Notices by JA Westenberg (daojoan@mastodon.social)

Real taste is idiosyncratic and unbounded by price. It can be a $1,000 dinner or a Michelin starred $10 noodle shop.

Manufactured taste marches in lockstep with price tags - which is how millions independently develop a love for the exact same fuck-ugly monogram.

https://open.substack.com/pub/jawestenberg/p/the-question-luxury-brands-dont-want?r=53ll86&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

The future of privacy may come down to a very awkward sentence:

“Yes, I do mind. Please turn it the fuck off.”

https://buff.ly/gHSZytP

If you base your entire indie hacking career on being the only asshole who knows how to center a div or hook up a Stripe API, you are going to lose.

Code is dead as a moat.

But the indie hacker is not.

Why the AI doomers are entirely wrong about the future of SaaS: 👇

https://www.selfonomics.com/p/defensibility-through-giving-a-shit

John Boyd’s fork: do you want to be somebody or do something?

Early on, both paths look the same. Later, the real work costs you the promotion, the patron, the story you liked about your trajectory.

Pick the fork early. By the time it feels expensive, you may have already spent yourself.

https://open.substack.com/pub/thedailygeneral/p/to-be-or-to-do-which-way-will-you?r=53ll86&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

“We plan to be here in 100 years” is a competitive advantage in a market full of fly-by-night companies looking for the exit.

But you don’t build a 100-year company by announcing one.

You build it by renewing a choice, every day, against every incentive telling you to cash out, bulk up, or drift.

https://www.selfonomics.com/p/can-you-still-build-a-100-year-company

You can care about nutrition and still eat cake at a birthday party.

You can be disciplined and still be fun.

Don’t confuse self-improvement with self-surveillance.

Don’t confuse certainty with wisdom.

And don’t confuse being a dick with courage.

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/just-be-normal-about-st

The best software usually does fewer things than its competitors, which is deeply confusing to people who believe value is solely measured in sidebar items.

Productivity culture is amazing because it takes the basic human desire to have a not shit day and turns it into a 14-step content funnel.

A funny thing about task management apps is that eventually the main task becomes managing the task management app.

I'd rather have a hundred readers who'd be pissed if I disappeared than ten thousand who wouldn't notice.

“Preventive war is like committing suicide for fear of death.”

- Otto von Bismarck

Whoever strikes first only to settle his own nerves has already lost to his fears.

https://open.substack.com/pub/thedailygeneral/p/whoever-strikes-first-has-already?r=53ll86&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

Half of good writing is deleting the thing you were proud of yesterday.

Being able to pay Google to show up above your competitor when someone searches specifically for your competitor is honestly one of the scummiest little growth-hacker products big tech ever cooked up.

“Did you mean the company you deliberately did not search for?”

No.

No, we did not.

Most "productivity" is just moving the bottleneck somewhere you can't see it yet.

The strength of your conviction tells you nothing about whether you're right.

It tells you about your appetite.

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/be-thou-not-pilled/

A tool that does 90% of the job creates a new job: doing the last 10% and explaining it in plain language.

“The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving on.”

— Ulysses S. Grant

Name the decisive thing, and close with it. Then refuse the comfort of stopping to admire your own seriousness.

https://open.substack.com/pub/thedailygeneral/p/find-the-enemy-and-get-at-it-him?r=53ll86&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

The funniest LLM-writing quirk is founders stuffing “quietly” into every launch.

“We’re quietly building…”
“We quietly shipped…”
“We’re quietly changing…”

Mate, it’s fucking marketing. If you're being quiet about it, have you considered that you might be doing it wrong

The medieval calendar had something like 80 to 100 feast days a year when work simply stopped. We engineered ourselves out of every one of them. I’m given to understand this is progress.

Attention is the only currency that prints itself, and we keep setting it on fire to watch other people’s AI-generated vacation reels