Hello! Come on in. I'm Justin Pot, your host, and this week we're going to talk a little bit about the puzzle game Pips before we briefly reflect on why we all feel so tired all the time.

Pips and the art of feeling good about being wrong

Pips is a daily puzzle from The New York Times, one of the top video game companies on the planet (they also meddle in journalism). It’s fun, frustrating, and recently taught me something important. 

In Pips you need to place a number of dominos on a board while following certain rules. Some groups of spots need to add up to a particular amount, for example, and there are individual spots that require a specific number. 

To win the game, particularly on the hard puzzles, you typically need to look at the dominos you have and find pieces that, logically, have to go in a particular place. If there’s only one six, for example, and there’s a place on the board that requires a six, you know your six needs to go there. Placing one piece allows you to find another piece that logically has to go somewhere, which eventually cascades until you place the final piece. 

The best games make you feel smart—Pips excels at this. Working out why a particular piece has to go somewhere is extremely satisfying, especially when doing so requires thinking ahead.

But sometimes it feels just as good to be wrong.

Anyone who plays Pips has, at some point, made a confident assumption about where a particular piece must go. It gives you the exact same feeling—of progress and of being smart. For a while. 

What’s actually happening is that your initial bad assumption is cascading into more bad assumptions, until you get to the final few pieces and realize you’ve played yourself into a corner. Then you need to figure out where you went wrong, go back to that point, and work out the actual way forward. 

In the short term, being confidently wrong about something feels just as good as actually being correct. 

Life isn’t as clear-cut as a Pips board, unfortunately—sometimes being confidently incorrect is rewarded seemingly indefinitely (insert your own political joke here). Generally, though, bad assumptions lead to bad outcomes, even if they feel useful for a time. Eventually you need to look back and figure out where you went wrong, then correct for that. 

This idea goes against the grain at the moment. American society believes that backing down on something you believe is weak, even if it turns out your belief isn’t true. But changing your mind when bad ideas don’t work isn’t weakness—it’s strength. It’s how you learn to be better. It’s a skill we’re all going to need.

_{link: https://justinpot.com/pips-and-the-art-of-feeling-good-about-being-wrong/}

Our devices are exhausting us

I’m no longer working with Lifehacker, which is disappointing. But I’m grateful I got to spend two years doing one of my favorite things: finding great indie and open source tools and sharing them with readers. 

I couldn’t be happier that Current, a different sort of RSS reader, is the last app I wrote about over there. If you like the idea of RSS, but find RSS readers stressful, this app is built for you. The decision to not have any unread counts means I can open the app, read the headlines that are interesting, and close it. And I can configure different feeds to stick around, meaning I don’t have to worry about losing track of articles. It’s a piece of software designed to stress you out less. 

So it makes sense that Terry Godier, the developer, has a lot of opinions on the way we use technology now. Here’s an excerpt from a visual essay published on his own website: 

Here is something nobody says plainly: Sometime in the last twenty years, our possessions came alive. Not all at once. Not dramatically. One by one, the objects in our lives opened their eyes, found our faces, and began to need us. Your thermostat has opinions now. Your television requires a login. Your car updates itself overnight, and sometimes when you start it in the morning, the interface has rearranged itself, as if someone broke in and reorganized your dashboard while you slept.

He’s giving words to an idea I’ve had for a while but couldn’t quite express: that we’re all spending too much of our time babysitting our technology. I highly recommend reading the entire essay (and clicking the buttons on the Casio F-91W).

_{link: https://justinpot.com/our-devices-are-exhausting-us/}

A few requests

As I mentioned: I recently lost a major client and have a bit more free time than I'm used to. I'm hoping to use some of it to build back my blogging habit, and to compile those blog posts here on the newsletter. But I'm going to need a little bit of help.

• Share this newsletter, if you find it interesting! Forward it to your friends, or share links to individual articles.

• Let me know if there are any subjects you'd like me to explore.

• Send cool apps you find to me, so I can write about them here

• And finally, if you're an editor who would like to work with me, get in touch!

Also, because people consistently complain if I don't include a photo of my cat Mira, here she is sitting in a tiny box.