JA Westenberg

I write about tech + humans + philosophy

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Last Notes

2026-06-06 04:41:00 GMT

The fastest way to ruin a good product is to start listening to the loudest customer

2026-06-01 04:41:00 GMT

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

2026-05-28 01:31:23 GMT

The Costco theory of the internet:
People are tired of infinite choice.
They want fewer decisions, higher floors, lower bullshit, clearer standards, and someone competent enough to throw the garbage out before they arrive...
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-costco-theory-of-the-internet/

2026-05-23 04:41:00 GMT

Half the internet is people optimizing routines they don’t like for a life they’ve never once paused to confirm they want.
The dashboard is gorgeous though.

2026-05-21 23:06:01 GMT

The internet is millions of people scrolling themselves into a crisis and then replying to each other from inside an anxiety spiral where they interpret everything as an attack, and we get the discourse we get.

2026-05-21 01:34:51 GMT

"Greatness" is not a personality trait.
It's closer to accumulated evidence.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/nobody-is-destined-for-greatness/

2026-05-20 03:51:07 GMT

There’s functionally no engineering reason to put a robot on two legs. Every other form factor is cheaper, more stable, more efficient, and easier to maintain.
There is, however, a very good marketing reason: everyone’s watched Terminator, fear goes viral, and anxiety drives attention.
A warehouse robot is infrastructure.
A humanoid robot is an engagement strategy…

2026-05-18 04:41:00 GMT

The thing nobody warns you about therapy is that it gives you a new vocabulary, not a new self, and far too may people stop at the vocabulary.

2026-05-17 23:07:00 GMT

A staggering number of adults have organized their personalities around having read one book in 2019. And the book sucked.

2026-05-17 22:39:11 GMT

The work you're trying to do hasn't been done yet because you haven't done it. Nobody else will do it for you. The route is through, not around.
In a few hundred years, someone might transcribe your work by hand to understand how it holds together.
That's not a bad goal, actually.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/how-to-be-inspired-without-copying/

2026-05-13 06:58:40 GMT

Why do you care?

2026-05-10 06:54:21 GMT

The thing about most people who write posts about what “most people” don’t do - is that they don’t do any actual research about most people.

2026-05-08 23:05:09 GMT

New York to Sacramento compressed from six months to seven days.
The integration of national markets that followed turned Sears, Roebuck and Standard Oil into empires.
But the railways themselves went bankrupt…
https://www.selfonomics.com/p/nvidia-goes-to-zero

2026-04-25 01:57:02 GMT

Jake, 24, said buying in Sydney wasn't that hard. "I cut down on avocado toast, walked to work, and my grandmother passed away leaving me $1.2 million in a trust. Anyone can do it if they really want to." This story sponsored by news dot com dot au.

2026-04-24 02:48:54 GMT

My hottest of hot takes: the only people who should run companies that make things are people who deeply give a fuck about those things. Only people who love games and love playing games should run companies that make games. Doesn’t matter if it’s cheeseburgers or software.

2026-04-21 07:16:18 GMT

The problem with YouTube is the compulsive professionalisation. Every new creator feels the pull toward a Mr. Beast video - the thumbnail, the hook, the cuts, the attention graph. They comply or they don't upload. A platform built for anyone became a platform for one kind of video and ~only one.
https://youtu.be/3gBRh9TkVXE

2026-04-20 21:23:25 GMT

Everyone transitioning these days
I blame Biden
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/439/135/051/368/194/original/d301b29426194f63.jpeg

2026-04-20 20:50:37 GMT

End of an era
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/439/006/412/883/939/original/57bfa9c445a40a20.jpeg

2026-04-19 12:35:40 GMT

On balance, and given the choice, I’d go back to a pre-internet world in a heartbeat.

2026-04-18 22:27:02 GMT

Peter Thiel: the only man who read The Lord of the Rings and deeply identified with Sauron

2026-04-17 22:26:32 GMT

You can tell a guy has never actually read 1984 because he will not shut the fuck up about 1984.

2026-04-14 22:17:11 GMT

Thank you for being a valued Streaming Service+ subscriber. Your monthly plan is increasing from $9.99 to $24.99. This price adjustment reflects our continued investment in canceling your favourite shows after one season, removing titles from the library without warning, and building a worse user interface. Note: Your tier now includes ads. To remove them, upgrade to our new Ultra Premium Platinum plan ($39.99/mo). Btw your password can no longer be shared with the people you live with.

2026-04-12 19:29:12 GMT

> “We can’t vote out fascists” crowd are on notice
> Donald Trump is going to be SEETHING
> Fuck yeah Hungary
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/393/387/779/595/770/original/25a7b737a5013051.jpeg

2026-04-09 01:10:26 GMT

Day 3 of challenging myself to do a video every day for 30 days...
I've been running a solo business since 2020. No employees. No office beyond the one filled with cat hair and comic books. Just me, a computer, a set of AI tools, and a network of clients I genuinely give a shit about. Here's how // why.
https://youtu.be/3yPrVu-QC2Q

2026-04-07 04:34:37 GMT

Bad writing is not new. Clunky sentences are not new. Overused metaphors are not new. "His eyes darkened with desire" was appearing in romance novels decades before anyone had heard of a large language model. Following genre conventions does not make you a fraud.
New video about AI detection, witch hunts, Alexandre Dumas, and why I will never participate in crowdsourced career destruction based on broken tools and vibes...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTeLgfLqMrY

2026-04-07 03:54:12 GMT

To the startup founder from the EU (who sold his company for multiple millions of dollars) who emailed me to complain that I’m on YouTube because it’s big tech - no worries m8. All I need to be completely financially free and not have to worry about building either readers or subscribers is $5m. As soon as you transfer that I’ll happily go all in on FOSS.

2026-04-03 21:33:02 GMT

every generation thinks they're the smartest group of people to ever live. Yet here we are, inventing apps to remind us to drink water and stand up sometimes

2026-04-03 06:27:00 GMT

The passive income movement was a fantasy about not having to give a shit. This is a terrible foundation for pretty much anything.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-passive-income-trap-ate-a-generation-of-entrepreneurs/

2026-03-31 10:12:02 GMT

the australian tradition of calling your best mate a cunt and your worst enemy mate has no american equivalent and this explains a lot of the miscommunication

2026-03-31 00:24:06 GMT

Newcomen built the first commercially successful steam engine in 1712. It was awful. 1% thermal efficiency. James Watt showed up 57 years later and built one that worked. Newcomen got a Wikipedia footnote. Watt got a unit of measurement.
"The World's First" is not the trophy you think it is.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-worlds-first-bullshit/

2026-03-25 00:47:27 GMT

Every bank is like “we’re more than just a bank” and all anyone wants is for them to shut the fuck up and be a bank

2026-03-24 06:12:19 GMT

On any given day, I have roughly 5 or so fucks to give.
Before anyone takes that as a confession of total selfishness, I want to be precise about what I mean...
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/tread-carefully-because-you-tread-on-my-fucks/

2026-03-24 01:02:04 GMT

I have 75% confidence that I am 90% sure that 40% of the things I believe are 100% wrong

2026-03-23 10:13:05 GMT

'Deep work’ is just ‘doing your job’ for people who’ve been on Slack so long they forgot what that felt like

2026-03-23 01:03:02 GMT

AI doomers and AI accelerationists have more in common with each other than with normal people who simply do not think about AI that much. The disagreement is coming from inside the church

2026-03-20 10:17:03 GMT

my political position is that i would like things to be noticeably less insane than they currently are. this is considered "not having principles" by people who think everything should be on fire

2026-03-19 21:49:50 GMT

The future is already evenly distributed. It’s just not here yet.

2026-03-19 10:11:04 GMT

everyone wants to be the last sane man in the asylum but buddy we’re all patients here. i’m simply the patient with the best tweets about it

2026-03-10 01:02:04 GMT

the word "ecosystem" should be banned from business communication until people demonstrate they understand what an ecosystem is

2026-03-09 23:16:03 GMT

"we're a family here" is something no actual family has ever had to say

2026-03-09 01:00:13 GMT

I don't want to work smarter or harder and I have zero fucking interest in either The Hustle or The Grind. I want to work the exact amount I need to afford a normal life, which used to be possible, and now apparently requires a podcast??

2026-03-05 10:19:02 GMT

The guy who says "I just speak my mind" has never once considered that his mind might benefit from an editor. Or a fact-checker. Or a moment of silence. Just one. A single moment of not speaking his mind. As a treat.

2026-03-05 06:03:02 GMT

The modern internet argument cycle: someone posts an opinion. Someone else screenshots it. A third person quote-tweets the screenshot with "this is wild." A fourth person writes a thread about the thread. Nobody has changed their mind. Everyone has lost 40 minutes. The sun sets on another day of human progress.

2026-03-05 04:17:02 GMT

The confidence of a man who has watched one documentary on the YouTubes and now opens every conversation with "well actually" is a force of nature that science cannot explain and god cannot contain

2026-03-04 10:17:02 GMT

The most unhinged thing about modern life is that we've normalised paying $200 a month for the gym and $300 a month for wellness "supplements" but if someone charges $5 for a newsletter they wrote with their actual brain people act like they've been mugged at knifepoint

2026-03-04 06:04:02 GMT

"I don't have time to read" says the absolute character who spent 4 hours last night watching a stranger rank every fast food burger on YouTube

2026-03-04 04:25:02 GMT

If you prioritise "sign up" over "login" on your landing page to the point that existing users have to search for the button, you are holding your existing users in contempt. And you're an arsehole to boot.

2026-03-03 21:34:02 GMT

All you need to know about the tech industry is that the people building tools to "connect humanity" haven't spoken to their neighbours in 6 years

2026-03-03 06:04:02 GMT

My kid asked what I do for work and I said "I write on the internet" and he said "so nothing" and this is the most accurate job description I've ever received

2026-03-02 23:14:02 GMT

The podcast industrial complex has reached the point where two guys can sit in a room and say nothing for 3 hours and call it "long form content" and somehow that's a career now. I'm not even mad. I'm impressed. I've been trying to get paid for saying nothing for years.

2026-03-02 21:31:02 GMT

Every "build in public" AI-guy is just a dude who automated his to-do list and is now mass spamming people about it like he split the atom. You used a Pi wrapper to move a Trello card, mate. Sit down.

2026-03-02 10:11:02 GMT

I genuinely think the worst thing the internet did to reading was convince people that finishing books is a competitive sport. You don't need to read 52 books a year. You just need to read. Books you like. At your own pace. And think about them for longer than a TikTok video.

2026-03-02 05:11:20 GMT

Humans are spectacular at remembering disasters, passed down in every format from the written word to the oral tradition. We are (for obvious reasons) terrible at remembering the disasters that didn't happen...
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/everything-is-awesome-why-im-an-optimist/

2026-03-02 01:02:02 GMT

Not one single "free thinker" who told me to "question everything" in 2020 has questioned a single thing since 2024. Turns out questioning everything meant questioning the specific things that made you feel smart at parties.

2026-03-02 00:45:08 GMT

Every tech CEO right now: "We need to move fast and break things"
The thing they're breaking: their own terms of service
The thing they're moving fast toward: a government contract

2026-02-27 21:32:03 GMT

The word “community,” a timeline:
1950: The people who live near you and help when your house floods
1990: A group of people with shared interests who meet regularly
2010: An email list you can’t unsubscribe from
2015: Anyone who follows a brand on Instagram
2020: A Discord server with 40,000 strangers and one moderator
2024: A Slack workspace your company forces you to call a community because it’s cheaper than actual culture

2026-02-27 10:12:02 GMT

You're not "playing devil's advocate." The devil has enough advocates. He has a whole political party. He doesn't need you in a group chat at 11pm.

2026-02-27 04:11:06 GMT

JD Vance wrote an entire memoir about how poverty destroyed his family and then joined the party whose entire platform is making poverty worse. Incredible arc.

2026-02-27 01:04:02 GMT

"The free market will sort it out" the free market sorted out child labour by saying yes please and we had to pass a law. That's how the free market sorts things out.

2026-02-26 10:11:02 GMT

The Venn diagram of "taxation is theft" guys and "why are the roads so shit" guys is a circle

2026-02-26 05:59:02 GMT

The entire internet grifter economy is just a guy who read one book telling you to buy his course about the book he read

2026-02-26 04:18:02 GMT

You don't have a "different opinion." You have a factual inaccuracy that you've emotionally bonded with and now you think correcting it is a hate crime.

2026-02-25 21:31:04 GMT

If you ever want to understand America just know that they have a channel called The History Channel and it shows Pawn Stars

2026-02-25 10:11:02 GMT

the Venn diagram of guys who say "facts don't care about your feelings" and guys who had a full meltdown over a Black Little Mermaid is a circle

2026-02-25 05:58:02 GMT

weird that "family values" never seems to include feeding families

2026-02-25 01:41:03 GMT

The most dangerous part of AI doom isn’t the forecast.
It’s the posture it produces: the talent exits, governance gets outsourced, and “cash out before the crash” becomes a moral philosophy.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/everything-is-awesome-why-im-an-optimist/

2026-02-25 00:56:02 GMT

"I did my own research" did you. did you really. in your pyjamas. on your phone. at 2am. on a website called truthpatriot dot eagle. you did your own research.

2026-02-24 23:17:02 GMT

reminder that "move fast and break things" was supposed to be a software philosophy not a healthcare policy

2026-02-24 21:33:02 GMT

Becoming increasingly convinced that LinkedIn is just Willy Wonka's factory except the chocolate river is bullshit and every Oompa Loompa has a podcast

2026-02-24 05:58:01 GMT

why does every crypto dude in 2026 look like they were generated by an AI prompted to create "a man who definitely has opinions about age of consent laws"

2026-02-24 01:09:17 GMT

The “swarm of agents” model assumes work naturally splits into roles: marketing, sales, support, development = basically mirroring human job titles.
But those titles and siloes are a byproduct of org scaling, not a universal truth about work.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/agentic-swarms-are-an-org-chart-delusion/

2026-02-23 15:13:05 GMT

Every AI company knows they're building the wrong thing.
And they can't stop.
Because the competitive structure specifically punishes anyone who slows down long enough to build the right thing.
The race is real. The destination is fake.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/everyone-in-ai-is-building-the-wrong-thing-for-the-same-reason/

2026-02-23 09:15:16 GMT

Ethical consumption decision tree:
Step 1: Research the company
Step 2: Find something horrifying
Step 3: Switch to competitor
Step 4: Return to Step 1

2026-02-23 05:58:02 GMT

"Thoughts and prayers" are just "read receipts" for human suffering

2026-02-23 00:57:02 GMT

"Why is everything so political now" mate, your grandparents died in a war about politics. It was always political. You were just comfortable.

2026-02-23 00:09:03 GMT

I found a journal entry from 2015 where I wrote, in all earnestness, that my life would be complete if I could just work from home and not have a boss. I now work from home and have no boss.
I do not necessarily feel complete...
https://youtu.be/dsYjBCINRvc

2026-02-22 23:13:02 GMT

The real cancel culture is Netflix who can’t let a single good show get past season one without canceling it

2026-02-22 10:13:02 GMT

The worst thing about online learning is that everything has become a video. Every code tutorial. Every design tutorial. Nobody actually writes out a guide anymore. It's just "hey guys welcome to my tutorial" and watching 10 minutes of content that isn't remotely relevant...

2026-02-19 06:41:13 GMT

Open source has an open slop problem.
And I think the solution is one that would've been perfectly obvious to a thirteenth-century Florentine weaver...
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-case-for-gatekeeping-or-why-medieval-guilds-had-it-figured-out/

2026-02-15 04:09:39 GMT

When someone tells you that AGI is inevitable and the permanent economic displacement of most humans is a foregone conclusion, what they're really telling you is that they believe the current leaders of the AI industry will execute flawlessly, indefinitely, against challenges they can't yet foresee, in an environment that's changing faster than perhaps any in history.
This seems unlikely.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-empire-always-falls/

2026-02-11 04:23:19 GMT

The reason Bluesky, Threads, and Mastodon don't feel like Old Twitter is simple sociology: Community is path-dependent. It’s a specific web of 10,000 micro-transactions of reciprocity that happened over a decade.
You can move the people, but you can't move the history.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/communities-are-not-fungible/

2026-02-08 06:02:03 GMT

my favorite genre of guy is "did his own research" guy and his research is 8 hours of a man with a whiteboard in a garage explaining that every problem in the world is caused by one specific group of people and here's how to buy gold

2026-02-03 06:02:02 GMT

The most useful productivity system is subtraction.

2026-02-03 05:18:32 GMT

Every enterprise app feels like typing on a mushy membrane keyboard. You click a button and get a gentle animation, a swooshy transition, a soft bounce, and zero clear feedback that anything actually happened. The entire B2B software industry optimized for how tools feel during a fifteen-minute sales demo instead of how they perform across an eight-hour workday, and the result is professional software with the tactile precision of poking a marshmallow.

2026-01-27 22:50:28 GMT

WHY DO WE EXIST.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/969/505/090/527/624/original/4541c425ef1c5c6f.png

2026-01-20 22:13:31 GMT

they called it trickle-down economics because 'financial waterboarding' didn't poll well with focus groups

2026-01-20 08:15:35 GMT

I get it.
I do.
But I am here to tell you, with all the gentleness I can muster, that if you couldn’t fix your life before Claude Code existed, Claude Code is not going to fix it now.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/claude-code-wont-fix-your-life/

2026-01-15 00:28:02 GMT

Stop trying to exorcise your demons.
Start opening tickets for them.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/how-to-debug-your-life/

2026-01-13 12:30:53 GMT

Everyone’s looking for the perfect app to keep their kids safe online. The answer is a desktop computer in the living room and we need to bring this shit back.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/887/796/984/849/840/original/0c422f4268839588.jpeg

2026-01-12 22:27:23 GMT

Move a reading app to your phone's dock. Put it exactly where the app you reach for reflexively currently lives, Kindle, apple Books, Libby, whatever you prefer. The goal is to intercept an existing behavior at the last possible moment and redirect it. You're accepting that the reaching will happen and arranging for it to land somewhere useful rather than trying to stop it all together...
https://youtu.be/BxLvuD79fH4

2026-01-12 06:59:11 GMT

Amy Poehler winning the first Golden Globe for podcasting is so on brand for an industry that looked at the most democratised medium in history and said “but what if we still gave awards to famous people.”

2026-01-10 22:24:48 GMT

Started mentally adding a wet fart sound after everything Elon Musk says. Highly recommend. Improves the user experience by 1000%

2026-01-10 09:03:22 GMT

Free speech is when you let people say controversial things.
Free speech is not when the world’s richest man builds a CSAM generator, hooks it up to the world’s largest public photo database, and gives 4chan a subscription service.
I’ve written thousands of words defending people’s right to be wrong on the internet.
I don’t need thousands of words for this. I have eight: what the fuck is wrong with these assholes.

2026-01-06 23:57:59 GMT

All we have are Mussolini cosplayers who can’t make the trains run on time, Rockefeller LARPers who can’t build a refinery, and Nikola Tesla tribute acts who’ve never shipped hardware. History will remember this as the age of the cover band. We are ruled by guys who watched a YouTube documentary about Napoleon and said “I could do that” but meant the hat.

2026-01-05 05:26:50 GMT

“all models are wrong but some are useful” i say about the model that just confirmed all my existing prejudices. extremely useful. love this model. Can I interest you in my course about this model

2026-01-04 21:04:31 GMT

I'm not going to talk about politics anymore. I'm just going to focus on the economy, the cost of living, rental prices, climate change and - GODDAMMIT

2026-01-04 03:28:38 GMT

“think for yourself” always seems to end with “and arrive at my exact conclusions or you’re a sheep.” very liberating framework

2026-01-03 11:06:53 GMT

sorry but if your reaction to “the US bombed venezuela” isnt immediate horror youre a fucking psychopath and i hope you step on legos forever

2026-01-01 22:58:51 GMT

I keep watching people who used to write 10,000-word explorations of complex topics now produce dozens of disconnected fragments per day, each optimized for immediate engagement.
It's like watching someone who composed symphonies decide to only make ringtones.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-case-for-blogging-in-the-ruins/

2025-12-31 06:26:00 GMT

some of you have never had a guy at a party explain the trolley problem to you like he invented ethics and then say "makes you think" and it shows