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.

Today I discovered miniature-calendar.com

These miniature scenes with everyday objects are so fun to look at.

I’m concerned. The cleaning place with the AI voice agent called back. This time I asked if this is an AI voice agent. The voice chuckled and said “No, I’m not, I get that all the time”. But I know that was not a real person. Why set up these voice agents to lie about what they are? Spooky.