Deane Barker

On Self-Improvement...

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I’ve never been a big Tim Ferris fan. “The Four-Hour Work Week” just kind of pissed me off, really.

But this is a good article, where I feel like he calls himself to account.

[The Self-Help Trap: What 20+ Years of “Optimizing” Has Taught Me])(https://tim.blog/2026/03/04/the-self-help-trap/)

“You can spend your whole life preparing for, instead of playing, the game of life. But why would anyone, including yours truly, succumb to this? … Subconsciously, it spares you from the messiest but most rewarding game of all: human interaction.”

Life is really messy, and we (me, and yes, you too) generally suck. We’re irrational about some things, we have bad habits, we’re inconsistent, etc. etc. etc.

I get tired of people claiming they can remove all the negative aspects of the human condition. Because they can’t. And when someone tries to follow their advice and fails, they think it’s a deeper problem with them, rather than with the stupidity of the advice itself.

Someone once told me that “guilt” is when you think, “I did something bad.”

But “shame” is when you extend that thought with, “…because I am a bad person.”

Too often, the self-help addiction takes guilt and turns it into shame.

Book Review: In the Beginning Was Information

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Reread

Added on March 22, 2026

So, this is actually a reread, even thought I didn’t have any notes back when I read it for the first time (probably in 2010, or so?). I do remember this was recommended to me by a guy I sat next to on a plane. He was reading the Bible, and we got into a discussion about that, then realized we were both in IT, and he recommended this book.

I reread the book because I was hoping I would get some amazing insight from it that I missed the first time, but the basic message is the same: it’s an attempt to prove the existence of God via Claude Shannon’s information theory.

The author – who is a German mathematician, and Young Earth Creationist – goes deep into examining Shannon’s theories, to prove a seemingly simple point: the transmission of “information” requires an intelligent sender. Meaning, the formation of information requires that a being with a thought process was able to form the message and transmit it, otherwise everything is just gibberish.

I’m onboard so far, and I don’t think this is disputed much in science.

However, the author then extends this to say that DNA is the “original information” of the world. It fits all the criteria for information, and it – by definition – existing before Man did, therefore we must accept that the creation of man was via information (hence the title of the book), and this requires us to accept an intelligent designer.

I actually like the theory. But the author makes a massive tonal shift in the third part of the book when he attempts to prove that all this validates the Bible. That’s a illogical extension of his core theory I think: he goes from proving that some intelligent designer existed, to saying that the Hebrew Bible is therefore valid. I just don’t think his central theory – which, again, I rather like – supports this.

I’ve often thought there are different “levels” in someone’s journey of faith. They kind of go like this, using myself and my current faith position as a guide.

Atheist: “There is nothing”
Agnostic: “I don’t know if there’s anything”
Supernaturalist: “There’s… something”
Theist: “There’s… someone(s)”
Monotheist: “There’s a single someone”
Christian/Jew: “There is the God of the Hebrew Bible”
Protestant: “Martin Luther was right! The Pope is bad!”
Baptist: …I have no idea
Converge Baptist: …no idea about this either

If you accept what this author is saying, that takes you from #1 to… #4? Maybe #5? His argument really has no relevance beyond that.

Outside of the third part, the book is actually a really good discussion of information theory in general. And his central point about an intelligent designer proven by the existence of information is thought-provoking. It’s not an unassailable point, by any means, but it’s interesting.

But the third part is a big leap, and I’m just not sure the prior portions of the book support it.

Book Review: The Most Beautiful Book Places in the World

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Book Review: The Essence of Software: Why Concepts Matter for Great Design

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “Interesting, prescient ideas”

This author is claiming that the “essence” of software isn’t code, rather it’s concepts. He’s arguing that we should design software more on the conceptual level.

Concepts are the user’s mental model of how the software works, and how the big pieces of the software interact. He argues for designing these concepts along multiple axes:

Structure: what is the concept?
Purpose: why does it exist?
Composition: how does it relate to other concepts?
Dependency: what other concepts depend on it?
Mapping: how does it manifest in the UI?
Specificity: does it serve only one purpose?
Familiarity: is it shared with other applications?
Integrity: how does it “protect” itself from encroachment by other concepts?

I’ve known this as a “noun” analysis. When trying to learn new software, sometimes it’s helpful to analyze the “nouns” – the… things, in the software, that you do stuff with. That really helps you organize the software in your head.

What’s interesting is how relevant this is in the new era of AI-driven software development. Writing code is no longer the critical thing. What’s becoming more important is understanding how your users will use the software, and the models they will use to think about the problem domain.

Future software will likely be designed at the conceptual level, and here’s a great example:

Configuration Language: Specification

This is a configuration language that I designed (…or maybe “evolved” over years of use). I wrote a detail specification for it, delineating the concepts behind it. Since then, I’ve had Claude Code implement it – write the actual code – for two different languages. It’s neat because it works the same in both, because the concepts are the same.

This is the future of software development. The book was ahead of its time.

Also, the book has an interesting format, in that it’s divided into two halves. The first half is the meat of the argument, without much elaboration of asides. The second half is basically an extended set of “notes” to the first half, in which the author tells colorful anecdotes and explains the concepts with more narrative. (The author is a professor at MIT, so if he was using this as a textbook, I think the students find that helpful.)

Finally, the author has an entire website in support of the book. It’s not just promotional – some of the content expands on and reinforces the concepts of the book.

March 17, 2026

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Est. Time:
Gear: bike, sled

4x
---
2,500m BikeErg
35m Sled Push (450#)

This was murder. The sled push, specifically.

I had 450# on it – 360# in plates (8 x 45#), and then the sled weighs somewhere between 80-100#. But, of course, everything comes down to the contact patch and the floor surface, so the weights of sleds are really hard to equate. What is hard on one surface and one sled, would be much easier or harder if either were swapped for something else.

Anyway, the sled push was very difficult. I want to say it took me about 30 seconds each way, and it just wiped me out. I was resting at least 30 seconds before starting the second push each round, and then getting back on the bike was the absolute worst feeling. My legs were jelly.

I was really proud that I hadn’t stopped the sled once in eight pushes (four down, four back). And then, literally 10-feet before the end, on the last push, something happened and the sled just seized up and stopped moving. I thought I had just literally run out of gas at that point, but there was a suspicious skid mark on the floor which makes me think something happened – it slipped off its caster, or something. (See my prior point about the sled and the surface playing very heavily into the effective effort.)

Rough, rough workout. I was a mess when I left the gym.

Annotated Link: The $500 Million Mystery Will, Signed by Ghosts

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 03:02:00 -0500

A random, bizarre will for a half-billion estate was “discovered,” and no matter how ridiculous it seems, the court is forcing lawyers to adjudicate the matter.

March 16, 2026

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Est. Time:
Gear: bench press, bike

6x
---
Max Effort Bench Press (#225)
Max Effort BikeErg until 5:00

This was a pretty simple one. I would do a set of bench, which would take about 50 seconds (the bench was 20-30 feet from the bike), then get on the bike to finish the round. I did this for 30 minutes today.

I got about five reps every round of bench after the first (in which I got, like, eight – I’m way off my peak, from before the shoulder injury).

All told, I got about 11,500m of bike, which is about right. I can get 15,000m in 30 minutes. With the bench, I effectively biked for 80% of that time, which is 12,000, so I’m in the ballpark.

Book Review: The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 -0600

TLDR: “An amazing experience you will never forget”

This was an amazing…experience. I call it that because I listened to this book on audio during a long road trip. I loved it so much that I ordered the hardcover before I even got home.

The audio version is read by a multi-voice cast of almost 50 voice actors. They need to do this because the book is a literal oral history – it’s a thousand (two thousand? three?) little vignettes of the 24 hours after the first 9/11 plane took off from Boston, told in the first person.

It goes through the day in chronological order, step by step, minute by minute, telling the stories by the people who lived through it. There are hundreds and hundreds of individual retellers. Many of them you come to know, because the story keeps coming back to them over and over again, throughout the day.

When introduced, the speakers give their name, what they were doing (like, which company they worked for), and – ominously – which floor of the towers they were on when the planes it.

The people are from all walks – some survivors, some rescue workers, some celebrities. There are stories and anecdotes from Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Dennis Hastert, even George Bush.

This is what I believe to be the most comprehensive account of what happened on 9/11. The audio book was 16 hours long. It goes into excruciating detail, from every possible perspective. It’s a staggering work of compilation.

Some things I learned –

The biggest immediate fear was that the rescuers didn’t know if there were more hijacked planes. Until the FAA got all the planes on the ground, rescue work would stop when a plane got near, because they didn’t know which planes were weapons.
The Pentagon crash would have been much worse, except they crashed into a section of the building that had just been remodeled, and not everyone had moved back in.
Some people still in the Twin Towers survived the collapse. The building came down around them, but they managed to be in a pocket of space, like an elevator shaft. Several people were pulled out of the wreckage after the collapse.
A “shootdown” order was given, to bring down any threatening planes. There was one plane inbound from Europe that was the only plane left, and discussion was had about whether or not to intercept it, but it eventually turned back.
The President was genuinely desperate to get back to Washington, but his security wouldn’t allow it until they were sure all the planes were down. He went from Florida, where he was reading to an elementary school, to Barksdale AFB in Louisiana, then to Offut AFB in Nebraska because it had better communications. Then they flew back to Washington so fast that the fighter escorts had trouble keeping up without running out of fuel (apparently Air Force One is a very fast plane).
During the travels of Air Force One on 9/11, the Secret Service posted an armed guard at the bottom of the stairs leading to the upper deck where the president was. The implied message was, “We don’t even know for sure that a terrorist isn’t on this plane right now.”
United 93 – the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania – was delayed at takeoff. This meant that they were in the air later than planned, and the passengers had seen news reports of the other planes hitting buildings. This is why they stormed the cockpit – the passengers on the other flights had acquiesced to the hijackers, but the United 93 passengers had seen what was going to happen to them. If their plane had taken off on time, they might have stayed in their seats, and it might have hit the Capitol (where investigators believe it was headed).
The F-16s that took off to intercept United 93 were not armed. They left before they could be loaded with missiles or bullets. The pilots debated whether or not to ram the plane out of the sky, but it crashed before they intercepted it.
There is audio recording of the struggle on United 93. I do not know if this is public, but apparently there is very clear audio from the cockpit recording of the fight for control of the plane. They cannot tell if the passengers ever got in the cockpit, but the terrorists voices are heard responding to the passengers trying to get in. The last words recorded are “Allahu Akbar” repeated eight times.
When the towers collapses, dust and ash became a huge problem. People couldn’t breath. Multiple people tell of having to literally scoop gobs of ash out of their mouths so they could breath.
In the afternoon of 9/11, boats of all kinds started pulling up to docks in Lower Manhattan to ferry people across the East River and the Hudson to safety. It turned into one of the largest maritime boat lifts in history, far bigger than even Dunkirk. An estimated 500,000 people were evacuated.
The hospitals in New York braced for a massive influx of patients… that never came. They realized, to their horror, that almost everyone had died, and that there were relatively few injured to care for.
Falling bodies from the towers was a significant problem for the rescue workers. More than one firefighter was killed by a jumper landing on them.
Some of the most harrowing survival stories are people who had to make it down the stairs of one of the two towers. They descended hundreds of flights of stairs in darkness and smoke. Lots of people died on the way down. Survivors headed down were constantly being passed by firefighters heading up.
When the plane hit the North Tower, a massive fireball shot down an elevator shaft and exploded into the lobby, killing people all the way down on the ground.
Rudy Guliani happened to be in the area when the planes hit. He was a few blocks from Ground Zero for most of the day. Likewise, Donald Rumsfeld was in the Pentagon and went to the affected area to help survivors.
An American Airlines ticket agent had unwittingly helped two of the hijackers make it onto their flight. He didn’t realize what he had done until the next day. He struggled with it for years afterwards.
Lots of survivors didn’t know what to do when they got out of the towers. A lot of them just walked home across the closed bridges to New Jersey, Brooklyn, or Queens.
The last survivor at Ground Zero was rescued at about 10 a.m. on the next morning. No one else was found alive after that.
In the weeks after 9/11, tow trucks were dispatched to train stations in New Jersey to remove all the vehicles that hadn’t moved since that day. These were owned by people who never returned for them.
An older woman named Josephine was rescued from one of the towers by a group of firefighters. When she died of natural causes years later, she asked that the firefighters be her pallbearers.

A couple things in particular struck me –

There was so much bravery. There are so many stories of people running back into the buildings, and people helping other people at huge personal risk to themselves. I kept wondering: would I be that brave, if I was there?

Another theme was the sheer physicality of survival. Many people who survived went to hell and back to get out. They carried other people, they moved heavy things, they through fought dust and heat and smoke.

There are other heartbreaking stories of people in poor physical condition who didn’t make it. Bodyweight was an unavoidable factor – there are several stories of obese people who couldn’t be easily moved, or who just gave up and couldn’t go on. I kept wondering: would I survive? Would I have had the physical capacity necessary to make it out? Would I have had the tenacity to carry on?

This is just an amazing book, and a rare instance where I’m going to say: listen to it on audio. The voice acting is very well-done. Clearly, each of the actors speak multiple parts, but I didn’t start to notice that until the end.

I did not speed up the audio of this book like I usually do. I listened to every last minute of the 16 hours.

It was an incredible experience. I am a different person for having listened to it all.

On Command Line Interfaces...

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 -0600

I’ve gotten weirdly obsessed with command line interfaces (CLIs) lately. I’ve always liked the speed and precision of them, and I have a strange love affair with plain text (markdown 4 life, yo…).

In the last couple days, I wrote a CLI for Staffbase user management. There’s a video below, if you’re interested. It’s just kind of a POC (meaning, a solution in search of a problem…), but it’s got me thinking about CLIs and how they relate to AI, from a user interface perspective.

(Also, I watched the original “Tron” for some reason the other day. Turns out there were lots of command lines in 1982. Don’t get me started on the philosophical implications of text being converted into anthropomorphic homunculi inside the machine that sort of resemble how we perceive LLMs…)

With the current state of AI, we’ve almost reverted to a CLI orientation. We type, something types back, we type again, etc. The only difference is that the syntax is more relaxed and the capabilities are far more vast. But the type/reply model is still there.

And we eventually fall into patterns – at least I did. When I want a word defined, I type “define [word]”. This is awfully similar to the command/argument model of a CLI. When I get coding error, and the conversation has context to what I’m doing, I just type “error [paste the error text].”

Browsers did the same thing: the address bar is another CLI. In some browser I used (Firefox?), I would type “!w [term]” to have it just pass the search to Wikipedia. Decades back, I remember being amazed at being able to type “showtimes sioux falls” into Google and get back movie listings. That’s basically a CLI.

How long until we wear “channels” into AI engines by using CLI-ish shorthand so much that it comes to expect that, and we all kind of accidentally, collectively define a syntax for common operations just from using them so much?

The Grand Canyon represents millions of years of erosion – the Earth eventually adapted to the incessant “usage patterns” of water. Will our usage of AI eventually “erode” our way to some common input language? What will that look like?

And, in the end, are we just walking in a big circle back to the command line?

Book Review: James Bond: 50 Years of Movie Posters

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 00:00:00 -0600

TLDR: “Exactly what it claims to be”

This is a huge coffee table book. So big that I’m having trouble finding a place to put it, as it won’t fit in my of my bookshelf spaces.

True to the title, it’s essentially a picture book of movie posters of all James Bond films through SPECTRE, with one image of the Skyfall teaser poster as that must have been the only thing released when the book was printed.

Each image has a caption and some discussion. After looking through all of them, I have some observations.

Here is the classic Bond poster: James Bond, staring intently into the camera, holding a gun, flanked by the two Bond girls (because there’s always two…). Surrounding them is a montage of action sequences from the film. This is an uncannily common formula, I imagine because the films don’t need much explanation – everyone knows what a James Bond film is, these days.
I don’t know why I was surprised that different countries have different posters. Obviously, there are language differences, but the tone of the poster is often different as well, to emphasize some aspect more or less, based on the local culture and appetites.
The Bond women are extremely prominent on every poster, seemingly more so in other countries. During the 1960s, they were mostly illustrated, with clearly exagerrated breast size.
Bond’s gun is most often silenced – meaning, it has a long silencer attached. This is so common as to be odd. I supposed it makes Bond seem “secret,” but it’s also an interesting visual thing – it draws more attention to the gun, and it makes it seem… ungainly. Like, this is a thing you would do to a gun only if you know what you were doing and has a specific reason. (I’m avoiding the phallic implications…)
I was a little surprised to see that Grace Jones was incredibly prominent on the A View to a Kill posters. She almost the focus of every poster – where as Tanya Roberts was almost nowhere to be found. I suppose it’s because of Jones’ exotic looks and her adversarial role in the film’s plot.

This was a fun book. I spent about a month paging through it.

Now, if I could only find a place to put it…

Annotated Link: Leaked Chats Expose the Daily Life of a Scam Compound’s Enslaved Workforce

Mon, 2 Feb 2026 11:17:00 -0600

Scam call center operating from East Asia hold victims’ passports and keep them in debt bondage, while presenting themselves – and even internally operating – as legitimate businesses.

The lost art of XML

Mon, 2 Feb 2026 00:00:00 -0600

Preamble There exists a peculiar amnesia in software engineering regarding XML. Mention it in most circles and you will receive knowing smiles, dismissive waves, the sort of patronizing acknowledgment reserved for technologies deemed passé. “Oh, XML,” they say, as if the very syllables carry the weight of obsolescence. “We use JSON now. Much cleaner.” This is nonsense. XML was not abandoned becaus

There exists a peculiar amnesia in software engineering regarding XML.
XML was not abandoned because it was inadequate; it was abandoned because JavaScript won. The browser won. And in that victory, we collectively agreed to pretend that a format designed for human readability in a REPL was suitable for machine-to-machine communication, for configuration, for anything requiring rigor. We relinquished the logical formalism for convenience with our tools.
It looks “heavy” compared to JSON’s minimalism. These are aesthetic complaints dressed up as engineering concerns.
JSON, by contrast, is an object literal from JavaScript. It is a notation for initializing dictionaries. It was never designed to be a data interchange format; it was promoted to that role because it was already in the browser and developers were already familiar with it. Convenience over correctness.
A format can be pleasant to work with and still be fundamentally inadequate.
We could have just used XML.
We could have simply used the binary XML encodings that already existed. But that would require admitting that XML was right all along.
I am tired of lobotomized formats like JSON being treated as the default, as the modern choice, as the obviously correct solution. They are none of these things.
Sometimes the old way was the right way. This is one of those times.
We threw away schemas, namespaces, validation, self-description, all because we didn’t like angle brackets.

CSS sucks because we don't bother learning it.