Fluffy Optimization
June 10, 2026
3-Item Status
Current Location: Milwaukee, WI
Reading: System Collapse by Martha Wells
Listening: Expert in a Dying Field by The Beths
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New Work
This week’s Let’s Know Things is about the SpaceX IPO
This week’s Brain Lenses essay is about Stress and Learning & the pod is about Corporate Buzzwords
I recently released an iOS camera app that only shoots unfiltered, un-messed-with RAW photos
Fluffy Optimization
Tools and systems can help us automate our tasks and routines, and much of the time, we should do exactly that when the opportunity arises.
We perform many labors because someone has to (and the responsibility somehow fell on our shoulders), not because we want to, or because they help us learn or grow.
Thus, we do the laundry, we juggle that spreadsheet, we attend yet another cookie-cutter meeting and in countless other ways expend our time and energy on things that are perhaps necessary, but not in any other way valuable or fulfilling.
I would argue that once flagged and mapped (so they can be reliably and beneficially automated), most of these responsibilities should be. In an ideal world, we humans would be spending all day painting and writing and making movies, and our technology would be folding the underwear and politely nodding their way through yet another PowerPoint about KPIs.
As we foist these responsibilities onto our agentic software and increasingly dextrous robots, though, we have to be really, truly, meticulously careful about what we give up in the process.
Some tasks, some responsibilities, some cumbersome efforts, are (as it turns out) psychologically vital to our health or continued development.
Maybe doing the laundry actually was important because of the role it played in breaking up our day, or as a quick little jolt of accomplishment that helped us power through the rest of the day.
Writing is often difficult, and even people like me who happily do it for a living don’t always find it enjoyable. But the process of writing is fulfilling. And writing allows us to extract our thoughts into an external medium, where they can then be assessed, reworked, and weighed in a manner that’s impossible when our cognition is limited to our skull-based wetware.
I could do away with the difficulty of writing, then, and by some measures that would be a productivity victory. It would certainly save me a lot of time.
But in doing so I’d be denying myself a process that, while at times tedious and draining, also makes me better. Not better because of the final written product, but because I invested the time and energy to make it.
Automation can be a wonderful boon when applied thoughtfully, but it should also be approached with care, lest we accidentally unload the burdens that strengthen us, leaving only the low-effort, superficially enjoyable fluff.
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What Else
This week’s Let’s Know Things episode was partly about the wave of enormous AI company IPO’s that are on the horizon, and I’ll be interested to see how those systems and tools evolve following those IPOs.
There’s a chance the surge in income will lead to some spectacularly powerful new offerings, but it’s also possible it’ll represent the beginning of the end, the current AI players possibly going the way of the early Dotcom entrants (many of which went under when that bubble popped).
Alternatively, things could go the way of the early fiber optic cable boom, the involved companies investing gobs of money to install a silly amount of early internet infrastructure before mostly collapsing—their assets bought up at a significant discount by the companies that then turned the internet telecommunications industry into a sustainable business. I tend to think some version of that latter possibility is more likely, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see several more years of boom, first.
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