Studio711.com – Ben Martens

A couple quotes that I heard recently have been floating around in my head.

“I think if you don’t have dreams about what might happen in your life, then how do you know what you want to do next? How do you choose whether I should do this or do that if you don’t really care where you end up? … I think it’s a wonderful gift to reflect within yourself and ask what do I actually hope will happen in my life if my life goes perfectly from now on? What do I dream will happen and what am I doing today and this weekend in order to change who I am deliberately?”

– Astronaut Chris Hadfield on the Mythfits podcast, April 27, 2026

I like this one because it encourages us to have a vision and work towards it. If you just float along letting life happen to you, it’s unlikely that your situation is going to improve.

The next one comes from the creator of a popular open-source project that recently decided not to allow AI generated code submissions. While this is about code, I think it applies to AI generated text even more.

It’s a common misconception that we can’t tell who is using LLM and who is not. I’m sure we didn’t catch 100% of LLM-assisted PRs over the past few months, but the kind of mistakes humans make are fundamentally different than LLM hallucinations, making them easy to spot. Furthermore, people who come from the world of agentic coding have a certain digital smell that is not obvious to them but is obvious to those who abstain. It’s like when a smoker walks into the room, everybody who doesn’t smoke instantly knows it.

I’m not telling you not to smoke, but I am telling you not to smoke in my house.

— Andrew Kelley

You can read more about their rationale for this move here. I’m not sure I totally agree with it because I think source code is becoming a generated artifact and specs are more important, I do think about this comparison to smoking every time I’m writing text and using AI to help me clean it up.

For the last ~6 years, I’ve watched gas prices mostly as a curiosity since my truck stayed parked in the driveway most days, but now that I’m driving back and forth to work, I feel the pain of those $100 fill-ups. But how bad is it compared to the past few years?

Since March of 2022, I have been running an app to record a half dozen gas stations close to me every day. I use this to carefully calculate how much money we are saving with the Tesla compared to a gas car. Here’s the chart:

So they are high but not quite as bad as when Russia invaded Ukraine. We live in a nice little pocket of reasonably priced gas, but there are currently some stations at $5.99 for gas and over $7.29 for diesel. Ouch.

I wonder what we’ll think when we look back at this post in 10 years.

Parenting is an interesting opportunity to think about important personality traits and life skills. Sometimes it feels like it’s hard to communicate anything so if I’m going to pick a few things to focus on, what should they be?

Lately, I’ve been thinking that one near the top of the list is the ability to be good at things you dislike. Too many people see a task they don’t like doing and they do the bare minimum required to get it off their list. But successful people are able to be excellent at things even if they dislike doing them. It doesn’t mean that they ever end up liking the task, but you’d never know it by the quality of their work. This advice shows up in the Bible too: “So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.” (1 Corinthians 10:31)

Often those things we don’t like doing are the hard things. We’d rather spend our time doing the fun things. Elijah gets tired of hearing me say “Work first, then play” but there are better versions of that quote:

• “Do what you have to do until you can do what you want to do.” – Oprah Winfrey
• “Do the hard jobs first. The easy jobs will take care of themselves.” – Dale Carnegie

It’s a straightforward lesson, but it’s one I need to remind myself of too.

This is a bit of a weird post (which is saying something on this site) but as I go through the grocery store each week, I’m always looking at the prices for the store brand versus the name brands. I will almost always default to the store brand unless the name brand happens to be on sale for cheaper, but there are some items that I will always buy the name brand regardless of price. That usually gets me wondering if others feel the same way about these specific items or if there are others I should be considering. Reflecting on this is harder than doing it in store, but here are some that immediately come to mind:

• Kleenex – Raw nose. Ouch. Enough said.
• Paper towels – I want the smaller sheets and I don’t want them to fall apart!
• Toilet paper – Raw… you get it. Ouch. The exception to this is Costco. Their generic brand of toilet paper works well and we had a plumber tell us that it’s one of the best ones for not clogging your pipes too.
• Trash bags – The cheapo ones fall apart too easily. This is another Costco exception. Their generic brand of bags is great.
• Bacon – Pay for the good bacon. It’s worth it. Locally I like to get Hempler’s center cut peppered bacon.
• Cream cheese – This is the newest addition. I have always bought the store brand and just assumed that when a recipe says “softened cream cheese” that was just impossible to do well. Then I bought the good stuff and learned that the consistency of good cream cheese is so much easier to work with!

What did I miss on this list?