Hey friends,

Back-to-School season is upon us! It smells like sharpened pencils and fresh notebooks... (What, you don't smell your notebooks...?)

Thinking Too Hard 🤔

I don't think there's such a thing as perfect work/life balance.

In fact, I think balance is the wrong concept. Life flows more in waves and seasons than it does in steady streams. Sometimes, waves will simply overtake you and there's nothing for it but getting through to the next one. What survives are your priorities. If something is a priority to you, it gets done. You will always manage to find time for the things that are truly important to you.

I think the real trick is prioritizing the right things. If you look back on your busiest seasons, what were the things that still happened? Those are your true priorities. Are they the ones you actually want?

Interesting Web Bits 🍜

Web Stuff

• Lean Rada shows us how to abuse the linear() easing function to simulate physics. Pretty neat!
• Lea Verou shows us we don't really need tri-state toggles for light/dark mode with some added wisdom, "Users do not seek out solutions to problems they don’t currently have."
• Jamie Lord takes a fascinating look into the Cloudflare OS where the key principle is distrust.
• I could probably leave off the last two steps for the sake of my token spending, but Laurentiu Raducu has an interesting way of using LLMs to learn complex topics.
• Shopify talks about using MySQL to scale.

Other Stuff

• Marco Arment (creator of Instapaper) is back with another app that helps you remember.
• Sean Goedecke writes that we should blog about things we don't understand. Stay tuned for my posts on how to fold a fitted sheet and what half the buttons on my microwave do.
• Technology ads from the 2000's were quite a different breed...

👽 Weird, 📺 Watch, and 🎮 Play

• 👽 Scroll through all 43252003274489856000 Rubik's Cube states
• 📺 A team is working on a puffin-inspired robot that can both fly and swim!
• 📺 Speaking of wild nature, some caterpillars launch their frass (poop pellets) like little cannons. (And there are some beetles that disguise themselves as caterpillar poop pellets.) Nature is so weird and cool.
• 🎮 John Buise has recreated Lemmings in PICO-8.