Viewing profile — dbrunton

Came here (and used Fastmail for password recovery) to say just this. I actually forget what it’s like to sell advertising on my correspondence!

If you want to be a successful bank robber, probably. Pirate, yeah, probably that too. If you want to be a successful hit man, smuggler, or drug dealer, you're going to have to ben…

"Making friends" is more technical than "learning math." But more importantly, having friends helps more with technical problems than, say, knowing some technology that doesn't app…

Learn to be resilient. Pick up an artistic or handcraft technique. Make friends. Comedy, music, drama, or something other performing art. Know your means, live within them.

Try increasing your attention on what's important to you, instead of decreasing your attention on what isn't. You can be asked for your attention, explicitly or implicitly, any tim…

Yeah! Kierkegaard! I agree with your point, even though I wouldn't call it a middle ground. I think, "make as much money as you can without being evil" is, maybe a middle ground. I…

You can do it! Have a mission. Imagine a kid dribbling a basketball along the baseline, while staring intently out-of-bounds. "What are you doing, kid?" "Making sure I don't go ove…

Do something completely different, and start immediately. Maybe it's working in a coffee shop, maybe it's laboring on a farm, maybe it's teaching a pottery class or bagging groceri…

Find someone to help. Preferably, this will be someone at work. Either someone in your job who's as stuck as you are, someone in the next layer up who needs a boost, or someone in …

I'm not a Stoic, but I like your question. Would you mind too much if I slightly re-worded it? "...retained a positive outlook while projecting no intrinsic meaning onto the univer…

Or into the pockets of the owners of the robots who develop, maintain, and power these robots.

Five good reads (okay, one that I've read and four that I now definitely will), and the beautiful prose I have come to love over twenty years of reading this particular author.

Tell that to someone on the no fly list.

Nice writeup by Ed Summers about how to learn to do the work we all do if you're not already doing it.

HAHAHAHA, touche! Thanks for the perspective ;)

Huh, for some reason, I can't see the comment I submitted with the post. Sorry if this shows up twice... My little brother (I'm so proud!) wrote a blog post about faster TCP slow s…

My little brother wrote a blog post, which I put into a reddit-ized headline (f-word, hyperbole, accusations, etc.), which actually turned into an interesting conversation. ON FRIG…

I wrote a long-format response to this essay on Jottit: http://lies.jottit.com . It's kind of too long to make as a comment, hence this pointer.