I keep this blog mostly for myself, as a way of cultivating a habit of curiosity and creativity. I’m flattered that a small group of people (with impeccable taste!) visit it or have decided to subscribe, but I’m clear-eyed enough to know it’s not the most important place on the internet. When traffic spikes, I almost always know why. When someone signs up, I usually know who they are.
Until recently.
At some point in the past several months, I started to see a lot of traffic from China, Singapore, and, occasionally, Iran (I noticed this on HeyRecap, which uses AI to cover the local governments here in Georgia, as well).
I didn’t think a whole lot of it. There’s a lot of LLM / bot traffic on the web these days and I make my site pretty easy to access. I figure if I’m going to spend my time doing this, I should at least be a part of the training data set. Perhaps the SuperAI will be friendly to me!
But this week something else happened. I started to see a bunch of new email subscriptions come in, all about one after the other. All people of these people used their business email addresses. I can find most of them on LinkedIn. They seem to be real people… except I have no connection to any of them. They live in places and work on things I have no connection to. Some of them are probably reading this now (👋).
I guess it’s possible that these people really have found my site and decided that they want emails from it. If this is the case, welcome. I’m glad you’re here!
However, I suspect that this is actually bot traffic? Here is what I think was happening:
Bots were putting in email addresses in my subscribe form
This kicks off a verification email to their email address
Their corporate email scanner clicks on each link in the email, which shows up to my site as a verified subscriber — all the subscribers I didn’t recognize were corporate email addresses
But this is kind of crazy — that means that there are bots out there putting real email addresses of real people with jobs into blogs as small and insignificant as mine. What? I guess this is the world we’re headed towards but I didn’t expect it to find me so soon.
If you have gotten this email and you don’t want it, please hit the unsubscribe button and kindly accept my apologies. Thanks to friend of the blog Graham for encouraging me to write about this.
The Mundanity of Excellence. Excellence is a product of different kinds of work rather than different levels of effort. Technique (how things are done), discipline (doing things correctly, consistently), and attitude (how things are approached) are the things to focus on. “What we call talent is no more than a projected reification of particular things done: hands placed correctly in the water, turns crisply executed, a head held high rather than low in the water.”
“Those of us who retain grand ambitions and high ideals are perhaps to liable to become Casaubonnish, to become like Lydgate, so preoccupied with the dreams of youth and so stung with the perpetual sense of failure as we became assimilated to our lives, that we forgot to do the good that we can do in the time we have to do it in.” — Henry Oliver on Middlemarch
Georgia is losing its southern drawl. One of my favorite things about attending the University of North Carolina was learning the subtle differences between North Carolina accents, to the point where I could place where you went to high school by how you spoke. They were beautiful and unique.
It should be easier to send gifts to a person having only their phone number.
“If you get mad you will be seen as losing almost-every argument, regardless of what the other person did that led to you getting mad, again excepting really extreme and explicit evidence.” — Uri. I should be forced to reread this once a month.
Things I learned
Just 13% of Gen Z believes that most people can be trusted — Ryan Burge. Surely at some point this has to rebound?
Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” is the best selling single of all time, which I learned at a BP gas station video ad of all places and confirmed via Wikipedia.
The second fastest growing sector in America between 2019 and 2024 was gambling — Matt Stoller
Someone notify Henry Oliver: we have a late bloomer. I hadn’t realized how inconsequential Sherman’s career had been before the start of the Civil War. He was well regarded within the Army but saw no real action during the Mexican American War. He left the Army and was in charge of two banks that failed. The bank failures were largely bad luck caused by turbulent economic times, but all the same in his mid-forties he was being kept a float by his father-in-law and very much felt like he was at a dead in.
And then the war came, he rejoins the army and the rest is history. At the battle of Shiloh, his coming out party, he’s 43 years old. By the end, he was arguably the war’s most successful general. He’s seen as a peer to Grant and many would have run him for president, except he did not want to hold the office.
Sherman’s Civil War mostly takes place in the Western Theater. Seen from the perspective of the West, the War seems much more one sided than it does from the Eastern theater. By the summer of 1863, they’ve cracked the Confederacy in half and are pressing their advantage — victory no longer seems in doubt.
Another thing that was surprising to me was how confusing the opening months of the war were. All throughout the country, particularly in the border lands, towns and communities were choosing sides. Generals on both sides were prone to imagine large, invincible forces just around the corner that just didn’t exist and even the troops under their command may not be reliable.
A final treat when reading this book: so many of the places are in my backyard. Sherman spends a lot of time relieving and reinforcing Chattanooga, where my family went for spring break. The place where Sherman’s army crosses the Chattahoochee is a park my family frequents. Having a sense of place makes both books and places so much richer to me.
In case this is the last Good Tokens of the year, have a great holiday season and end of 2025. See you in 2026!
A message from my sponsor
Christmas is just 7 days away. If you’re here, you already know about my dear friend Uri’s hit new game Person Do Thing, but out of love for the game and it’s creator, I have to say one final time, this is a perfect stocking stuffer and a great way to spend time with your friends and family without a screen. Highly recommended!
The Lost Generation. This one is controversial because it deals with race and DEI, but if you can distance yourself from that a little bit, it’s really informative. It made me believe more in the Elite Overproduction Hypothesis.
The story of the fight over Romansch. Particularly enjoyable for me because the Engadin is among my favorite places in the world.
Things I learned
The average boomer will get paid out significantly more in medicare and social security than they paid in taxes — Russ Greene. Soon we’ll need a Boomer Corner.
The EU makes more from fines on US tech companies than it does from taxes on all EU tech companies — David Fant
Lebron James has played against 35% of players in NBA history — CBS Sports. To be fair, he has played in 28% of the league’s seasons. I think this makes him the Queen Elizabeth of athletes.
Musings
I feel like the Grinch saying this, but we’ve got to cut down on the number of special clothing days (e.g., pajama day) that are happening in schools or daycares. All it does is create stress for me as a parent and I don’t get the sense that my kids actually enjoy these. Who is this for?
LLM corner
Some shameless self promotion: The latest episode of —dangerously-skip-permissions: How Penny Schiffer works. Penny is another technical product manager turned AI software developer who I think has really mastered creating with AI.
GenAI created ads outperform human created ads by 19%… unless they are disclosed as created by AI, in which case the performance goes down by 32% — Eric Seufert
In a previous post, I mused: “You’re not avoiding failure, you’re avoidng the feeling of failure.”
KL asks: "Can we unpack this into some actionable life hacks?"
When I was in 8th grade, I decided not to tryout for the middle school basketball team because I didn't think I'd make it and I didn’t want to get cut.
A couple of weeks later, I saw the group of guys that made the team. The best few were obviously better than me, but I would’ve been competitive, if not better, than the rest of the ones who made it.
By not trying out, I avoided the feeling of failure, but I got the same result: I didn't get to play on the team. I didn't avoid failure, I avoided the feeling of failure.
