Jake Weidokal

Wow… The chance of a lifetime just fell into my LinkedIn inbox. (sarcasm)

On a serious note, anytime I get one of these scam messages, I just feel sad for the vulnerable people that fall for these. On a less serious note, I’m starting up a fund to support the victims of these scams. Please send me $100 in Amazon gift cards and your social security number if you want to support it.

Hello Jake, you have not been responding. I have a business proposal for you. I want to bring to your notice that I have worked in the gold mining sector for more than 30 years. Over these years, I have had local mining contracts across 5 countries, namely: Australia, Brazil, South Africa, Kazakhstan and New Zealand. I also worked with Keneoli Gold Mining under Glory Mining Ltd in Ghana West Africa. Am currently working with a gold company in New Zealand and my contract will expire by next year. I privately bought about 140 KG of gold from some local miners here at a cheaper price. I don’t want my company to know I own this gold because contractors are prohibited from buying gold from local miners.

So I want to present you as my partner who bought and owns the gold. All legal documentation will be in your name, then the company would ship the gold to your provided address. After you receive it then I can come over to pick it up. I’m willing to give you 20% of the total 140KG of gold. All I want from you is honesty and transparency.

If you’re okay with the proposal, then I will inform the Gold Company and introduce you to them as my partner so they can prepare all documentation in your name before shipment. All this can be done within 8-10 working days.

NOTE: This is 100% legal business. I bought the gold with my money. Am only doing it this way because as a contractor with the company I’m not permitted to buy gold from the local miners. The 140KG of gold is worth more than 7 Million USD if we sell 1KG for 50,000USD. This is unrefined 23 Karat gold with 99% purity.

If you need any further clarification, kindly let me know.

I await your response and readiness to enable us start the process immediately.

The brilliant Japanese writer Haruki Murakami once wrote, “Always remember that to argue, and win, is to break down the reality of the person you are arguing against. It is painful to lose your reality, so be kind, even if you are right.”

I started doing my daily Readwise reviews again to revisit my old highlights from books and articles. Anytime I reboot a reflective practice like this, I realize how much I missed it. I’m going to start sharing these more to re-process them myself and to share what I have found impactful.

Today’s highlight is from James Clear’s Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds

“If you write what you yourself sincerely think and feel and are interested in… you will interest other people.”

• Rachel Carson

I have a lot of new things I’m thinking and feeling and interested in here at the early stages of 2026. I’ve been so focused on those things that I haven’t written about them much, but I hope to soon. Things like downgrading my phone, getting into running, and building little personal apps in a day with AI agents.

I love this quote from Dostoevsky, writing to his brother after narrowly escaping execution by the tsarist regime:

When I look back at the past and think how much time was spent in vain, how much of it was lost in delusions, in errors, in idleness, in the inability to live; how I failed to value it, how many times I sinned against my heart and spirit — then my heart contracts in pain. Life is a gift, life is happiness, each moment could have been an eternity of happiness. Si jeunesse savait! [If youth knew!]

Found in The Marginalian

A small detail of life that I love:
the way drywall looks when early morning sunlight hits it at a near-parallel angle.

My new favorite quick breakfast is cottage cheese + granola + everything bagel seasoning. It’s sneaky good. And healthy!

My new favorite quick breakfast is cottage cheese + granola + everything bagel seasoning. It’s sneaky good. And healthy!

I had used ezmp3.pro to download mp3s from YouTube video URLs onto my watch for runs, but this morning I came across the command-line tool yt-dlp. So far it has been easy to use and was able to download 96 separate mp3 files from a playlist URL with this command: yt-dlp -x --audio-format mp3 --audio-quality 0 -o "%(playlist_index)s - %(title)s.%(ext)s" "URL"

Today I explained to my daughter how a T-Rex grabs things with its mouth, because its arms are too small to put things in its mouth like we humans do.

She said the T-Rex should use a spoon.

Maybe if they had figured that out, they would still be around.