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jamesgillon Take One Small Step

Short answer: yes, I have--walking. I think the main learnings were (a) have faith in absurdly small steps, repeated, and (b) my anxious brain is always looking for the slightest excuse to skip it. No real tweaks, except keep trying to make the step smaller.

jamesgillon Take One Small Step

No, it’s an expansion of my reading of a different book: http://thinkhuman.com/book-notes-one-small-step-can-change-y...

I read Clear’s book, though, and like it. Neither book has new ideas, but they both present old ideas in useful ways.

jamesgillon The Most Popular Blogs of Hacker News in 2025

Jeff, your /books and /blog links appear to be broken here: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/about/

jamesgillon Tech billionaires threaten to exit California over proposed wealth tax

Bye, Felicia.

jamesgillon Musk claims Tesla Model Y is best-selling car in the world, but there are doubts

The real “Trump Derangement Syndrome” is really just this—what used to be called demagoguery. It often works—for a little while. But it always ends in sad, destructive, painful ways.

jamesgillon Local AI Needs to Become the Norm

But AI is not an agnostic thing. Its entire story arc is built on a race to monetize and profit—and that requires human data and captured users.

jamesgillon Sauron, home security startup, plucks CEO out of Sonos

Wasn’t Sauron defeated by an amateur hacker who defeated the security, found a backdoor and destroyed the power grid?

jamesgillon Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers (2022)

That's Miss Jackson if you're Windows.

jamesgillon Always bet on text (2014)

Related: https://sive.rs/plaintext

jamesgillon Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features

He said there would be both an "AI kill switch" but that it's also "opt-in". Taken together, his two statements seem a little...odd.

jamesgillon Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features

He didn't say he wasn't going to remove ad blockers; he said "I don't want to". No commitment or position, just a preference.

jamesgillon Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features

Why not make them disabled by default, with the option to turn them on?

jamesgillon Yellow Dog Linux

I never knew that. Cool.

jamesgillon Ruby and Its Neighbors: Perl

The part about Smalltalk's influence on Ruby is a good callout. Smalltalk has influenced many languages: Python's 'everything is an object (like Ruby)'; Objective-C's message sending syntax; JS's 'self'; and probably Scala. Not sure what else (besides Ruby of course).

As for Perl, I think besides Ruby probably PHP (began as "Personal Home Page Tools — a set of Perl-like macros") and JS (expressions, variable pragmas, loose semantics) have the clearest influence.

jamesgillon Ford pulls the plug on the F-150 Lightning electric pickup truck

But once it actually hit production lines, Ford was never able to sell it for anything close to the promised price tag; the 2025 model started at around $55,000.

If you could find one, they were far more than that. And the 2026 model real, available and for sale cost $65k+ and can easily be $90-100k with options.

Of course they killed it.

jamesgillon The appropriate amount of effort is zero

"Let me share my slightly unusual definition of “effort”: it’s the felt experience of expending energy beyond what an activity requires, like tensing your brow when you try to understand something, or the excess tension in your hand when you hold your phone...Using this definition, it’s clear that the appropriate amount of effort for any activity is zero."

jamesgillon Git in 30 Minutes: A Beginner's Guide for Technical Writers

Last year, I wrote a short ebook to help technical writers--especially those working with software in a 'docs as code' environment--quickly get up to speed with Git. Recently, I turned that book into a small website to make it freely available to a wider audience.

I aimed for an audience of tech writers with absolutely no experience with Git, though it's really for anyone without any experience who just needs to learn enough to start using Git fast. The 'prerequisites' are minimal.

jamesgillon US Tech Force

What an AI slopfest of a website.

Also: the "United States DOGE Service"? Really?

jamesgillon Warp Drive: Scientists Say a Physical Warp Drive Is Now Possible (2021)

Doubtful; though the first verified successful test of a warp drive is only 38 years away.

jamesgillon Ask HN: What is your go-to breakfast?

Fasting.

jamesgillon Craft software that makes people feel something

I agree with the title, but disagree with this:

"When programming becomes repetitive, the odds of you creating something that makes people go “wow” are reduced quite a bit. It isn’t a rule, of course. You need to be inspired to make inspiring software."

The purpose of software for other people is not to make them go 'wow'; it's to help them with their jobs to be done. That's it. The software is always in service to the job the user wants to get done. Can that make them go 'wow'? Sure, but you can't..aim for 'wow'. That's the wrong goal.

As far as 'inspiration' goes, I'm with Stephen King: "Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work."

For those that might disagree (hey, it's HN), I would ask: how do you know when 'wow' occurs? Here's a clue: 'wow' can only happen when something else occurs first. That 'something else' is described above.

jamesgillon Show HN: JotBird – A simple Markdown editor with one-click publishing

I like your Markdown Guide, and I write extensively (almost exclusively) in Markdown.

But I realized several years ago that offline first is always my first requirement for a tool like this—no SaaS, no subscriptions (or freemiums), no storing important info in yet another cloud, no signups, nothing. I write markdown locally, convert it to whatever I need locally (PDF, EPUB, etc.).

I think I’d use your tool as more of a ‘whiteboard’, where I could temporarily share simple information that’s not critical or private or work-related, that I don’t mind the world seeing. Would I pay for that service? Probably not.

jamesgillon How to Fix a Typewriter and Your Life

Wow, thank you. I'm grateful.

jamesgillon How to Fix a Typewriter and Your Life

It’s a great story. When I read it last week, his quote about kids inspired me to write this: http://thinkhuman.com/chrome-bumpers/

jamesgillon Christmas Tree Exec

It’s Christmas Tree EXEC, with intentional caps, but HN changed it.

jamesgillon [dead]

The video of him snatching up the medal and putting it on himself while the FIFA guy fawns over him and then claps is…something. And so very painfully sad to watch.

jamesgillon Dotfiles Management

I do something similar, with a combination of a bash script, gnu stow, and a git repo. It also makes provisioning a new machine with my configs and other such files much easier.

jamesgillon Chatbots can sway political opinions but are 'substantially' inaccurate: study

Aren’t we all.

jamesgillon It’s time to free JavaScript (2024)

It's time to rename JavaScript.

jamesgillon Kohler Can Access Pictures from "End-to-End Encrypted" Toilet Camera

Enshittification.