Digging for Fire

I have a deeply personal post I need to write, but it won't make sense without the context. So I'm going to break it up into multiple parts. They might seem disconnected to begin with. This is part two. Part one is here. On the 22nd of September, 1949, Ronaldo Fabri got on a boat, leaving behind a country on the brink of revolution. Egypt in 1949 was a country with a long history and fresh wounds.

I have a deeply personal post I need to write, but it won't make sense without the context. So I'm going to break it up into multiple parts. They might seem disconnected to begin with. This is part one. In 2009, Talia and I went on a Contiki tour of Europe. Despite being the only married couple (we were only 22!) on a Contiki tour, we managed to have a great time touring Europe without getting too sloshed along the way.

We're spending the last days of pesach in Mullumbimby. There's an amazing Jewish community here, full of young families and friendly faces. The Rabbi was kind enough to let us park our caravan in the yard of the shul, so we'll be very close to services over the next two days. This morning I was up early with Zohar and we went for a 6am walk down Burringbar Street, which is the main street of the town.

When was the last time you were offline? Like, really offline. Not just signed out of Slack. Not Do Not Disturb. Not even airplane mode. I'm talking phone entirely off for a good 24 hours. Stay at home, with no internet, and no screens. It's a forcing function for your mental health. I challenge you to try it. Once a week, or once a month, or once a year. Some sort of schedule helps set the right expectations with friends and family.

Out of sheer curiosity, I applied for a job that had a really interesting cross-over between Education and AI. I flubbed the interview. I felt very out of practice, but also, the CEO had very silicon valley vibes. She was operating at a way faster speed to me. Come to think of it, people often say that I'm calm or relaxed. Do they mean it as a compliment? It only happens when I'm on work trips.

I received a proposal today. Someone asking me to invest a decent chunk of money into their work. But the proposal was kind of hard to parse. It was written well, but the concepts weren't well organised. The structure was too complex, and poorly formatted.1 Of course, it was AI generated. I spent 30 minutes going over it with a colleague, call it an hour between us. The damn proposal probably only took 5 minutes to generate.

Normally I start with a blog post that I then convert that into a podcast. But this is a podcast first, and I'm going to turn it into a blog post later. I don't have a script that I'm reading from. This is all sort of off the cuff. There's something that I've been meaning to talk about. To speak out loud. And I hope you find it interesting. I've been thinking a lot about academic integrity lately.

Welcome to Pirate School! A new podcast hosted by me and Talia Carbis, about the chaotic, messy, wild world of home education. This podcast is basically just a chat about how we homeschool. We're both trained as teachers, so we do know a lot of those foundational education principles. And, of course, we have opinions. We just released episode 9, which you can find on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Say something profound Say something profound Say something profound Say something profound Pull it down from the heavens Pull it up from the ground Say something, Say something profound Say something oblique Say something oblique Some obscure reference Something antique The less that they get it The better it sounds Say something obscure and profound Say something brand new Say something unique An utterance that I’ll decode in a week

Pebble is back!1 I wrote about it, Eric Migicovsky wrote about it, even John Gruber wrote about it, and it's now available for pre-order. But… iPhone users like myself have been warned. The experience will be hamstrung, due to Apple's lack of interoperability between iOS and third-party devices. Some features will appear first on our Android app, and then eventually we’ll add them to the iOS app. This is because the majority of our development team uses Android phones, and generally we’re building things for ourselves, so naturally Android comes first.

I've been interacting with quite a lot of Americans, Europeans, and Brits the last few days. I've learned two new things about the USA, and for once, neither comes from my typical sarcastic, antagonistic disposition toward "the land of the free". First, Americans share a common cultural temperament with Aussies, which is that they're not afraid to call bullshit. They're inclined to stand up for what's right. Of course, this can cause problems, especially when the definition of "right" is disputed.

It's pretty rare to find people who live an Orthodox Jewish lifestyle where there's no Orthodox Jewish community. But I do. Because I'm recognisably Jewish (I wear a kippah), I often encounter people who have questions and pre-conceptions about Judaism, which I'm more than happy to oblige. There is one particular misconception about Judaism that I encounter time, and time again. For some reason, people seem to think Jews don't drink alcohol.

My previous post was a little dense and academic. Sorry about that. We're not all educators, but we are all learners. Even though Ecological Dynamics was a little hard to parse, there's some really helpful learning advice contained there. I'm going to sum it up here in a more casual tone. And before you read this point I want you to pause. Think about something that you are trying to learn right now.

I was recently introduced the sports psychology methodology called Ecological Dynamics. It's an approach to skill acquisition for physical activities which is becoming widely adopted by contemporary coaching practices. Elite coaches across the globe are leveraging these strategies to achieve remarkable success in top-tier sports. I believe Ecological Dynamics can apply broadly to skill acquisition in fields beyond sports. In fact, I'd argue that it's a direct reframing of Constructivism, a pedagogical movement which began way back in the 1920s (with every Education undergraduate's favourite reference: Jean Piaget).

The dragon is closing in. The cleric is out of spell slots. The rogue is unconscious. The barbarian is bleeding out, and the wizard has one last chance to pull off something, anything, that might turn this around. The dice clatter across the table. Don't we all live for moments like this? We’re drawn to the thrill, the drama, the high-stakes decisions. But Dungeons & Dragons isn’t just about rolling dice and fighting monsters.

Soundtrack for this post. What Satie is teaching me. Fast and quiet It's very natural to play allegro forte, fast and loud. It's much harder to play allegro piano, fast and quiet. Just because my days are busy, quickly moving from one task to another, that doesn't necessitate stress. It's possible to play quickly and quietly. So I endeavour to move through my day with calm alacrity. Crossover is inevitable That top note of a right-hand chord is occasionally played on the left.

In order to, maybe, reach a wider audience, I’ve decided to change my position on social media. I recently ran into an X profile which declared itself “write only”. My plan is to create social profiles that do the same, auto-posting words and clips from this blog. l-w------- I've chosen four networks: X, Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads. These are all primarily text-based platforms, which suits my blogging style. I've chosen to avoid Instagram and Facebook.

Inspired by Matt Webb's Unoffice Hours, I've opened by calendar for 30 minutes every week. Whether you'd like to chat about a recent blog post, how I organise, homeschooling, podcasting, film recommendations, or anything else, I'm available. All you need to do is book a call. You will need to be contactable via FaceTime. When you book the meeting, you will be given a FaceTime link to join the call. This should work everywhere, including non-Apple platforms via the web.

Whenever I'm working on something new, my end goal is to distill it into the simplest version possible. Clean, readable, minimalist. Usually, that process starts with chaos and complexity. Whether it's a coding project or a TTRPG concept, the genesis is the same. Throw together a whole mess of ideas, goals, questions, and inspiration. Then refine. Find parts that fit together nicely, trim the fat, leave no wasted space. The same thing happens on the macro scale.

Derived from the Old English Wōdnesdæg, Odin’s Day. A Norse god of complexity and contradiction, war and wisdom. In the Romance languages, mercoledì, miércoles, and mercredi, named for Mercury. A Roman god of trade and travel. These gods, it seems, aren’t on my side. Wednesdays have been a struggle for me. I could use a little wisdom, a lot more focus, maybe some guidance on Wednesday. German gives us the transcendentally simple Mittwoch, which translates to “mid-week”.

This is a special audio-only episode of Digging for Fire, where I discuss Brandon Sanderson's latest Cosmere novel Wind and Truth with special guest Lior Carbis. Spoilers!

There are three kinds of ads. Heat seeking missiles [BAD] Data aggregators purchase your data, analyse your location, purchase history, browsing history, app usage, and more, then create a complex profile of you with AI assisted inference. They guess, (and nearly always accurately) your income, hobbies, education, age, gender, and most worryingly, your most likely future purchasing behaviours. Then they sell this data to advertising networks. These shadow profiles are so incredibly accurate that they’ve given rise to the “my phone is listening to me” myth.

Keep ‘em in suspense. Make all the promises you need to. Walk right on up to the door holding all the answers. Then, zag. There’s an art to timing a good zag. Too early and you lose impact. Too late and you lose trust. A good storyteller knows how to zig, but more importantly, knows precisely when to zag. I was on a call the other night with my brother, discussing Severance (s02e03).

"I love that Facebook shows me the ads I want to see!" Have you ever come across anti-privacy apologists? "Privacy is dead. It's a thing of the past. You just can't expect a right to privacy in the modern world." This is such a dark road to go down. The end-game is a black mirror episode where the ads we see are so innocuous, so inconspicuous that we don't even realise how they're manipulating us.

I noticed something weird about the things that interest me. I’m fascinated by emerging technologies. I’m all about the bleeding edge, more than happy to trade software bugs for early access. Give me the beta! I had an early smart watch, I was early to the smart home (much to the chagrin of my wife!), I bought into VR with the original HTC Vive, and I’ve been excited about LLMs since the launch of OpenAI’s GPT 3. I own two 3D printers (yes, I’m one of those people)! But that's not so strange. The weird part is that I also long to return to the early days of the internet. I love black and white film photography. I DM a weekly D&D group (a game invented in the 1970s), which requires no more technology than a pencil, paper, and your imagination. It’s more than nostalgia, I’m just captivated by…

Depending on where you’re at in life, and what kind of processes you have in place, you may dive right into the idea. Perhaps you work on it nonstop, stay up late tinkering, and overall just can’t get put it down. At some point you’ll start to add some definition and try to bring shape to the idea. Then, all too often, you abandon the thing right before shipping. — Joshua Wold, Nebulous undefined ideas are too perfect This happens to me. A LOT. Too many times to count. I have so many unfinished projects. I've always felt low-key ashamed of my inability to ship. But Joshua's post has got me thinking. Maybe all my failed-to-launch products are not such a bad thing after all.

In the early days of the cigarette, smoking was considered a harmless or even beneficial activity. Cigarettes were considered stylish, sophisticated, and doctor-approved. By the early 20th century, smoking was so deeply embedded in modern culture that it was hard to imagine a future without it! Of course, fast-forward to now and, at least in Australia, cigarettes are heavily taxed, not permitted to advertise, or even be displayed in a store. Cigarette packets are covered in grotesque imagery intended to discourage their use. Smoking in bars and restaurants is not permitted, nor is smoking within 10m of a store, beach, or playground. In New Zealand, cigarettes are now banned entirely for anyone born after 1 January 2009! We're all physically healthier for it. But a new health crisis has taken the place of Big Tobacco. A mental health crisis.

Everyone is making it up to some extent. This is the secret I didn’t learn until years into my career. I often thought I was the only one in the room who didn’t know what was going on, and was in awe of the geniuses always surrounding me... ... Often people are making things up as they go along. They’re not sure, things are undefined and squishy. — Joshua Wold, Making it up Thankfully, this is a secret I learned very early, and has steered me true in every stage of my career. In high school, everyone thought I was a programming genius. In reality, my VisualBasic apps were mashups of code I found online, and my websites usually started by copying the source from another site I liked. And then I realised, that's what programming is.

Tuesday morning, I'm in the car with my son, and the topic of steganography comes up. Eli is an adventurous kid – he loves playing games involving treasure and discovery with his mates. No prize for guessing how fascinated he was with the concept of hiding secret messages in plain sight. He wanted to learn a few steganography techniques, of course. I told him about some of the obvious ones. Despite my experience with steganography in the past, I struggled coming up with simple techniques he could put into practice without the help of a computer. Determined to figure something out, I explained Acrostic Steganography. Eli loved the idea. Now he could write letters to his friends containing secret messages.

In 2020 I started writing a novel. It was an ill-fated endeavour, but I learned a lot along the way. One of the things I learned is that it's useful to have a separate "space" for writing. I used to cycle into my city office on Eagle St., then take my laptop and a coffee somewhere else to write. There was this one particular spot, a chair in the lobby of an office building, that had people bustling all around and a view of the river. I'd put in my headphones, play a very specific playlist, and write.

I've been having an ongoing argument with a friend about AI's role in recruiting. Whether you're a job-seeker or employer, things are getting pretty dire. If you're looking for a job, one in five advertised positions are "ghost jobs" – fake, or already filled. The number of ghost jobs are probably much higher on LinkedIn, where recruiters are priming their talent pools and employers are gaming the algorithm. If you're looking for an employee, you're already drowning in AI-generated CVs and cover letters. From the Financial Times: Candidates are turning increasingly to generative AI – the type used in chatbot products such as ChatGPT and Gemini to produce conversational passages of text — to assist them in writing their CVs, cover letters and completing assessments. Estimates from employers and recruiters who spoke to the Financial Times, as well as multiple published surveys, have suggested the figure is as high as 50 per cent of applicants. A “barrage” of AI-powered applications had led to more than double the number of candidates per job while the “barrier to entry is lower”... — Financial Times, Jobhunters flood recruiters with AI-generated CVs

I'm building an app called Pita. It makes publishing and managing your podcasts easy (and pretty). This is the second update. The first is here. One of the problems with hosting your own podcast is that you still need the audio files to be served from somewhere. Depending on the podcast, these files can be quite large, especially after you're 50 or more episodes in. You also need to host your RSS file somewhere (though this can be somewhere different). And most of the time, you'll want a simple marketing website too – maybe one that has your podcast episodes listed with an audio player. That's a lot – and that's why all these paid SaaS options exist (Buzzsprout, Blubrry, Podbean, Libsyn, the list goes on…)1. But what if you could do it all for free?

On the 25th of February in 2015, I backed what would become my most beloved kickstarter project. The Pebble Time smart watch. I chose the Pebble Time Round edition, which I still believe to this day is the most beautiful smart watch that's ever been built. I was a long-time Apple Watch holdout simply because Apple didn't make it as a circle. PebbleOS is pure delight. My memories of the software are laced with nostalgia, and it's only 10 years ago! It had this quirky interface that was as fun and beautiful as it was unique. It covered all the bases for me in a Smart Watch: Lightweight Multi-day battery Easily readable outdoors Extensible (great developer API and documentation) Notifications

Try asking DeepSeek about Tiananmen Square or Uyghur Muslims or Taiwanese Independence. I'm not using it. ChatGPT has better voice recognition and can remember things about me. I like that. Can't login with Apple over the web, just in the app. It should be banned like TikTok. Exporting Chinese propaganda to the world. Something there about some level of censorship being useful and good, but this crosses a line. What line?

We use the word "goal" to talk about so many things. I want to get better at piano. I'm committed to doing yoga every morning for 3 months. Someday, I'd love to run a marathon. These are all "goals". Business school teaches that goals should be measurable, within a set timeframe. Sales targets and KPIs and OKRs are all goals with multiple axes: time and value. We plot our course as we go, adjusting as necessary, until we reach our final destination (up and to the right). These types of goals are maps. But back here in the real world, life teaches something different.

There's something special about black and white photography. We cannot help but perceive colour all around us, so the black and white image doesn't capture the world as we see it, but rather, as we remember it. It is said that we dream in black and white. I don't think that's true. Dreams, like memories, are a non-visual sensation. We might remember some colours that might have stood out, but that's a memory of the experience of colour, not colour itself. As Andri Cauldwell puts it: To see in color is a delight for the eye but to see in black and white is a delight for the soul.

I've always been a troublemaker. It's in my blood. You see, through my father's line, I am a descendant of Cornish pirates. You may have heard of the Pirates of Penzance. The Gilbert & Sullivan opera was written about real pirates who harboured in a town named Penzance, at the southern tip of the United Kingdom. If you drive 15 minutes north from there, along the A30, you'll come to a place called Carbis Bay. That's my namesake. I'm a Carbis.

I recently wrote about the way AI is making it possible to build software essentially for free. That's not exactly true – at least not yet. Starting work on a new project is hard. It's the classic blank page problem. While AI doesn't yet do such a great job of programming, one thing that it's great at is giving me a starting point.

On June 28, 2005, Apple release iTunes 4.9. From the release notes: With iTunes 4.9, you can now browse and subscribe to podcasts from within the iTunes Music Store. Podcasts are frequently updated radio-style shows downloadable over the Internet. You can also transfer podcasts to iPod, for listening on the go. At launch, Apple's podcast directory was home to 3,000 shows. The BBC at the time described podcasts like this: Podcasts are downloadable audio shows that can be created and listened to by anyone with the right equipment. Who could have imagined that podcasts would grow to become an entire media category, right alongside film, television, music, and books?

Ben Thompson's aggregation theory posits that the internet created an entirely new disruptive business paradigm, because for the first time in history, products could be distributed with zero marginal cost. Now, large language models have triggered a second wave of disruption: while the internet eliminated distribution costs, AI is eliminating creation costs – making software essentially free at every stage. Internet = zero marginal cost Internet + LLMs = zero total cost1

A little housekeeping post, with a few updates to the website. First of all, if you're reading this in your RSS reader, THANK YOU for keeping the dream alive. You might like to click through for this post, because I've made some small changes to the website.

I was inspired by something I saw on Joshua Wold's blog a few days ago. He was reflecting on why we write. When I sit down to put words to the page I have an idea of what I want to write. But I’ve purposely chosen not to plan it out. The experience is much the same for me, except that sometimes I don't have an idea of what I want to write.

My method for practicing bass guitar is based on the Circle of Fifths, inspired by a method taught by Scott Devine. The Circle of Fifths is a music theory concept which links each of the 12 notes in a sequence. Start with a note, and increment it by 5. Play that "fifth", and then increment another five. As a bit of code, it could be expressed like this: notes = ["C", "D♭", "D", "E♭", "E", "F", "G♭", "G", "A♭", "A", "B♭", "B"] index = 0; while playing { index = index + 5 // Move foward 5 notes in the sequence. index = index % count(notes) // Make sure our index is within range. play( notes[ index ] ) }

Every so often you'll come up with an idea that you're pretty sure nobody has tried yet. 99% of the time you're wrong. But I think our invention of the turn-based podcast falls into that 1% of truly unique ideas. Joshua and I have been working asynchronously for nearly our whole careers. So when we started a podcast that required a scheduled calendar event every week, something didn't quite sit right for us. So we decided to try something really different. The podcast is called Async, and you can find it on all the best podcast networks. It's a podcast about technology, app development, and remote work. The unique aspect is that each episode alternates between hosts, switching back and forth between Joshua and me. This allows our conversation to unfold gradually over multiple short episodes. Since this episode-to-episode asynchronous exchange is a new idea, I thought it would be good to define the term "Turn-Based Podcasting" a little more, and talk about the pros and cons of this novel format.

On a drive with Talia yesterday, I wanted to tell her about some of the interesting things I discovered while writing my Input 2024 post. The conversation went something like… Saadia Let me tell you about something I wrote, since I know you don't read my blog. Talia How do you know I don't read it? Saadia Because you don't use an RSS reader! Do you? Talia No, you're right, I don't. Saadia So how would you know when I've posted something new? You're not going to go check it everyday. It's fine! You don't need to. Let me just tell you about it. You might have heard about this "Indie Web" movement, also called the "Small Web", "Web 1.0", or "Geocities Web". It's a push to reclaim something about the internet that we lost along the way. I think that something was, specifically, RSS.

Since 2021, I've recorded every Book, Film, and Television series I've seen each year. Usually, I'll write a round-up post at the end of the year with long lists of every title. For my 2024 roundup, I've decided to keep it a little more succinct. Those who know me know that I think a lot about Input and Output. What creative information do I take in, and what creative acts do I undertake? I believe a healthy mind has a good balance between these two. Here are the best and worst of my Inputs for 2024.

Growing up, we always showered using (what my Italian mother called) a straccio. It wasn't until I was old enough to shop for myself that I encountered the plastic "shower puff", known also as a loofah1. That word – loofah – occupied a very singular place in my mind (synthetic shower accessory) until a few years ago, when I discovered a loofah growing in my garden. The crazy part was… that cucumber-like fruit turned out to be exactly the same thing.

Twenty twenty-five is such a great number. Check this out: (20 + 25)² = 2025! And if that doesn't convince you: (0 + 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9)² = 2025.1 Clearly we're living squarely in auspicious times.2

In 2024, I led a series of Film & TV classes for a small group of homeschool students. The curriculum was designed to explore a variety of tasks and topics, offering the students insight into different career paths within the filmmaking industry.