“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.” – Alfred North Whitehead Effective technology takes our most time-consuming tasks and moves them into the background so we can focus on other important things. We can see this happening on the civilization level with the infrastructure we’ve built to get inexpensive food, water, energy, and transportation. But it also works on the personal level. Whether it’s a high-quality dishwasher or well-designed personal-finance software, technology is our primary tool for saving time and redirecting our attention. But not all technology is successful at this. The power of technology is abstraction and a poor abstraction is worse than having no technology at all. Case in point: a smart light-bulb that never saves you enough time to recover the time you spent setting it up. Simon Sarris has a great post describing some of these issues: “Many modern devices (and apps) really excel at squishing tradeoffs into weird shapes. They are better thought of as little imps that sneak into homes and ask for more and more of your attention. They want to gently claw at your eyes and ears. They want to put notifications on your phone and remind you that you need to interact with them, or buy more of them, so that they might become even more convenient.” Simon Sarris, Careful Technology Much of our technology has small hidden costs. A new app on your phone, an audible hum in the background, a recommended cleaning every six months, recurring manual software updates, monthly emails in your inbox, increased risk of a breaker trip, reduced counter-top space, parts that need replaced, a small monthly fee, a new username and password, batteries to recharge, parts to recycle, etc, etc. Each cost seems small but with enough bad technology you face death by a thousand cuts. You lose time, peace, and other more difficult-to-quantify things, like “the cozier feeling of home.” We have to be discerning about the technologies we let into our lives. I’m tired of technology that trades one set of problems for another. I want that technology you don’t have to think about.

A few weeks ago, I was building a server-side API client. I had written the code and tested it in isolation. Everything looked good. Unfortunately, when I included it in the main service, I started seeing errors. I decided to try asking an AI tool for suggestions. I gave it the error message and a bunch of context. It gave me a solution with a detailed explanation. The errors went away. But the solution didn’t sit right with me. It was a bit complex, introducing more layers of code and various protections. The errors were gone, but I couldn’t clearly explain why it worked, and that was bothering me. While the code was being reviewed, I decided to take another look. I brought back the error and spent some time digging into the stack trace. That’s when I made the discovery: it was an environment issue. All I needed to do was set an environment variable and the issue would be fixed. The AI-provided code had been masking the real issue, quietly suppressing the error, and hiding the truth in its complexity. Now this is the part of the post where I’m supposed to criticize AI programming tools. I won’t be doing that. This isn’t an AI problem. I remember the first time I tried to fix a memory leak. Certain iPhone users would load the webpage, interact for a while, and then randomly the webpage would crash. We struggled to diagnose the issue (Safari’s devtools weren’t great at the time). We thought we fixed it several times but the issue kept coming back. Why? Because we didn’t understand the problem. We kept digging and eventually we found it: one of our dependencies was storing massive amounts of data on the window object and it wasn’t getting cleaned up. We added a cleanup step and the problem was gone for good. Since then, I’ve adopted a mantra: you can’t fix a problem you don’t understand. It doesn’t matter if the “fix” comes from AI, Stack Overflow, or trial-and-error. If I don’t understand the problem, I feel unsettled until I do.

Here are some things I made in 2024: Music Box Fun: Advanced Editing (a new major feature): Adds multiple-note selection for bulk operations on notes (like deletion, copy/paste, nudging and dragging) Also includes a “space editor” for arbitrarily adding/removing space anywhere in the song Includes other niceties like note highligting during playback and pitch highlight on hover Music Box Fun songs I made: Elliott’s Theme (Stardew Valley) in 15-note and 30-note versions Bluey Theme Song Jupiter Theme (The Planets) 11 new projects added to Let’s Get Creative, now available at a new domain name: https://letsgetcreative.today The Firefly Building in Minecraft (if you know, you know) 13 blog posts on bryanbraun.com, including a companion repo to my post on unusual Git IDs. I’m happy with this list. It was a year of many challenges. In February we got hit by a flooded basement and an emergency hospitalization which left my wife with limited mobility for a month. It was a difficult time and I’ll be forever grateful for the family and friends who helped us get through it. It was also a year of growth for my kids in particular, bringing many new parenting challenges. At the same time, I have so much to be grateful for. My wife and I hit our fifteenth anniversary and our relationship has grown stronger despite (or perhaps because of) the storms we’ve weathered. Every year brings new opportunities and challenges and it’s a privilege to have a committed partner that I can face them with. 🚵🏻‍♀️🚵🏻‍♂️ I wish you all the very best in 2025.

Here are some more links to things that I keep thinking about. I shared a bit more detail on these ones than I usually do—there were so many good quotes to include. Enjoy! Selfishness & Therapy Culture Earlier this year, there was a post in the New York Times called “Sometimes, Forgiveness is Overrated”. Selfishness & Therapy Culture is a brilliant critique, both of the NYT post and of the culture that produced it. “Who in the world could possibly look out at contemporary society and think that the message ‘put yourself before other people’ isn’t loud enough? Every women’s site on the internet preaches this message. Every hustle bro on Threads preaches this message. Every therapist between San Diego and Sacramento preaches this message. Every eight-word meme in overly elaboratee cursive font on Pinterest preaches this message. … There’s the girlboss version and the Joe Rogan bro version and horoscope obsessive version and the Wall Street grindset version and the fitness guru on trenbolone version…. Justification for selfishness is not in short supply. It is the water in which we swim.” My opinion: the celebration of selfishness is a form of societal sickness that we have, and it isn’t new. Faith practices that center on forgiveness and selflessness are part of the social infrastructure our forefathers erected to fight the sickness, and when we erode them, we do so at our own peril. The Morality of Having Kids in a Magical, Maybe Simulated World This post is a reaction to the recurring sentiment that perhaps it is immoral to have children in a world threatened by climate change. The “evidence for a simulated world” part is a bit farfetched, but what interested me the most was the idea of framing human progress in the terms of “ENERGY: The Game.” It gave me this feeling like, oh, we’re all collectively playing this game1, and it’s going somewhere, so what is my role? Instead of playing for myself, or my family, or my country, I could be playing for humanity, in its fight against the elemental foe. In this game, is there anything more noble then working to push technology forward, creating value out of nothingness, helping to create abundance for all humanity? You should be working on Hardware I work in software but I studied mechanical engineering, so I have a deep respect for those who work in hardware (like Casey Handmer, the author). I love how this post calls out the needs in the world and raises your aspirations to work on them: “You only get a few chances to work on really big projects, to build the future, to move humanity forward.” “Most hardware concepts will never even be dreamed, let alone designed, built, and brought to market. There are many, many more important, good businesses to build than there are people building them. When you build something, you can accelerate the future by decades!” The whole post is inspiring, not to mention the follow-up post How to learn Hardware, which included this wisdom: “It is always easier to learn things you enjoy doing. The art lies in finding ways to enjoy the things that are necessary…. and finding ways to avoid enjoying to excess things that are counterproductive to your mission in life.” The Well-Rounded Engineer Another one from Casey Handmer (I’ve been reading through his archives). In this one, he explains that all nontrivial engineering efforts eventually encounter “the coordination problem.” It is very common for engineers to be oblivious of it, which manifests itself in things like complaints about management being inept, or resentment that their work was “thrown away.” Here, Casey argues that elite engineers should understand the coordination problem, what causes it, and ways to resolve it. I’ve historically avoided the management track because I enjoy creating things and people are messy. That said, management exists to help solve the coordination problem and this post helped me see that I ought to develop a working understanding of management if I ever want to create something nontrivial (and I do!). Casey’s blog has quickly become one of my favorites. You Don’t Have Time to Read Books That Won’t Change Your Life We’ve all read a book that changed our life, right? Given that there’s 50 million+ books in existence, there are likely hundreds of thousands of other life-changing books out there that we only haven’t read because we haven’t found them yet. This post pushed me to imagine what my life might look like if I read twice as many “life-changing books” as I currently do, and how I might do that. I’ve been on a reading kick recently (a book a week for the past six weeks!) and I feel like it’s added a richness to my life that I don’t get from podcasts or music. 1 "It's like we got handed a save file of a game, where others put in millions of hours of work, and we can decide what game we want to play in the future." - Kurzgesagt