipate the source of the action, don’t just react to the result.

21. The 3rd ball attack - This is bread and butter. The goal of the serve isn’t always an ace, but it’s to force a return that you can kill on the third hit. Your initial “pitch” should always be designed to set up your “close.”

22. Recover quickly - After a big smash, the best players reset to a neutral position instantly. Going back to the center will let you get ready for the next attacks. After a big win or loss at work, get back to neutral so you don’t become lazy or discouraged.

23. Vary your serves - The best serve is the same motion with different contact points to drastically change the spin. Diversity in your “opening move” is a massive competitive advantage.

24. Listen to the sound (easier in-person) - The “bok” of the ball tells you if you hit the sweet spot when the rubber grips it just right. This is also useful for services (and a big source of my stomping pain because I thought it was the right thing to do when hiding the contact sound). Develop an “ear” for your industry so you can hear when a project is going off the rails before you see the data.

25. Play the long game - A match is a marathon of sprints. Don’t get discouraged by losing a set. Resilience is super valuable for all things in life.

26. Mind your stance - A wide, low base gives you the power to move in any direction. Build a broad skill set so you can pivot when the market moves.

27. Respect the referee/coach - If you get to this point, then you’re probably playing pretty seriously Remember to shake the hand of the player, referee, and coach after a game. Also, arguing rarely changes the outcome and only disrupts your focus. For work, the “umpires” of the corporate world are legal, HR, and compliance. You need them on your side.

28. Celebrate the process, not just the trophy - The joy is getting better and growing closer with friends. If you only enjoy the victory, you’ll spend 99% of your time unhappy.

29. Know when to take a timeout - A 60-second break can save a 20-minute match. Recognize when you’re “tilted” or frustrated, and step away from the keyboard to reset.

30. Leave it all on the table - When the game is over, shake hands and be proud of the effort. Drink some beers and hang out. It’s the best. Give every project your maximum intent so you never have to ask “what if?”

~See Lemons Love Table Tennis

//What a wild ride of a show. Obsessed with the flying hotdog through space

This Phish show blew my mind and has likely ruined all future entertainment because it’s the singularity of the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I’m actually not sure what to do with myself anymore. Do I quit my job and develop a gambling addiction so I can watch sphere shows for the next few months? I don’t even think the creators of the Sphere knew this level of graphics and creativity was possible.

We bought the 3-day pass show with the stay at the Palazzo in Las Vegas from Apr 16-18 shows.

//Amazing team from an unforgettable show

I’m mostly writing this review to remember the awesomeness of this trip. We had some really fun low stress days and great eats.

Things Phish Does Well

//Our room had a great view and the eyeball freaked us out

• The rooms we got at the Palazzo were sweet and a brisk 20 minutes walk to the venue with a little foot traffic

• The visuals really went above and beyond with no repeated concepts. It’s 100% full scale Sphere with what we called “Winamp” responsive visuals.

• They didn’t just play their music to a background of pre-planned Sphere video. It was responsive to the groove and synchronized seamlessly. They even brought in the full scale light show, but 100x more trippy.

• Friendly wookies. Loved having random conversations on lines and even at the airport. The topic of Phish is a bonding experience.

//Phish Sphere gift bag!

• You get an awesome giftbag which includes a blanket and baggage tag

Things to Know

//Great collection of Pliny the Elder

//We did great.

• It’s Vegas so it’s going to be expensive (like $16 beers stadium expensive just drinking at the casino). If you want to save a bit of money, you can go to Whole Foods and stuff your suitcase with Plinys.

//Nom nom nom on the huge Italian sandwiches

• Try a sandwich at All’Antico Vinaio (it’s in the Via Via food court). We went here 3 times and the Paradiso really hit the spot. It didn’t hurt that we were talking about eating mortadella sandwiches while watching Stanley Tucci in Italy while on the plane ride.

• Everything in Vegas is much farther than you think. Walking between casinos is a journey.

• Bring cash if you’re into the gambling thing

Our Itinerary

Thurs

Flew in by 9AM, so we went to grab a brunch at the Broken Yolk Cafe. The food was typical diner afair, but I think they’re most famous for their pancakes. Definitely did not like their huevos rancheros.

Walked to Whole Foods across the street and found all the Pliny and snacks.

Since we were too early for check-in, we just had some expensive beer and learned about horse gambling

//Great view from our hotel room

Once we got into the room, we enjoyed some Pliny and just chilled out.

//Wandering Venetian was pretty fun.

One of the Dads in the neighborhood flew by to hang out for the night, so we looked on Stubhub and found a last minute $40 ticket (obstructed view). I guess we just got lucky?

Apr 16 Day 1 Phish Show at Sphere

//The elevator door journey was really cool. This one was definitely planned with the song.

//The wall of posters that turned into the Interstellar multidimensional space was so cool

//That spider really bothered me. It crawled around, but the webs became a beautiful piece

//Dog licking the screen was so trippy. There was also a part with the Tesla going through a car wash that was very upbeat.

//Hot dogs in space with lots of random foods. Definitely a crowd pleaser.

Fri

//Old ladies pushing carts with big family tables. Authentic goodness.

Dim sum breakfast at Asian BBQ. As someone who grew up eating dim sum, this place was excellent. I wish I had this level of familiarity in Denver, but I’d probably get fat eating delicious tripe and chicken feet.

//We needed some non-pliny and seltzer, but we also bought more Pliny

Whole foods run for more beer - Was this necessary? No. Did we do it anyway? Yes.

//What a nice pool

Drink beer by the pool in our waterbottles.

Apr 17 Day 2 Phish Show at Sphere

//Portapottys everywhere

//Turntable with so many random dancing dudes and then some great ghostly effects

//Single photo from the barn turned into all these cool geometric shapes and rotations. also went to space.

//There were some trippy colors and 8-bit gaming themes

//Second set started with the light rig, which went even crazier than the first time

//The floating whale around the spooky forest was dope. Loved the planet and black hole looking thing

Sat

//The Huevos con Chorizo y Papa as a burrito with the fresh habanero sauce was so good

Breakfast at Mi Barrio - This was one of the top 5 burritos I’ve had in my life. I just loved the beans and flavor from the chorizo. Highly recommended.

//Get the “Duck you and the haze you rode in on”

Able Baker Brewing - I don’t think all the beers are good, but the one I had was excellent and it was a great starting point to the Brewery row day drinking we had planned.

//Walking around the market to see some graffiti

//Damn you super fast shuffleboard!

Bad beat brewing with shuffle board - Came for the beer and stayed for the shuffleboard. We honestly had a great time trying to get used to this slippery-ass board.

//The portraits of dogs are hilarious

Stray Pirate Tropical Cocktails & Effects - We stumbled in here because someone opened the door when we walked by and it looked cool. This is the way decisions are made.

//It was indeed a pretty yurt and the food was pretty good too

Viking Mike’s Alpine Yurt Bar - Why not have a nice cocktail in a yurt? Also, I’ve never been in a yurt before and this felt like the right time.

Apr 18 Day 3 Phish Show at Sphere

This was not only the best show out of the 3 days, but it was also the best Phish show I’ve ever seen and possibly the best piece of entertainment I’ve ever watched in my life. I am forever going to chase this high now.

//The light show started off strong

//I loved this artwork. So cool seeing the rock opera alive.

//I really liked sitting in that nest with the other birds

//It felt like some fractal view with a huge splash of color

//These colors were so cool. I definitely felt like my brain was melting through this part

//the blackhole of color was really wild

//giant robots walking the hills

//Classic light show lazers

//the dentist part was a bit upsetting (especially when the wrecking ball knocked out the teeth)

//oh man so much was happening

//Flying through the honeycomb was super dope

//I can’t believe it kept on going, but all good things come to an end

Sun

//The mole and cookies ‘n cream tini were so good

Breakfast at Mi Barrio - I usually like going to multiple restaurants for variety, but I’m glad we went back to try more things on the menu. This place was too good to pass up.

Early morning beers before my flight. This was definitely a once-in-a-lifetime type of trip.

I am still processing through the 30+ minutes of 15-second clips I’ve taken over the past few days. Find me on Instagram if you’d like to see them. Videos are posted on my Instagram:

~See Lemons Love Phish at the Sphere

//Nano banana 2 making me techni-color

Why this List?

Continuing my tradition of what it means to be human. This is just the stuff on my Keep notes. See the bottom for the other random insights. I love re-reading my random Keep notes. I did put this all into a NotebookLM, but I didn’t like the slides output. Let’s just stick to the old process.

1. Happiness is a combination of Significance, Coherence, and Meaning

2. Forecast: Sunny with afternoon margs

3. If you love being right, then you'll be right alone.

4. That steak is beyond “well done.” It's beyond “congratulations.”

5. I renamed my toilet “Jim” instead of “John.” People are really impressed when I tell them I go to the “Jim” every morning.

6. Is it still anxiety if it’s rational?

7. When someone tells me their hands are cold, there's a 95% chance they will show me how cold they are by touching me.

8. I just want to make curiosity contagious.

9. We have wisdom. AI has intelligence. We can apply it.

10. It's unbelievable how much work it takes to have a mid body and clean house

11. Something great is about to happen when you're bored.

12. Stay away from negative people. They have a problem for every solution.

13. “You pile up enough tomorrows, and you’ll find you are left with nothing but a lot of empty yesterdays.” Go do something today!

14. Bill Nye is short for William New years eve.

15. Actions speak louder than words. Unless that action is talking, then it's about the same.

16. I'm an adult the same way a tomato is a fruit.

17. I hate imitation crab. Like just be yourself, bro.

18. "Damn girl, are you Black Friday because I'm wondering what your deal is."

19. Fall in love with the process in your life.

20. Republicans. They love humanity, but they hate people.

21. What if soy milk is just regular milk introducing itself in Spanish?

22. My 5 to 9 after my 9 to 5.

23. Do you ever think scabs are just bacon for vampires?

24. Bats are just Halloween butterflies.

25. Had pizza without Lactaid. I’m just raw dogging it.

26. Everything I lose makes space for everything I need. (Except money. I need more money.)

27. If my wife ever tells me her head hurts, I'd just say "I dunno, babe. Your head feels pretty good to me." and then go in for a high five.

28. Poverty is poverty. It’s not optional. Optional poverty is camping.

29. I'm a real horror buff. A term for people who love to watch horror movies naked.

30. Stop spilling the tea because the ingredients just walked in.

~See Lemons Randomly Observe even more

Random Observation/Comment #413: The Bad Idea Bears are not foreign to layovers and have enough experience to make the most out of the transfer in a new country.

Layover trip planning is a completely separate beast to regular trip planning because TIME is the largest constraint. In most cases, you want to err on the side of caution and stay within the international terminal as to:

1. Not miss your connecting flight and get screwed staying in your random layover city

2. Not pay for the visa if it is required for certain countries

3. Not to pay extra money on transportation into the city to only spend a few ours there before rushing and returning to the gate

4. Not exchange foreign money

All of these reasons are quite valid and usually sway us to stay in the airport, but there are exceptions:

1. Layover is longer than 6 hours and there’s something close-by to see or eat

2. You’ve never been to the country and you want to get a passport stamp

Due to this compulsive desire to make our passports look badass, we at least go through security to get the passport stamp and just walk right back into the airport. We’ve done this on multiple occasions for Turkey, Japan, and Nigeria (or at least tried).

By far, my favorite layover destination is Narita Airport in Japan. After exiting the terminal, the Tourist Information center was extremely friendly and helpful to provide us with a 2-3 hour typical itinerary for layovers that worked extremely well.  Here’s what we did:

• Take the Keisei Main Line one stop (7 minutes – cost 250 yen). This train comes every 20 minutes on the 10/30/50 of the hour when going West.

• Eat amazing sushi at Edokkozushi Sandohonten.  Prices are very reasonable and the servings are filling. Even just for this, I’d do this layover every time.

• Take a walk through the Naritasaan Shinshoji temple. If you’ve never been to Japan, this temple will be a nice treat for you. You can hear the wind blow in peace and I think it’s the perfect introduction and lure for Japanese culture.

• Head back and eat ramen. Because it’s so hard to find reasonably priced Japanese food in NYC that matches the quality, we actually sat down and had a second/third lunch ramen. It was so fresh and delicious that I didn’t care I had a 13-hour flight back to Chicago.

Alternatively, it looks like the eel is very famous in this location. A nice bowl of eel and rice would have been a lovely treat as well. Alas, I only have room for so many lunches.

The whole layover experience took 2.5 hours max and we were so glad we did it. Even if you just miss the train both ways, you have: 20 min train wait + 7 min commute + 30 min eat sushi + 13 min walk to temple + 30 min relax at temple + 13 min walk back + 20 min train wait + 7 min commute = 140 min.

If you’re ever in Narita airport, spend the 500 yen for the train round-trip commute and go have some 2000 yen sushi with a relaxing walk. It’s certainly worth the extra time and effort. Also note, you can leave your bags at the airport storage for 500 yen. Ask the tourist information area for more details.

~See Lemons Love Narita Layovers

//Agentic collaboration led by humans

Why this list?

What does an “Agent-Augmented Enterprise” look like? At the moment, we’ve only seen high efficiency from solo entrepreneurs, but at some point we need to build a family of contributors. It can’t just be one person and 100 agents doing everything or else we don’t feel included in the project’s strategy and trajectory.

The “efficiency-only” model of AI where you just dictate will lead to a small company with very high infrastructure costs. What we want to keep in the complexity of enterprise work is the vibrancy, diverse views, and entropy that comes from human collaboration. The agents are only acting as tools of the individual the company hired and not the replacement for creativity and headcount.

​I hope the future has a “Bring Your Own Agents” (BYOA) ecosystem to the Enterprise’s core. Humans can still decide what to contribute from their agentic operating system or tech stack preferences. The software product itself will probably be a hive mind collaboration tool that also fosters a culture of understanding the product.

​The Philosophy of Human-Agent Teams

1. ​BYOA (Bring Your Own Agent) - Employees are encouraged to curate their own digital “staff” that reflects their unique working style. They may be more familiar with how these agents are optimized and how they can be split to reduce context window and manage their tokens.

2. ​The Anti-Monolith - We reject the single “Corporate GPT” in favor of a diverse “Agent Marketplace” within the company. A single GPT that is the whole company’s codebase doesn’t really make sense because it would discourage diverse thinking. If your whole company is just your super computer then the human job is now the scheduling of tasks the super computer executes? That sounds like a one person job, which can get disillusioned with power.

3. ​Entropy as an Asset - Multiple agents with different “personalities” or logic models prevent groupthink and boring, mid-level outputs. Entropy comes from human understanding, which breeds wrong answers and problems that require unique solutions. We’re excellent random generators.

4. ​The Agent-to-Human Ratio - Success is measured by how many agents a person can lead, not how many humans they can replace. If you’re able to mentally cover the deliverables across delegating your tasks to multiple agents, then perhaps you can have a one-person marketing team. In many cases, smaller companies will give a head of Marketing a large budget so they can delegate out to consultants all of the chunks of work. Agents management will be similar as a single person is still accountable for the on-time delivery.

5. ​Agency over Autonomy - Humans have the final agency; agents have the task-level autonomy.

6. ​Human-in-the-Loop-by-Design - Software must require human “taste” and “ethical sign-off” at critical forks in the road.

​The Software & Product Mechanics

7. ​Contribution Commitments - The collaborative product we build is a GitHub/Source control for ideas. The individuals “commit” agent-generated drafts to a shared enterprise goal. Maybe it’s a slack plug-in for discussion. Maybe it gets saved into Notion database and we spend time in meetings reviewing these core pieces. Maybe they autogenerate into slides and we talk through slides as a job.

8. ​The “Agent Handshake” - Interoperability protocols that allow my research agent to talk to your design agent seamlessly. I think this type of collaboration is more important than the agentic commerce where my agents go off and try to spend my money on things.

9. ​Attribution Ledger - Every final product clearly tracks which human led which agent to create which specific component. This is like the break-glass controls we had for finding proper accountability. I guess it can also be a shared log.

10. ​Agent “Forking” - If a teammate has a highly effective agent setup, others can “fork” it and adapt it to their own style. It would be awesome if the original creator and trainer of the agent is paid for their fork.

11. ​The Sandbox Buffer - A private space where users can experiment with their agents before “submitting” results to the team. Perhaps we all work in a new Slack with our agent teams that use this space as a discussion area of outputs.

12. ​Collective Memory - An enterprise layer that learns from the output of the agents, not the private prompts of the individuals. We can only learn from what the humans submit since they are the ones ultimately accountable.

​Preserving People Skills & Growth

13. ​The “Manager of Machines” Role - I think this is one of the hardest things because engineering managers are usually empathetic with the process of being individual contributors. This younger generation of workers may need to learn more skills around managing before they even get to mature into that role. The “Agent Architects” will likely become second nature just like it was easy for our generation to be task-takers.

14. ​Prompt Empathy - Learning to communicate clearly with AI actually improves how we communicate requirements to other humans. We also want clear communication in order to get clear results. It will pay (literally) to be eloquent and expressive.

15. ​The Value of “The Mess” - Preserving whiteboards and brainstorming sessions where agents are barred, to keep human friction alive. There’s definitely a human premium here, but I think we do the best collaborative understanding together.

16. ​Skill Longevity - Focusing training on high-level strategy, ethics, and “taste” because things agents can’t yet replicate.

17. ​Peer Review 2.0 - Teammates review the logic behind a peer’s agent-workflow, not just the final text. I think it’s interesting to see through why the queries go through and what it means for the final output.

18. ​The Mentorship Loop - Seniors teach juniors not how to do the work, but how to guide the agents to do the work excellently. There’s a mental maturity that will be needed to have a successful and collaborative product.

​The New Economic & VC Model

19. ​The “Non-Solo” Solo-Preneur - A startup of 3 people that operates with the output of 30, requiring (and deserving) VC scale.

20. ​IP Ownership - Individuals “own” their specific agent-configurations (the “how”), while the enterprise owns the result (the “what”).

21. ​The Dividend of Time - Using AI-gained efficiency to fund 4-day weeks or “creative sabbaticals” rather than just more tasks.

22. ​Agent Diversity Scores - Measuring a team’s health by the variety of AI models and workflows they utilize. This might be a stretch, but we’ll probably find cycles to try out different models.

23. ​The “Quality over Speed” Metric - Judging teams by the depth of their output, given that speed is now a commodity.

​Culture & Human Value

24. ​Cognitive Sovereignty - No one is forced to use a specific AI tool. You own your thought process.

25. ​The Emotional Layer - Agents handle the data while the humans handle the morale, the conflict resolution, and the vision. I don’t know if we’ll “miss” the way we work together now, but there is something special about making friends with coworkers and having the opportunities to grow deeper than the paycheck.

26. ​Agent Transparency - Being open about when an agent was used, so human “raw” talent is still recognized and celebrated. I bet everyone thinks I don’t write lists of 30 anymore (but I do).

27. ​The “Human-Only” Vault - Creating space for ideas that are deliberately developed without AI interference.

28. ​Collaborative Ownership - The product makes it easy to see how 10 different people (and their 50 agents) built a single masterpiece.

29. ​Anti-Isolation Protocols - Software features that require human-to-human syncs to unlock certain agent capabilities.

30. ​The “Soul” Check - A final project phase where the team asks: “Is this technically perfect but soulless? How do we make it human?”

~See Lemons Prepare for the Agentic Future of Work

//Nano banana doing a good job

Why this list?

If there are no moats and switching costs for software goes to 0 then what is the special sauce of a company? Why would I not just vibe code my own features and use your API? Or better yet, start to de-platform myself and just start owning my own data?

I’m thinking about how this as how we can create moats in our own projects. This may not apply to software anymore, but maybe we can see different ways it does. Features can be copied. Platform stickiness helps with habits. Users can change patterns slowly. AI agents are probably the most fickle.

The Foundations of Defensibility

1. ​Network Effects - The classic. The product becomes exponentially more valuable as more people use it (e.g., a marketplace or a social protocol).

2. Proprietary Data Loops - Not just having data, but a system where every user interaction improves the model/product for the next user, creating a gap competitors can’t bridge.

3. High Switching Costs - The “pain of migration.” This isn’t just about technical lock-in, but the mental energy required to move a workflow.

4. Brand as Trust - In a world of infinite AI-generated “vibes,” a brand that stands for “this won’t break” or “this is ethically sourced” becomes a massive moat.

5. ​Platform Habituation - When a tool becomes “muscle memory.” You don’t use it because it’s the best; you use it because your fingers know the shortcuts. What apps do you open up by default when you need that dopamine hit on your phone?

6. ​Integration Depth - Being the “glue” between ten other indispensable tools. If removing you breaks the ecosystem, then you’re safe.

7. ​Community Sovereignty - A group of users who feels a sense of ownership. You can copy a feature, but you can’t “vibe code” a community of 10,000 advocates.

​The “Human” Moats

8. Curation and Taste - AI can generate everything, but it can’t tell you what’s cool or right for your specific context. Taste is the new frontier of defensibility.

9. ​Distribution Power - Having the “pipes” to get a product in front of people. Even a mediocre app with 1 million eyeballs beats a perfect app with zero.

10. ​The “Lindy Effect” of Reputation - The longer your software has existed and stayed reliable, the more likely it is to be chosen by risk-averse enterprises.

11. ​Localized Nuance - Software that understands specific cultural, legal, or regional “un-written rules” that a general LLM might miss.

12. ​Personal Identity - Software that becomes part of who the user is (e.g., your blog, your fitness tracker, your specific setup). I personally think this is a great place to start as you own your AI Operating System and tech stack.

​Technical & Structural Barriers

13. Regulatory Moats - Compliance, SOC2, HIPAA. This is the boring stuff that “vibe coders” hate doing but enterprises require.

14. ​Hardware Synergies - Software that works better because it’s optimized for specific hardware (the Apple approach).

15. ​Economies of Scale - Being able to provide the service so cheaply because of your infrastructure that it’s not worth it for someone to “vibe code” their own.

16. ​First-Party Hardware/IoT - If your software controls a physical device in my house, I’m not switching easily. Especially if this is a one-time purchase, then I’m probably going to feel like there’s a sunken coast to already have a particular brand or type of hardware.

17. ​Unique Algorithms - While rare now, there are still “math-heavy” problems that a prompt can’t solve as well as a dedicated PhD team.

​Defensive Strategies in the AI Age

18. The “Workflow” Moat - Don’t just provide an API; provide the entire end-to-end experience that saves a human 4 hours of clicking. More importantly, this could save your agent hours of clicking and interpreting GUIs.

19. ​Vertical Integration - Solving everything for one specific industry (e.g., software just for dental hygienists) rather than being a horizontal tool.

20. ​Offline Capabilities - In a world of cloud-dependency, being the tool that works in a cabin in the woods is a moat.

21. ​Predictive Anticipation - Not just responding to prompts, but knowing what the user needs before they ask based on historical context.

22. ​Permissioned Access - Holding the keys to a specific, high-value network or gated set of information.

​Intellectual & Personal Moats

23. The “Founder’s Vision” - A roadmap that makes sense five years out. AI can iterate on the now, but it struggles to invent a specific future. I think the Founding team itself needs to agree on where the whole product heads towards for this collaborative joint arrow towards new opportunities.

24. ​Patent Portfolios - The old-school way. Still effective for protecting core underlying IP in certain jurisdictions.

25. ​Exceptional Support - When things break (and they will), having a human who answers the phone is a moat. I feel like these might be longer sessions and maybe fun if they were in person.

26. ​Education and Certification - If you train the workforce to use your tool, the workforce will demand your tool at their next job.

27. ​Speed of Evolution - If you ship faster and build a corpus of features then your vibe code output starting from scratch from different people every time will not catch up fully. I’m looking forward to better tooling.

28. ​Exclusivity - Intentionally limiting access to create a “velvet rope” effect.

29. ​Emotional Resonance - Making the user feel something. Most software is cold, so building the stuff we love is defensible.

30. Simplicity - In a world of “infinite features,” the tool that does one thing perfectly and then gets out of the way is the most defensible of all.

~See Lemons Work on Defensible Software

//Just doing some drawings

Theme of the Month - Health and Recovery

The questions/thoughts that led me to the posts for Mar 2026 were:

• What lessons did you learn from buying a new car (during COVID)? (Aug 2020)

• How did the basement turn out?

• How was Hong Kong back in 2015?

• Who are 30 important contacts you should have?

• What are your favorite Chuck Norris facts?

So we’re at war. I predicted this last year that both the economy and the media needs distractions to cover a lot of broken spirals:

• Wealth gap - Rich are getting richer using AI tooling and crazy valuations. People in the lower class struggle to do better this generation. Houses too expensive. Mortgages too high.

• Debt Ceiling - We’ve printed so much more money in the past year than we did in the previous decade. It’s insane. Cracks are showing in the bond market. It’s not looking good. Once interest rates drop to 0, we’re going to see a cascading crater.

• AI job displacement - If you’ve lost your job, you’re definitely exploring how to use AI tools even closer (because maybe you can automate your work and get hired somewhere else).

• Change in Hiring and Company Structure - As of right now, the associates are finding it harder to get jobs when the work being replaced is “assistant” level tasks. What will be crazy in the next few years is that the AI systems in place will be good enough to be self managed so the more senior people will start to lose jobs and the younger candidates will increase as they show more native resiliency and comfort in the uncertainty of job security. The wage for white collar jobs will decrease. SaaS subscriptions will get replaced with AI tooling ones.

• Gambling - Whether you’re predicting popular sports or you’re degen in Polymarket, this is a new full-time job for your AI bots. The financial layer will be scalped with bots and we’ll see a much more liquid set of markets. To be honest, derivatives are definitely propping up the up-only market.

• Future of Work - What do we even do? Is our job just commanding agents around to complete workflows? I haven’t written a line of code in months and to be honest, I don’t even know the codebase anymore. I get a high level structure, but it’s just a bunch of files. Is it even useful?

• Company Culture - If everyone is heads down vibe working in their own little deliverable corner, then when do we get to connect? Where’s the culture? How do younger people meet spouses? How do we mentor each other and motivate each other?

• Burn out from refactoring - The next few cycles of AI tooling will make the current ones obsolete and we’ll need to refactor everything again. This will keep happening until there’s no “standard” tech stack and everything is bespoke with terrible support. I mean, I guess the support comes from the dependency of the AI Agent that wrote your code.

• Trust and evidence - If there was an anomaly like alien invasion or attack on NYC, it’s actually not that hard to convince me that these things did (or did not) happen. I’d honestly ping friends through WhatsApp to see if they heard anything. I don’t actually know what is real because it’s all coming from the same phone and set of feeds with amplification through the same mess of controlled media. Does it actually matter?

I guess this could have been a list of 30, but it was nice to physically type things out.

This was a nice month of learning, growth, and healing. I played board games with friends, built some Gundam models, and automated some home control centers. Just normal side projects keeping things interesting. I hope to keep this mindset moving forward.

The blogposts I published this month were:

Buying a car is hard to navigate. I read so many blogs and reddit posts about it, but it turns out being in a crazy COVID world actually made a lot of the negotiation and shopping around easier.

I love my basement. I think it has distracted me nicely from the crazy cycle of AI.

Hong Kong is still one of my favorite places to go. I should go back sooner than later before I develop a seafood allergy.

Sometimes you just need to know some awesome people to help you with expertise. I guess you can also just have a really smart Clembot. I realized this list is probably different in the next 3 years, so I’ll be sure to revisit.

Chuck Norris is a legend. RIP.

Some ideas for April 2026?

• 30 Beginner Table tennis Advice - I can’t believe I haven’t published one of these yet!

• Lists of 30 App - This was a fun vibe coded app that I’m ready to reveal post Spring Break. Maybe it’ll be a replacement to this?

• 30 Vibe working experiments - With AI doing all the digital things, here are the 30 rabbit hole questions and results I’ve gotten just querying Clembot a bit deeper. This is a great 30 day challenge.

• Life in Lists of 30 Audiobooks - As I record these, it’s actually pretty relaxing. It feels a bit weird reading my own book.

Thank you for reading and I hope everyone stays safe! See y’all in the new year!

Please suggest a list of 30 and I’ll write it! I’ve written 350+ lists of 30 and only publish ones that I think other people would enjoy. It’s my fun brainstorming routine.

—

//IRL drawing of Chuck Norris (but I may have accidentally drawn that flannel wearing meme dude that gives a thumbs up)

Why this List?

Chuck Norris is a multi-dimensional treasure. There are probably interdimensional beings that consider how their lives are merely imaginations of Chuck Norris living on another plane of existence. This is by far my favorite internet trend.

//for funsies, I fed the image into veo3

To pay homage to the legend, here’s some of my favorite Chuck Norris facts:

1. There is no chin behind Chuck Norris’s beard. There is only another fist.

2. Evolution doesn’t exist. Just a list of creatures Chuck Norris allows to live.

3. The universe is expanding because everything is trying to get as far away from Chuck Norris as possible.

4. Death once had a near-Chuck-Norris experience.

5. Chuck Norris doesn’t do push-ups. He pushes the Earth down.

6. Chuck Norris can gargle peanut butter.

7. When Chuck Norris slices onions, the onions cry.

8. Chuck Norris threw a grenade and killed 50 people. Then it exploded.

9. If you search for "Chuck Norris" on Google, it doesn't show results. It just says, "Run while you still can."

10. Chuck Norris doesn't use a mirror. There can only be one Chuck Norris.

11. Chuck Norris doesn't have a spam folder. No one dares to send him junk mail.

12. Sharks dedicate one week a year to "Chuck Norris Week."

13. Energy cannot be created or destroyed—unless Chuck Norris says otherwise.

14. When Chuck Norris was a kid, his parents slept in his bed because they were scared of the dark.

15. Chuck Norris’s tears can cure cancer. Too bad he has never cried.

16. Chuck Norris can slam a revolving door.

17. Chuck Norris’s calendar goes from March 31st straight to April 2nd. No one fools Chuck Norris.

18. The Great Wall was originally built to keep Chuck Norris out. It failed miserably.

19. Chuck Norris once won a World Series of Poker holding a Joker, a Get Out of Jail Free card, and a library card.

20. Chuck Norris doesn’t read books. He stares them down until they give him the information he wants.

21. Chuck Norris’s keyboard doesn’t have a "Delete" key. Chuck Norris is the "Delete" key.

22. Chuck Norris taught gravity how to pull.

23. Black holes are just places where Chuck Norris punched the universe.

24. Chuck Norris invented the giraffe when he gave a horse an uppercut.

25. Chuck Norris’ periodic table only has one element. The element of surprise.

26. History books are just a list of things Chuck Norris allowed to happen.

27. Superman wears Chuck Norris pajamas.

28. Chuck Norris can jump over a house. He doesn't, though—he just walks through the walls.

29. The Genesis Block wasn't mined; Chuck Norris just looked at a pile of data and told it to stay put.

30. Chuck Norris doesn’t write lists of 30. He writes lists of whatever he wants, and the numbers just agree with him.

~See Lemons Miss Chuck Norris

Random Observation/Comment #682: “It’s not about who you know, it’s about who knows you.”

Why this list?

Knowledge is at our fingertips, but we can’t have hands-on business or technical experience across all topics. Sometimes, you just need to “know a guy” that can get you connected to the right services. Maybe it’s good enough to just “know a guy that knows all the guys.” Maybe I can be that guy.

This is not an exclusive list for careers of importance – a single friend can cover a lot of these areas if they are passionate about these things. Also, I’m clearly not just your friend because you contribute some specialized service – that just feels wrong. I do think that I can provide some of these services and I’m happy to excel as a subject matter expert.

1. Doctor – Not to call up and ask about lumps, but it’s always good to ask for high level advice.

2. Lawyer – The legal network is pretty important in the US. So many people suing each other all the time. I’d ask for advice from a lawyer friend for some base activities. At least needed for writing and executing a will.

3. Accountant – Underrated person to know not just for taxes, but for tax advice.

4. IT guy – Hey, this is usually me. Yes, I can probably make your computer and phone faster as well as make sure you have an awesome build. Also, you always need a devops guy.

5. Scientist – Someone that studies obscure sciences like infectious diseases could randomly come in handy during something like a pandemic.

6. Mechanic – I wish I knew more about cars, but the truth is I am terrible at maintenance and would rather know someone to help me with changing oil.

7. Entrepreneur – Some of this is for the know-how in bootstrapping, but a lot of it is just thought leadership in the field. Entrepreneurs (at least the successful ones) have a tendency to know a lot of people and have grit to get answers.

8. Publisher – I love picking their brains about books in general and getting advice for book writing, editing, and promotion. I think everyone should try writing a book or at least memoirs. Maybe it’s a somewhat dying field.

9. English/Philosophy professor – From my experience, professors as friends are actually pretty cool. They read such inspiring passages and enjoy sharing inspiration.

10. Someone in movie production – This is not to say I’d want to make a movie, but the movie production must take a lot of contacts. I especially love post production work.

11. Photographer – Hey, this is also me. I may not be able to shoot your wedding, but I can make recommendations and view a portfolio and price to see if they’re good.

12. Videographer / Video editor – Honestly, so much is in video nowadays that you’ll probably want to do something in this medium and need to ask for advice about equipment, lighting setup, or video processing software. I may also group into this a bit of directing and editing.

13. Musician – You certainly know how to party. Not that I’d start a band, but musicians are fun and have great stories if they play professionally.

14. Dancer – In case you ever need to learn a wedding dance or just a simple box step, dancers can at least help you practice.

15. Long term investment manager – I don’t give short term investment advice, but by current macro economic trends, you’ll probably see bigger companies getting bigger, tech boom, pharma overall growth, home improvement growth, Chinese stock growth, alternative energy added demand, and fast bank rebounds.

16. Technical Analyst / Trader – They probably won’t give you trading advice and just say to invest money long term instead of timing the market, but they tend to give great insight.

17. Economist – Not to help write papers, but good conversations on emerging patterns

18. Suit maker – This used to be more important, and I definitely got a guy for this. Class never goes out of style.

19. Home improvement expert – It’s nice to borrow a ladder. Generally, I know very little about taking care of a house, so this is a necessary friend connection. Extra points for being a neighbor. Need a good friend to help me hang up a tree.

20. Carpenter – Sometimes home made vintage pieces bring a living room together. I’d totally want to ask someone to help me build a media console table.

21. Chef / Home cook – I’d ask for recipes, but I really just want to cook with you. Can’t wait for potlucks to be a thing again. Also super fun to do niche stuff like Instagram-worthy cheese platters.

22. Beer brewer – Brewers always have new beers to try out. I don’t think I’ll get tired of IPAs out here. Brewers are also great chemists.

23. Outdoors person – Most valuable long term skill if the world gets blasted back to pre-tech days. I have a list of 30 survival skills I should probably learn better.

24. Graphics designer – Sometimes you need advice on how to make an awesome logo. I’ve found graphics designers to have good taste.

25. Gardener – Sometimes you just need advice on plants and landscaping. Gardener friends hopefully have good connections in this area.

26. Someone who stays in shape – Super health conscious people have great recipes and recommendations on workout routines. I may not do them all, but I can incorporate some good ones.

27. Space enthusiasts – There’s just so much cool stuff about privatized space programs. SpaceX launches. Starlink. So cool. Need a space guy to talk space stuff.

28. City local guide – I like doing stuff around the city and eating at restaurants off of recommendations. Anyone who explores a city or hikes is welcome to chat about the hidden treasures.

29. Sports enthusiast – If you know me, you know I rarely bring up sports. I know enough to enjoy watching it, but I have no passion towards teams or rivalries. Usually cheering for the underdog.

30. Cryptocurrency guy – This me. I do more enterprise integrations, but I know more about this topic than a normal/sane person should.

Which person are you for this relationship? Do people come to you for advice for specialized areas?

*** Listener – One of the hardest skills and important traits because it’s not always about solutions and advice. Sometimes listening and making space is the solution.

~See Lemons Know a Guy for Everything

Random Observation/Comment #515: If you read TripAdvisor, almost every recommendation for visiting Hong Kong is eating food (it’s not, but it should be). Bring your appetite and elastic waist pants.

Things Hong Kong Does Well

• Seafood. I love the large family style dinners that give you a bit of everything. Give me all the jellyfish, scallops, and steamed fish!

• MTR. The metro in HK is much simpler than the one in Tokyo, so you can get to any area within 45 minutes. It runs frequently and on time with perfectly timed connections. I’ve never waited on a platform for longer than 2 minutes for the next train. The MTR is also extremely clean and for some reason I love the smell.

• Octopus cards. This is similar to what they have for PASMO in Japan and the Oyster card in London. You can basically pay for everything with this card so it’s super convenient.

• Air conditioning. They’ve got it blasting full speed everywhere. This might be an issue for some people because it’s easy to get sick when moving between 100% humidity and freezer cold. Glasses wearers will be foggy.

• Drinking games. Every country has their own traditional drinking games, but I love the Hong Kong ones because it involves shaking dice. It gets pretty crazy and out of control, but it’s something to try.

• Midnight snacks. As mentioned, you won’t go hungry in Hong Kong. The 1AM skewers are so delicious.

Things Hong Kong can improve

• Street/Building cleanliness. If you’ve been to Chinatown in NYC, then you can imagine what some of the streets look like in Hong Kong. It’s not always dirtiness, but there are market areas that have the fishy smells.

• Sympathy for those allergic to seafood. Everything has seafood in it. I guess you can always have beef chow fun.

• More tourist attractions? I’m on the fence about this because I love Hong Kong as it is, but I feel like I’d run out of dating idea. In NYC, London, Paris, Tokyo, etc, I’d probably never run out of dating ideas.

• Humidity. Damn! I think the hot weather puts me in a complaining mood.

Lessons Learned

• Avoid the summer months. It’s just hot and humid. The fall to winter times are probably better. You can eat any time of year and winter has shabu shabu.

• Get more custom made suits. I think I will only get my suits made in Hong Kong (Sam’s Tailor) from now forward. They had a 48-hour turn around time and my three-piece suit was less than $550. I like the measurements they made and it was the perfect fit. I also can’t gain any weight for the wedding.

• Spend more time chatting with family. This is more of a personal reflection, but I think I could have spent more time catching up with my cousins. We only see each other once every few years and they’ve grown up so much. I feel like I should have imparted some wisdom to them. I also wish I asked my grandma more questions about her past. It would have been perfect for storycorps, but it’s so hard to get it all started.

Activities

• Victoria Peak at night – take the cable car up and witness the magnificent view. I don’t think it’s necessary to pay for the extra tickets up to the other observatory when the roof of the mall view was just as good. I do highly recommend going to the Wildfire and ordering the “Jumbo” size drinks. They are very jumbo.

• Big Buddha – it’s a bit far to get to, but it’s a beautiful escape from the city and great for hiking. There are a lot of tour buses that go there as well.

• Tsim Sha Tsui – great place to see the Hong Kong skyline and take a star ferry. People say you should take one of the junker boats, but I’ve never done it before. I think it’s like going to the Statue of Liberty in NYC.

• Lady Street shopping – in Mong Kok, you can walk around the busy lady street filled with a bunch of touristy things you can bargain to get. They’ve gotten much better at bargaining and probably don’t give too much leeway unless you’re buying a larger volume.

• Kowloon Park – This is in Tsim Sha Tsui and warrants a quick visit. It’s surprisingly quiet and a great place to hang out with a date. We came here after getting my custom suit made at Sam’s Tailor and then went to the Mira Mall for lunch.

• Nan Lian Garden – I like visiting this place because it reminds me of Japan. Since I already went to Japan on this past trip, I didn’t bother going again. You’ll go here to see some really really old trees and some cool rock structures. Go during the weekdays or else it gets too crowded.

• Eat all the food – so important, it deserves its own category

Food

It wasn’t as easy for me to write this travel advice because I mostly spend time in Hong Kong visiting relatives and eating lots of food. The touristy side of things isn’t as appealing since I personally just love being there and eating endlessly.

~ See Lemons Love Hong Kong

//Can’t wait to have more parties

Why this list?

My basement is done (it was done back in late Jan 2026)! The actual work was only 8 weeks (because Daniel is awesome), but the desire for a finished basement has been a long 3-year journey of despair. In any case, here are things that made a difference in the design and overall vibes.

How it started:

How it turned out:

Here's the Amazon buy list https://www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/ls/27CTGOQGTXUV8?ref_=wl_share

If you’re in Denver, here’s the review for Daniel Diaz from Laguna Construction, LLC: https://maps.app.goo.gl/ALECjrmcAmfsKytR7

1. Get the right general contractor through recommendations and reputation - Daniel Diaz from Laguna construction, LLC (Google maps) has all my high praises. He’s so personable and genuinely felt like he treated my basement as his own. He would keep iterating until he was happy with it and proud of his own work. I felt like he made so many ad-hoc suggestions in design that really brought the whole basement together. He’s such a great guy that I’ve befriended him as a poker friend (and probably a general great contact to know about home improvement).

2. Designers can be hit or miss - Part of the basement journey was working with a designer that really did a terrible job with communication and sticking to schedules. She charged for everything and we had to threaten lawsuit. We felt she had a good design eye, but a scammy business. Sadly, these type of services vary in quality and become super boutique tailored to wealthy clientele. I’m happy we eventually found a diamond in the rough.

3. Submitting for city permit sign off takes at least 3 months - The permit process took longer than the actual build. If you’re starting that basement journey, just be aware of the long lead time.

4. Consider your floor design for future bedrooms - Bedrooms require a closet and a window, so the resell value will be much higher if this space can be converted. I’ve opted to make a functional office with the window well, but it might make a difference on paper in the future (far, far, future).

5. Don’t forget to design for storage - Design for 10-15% of the square footage space to stay as storage. I hated this rule, but I think it’s the right thing to do.

6. Pay for quality flooring - If you’re in a fully unfinished basement, then highly consider going in on leveling, underlayment, and a high quality LVP. Flooring is done once, so we’re happy we also finished the storage closet.

7. Expect stress and clutter - There’s going to be clutter from things moving from the basement to other rooms. There’s going to be a lot of overhead in thinking as well. The weight of the renovation is real.

8. Expect lots of Amazon purchases - We went pretty crazy with last minute purchases on things that we didn’t know we needed. The Amazon bill was pretty high, but super thankful everything is 2-day shipping with Amazon Prime. It says I’ve saved over $1000 on prime in the past year, so I’ve definitely ordered way too much with way too many trips.

9. Create your Pinterest board - Go through a bunch of photos and start to star what you like and what might be cool to have in different parts of your room.

10. Look for colors that match your vibe - We also used the Color Concierge (Google Maps, https://thecolorconcierge.com/ ) who did a great job deciding on the colors inside the office and bathroom.

11. Work with Floor and Decor designers - We were really lucky to have gotten XYZ name from the Central Park location in Denver, Colorado.

12. If you get any renderings, you can always use AI to adjust little things - This was a game changer since I didn’t have the software to do the little updates.

    

    //Drywall pic

    

    //Fun nano banana rendering in the style of Star Wars

    

    //Drywall progress of our wet bar area

    

    //AI rendering of the materials we’ve picked for the same photo

13. Consider taxes - If you have your own company and you work from home then you can claim the work in your office to offset and gains. This could save quite a bit to offset income taxes.

14. Dupe.com could save some money - We didn’t always skimp on quality, but dupe.com was great site for looking at alternative furniture with similar looks. There could be good taste in furniture that doesn’t need to be 10x the price.

15. Consider this awesome recessed lighting - It has a regular light and also a dimmed version of it.

16. Consider govee strip lights - I can’t believe how important it is to have good lighting as it adjusts all the vibes. Spend the extra few hundred on the details of lighting.

17. Consider these panels as an accent wall - I’m super happy with these wall veneers because they just look so badass. It was pretty expensive, but super worth it.

18. Instead of buying a hidden bookshelf, consider a hidden wooden veneer wall - The carpenter really did a fantastic job. It looks so good and has really great sound.

19. Reverse Osmosis water tastes so much better! - This was one on my wish list after going to a friend’s house.

20. For your sink, consider a bar glass cleaner jet - This was the dream!

21. Pay extra for a wet bar with matching cabinets - Daniel did his own cabinet fronts to the wine refrigerators and dish washers.

22. Consider buying an awesome toilet with built in bidet - A regular porcelain bowl is $250 and the seat I’d buy as an attachment was around $200, so I paid a bit extra at $600 to get it all together.

23. Consider buying this awesome projector - Valerion VisionMaster Pro 2 mounted on the ceiling upside down around 12 ft from the wall (used ChatGPT to suggest the measurement and size). It gives me a 170” screen. Not only do I love the image quality, but the projector itself looks like a giant heat sink.

24. Finalize speaker wire hiding early - If you’re doing surround sound (which you should), the wiring plan must be finalized before the drywall goes up and they start insulating the ceiling. I definitely messed this one up, but I’ll find a solution to use a lightweight amp up there with low latency.

25. Buy fewer nice pieces of furniture than just fill the whole space with junk - This is a general design philosophy. Less is more.

26. Insulation is for sound (and also temperature) - Rockwool was used for the ceiling of the basement to dampen the sound of footsteps from the floor above.

27. Soft-close hinges and dimmable switches - In the grand scheme of things, this is pretty much pennies, but it will feel more expensive every day.

28. Live in the space before buying anything large - You don’t know the flow of the room until you’ve walked it for a few weeks. We just bought the couch and that will probably be the end of our spending for the rest of the year.

29. Listen to your wife - She’s usually right about the “feel” of the room, even if you’re focused on buying more junk.

30. Celebrate the win - I can’t wait to have a “stock the bar” or “bean bag” party where we can host and also celebrate the completion of the project. I intend to have a “friend’s cabinet” space where friends can keep their own glass for you to use.

~See Lemons Love the Basement

Result:

New office setup

Behind the TARDIS door:

Before and After:

Random Observation/Comment #670: The car buying process is broken and all dealership are finding ways to make profits. I’d personally use an “Amazon for buying cars” to reduce the stress of being upsold during the close.

Why This List?

I have driven quite a bit as a city dweller with zipcars and rentals during travel, but now I’ve entered into a new phase of car ownership. After doing some youtube searching and studying, I’ve learned quite a lot about this broken market. I’ve written this list into the steps I’ve taken from research to car closing.

Note: July 2020 is a terrible time to a buy a new or used car. You might get some deals for the 2020 models before Sept 2021 comes out, but there is no new inventory at the dealerships. Not much wiggle room on negotiation. Also, contactless online payments have embedded fees (with additional platform convenience fees).

Research Phase

1. Understand your car needs. Car usage? Car size? Number of kids? Eco-friendly? 4 wheel drive? Weather? Terrain? Driving distances? Types of trips? Fit of car type to neighborhood (don’t want to have the worst or nicest car on the block)?

2. Understand your constraints. Price point? Driving comfort (not too big?)? Safety ratings? Car seat? Financing options for down payment?

3. Map your needs to your car type. Standard vs luxury? Sedan? SUV? Coupe / Sport?

4. Read Consumer Reports or similar sites to see which cars can be narrowed down by year and reliability. I looked into Edmunds, Cargurus, and Kelly Blue Book quite a bit. Narrow down to 4 or 5 cars (for me, it was the Subaru Forester, Subaru Outback, Audi Q5, Toyota Highlander, and Toyota RAV4 –> these were used for initial test drive targets)

5. Dive deep into each car. Within each model, there are usually 3 or 4 tiers that have different naming for engine and base. For example, Audi Q5 have premium, premium plus, and prestige with tons of packages and options. You will need to know how to talk about these and why you’re choosing one option over another.

6. Read about the current market. Is this a time to buy new? Buy used? Buy certified pre owned? Lease? Which is best for you? Edmunds has a good car buying analysis. I’d wait until Sept on the Used Car market.

7. For used cars, figure out how long the car has been on their lot – There are drops of 30 and 60 days. There are incentive mechanisms based on car volume in dealerships.

8. Make a new email for your car buying process. I tend to do this for most bespoke processes.

9. Show up around end of the month around Monday or Tuesday – Dealers to meet their unit goals

10. Watch videos about car dealership process and how to not get screwed over. Your Auto Advocate has some good discussion.

11. Understand how dealerships make money – Car sale, car packages, finance deals, additional products and insurance fees. Since the information online is transparent, there’s usually less room in negotiation of the MSRP. Money is usually made on the finance side for 48-month plus payment packages. Go to the dealership to close with approved finance.

12. Know the standard buy process –
    1) Test drive and gather info to find the right dealership and sales person
    2) Negotiate with the car salesman to get the right price on the car and packages
    3) Finance room – get up-sold like crazy on how you’ll pay for it with loans
    4) Additional sales – While waiting for finalization, you may be sold a hundred other accessories and packages that lock you into the garage/mechanics

13. What information not to reveal during the buy process because you want to give yourself a way to walk out and have negotiation leverage
    A. Your high price range
    B. Your urgency for a car
    C. Your locked in love of one car (say you’re shopping for cheaper or more expensive options across multiple dealerships)
    D. Your intentions on length of ownership – say you will reevaluate in 3-4 years

14. Show you’re interested and ready to buy with a way to walk out the door. Usually you don’t buy the first time you enter a car dealership.

15. Collect your salesperson info by email and follow up

16. Plan ahead so you can be patient on your buying for the right price. This may take weeks.

17. Plan your test drive day. Go to 2 or 3 dealerships to have your significant other test drive. Whenever you’re going, be sure you start early and tell the dealers that this is the first/closest, but you’re looking to go second or third other dealerships. When you’re test driving, make sure your partner is on the same page with not revealing certain information about urgency to close sales.

18. Contact your insurance company for the rates to your car year and model in order to be cleared when buying. Usually there’s a discount (10%) for getting the policy a week ahead.

19. Contact different mechanics. If you are getting a used car, you may be able to have a third party appraisal rather than fully trusting carfax. This is much harder during a pandemic and used cars seem to have high prices at the moment.

20. Make a reservation to buy the car. It will take a whole afternoon. This is the stressful part, so be prepared. If you want to reduce the stress, you can use contactless solution (with baked in fees, but less headache).

21. On your buy day, bring your driver’s license, a checkbook, and the insurance info. It’s necessary for closing. You can ask on the phone to confirm.

Buy day

20. Remember: don’t tell them you’re paying cash if you are or else you will not get the best base price. If they ask how you want to pay, say you’ll discuss it with the finance team when we’re ready

21. Car itself will get sold with a lot of features and numbers. Be sure you know what the approximate price is for all these desired bells and whistles. Go in with the fair price number. Do your research.

22. If you’re buying used, you can ask for the car history information or look it up on carfax. This is usually transparent. Not an issue if it’s a one owner car or CPO.

23. You need a sales price agreeable before going into finance room. The separate process will really try to provide extra everything if it’s a new car. This price is checkable with online sources, so this process has been heavily arbitraged out (not a big dealership advantage now).

24. When you agree on the price, they draft up the paperwork for different finance options for 48 or 60 month to get a low price per month. This can be tricky. Do some math.

25. Ask the finance officer to step out as you review terms. First pass is to make sure the administrative fee is less than $100. Usually $75 and not $500. Red line and circle areas. DMV and sales tax fees are usually low.

26. With the second pass ask about the additional fees that are just made up. Check this video for what hidden dealer fees look like. It is recommended that you bring up removal of these fees by saying you will close if it’s all removed.
    For new cars:
    – Delivery/destination fees – should not have it unless it’s with a new car
    – Advertising charges – paid for by manufacturer
    – Theft protection/vin etchy etc – insurance will cover this
    – Nitrogen machine? – deflate and reinflate tires
    – Vinyl strip – $15 to put on
    – Additional dealer mark up ADM – do not pay over msrp for a markup
    – No need for mudflaps – take it off – no extra fee to remove features
    – Finance office credit life insurance – way over priced and can buy premium term life insurance separate (in the event of your untimely death who do you want it to be sent to)
    – Temp tag or dealer prep
    For used cars:
    – Reconditioning fee
    – Destination fee
    – Cash up-charge
    – Carfax or auto check

27. If they ask for finance options, see if they will allow for half down 36 month financing. Today, there are low financing option deals.

28. After the deal closes, hopefully you’ve got a good deal. They will try to sell other things while you’re waiting for the final processing. Buy it if you need it, but it’s a lot of extras.

29. Do not buy the car if there’s a bank fee for cash. There is currently a surplus of cars and I don’t see why they wouldn’t want a full payment for short term capital.

30. Help fill out a manufacture CSI survey for your dealer. They will be grateful and this can also be leverage earlier in the process.

For my negotiation process, I lucked out in finding a Toyota and Subaru dealership next to each other. Talking to the salesperson, I was able to ask for recommendations of sales people. This became a specific car showdown of features and price. I think it has worked out in my favor when getting close attention and closing.

~See Lemons Own a Subaru

//Yay Paradise hotel outdoor hot tub

Theme of the Month - Skiing and EthDenver

The questions/thoughts that led me to the posts for Feb 2026 were:

• What adulting skills should you learn? This is also what I want to teach Evie.

• How was flying with a toddler during COVID moving to Denver?

• How was your 2 days in Seoul with an awesome tour?

• How was your 4 days in Busan with Korean wedding?

• What will happen if the white and blue collar flips in a Great AI Inversion?

• What advice would you give to a beginner poker player?

OpenClaw broke me. For those who have been living on a rock or just skipped this cycle, you’ve missed seeing the architecture do a huge jump. Some core infrastructure:

• Whatsapp/Telegram/Discord - place to message your clawdbot

• Control UI - Browser dashboard of your bot on localhost

• Heartbeat - CRON-like scheduler that runs 30 min for automations

• File system reads SOUL.md, MEMORY.md, memory/YYY-MM-DD.md with autogenerated dail logs, AGENTS.md, TOOLS.md

• Skills/ - installable capabilities from ClawdHub

The memory system here really does compound because it will start to know your schedule. This is about personalization and peaks into the joy of the TRAIN phase of the internet. There’s so much more customization that’s interesting (and probably dangerous to be on the bleeding edge).

I feel like the agentic side of things are just moving so much faster and we’re at least headed towards a developer’s world of singularity. There will still be a catch-up for all devs to build this way and trust the tools, but it seems like there’s a definite trend in the solo entrepreneurs taking advantage of the opportunity to bootstrap ideas.

It brings me a general malaise of anxiety. It’s hard to believe it’s all because of a few well-timed articles from my phone that there’s a chance aliens exist and we’re on the brink of some digital space no longer dominated by human feedback. It’s probably all just media manipulation because my day-to-day doesn’t seem all that different.

This piece also did a doozy:

Citrini Research

THE 2028 GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE CRISIS

Preface…

Read more

2 months ago · 3723 likes · 80 comments · Citrini and Alap Shah

The scenario seems pretty plausible mini short term from some ripple effects, but it also doesn’t look long term enough for 10+ year impact. I’d totally love to read the rest of this book. It reminds me of this post I wrote about the AGI playbook:

First an infiltration in the foundation of how we work, then a dependency of our usage of AI, then a soft takeover with deeper adoption, and eventually we are controlled with consent.

What matters most in the interim of being lost in our own Matrix of the making, is health, happiness and connections. We can adapt to the different conditions of adjusted jobs and still make people feel better by being kind and generous.

The blogposts I published this month were:

I think adulting is so hard. It was so much easier when my parents just took care of everything. I hope my daughter learns all these adulting things at some point. I should read her this blog post.

This turns out to be pretty good advice for going on a plane with a toddler even without COVID.

Seoul was short, but filled with a lot of culture. I wish it wasn’t so freezing, but we still walked around and wore some Long Johns to keep warm.

Busan was a bit longer and I really didn’t have any agenda (except to relax and try some restaurants).

The latest automated AI assistant features are really getting surreal. I think the multi-threaded agents orchestration set of tooling is going to move adoption even further with so many layoffs and move towards the downturn.

Poker is a new favorite local Dad hobby. We have some regulars. This was more of a random thinking exercise as I wrote one for Disc Golf.

Some ideas for Mar 2026?

• 30 Basement Reno Lessons Learned - This was a multi-year project so I’m glad we finally finished it. There were some big things we learned and little upgrade purchases that made the overall feel less generic and more badass. I’ve enjoyed rewatching some cinematic beauties.

• 30 Car Buying Lessons (from 2020) - An oldie, but goodie post about buying our Subaru from 2020.

• 30 Vibe coding experiments - With AI doing all the digital things, here are the 30 rabbit hole questions and results I’ve gotten just querying Clembot a bit deeper.

• Lists of 30 App - This was a fun vibe coded app that I can probably reveal and collaborate with this Substack.

• Life in Lists of 30 Audiobooks - Started recording this for fun now that the basement is completed. Might as well add videos. Work hard and play hard.

Thank you for reading and I hope everyone stays safe! See y’all in the new year!

Please suggest a list of 30 and I’ll write it! I’ve written 350+ lists of 30 and only publish ones that I think other people would enjoy. It’s my fun brainstorming routine.

—

//Clembot playing poker - made by Nano Banana

Why this List?

We have a pretty solid bi-weekly/monthly poker group. It’s a friendly cash game with a one or twice a year tournament. Super friendly and fun where we drink more than we play.

I’ve known how to play poker since college days, but I don’t think I really played consistently until we started playing here in Denver. Highly recommended for getting to see some local dads.

1. Know the Suit order - Three of a kind beats two pair. A flush beats a straight. All 5 cards count. If you’re bringing a printed out chart then the table will smell blood.

2. Math is your only real friend - You don’t need to be a human calculator, but you need to know that “feeling it in your gut” is probably not going to happen.

3. The Rule of 2 and 4 - This is the secret menu for mental math. Multiply your “outs” by 2 on the turn or 4 on the flop to get your winning percentage. An “out” is the cards you’re looking for to give you a better hand.

4. Outs aren’t just numbers - If you’re chasing a straight and need a 6, you have 4 outs (if you assume no other 6s were dealt already). That’s a roughly 12% chance on the next card. Recognize those thin margins before you bet the house.

5. Reading people isn’t magic - Look for patterns, not “tells.” If the guy in the hoodie only bets when he has a monster, believe him the first time. We definitely have people in our group that likes to bluff or do the $1/$2/$4 bets on a $0.50 big blinds.

6. The Check-Trap - Checking when you have a powerhouse hand is the ultimate “I’m just a harmless lamb” move. It happens quite a bit to trap people by being a pattern/anti-pattern.

7. Betting size matters - Betting 1/4 of the pot looks weak, but betting 3x the pot looks desperate. Finding that “value bet” sweet spot is an art form.

8. Cash games are our social favorites - You can buy back in, grab a drink, and play “honest” poker. We definitely drink the cost of more alcohol than we play. I also don’t know if lying for three hours straight has been anyone’s strategy.

9. The “Honest” Player - Some people physically cannot lie. They are great to have at the table because when they bet, you can just safely fold and save your money. We also love the talkative players that like to Negreanu guess people’s hands.

10. The “Bluff-Machine” - We all have that one friend who thinks they’re in a James Bond movie. Let them bluff their stack into your pocket.

11. The Color Confusion - Shout out to the home game hosts who use identical shades of orange and salmon for different chip values. It’s unintentional psychological warfare (and we all got used to it).

12. Respect the Muck - If you’re beaten, just toss the cards face down. Showing a losing hand is like showing your “D” grade on a math test that nobody asked for. It’s a bit embarrassing. As a newbie, you definitely don’t want to turn over and see what cards they have. As our Brazilian neighbor says, “You’d get shot in the favellas for that one.”

13. The Head-to-Head Etiquette - When the table goes quiet and it’s just two of you, keep it classy. We usually don’t slow-roll winning hands in a heads up, but it happens.

14. Position is power - Being the last to act is like seeing the other person’s cards before you have to decide. Never underestimate the “Button.”

15. Don’t chase the “Inside Straight” - It’s the “Get Rich Quick” scheme of poker. It rarely works, but when it does, you feel like a genius for about five minutes.

16. The Turn is the tipping point - This is where the bets get real and the “maybe I’ll hit it” crowd starts to sweat. I think most people usually play the blinds just to see the cards to maybe hit something unusual.

17. The River is final - There are no more miracles coming. If you don’t have it now, you better be a really good actor.

18. Watch the “Limpers” - People who just call the minimum bet are usually waiting for a miracle. It’s fine to limp in if you want to contribute to the pot, but winning on the River is super lucky.

19. Bankroll your ego - Don’t play at a table where the “small blind” is the cost of your weekly groceries. You’ll play scared, and scared money always loses. Also, if you’re just starting, don’t play at a casino. I don’t even think casinos are that fun with friends.

20. The “Pot Odds” shortcut - If there’s $100 in the pot and it costs $10 to see the next card, the math says you should probably stay in. It’s basic bargain hunting.

21. Don’t show your cards for free - Information is expensive. If they want to see what you had, make them pay the “call” to find out. Most people show their cards if they like to brag on a bluff or if they really had the nuts.

22. The “Tilt” Factor - If you lose a big hand on a fluke, then take a lap. Playing angry is just a fast way to donate your remaining chips.

23. Small Tournaments are the best classroom - For $60, you get a few hours of experience without the risk of losing your rent money.

24. Identify the “Aggressor” - Someone at the table is going to be the bully (especially if they’re chip leader). Figure out who it is so you can stay out of their way (or set a trap).

25. Mental Math for the River - Remember that by the river, the “3% per out” rule is your final check-up. If the odds aren’t there, then walk away.

26. The “House Rules” Homage - Yes, we drink when everyone’s anted in on a hand as the “social”. Yes, we also do payouts for whomever hits a 4-of-a-kind, straight flushes, and royal flushes.

27. Folding is a winning strategy - You win more money by not losing it on bad hands than you do by winning “big” pots with 7-2 off-suit. (It is pretty fun to play 7-2 off suit though).

28. Develop a nervous tick like chip stacking - I’ve stacked so many chips that my fingers hurt. You definitely get a lot of practice throughout the game.

29. Enjoy the game - At the end of the day, it’s just cards and chips. If you aren’t laughing, then you’re doing it wrong.

30. Randomly say “Rounders” lines - “If you can’t spot the sucker in the first half hour, then you’re the sucker.” Classic.

~See Lemons Love Playing Poker

//Clembot trying to keep up

Why this list?

TL;DR: We're cooked. I have been building with AI tools for the past few years and it feels like every new shiny tool just accelerates passed my previous implementations. So much refactoring Clembot has gone through. I wonder if I can just skip a cycle?

There’s going to be a lot of disruption if we extrapolate the impact of the death of SaaS. For each point, I’ve thought of a “Hedge” which has helped ground me with my AI adoption strategy.

1. Status Reversal - Physical skills become so much more valuable than tech saturation.

   1. The Hedge: Maintain a “Physical Anchor.” Whether it’s my basement renovation or disc golf, I intend to keep skills where the “Undo” button doesn’t exist. I’ve always found a joy of using my hands.

2. SaaS Decimation - Bespoke internal tools can replace expensive subscriptions (at least 75% of features). I actually thought the buy vs build narrative would shift to buy in the past decade, but now the pendulum is swinging hard the other way.

   1. The Hedge: Stop learning “how to use Salesforce” or other specific tools like Figma. Instead, understand Schema Design. If I own the data structure, then I can prompt the trending CRM. Tools like Figma will likely be jumping file formats that get immediately moved to working prototypes.

3. The Death of “Features” - We prompt for outcomes, instead of buttons or new UI/UX consistent across apps. Maybe this is my own bespoke app or maybe there’s going to be a wave of “customized” dashboards for each user based on their overall usage. I already feel like I’m accessing all the endpoints through skills instead of waiting for the UI from someone else.

   1. The Hedge: I aim to become an Outcome Architect. Consider focusing on defining the “Definition of Done” so clearly that an agent can’t misinterpret it. I probably won't need to write another line of code.

4. Hardware as the Only Moat - Compute and energy are the real foundations. The hardware itself can house my personal Jarvis server with high mem instead of relying on services that might try to connect to your data (or learn from your prompts).

   1. The Hedge: Invest in Edge Hardware. Own a high-spec local machine (or a private server) to run local models (SLMs) so you aren’t throttled by a provider’s API.

5. Blue Collar Renaissance - AI can’t swing a hammer (yet). I have always felt it more rewarding to build things.

   1. The Hedge: Build a network of Trusted Humans. In a world of digital “perfection”, knowing a reliable electrician is more valuable than knowing a Python dev.

6. The One-Person Unicorn - Efficiency over headcount. A very motivated and hardworking person might actually be more successful than a smart one.

   1. The Hedge: Master Agentic Orchestration. I've learned to manage 10 specialized AI agents (one for SEO, one for copy, one for lead gen, etc) as if they were a marketing team.

7. Algorithm vs. Mass - Efficient algorithms win over brute-force scaling. There were so many times people went to market faster with human labor, but I don't think that's the case anymore.

   1. The Hedge: Stay “Algorithm Agnostic.” Use libraries like LangChain or Ollama that allow you to swap your model “brain” without rebuilding the “body.”

8. Bespoke Everything - Every employee has a custom-generated UI. You can build something that fits for you. It can be a full life dashboard. You can fully copy a SaaS app.

   1. The Hedge: Curate your Personal Prompt Library. Your specific way of directing AI to build your “Cognitive OS” is your proprietary intellectual property. I think this will also kill ads.

9. The API Apocalypse - Local models simulate third-party services. You might not need someone else's skill because your AI agent can rebuild it from scratch.

   1. The Hedge: Practice Local-First Development. Whenever possible, try to run a task locally before reaching for a paid API. It builds “Inference Intuition.”

10. The Consultant’s End: Middle management is replaced by routers. We may still see some people rely on consulting companies for accountability, but the real 10x engineers are managing agents and keeping people connected.

    1. The Hedge: Move to the Front or the Back. Either be the person finding the problem (Front) or the person ensuring the physical result (Back). I'm not sure what the “in-between” will become if reporting is just automatically updating the company wide knowledge data lake in real time. My software contribution can be tracked by more than just github pull requests.

11. Physical Proof of Work - Human-made becomes a premium label.

    1. The Hedge: Document your Process, not just the Product. Show the “behind the scenes” of your work to prove human intentionality was involved. We may add imperfections to seem more human.

12. The Prompt is the Product - Intent is the new code. It’s more important than ever to dream big and architect your setup and revisit your tooling.

    1. The Hedge: Study Linguistics and Logic. The better you understand how to structure an argument or a command, the better your “code” will be. Maybe I just need to practice being more bossy to my Agent swarm.

13. Local-First Sovereignty - Enterprises might flee the public cloud. Imagine the infrastructure team in banks going back to maintaining internal AI infrastructure.

    1. The Hedge: Learn Data Privacy Architectures. Understanding how to keep data local and secure will be the most requested “white collar” skill of 2027. This might especially be true with configuring localized virtualization infrastructure.

14. The IQ/EQ Swap - Empathy is the new high-value skill. A “smart” person is someone that doesn’t necessarily answer complex questions, but works well with people to close deals.

    1. The Hedge: Double down on Community Building. AI can’t organize a neighborhood bourbon crawl or lead a disc golf tournament. People still need to spend their time in person.

15. Maintenance over Creation - Designing is easy; keeping it running is hard. Deploying to production with low overhead costs and good practices is harder.

    1. The Hedge: Focus on Systems Thinking. Learn how things break. The person who can diagnose why the AI-generated code is crap is the one who gets paid.

16. The “Good Enough” Plateau - Diminishing returns on “perfect” software.

    1. The Hedge: Value Speed over Perfection. If a 90% solution takes 5 seconds to prompt, ship it and move to the next “Main Quest.” I do feel like all my weird side projects are very buildable and shippable on a whim.

17. Agentic Hyperinflation: Digital workers outnumber humans.

    1. The Hedge: Establish a “Human Signature.” My personal brand with “Lists of 30” feels unmistakably like me rather than Clembot. I hope people seek me out specifically for the manual joys of brainstorming and using my brain.

18. Zero-Interest Rate Software - The market value of “code” goes to zero.

    1. The Hedge: Pivot to Value-Based Pricing. Never charge for your time; charge for the impact your bespoke system had on the business.

19. The New Tech Stack: Compute + Energy + Materials. It seems like the composable models can learn context of existing projects.

    1. The Hedge: Understand Supply Chains. Knowing how chips are made and where energy comes from might open new opportunities. Maybe AI is trying to recruit me to do this stuff.

20. Education Inversion - Trade schools > CS degrees.

    1. The Hedge: I've always wanted to be a Polymath. It’s important now more than ever to combine a high-level tech understanding with a practical, “blue collar” hobby. The intersection is where the money will be because the plumbers might just work with me to update their tech (even though they could also just do it themselves, but they think it’s too technical to get started).

21. The Ghost of Technical Debt - AI rewrites code instead of refactoring it. It might be interesting to see Claude code just keep shipping new and more optimized ways to run through and add more features.

    1. The Hedge: I practice Version Control for Ideas for code bases and random ideas. I need to remind myself to not worry about the code history; keep a history of the evolution of the strategy.

22. The Artisan Economy - Mass production yields to mass bespoke.

    1. The Hedge: Focus on Niche Customization. Use AI to build things that are “too small” for a big company to care about, but life-changing for a single person. Your product market fit might just be for a handful of people for that service. Maybe it's not all plumbers, but just one plumber. Perhaps we all become our own independent contractors.

23. Data as Currency - Private data is the only tradeable asset.

    1. The Hedge: I’ve started a Personal Data Lake. This includes saving important emails, blog posts, notes, and outputs/deliverables in a clean, searchable format for my private AI Clembot to use. I don’t even know if I want my Clembot to be me.

24. The Trust Tax - Premium for “verified human” services. I still think we will be the trust layer for execution while using tools.

    1. The Hedge: Use Blockchain networks for Provenance. I'm still unclear on the price addition, but perhaps this is the only way to create some levels of useful interaction. Maybe IPFS and Arweave or DePIN services will be the only thing that lasts economically.

25. Memory Optimization - Edge devices with high RAM outcompete the cloud. I want a big enough context window memory to easily complete and feed the outcome.

    1. The Hedge: Optimize for Low Latency. I’ve been building my personal tools to work offline (like what Google does with gemini nano instances on your phone). Resilience is being able to work when the Wi-Fi (or the cloud) is down.

26. The End of Subscriptions - Own the weight file, don’t rent the app. Ownership will remove you from the SaaS world of large recurring bills for most things you don't need digitally. Besides, it might be more fun building than consuming.

    1. The Hedge: Buy Open-Weights Models. Support and use models that you can download and keep forever.

27. Physical Logistics > Digital Logic - Moving atoms is the new hard problem. It’s scary that China solved this already and the AI strategy literally solved the moving bytes problem for them. AI can make China's physical edge and economy more valuable than ever.

    1. The Hedge: In your free time, consider studying Robotics and Automation. Even if you’re not building robots, understanding how AI interacts with physical sensors is the next frontier.

28. The Prompt Engineer is a Parent that Rears AI, and not scripts it - I think we'll just be tapping into a new economy with new tools.

    1. The Hedge: Develop Patience. Treat your AI agents like a team you are mentoring. Invest time in “training” them on your specific style and preferences.

29. The Sovereign Individual 2.0 - Self-contained civilizations where my agent swarm is a one person company.

    1. The Hedge: Build Redundancy. Have a “Plan B” that doesn’t rely on the internet like a physical garden or a library of actual books. The offline Wikipedia phone was a fun project.

30. The Final Flip - Remembering what makes us human.

    1. The Hedge: Prioritize Analog Experiences. No matter how good the AI video is, the taste of the picanha or the cold air on an Aspen ski run cannot be digitized. I can see concerts, stand up, conferences, Disney, and maybe even cruises to be even more valuable than before.

~See Lemons Hedge AI Bets

//Sunrise on the beach in Busan with the drop

Things We Loved About Busan

• Beach hotels - This really felt like a mini Miami with some really incredible spots and amenities. I would totally do this again.

• Beach for Sunrise and Sunset - It’s not a long beach, but it’s quite beautiful and filled with charm. There’s morning joggers and a huge exercise community. I love that they have built in little stages for performers.

Busan Activities

Friday - Dinner and Relax

Arrive at 4PM from KTX to hotel

Paradise Hotel - This is totally worth the price of the hotel. We got super lucky somehow and booked on Agoda a king room with a beach view for $200 a night. I think it’s off season and we kept hunting for deals. The amenities are awesome.

Obanjang Korean BBQ dinner - Great chatting with friends and meeting the bride and groom with fam! Classic BBQ vibes.

Bar Nyx - Randomly found a Speakeasy on 3rd floor in the main building. it’s behind a hidden door, which is always so cool. Drinks are 25,000 won ($18 USD) which is totally reasonable for the delicious care.

Purple Moon pub - What a weird pub. Maybe it’s for karaoke? We definitely went at an off time.

Saturday - Wedding and Boat ride

On the Plate - Breakfast Buffet at Paradise Hotel is so good. Fresh dim sum, which I dipped in the sauce of a braised Taiwanese Pig knuckle dish. Also, you know the buffet is good if you can get both crispy and non-crispy bacon options.

Haircut and massage - We were actually going to hang out at this pool, but it was being cleaned, so getting a haircut was just as good of an idea.

Exploring the Paradise Hotel - No shortage of amazing views and amenities.

Pool time - 85 degrees pool and a hot tub. Super relaxing.

Wedding ceremony - So happy to join this wedding and be there for a great friend and loving relationship. This was the whole reason for the trip, so it was a real celebration.

Boat and Drone show - Left from Suyeongman Bay and had a 1.5 hour ride around. Many thanks to the bride and groom for organizing it!

Sunday - Chill Day and Sky Capsule

Morning sunrise - I love sunrises. This was such a peaceful one that I did in my sandals. Bold choice.

Breakfast buffet with Justin - Just glad to share some wisdom and memories with an old friend.

Lotte Mall and UNIQLO shopping - There were a lot more stores than I expected. We bought all our winter and summer clothes for the fam at UNIQLO. Lunch was from a random assortment of places.

Sky Capsule ride from Mipo Station - Book this ahead of time! Our slot was for 4-4:30PM and we got there at 4:10PM with a ticket to join the queue. It was around a 30 minute wait on line. We were able to make it across by 5:15PM. It’s around a 20 minute ride. The beer that you can buy from the station was a good choice.

Sunset near lighthouses - The eye of Sauron! If you walk to the white lighthouse, you can see the sunset directly over the observatory.

Haeundae Market - Exploring the market and got some freshly made dumplings. This place was so good.

Shabu All Day Busan Haeundae - Family friendly, but I think it was missing some noodles or something to round it out.

Monday - Chill day and BBQs

Working Holiday - This turned out to be a go-to spot for breakfast. Delicious benedicts and pastries.

Crab Peak - Randomly found this lunch place and ordered way too much. The abalone congee/porridge was so good. The crab ramen also had a ton of regular crab for $7!?!? I didn’t even need to order the huge snow crab. I won.

Walk through Blue Line Park to Haewol Observatory - I needed to digest so I can eat some more later. This was actually a lovely walk and much shorter than I thought it’d be. It seems to be a common jogging route in the morning.

Rib of Legends - The meat is so tender. this isn’t really a typical set of side dishes, but it was delicious. Super tiny menu, but the spicy cold noodles are a great accompaniment and super chewy and refreshing.

Tuesday - Morning Sunrises

Sunrise on the beach at 7AM - We saw the perfect drop rising and release. So dope.

Working Holiday - I had the mushroom paradelle and we got some pastries to go.

Long commute with lots of airport lounges - Lounges FTW! I also binged Hijack, which was okay I guess.

Overall the noms were great and I would totally come back over the summer (even if it’s a bit more crowded). If we had more time, then we’d totally go to Spa Land for a day and BUSAN X SKY for the sunset. Definitely more time needed for Seoul overall to explore more of the little neighborhoods.

~See Lemons Love Busan

//View from the Namsan Mountain Park by North Seoul Tower

I’m splitting the Travel Advice for this South Korea trip to Seoul and Busan as we had different agendas and vibes.

Things I Love About Seoul and South Korea

• Reminds me of Tokyo, Japan - I love the clean streets and great infrastructure. It’s also a huge city with a large population and lots of tall buildings. The food is excellent and I think there’s something for everyone.

• Delicious food and pickled side dishes - The different pickled side dishes are such a great addition to any meal. I may have convinced my wife to let me have kimchi in the fridge.

• Interesting U-turns - I love that there are a lot fewer left turns on major roads and instead these little mini U-turns, which clears a lot of traffic.

• Heated bench seats at markets during winter - What’s better than a bowl of hot noodles and mandu? Hot noodles and mandu with a toasty butt.

• Inexpensive taxi rides - I was just going through my Uber app conversions to USD and I think most of them were less than $5. Also, the exchange rate of 1400 won to USD is pretty crazy.

• Skincare products - This goes without saying that the cosmetics game is strong.

• Inexpensive to drink soju - Soju is like water. I was definitely enjoying it. I actually couldn’t find a soju that cost more than $20. Liquor was definitely much more expensive. Beer was a bit meh.

• Tablet ordering - Most BBQ places use tablets for ordering, which is super tourist friendly.

Things to be aware of

• Google Maps does not really work well - You’ll see some reviews (which are skewed by tourists), but any of the walking and driving directions are non-existent even for estimation of time.

• Super apps like Kakao are recommended - I still love the “Kakao talk” sound with payments/wallet, chat, taxi, and reviews all in one app.

• Uber works well - There are Uber Taxis and they’re not that expensive either. We didn’t have any issues calling a ride in any of the popular areas.

• Surprisingly popular for Chinese tourists - This was much more prevalent than in Japan. It was fairly normal for major Korean tourist areas to speak Mandarin and have translations for Japanese.

• Cash is not a bad idea for the night markets and especially subway card - I would say that most dishes are around 7,000-10,000 won. I’m sure you can easily spend 140,000 won ($100 USD) in a few days.

• Subway may not take foreign credit cards - I wasn’t able to buy the card or top it up with my credit card, so I wound up just getting an Uber.

• WeChat is accepted broadly - Credit cards are usually okay, but more surprising is that there are tons of WeChat QR codes. If you’re already signed up to WeChat then that payment method should work as well.

• Not great beers - I am spoiled by IPAs. I did find a few random select ones, but most places just have really bad beer. Maybe this is true for most places.

• Learn some Korean - It’s always nice to be able to say “hello”, “good morning/afternoon/evening”, “where is…?”, “this one”, “excuse me”, “Is English okay?”, and “thank you”. There’s a Samsung interpreter feature that has it downloaded offline which worked well.

As usual for these trips, my general daily strategy is to book 1 thing to look at in a general area and then research 5 places to eat. I would then go to the area and walk around as much as possible so I can go eat some more.

2.5 days in Seoul Itinerary

Wednesday - Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP) and Exploring

Arrived at 5AM at the airport. Note: We paid for the night before because we didn’t want to wait until the regular 3PM check-in time. In retrospect, this was definitely a great idea.

The Shilla Seoul Hotel - What a beautiful hotel on a hill. We were able to snag a great deal for $220 a night. I mean… there’s a place for golf practice next to the fitness center.

Note: There’s a hotel shuttle to DDP and Myeongdong that leaves hourly. They will also shuttle you down to the front gate if you want to take the trains. You can also get an Uber, which would have been cheaper and less time dependent.

Seouljip Korean BBQ lunch - Delicious galbi and a great intro for my wife to some of those pickled side dishes.

DDP - This is just so cool to wander. There’s all these cool exhibits everywhere and it’s such a great place to walk around.

DDP Architecture tour - This happens once daily and we just got lucky to join it. English friendly. 40 minutes and learned quite a bit about Zaha Hadid (architect).

Dundun Mall - Like many Asian malls, this one was super fun. There’s no UNIQLO in Denver, so we did some shopping. Remember to bring your passport for immediate tax free discounts.

Gwangjang Market exploration - The places I’ve purchased food doesn’t even have Google Maps places, so I knew it was great.

DDP at night - From the architecture tour, they recommended that we see it at night. It’s cool, but only if you’re in the same area.

Pyeongando Jokbaljip - Pork trotter wraps. I did eat a whole small serving by myself.

Pastry Boutique in Shilla Hotel - This place was a life saver since we slept past 9PM. We were able to get a baguette with delicious cream cheese that gave us some jetlag noshing power.

Thursday - 8 Hour tour

Booked through Viator - https://www.viator.com/tours/Seoul/Travel-for-foodies-Seoul-Highlight-Tour/d973-42053P12

8:30AM pick up at hotel

Gyeongbokgung Palace - We arrived as one of the first groups and we decided not to change into the traditional dress. This was key because this place gets super crowded with huge buses after the 10AM changing of the guards.

Changing of Guards - Cool 15-minute ceremony to witness at least once. It’s a nice reenactment.

Namsan Cable Car - It’s a short cable car ride and probably a better use of time than the hike up.

N Seoul Tower - We didn’t go up the tower, but the area around it has lots of love locks and amazing 360 views of the huge city of Seoul.

Drive around the Blue House area - There were some cool stories about this, but we didn’t actually get out of the car.

Jogyesa Buddhist Temple - This was a little mini stop before walking around the culture street and grabbing lunch.

Insadong Art Street - There’s all these little shops and art galleries. It’s an easy 1.5 hour wandering for buying some random things to bring home.

Lunch spot that doesn’t have an English name - We really enjoyed the bibimbap.

Ssamziegil - Insadong hand crafts exploration with a slow ramp up to the top.

Bukchon Hanok Village - There’s a small residential area that keeps the old school village architecture. I think there are around 800 houses that are protected by the original village.

Gyangjang market with tour - There’s no shortage of street food, noodles, and fried things.

Noodles from Netflix place - This lady was so nice. She has such a loveable face.

Late night drink at The Library - This was an expensive drink, but it had all the right vibes.

Friday - Hike and Commute to Busan

Namsan Botanical Garden - We got a taxi to the entrance and then just wandered around. We did make our way back up to the Shilla area, which was around a 45 minute walk.

Haus Coffee & Dessert - Brunch spot with delicious Persimmon granola dish. Highly recommended!

Seoul Station KTX to Busan - Booked this via https://www.koreantrain.com/ two days before. Klook did not allow us to buy this because they usually buy a few days out. Less than 3 hours and super comfy reserved seats.

Next is Travel Advice Busan:

• Sunrises and Sunsets

• Korean wedding - Congrats Justin and Esther

• Drone show on a boat

• Random noms at great restaurants

~See Lemons Love Seoul

Random Observation/Comment #673: I’m okay with not flying for a while

Why this List?

In order to move cross country, we decided to suffer 4-hours and take the airport risk rather than driving over 3 days and take the hotel risk. Here are some tips we used on prep and execution for this flight.

Prep – Things to Buy

1. We limit screen time, but having a tablet was critical. We bought an Amazon Fire7 tablet for $60. Comes with a nice kid proof case.

2. These over ear headphones were in case the lift-off got too noisy for her.

3. Sugar-free Gluten-free clean teeth flying lollipops -It was her first lollipop special for travel

4. Cover for Car Seat – We had to check our huge car seat – Check online with your airline as car seats should be a lower cost for check-in.

5. Kids toilet seat with handle – Airplane toilets are so gross. Definitely get a seat with a big handle so she doesn’t touch the actual seat

6. Clean disposable floor pads – When we entered the airplane, we put these by her feet and also on her chair in case her food falls on the floor

7. Disinfectant Wipes – We’ve been looking for these for a long time, but luckily we had some we could keep on hand. Recommend buying these online ahead of time because they’re sold out at most places.

8. Favorite snacks – Whether it’s goldfish, snack bars, or craisins, you really need to get some options. When she got fidgety, we basically leaned on having a snack for 10 minutes of non crying.

9. Face mask with favorite character – We eventually bought her a cute peppa pig face make she likes to wear. For day-of, we used one of my mom’s face shield invention.

10. Buy First/Business Class tickets – You may think you can’t afford it, but my Delta Comfort+ tickets were only $50 more. It’s a completely separate search result from economy/economy+, so at least check it out. It was definitely worth it for the extra legroom and boarding options. Our flight was not full and middle seats were not booked.

11. Try to book a morning flight – Morning is easier for the toddler because there might be a nap time (it didn’t happen for us). She just wound up being cranky the last hour.

Prep – Things to do a Week in Advance

12. Setup the tablet and download shows for offline usage – We installed Disney+ and downloaded 3 movies and most of Mickey Mouse Club House. She didn’t watch it all, but it was an idea

13. Download an offline game – We installed Toca Pet Doctor and she really likes making the animals feel better and feeding them. There are some pretty weird ones in there.

14. Get her used to wearing a mask – We had an awesome face shield my Mom made, but in retrospect, it would have been great to have her wear a mask. With a 4 hour flight, it was literally 6 hours of flying

15. Get her used to wearing the headphones and tablet – She had a good 2 or 3 hours of usage.

16. Read her a book about planes – We wanted to make sure she knew we were going on a plane to get her excited. Do not overlook this step because it’s better to not make this long trip a surprise. The plane book went through the airport.

17. Make sure she has her documentation in order – We had ordered her passport before she turned 1, but these may take time with covid.

Day Before

18. Make sure all devices are charged – Amazon Fire turned out to have a 5 hour battery life, which was pleasantly surprising.

19. Pack a toys backpack – This has her tablet and a few other random toys she likes.

20. Pack a convenience bag for access to snacks – We had so many snacks…

21. Pack a clean bag for access to wipes, hand sanitizer, and masks – This was used very often. Put it in a fanny pack if you have one.

Flight Day

22. Bring a fold-able stroller – I can’t emphasize how important this was. It will be checked by the plane and we tried to keep her in the stroller at the airport until she cried to get out.

23. Don’t arrive too early (1.5-2 hours is fine) – The airport is not that crowded, although you should be there slightly earlier if you have a lot of luggage to check. If you’re there too early, you wind up standing too close to the arrival gates around people. All the lounges are closed.

24. Be ready to go through security – Pack your things such that you can go through security quickly. That means no metal clasps on shoes or jewelry for the toddler.

25. Take your time walking and have fun on the sky walk – My daughter loved going on these escalators. We burned 30 minutes getting there and it was better than sitting down by the gate.

26. When time to board, have one parent go in first and have the toddler enter last – My wife setup the whole area properly and wiped everything down while I hung back. It’s not that much less time in recycled air, but she liked waving to people boarding the plane.

27. Don’t put down the disposable floor mats until after take off – Apparently the floor mat is a hazard. We wound up picking it up and putting it back down.

28. Don’t forget to show her the view of clouds and mountains – She sat in the middle seat during take-off, but we entertained her by switching seats a few times. She loved looking at the fields and little cars.

29. Snacks saved us – Also remember to buy a small package of milk with a straw. We basically skipped lunch and just ate junk food for 4 hours.

30. Have a drink – Yes, it was 10AM, but don’t judge me. I’m flying with a toddler during a pandemic.

~See Lemons Fly During a Pandemic

//I love the left side because more things are broken the more you look at the details

Why this List?

With AI taking over so many things, I definitely wonder what adulting will look like for my daughter. I don’t think she’ll have a robot walking around and folding her laundry or doing her chores, but there’s probably going to be some more specialty appliances. In any case, there are core skills that I find as the basic generalist adult should learn how to do. I also worry there’s going to be some EMP that shuts down all electronics, so some of these are partial survival skills.

We really need some anti-helplessness protocols.

I wonder if the new generation will just be so helpless they use TaskRabbit or a similar service for most things (and then ultimately become a cat).

Domestic Infrastructure and Survival

1. Troubleshooting a Toilet - Open the back tank to see if the flapper/fill valve is on tight enough to fill water in the tank. Locate the main water shut-off if needed. Learn how to use a plunger (or whatever new tech plungers look like) if you take big poops.

2. Electrical flow - Just generally know where the circuit breaker is and understand the load limits of a household outlet so you prevent fires. Don’t plug in your new sauna into just a regular outlet.

3. Roadside help - Change a tire with a spare, know where you can lift the car (although this probably won’t be possible with electric cars being so heavy). Know what to check in terms of lights to prevent a dead battery (although electric cars are smart enough to turn everything off by itself from an app).

4. Just using a stove - What if the electricity goes out? Gas line means you can still safely light a pilot and boil water. It’s also helpful to be able to cook rice without a rice cooker (even though a rice cooker definitely does a better job). I do love the essence of camping for all of these bare minimum survival skills.

5. Structural hanging - Find a wall stud and hang a heavy mirror or shelf securely. Know the difference between a drywall screw and an anchor. This is more of a manly house thing, which can be outsourced.

6. Basic sewing - I’m not a great example of this, but I can sew a four-hole button with a blind stitch and probably mend a simple hole. I hear the style is to just keep the holes and wear “athle-isure” clothes all the time.

7. Kitchen chemistry - Especially for searing proteins, I think it’s important to know some science around the “Maillard Reaction” and then how to create a nice sauce off of it with some onion and red wine deglaze. Watch Kenji Lopez-Alt and Alton Brown.

8. Starch ratios - A standard pot can cook rice, pasta, cous cous, grains, etc. I think there’s a good starting point of cooking to be able to properly cook pasta or boil an egg.
   

9. Knife maintenance - Never put a knife in a dishwasher and just hone it regularly. Take care of those knives.

10. Basic House Maintenance - This is going to be a further catch-all of things around the house I have started learning in the past 5 years. Cleaning AC filters, sealing water-heavy grout areas, squeegee-ing glass to prevent mildew, and other simple house maintenance will save on services fees. My wife will like that I included this in the list.

11. Analog Navigation - Navigate with a compass and a physical map. Also learn to drive to places without using Google Maps navigation for everything. Recognize landmarks and read road signs.

12. Trauma Response - Know the basics of chess compressions, tourniquet, and cleaning wounds.

13. Ropework (The Essential Five) - Tie a Bowline, Taut-line Hitch, Sheet Bend, Butterfly Loop, and Trucker’s Hitch. Also, know which situation to use which knots.

Digital Survival

14. Network maintenance - Access a router gateway to update firmware or manage SSID security. Understanding how the internet works in general is a good skill to have. It’s a series of tubes!

15. Credential Hygiene - Use proper password managers and hardware-based 2FAs.

16. Digital Footprint - Conduct a personal audit to understand who’s using your data and how it is saved across multiple companies. Specifically be diligent on removing your data from major brokers.

17. Cyber Defense - Identify any social engineering attempts and protect yourself in as many ways as possible. Within the family, there should be verification protocols with family safe-words or a way to act if you get seemingly emergency messages.

18. Digital Legacy - Figure out what you want to leave behind as a legacy.

19. Anti-Deep Fake - I don’t know what this will look like, but there needs to be a better way for the new generation to identify and understand the impact of generative AI. Maybe all things are just considered AI-altered images and we’ll just need to pay money to post “real” images. Definitely going to be a human premium.

Financial & Legal Layer

20. Compound Interest - Learn the “cost of waiting” to invest and different rules for creating solid returns. Maybe the new generation will just rely on trading bots or make all their money on prediction markets and sports betting.

21. Tax Architecture - I’m hoping this becomes easier for the next generation, but it is important to keep track of your income, contributions, major expenses, and also how to not get audited.

22. Legal Basics - Understand the binding agreements and rights from common legal documents like terms of service, return policies, data retention, and rentals. I’m sure the newer generation will just feed full documents into an LLM for it to analyze, but you still need to know what question to ask.

Human Layers

23. Deliver a toast - Using the Past-Present-Future structure, you should be able to toast 60 seconds to a friend or say a few kind words.

24. Radical Candor - Deliver constructive feedback that improves the system and not just the person. Don’t deliver it as a judgment on the person’s capabilities or personality.

25. Small Talk - The art of small talk is probably going to be more important than ever. Ask questions and be interested. Get to the punchlines and relatable points with open ended answers. So, “where do you live?” should be answered with “Colorado - where we do weekday skis and hikes.” rather than just a statement with no ability to “yes-and.”

26. One Party Trick - Think of one party trick you can do. I can wiggle my ears.

27. Budgeting your Energy/Attention - There are activities that give you energy and activities that drain it. It’s important to know what this looks like for you. Maybe the introverted recovery requires a hot bath with listening to an interesting book. Maybe it’s drawing or making music. How to regulate your energy will be such an important part of adulting.

28. Doing Your Own Research (DYOR) - This can mean many things, but for me this is the process in which you are going to learn about a subject by looking at multiple sources and figuring out how this new information impacts your actions (trades) or adjusts your understandings (weights on current events or acceptance to new technology). We’re responsible for our own actions and it’s too easy to be swayed by single opinions. Also, don’t just blindly follow what the LLM tells you to do.

29. General situational awareness - When you an enter a room, identify exits and potential hazards. Stay observant!

30. Patience - Parenting is the ultimate test of patience. I usually have a very long fuse temper because I know that most arguments are about preferences (and preferences are usually no big deal - I’ll load the dishwasher your way or you’ll keep annoying me to put on lotion). The patience for the more important things is the key to enlightenment. Maybe it’s all not that important.

~See Lemons Keep Adulting

//Yay the basement is finished! Soft launch party

Theme of the Month - Basement Done, Comedy Shows, and South Korean Wedding

The questions/thoughts that led me to the posts for Jan 2026 were:

• What do you think makes your house feel luxurious (without spending a lot of money)?

• What are some funny WiFi names?

• How was Whistler in 2014?

• What are some predictions about AI in 2026?

• How was using pods.com for your move in 2020?

• How do you grow a virtual community?

The start of the year is so refreshing. I had fully cleaned whiteboards, unpinned Keep Notes, listened to all my downloaded podcasts, closed all my unread browser tabs, read all my slack messages, read all the discord/telegram crap, and processed all my returns.

First week of work and it’s all filled again. Thus is life.

Every January, I put together some high level big plans for the rest of the year. This year, being my 40th birthday, I have a big one to consider with corresponding action plans:

One thing I’m going to try and add to my list is a personal “This is 40: Proof of Selfie” project. Since it’s unlikely I’ll see people on my birthday, I wanted to visit my close friends around the world for a proof of selfie. The start of the travel/visit list was:

• Who do I message regularly and make effort to keep in touch?

• Who do we send post cards to?

• Who was at our wedding?

• Who do I need to thank for being a good mentor and friend?

• Who did I wish a happy holidays to?

Off of this list, I think I’ll probably have upcoming trips to:

• New York - Table Tennis, Cooper Union, High School besties, Work Alumni (Credit Suisse, R3, Consensys)

• Pennsylvania - Friends

• Maryland - Brother

• Florida (Tampa, Naples, Miami) - Family and friends

• Cleveland - Friends

• California (SF, LA) - Friends

• Nashville - James & Paulina

• Hong Kong - Family and cousins

• Some Maybes with some friends: Hawaii, Seattle, London, Osaka, Hamburg, Tel Aviv

If you know me and want to be included, feel free to reach out. I think it will be a worthwhile project and might replace that cross country road trip in my 40 under 40.

The blogposts I published this month were:

Man, I love my bidet. It’s expensive, but I poop every day, so I might as well invest in a good pooping experience.

I saw a funny WiFi name, so I decided to think of other funny/punny ones that gave me a chuckle. I think you can tell what I’m watching by what names I came up with.

Whistler was fun for both TEDActive and just a visit road trip from Vancouver. I can’t wait to bring Evie there.

2026 will probably be a nothing burger, but its been a few months since I’ve written about AI so I felt the need to write one.

We moved to Denver in 2020 and luckily had an easy move using pods.com. This is not a sponsorship for them, but it was convenient.

This was an older post on considering how to grow a product’s community. I revisited this because it’s obviously top of mind for pushing product OKRs forward.

Some ideas for Feb 2026?

• [Travel Advice] South Korea - Of course there’s going to be a post on this. Wedding times! Food tours!

• 30 Adulting Skills to Learn - These are just the random things I have learned to be a functioning adult.

• 30 Beginner Poker Advice - I’ve been playing poker for a while in the neighborhood and realized I haven’t written about it yet.

• 30 Basement Reno Lessons Learned - This was a multi-year project so I’m glad we finally finished it. There were some big things we learned and little upgrade purchases that made the overall feel less generic and more badass.

• 30 Future Decade Goals - We split the next 30 years into goals per decade as mapped out by Evie’s age. This was a great activity in long term planning for her ages 6-16, 16-26, and 26-36.

• Lists of 30 App - I want to build something different to house my lists of 30. I have plenty to fill a book, so why not fill an app? Why not fill a Clembot that can live in this app and help others with this writing journey? It’s all vibes.

• Life in Lists of 30 Audiobooks - Started recording this for fun now that the basement is completed. Might as well add videos. Work hard and play hard.

Thank you for reading and I hope everyone stays safe! See y’all in the new year!

Please suggest a list of 30 and I’ll write it! I’ve written 350+ lists of 30 and only publish ones that I think other people would enjoy. It’s my fun brainstorming routine.

—