Just Joshin' #201 (Forts)
Family Photo:
|
What's stronger: the urge to build a fort, or dig a tunnel?
It feels like Calvin and Lawrence are building forts everywhere these days. Building materials range from couch cushions and blankets and pillows to cardboard bricks and cardboard boxes and storage containers. This weekend they built a fort out of the neighbor's mulch pile. Last month, we built a snow fort together up in Truckee. When the cousins visited a couple weeks ago, they all built a mixed-media fort that covered the whole living room.
In our old house, I once had the brilliant idea of building a fort in our backyard. It was either a shed, or a home office, or an indoor/outdoor seating area depending on how you squinted. "An external room" is how I believe our listing agent described it.
Brilliant in theory, the structure was built directly onto the stamped concrete slab. When the ground was cold in the morning, the concrete felt like ice. When it rained outside, some of that water would trickle under the walls through the cracks of the stamped concrete and greet your toes.
The theory and practice of forts can be very different.
--
A friend was talking to me last week about "building his mental fortress". There's so much detrital information: politics, sports, whatever celebrity news passes that isn't already politics or sports. Flashing lights, scrolling pixels, is that really what we want to spend our time consuming? Is that where we want to apply our precious mental energy?
In some cases, within some limits, the answer might be yes. But we should still think about the mental fortress we have to build to keep out the other stuff.
Dad Joke:
Pillow Fort
I built a pillow fort, but it collapsed...
...I guess it couldn’t handle the pressure.
Source: Dad[AI]Base
Highlights:
Fortress
How to Make Sense of AI by Cedric Chin
--
At its core, sensemaking is the art of regulating attention. This is a fancier way of saying that you must know what to ignore. And then you must have the discipline of mind to ignore those things, so that you may focus only on things that will help you.
--
At all times, whenever you are doing something or reading something, you should ask yourself the question: “What is the outcome I am trying to achieve here?” You may then continue with the action or consumption if you wish, but you must answer the question honestly first.
Ribbonfarm is Retiring by Venkatesh Rao
Danielle is the creator of Sit Club (like run club, without all the bad parts) and other viral pranks.
iamJoshKnox Highlights:
Fortify Science
Operation Carbon Speed | by Peter Agbo and Josh Knox
Submitted for the Astera Institute 2026 Essay Competition: Identifying Systemic Bottlenecks to Science
Want to Be Interviewed?
I want to improve my interviewing skills:
Please REPLY if you'd like to do a 30-minute interview with me for a Podcast that doesn't yet exist.
Or book some time on my calendar if there's anything else you'd like to chat about:
https://calendly.com/iamjoshknox
Until next week,
iamJoshKnox
Thoughts? Feedback?
😊Hit Reply and let me know😊
Josh Knox
Hi! I am Josh Knox. Read more of me here: 👇
Family Photo: Fair Play Last week, we attended a San Luis Obispo Blues baseball game with some friends from Leadership SLO. I thought this might be a good chance to teach Calvin and Lawrence about baseball - strikes and balls; fair and foul - but in the end it was a difficult venue to hold a conversation. Our group sat near the PA system, so the start of any discussion was punctured by 10-second music clips of player walk-up songs or sponsorship announcements. It was fine though. The kids...
Family Photo: Memory Lawrence's beveled mirror reflection. Friend of the Newsletter Aaron sent me a very nerdy article about ways to use AI. The main point was that the AI models will continue to improve, but they are most useful because of our specific interactions with them. The article proposed a method to capture these AI model interactions so that you could port the interaction context across other models to avoid getting locked in—Anthropic's Fable and ChatGPT's Sol would be conditioned...
Family Photo: Generational Wealth Our lives are built atop unfathomable piles of generational wealth. Generations of innovators took us from hunter-gathering, to subsistence farming, to the industrial revolution to...whatever this is. Each generation improves our understanding of science and our use of technology a little bit. Part of what makes a city so valuable is its compounding infrastructure investments across generations. I read that 250 years ago about half of children died before age...