Some Days You Cull, Some Days You Build

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Hey there Builders!

Today I have to go help dispatch a sheep.

One of our ewes went rogue and started attacking the new lambs born Sunday. On a homestead, that isn't a thing you sit on. The message came in this Tues.

That text landed after I'd already spent the morning building.

Up at 4:30am. Playing with a new AI design tool. Fourteen years ago, my first website took five months to stop being embarrassing. I was duct-taping WordPress together in 2012, losing hours to broken plugins.

Now the curve has flattened all the way down.

Three landing pages this morning before chores. One of them replaced a $35/month link-in-bio tool. Another one took me under an hour.

My eye has been twitching from too much build mode. I keep reminding myself: if you don't design bottlenecks into your life, the speed will eat you.

So here we are. One hand on a knife. One hand on a keyboard. Both belong to the same day.

Why You Should Give All the Cares:

• Culling a sheep today: What the homestead teaches that no productivity book can.

• LinuxFest Sunday, 4pm: Why I'm standing in front of a room full of open source people this weekend and who I'm trying to find.

• From Chatbot to Coworker: The workshop replay for people who know AI is bigger than ChatGPT but don't know where to start.

Tech Won't Slow Down. So I Do.

Technology isn't slowing down. It's engineered not to. Every update, every notification, every new tool is tuned to hook your attention and keep you swiping.

Fear of missing out is the whole business model.

Every release promises to make you more productive. Tighter systems. More output in less time. And in one sense it works. I can take an idea and ship it in hours instead of months.

Then I sat down with my men's Fire & Smoke group last night and said it out loud. It's dizzying. How fast you can produce something online. How easy it is to start three new things in a single afternoon and finish none of them.

Follow-through is where the reps need to go now. Not starting. Not ideating. Finishing.

So I've been designing bottlenecks into my life on purpose.

• Sheep to care for. Lambs to check on. A rogue ewe to deal with today.

• Jujitsu on the mat every week.

• Chores that don't compress no matter how fast the tools get.

• Time with my daughter that isn't negotiable.

None of these make me more productive. That's the point.

They pull me out of the screen and back into my body. Back into the moment. Back into the thing actually in front of me. They are the ground I stand on while the tools get faster every month.

If you don't build bottlenecks into your life, the speed will eat you.

So here's the question I'm sitting with today.

Where are yours? What pulls you out of the feed and back into your life?

If you can't name three, that's your answer.

LinuxFest Sunday. 4pm. Room CC 236.

This weekend I'm standing in a conference room in Bellingham full of people whose hard drives turn on when you say "run it locally."

And I'm there to recruit.

LinuxFest Northwest is the biggest open source gathering in the Pacific Northwest. Sysadmins, developers, hackers, privacy people, and the crowd that's been sounding the alarm on centralization since before it was trendy.

My talk: 10 AI Dangers You Will Face in Your Lifetime.

• Autonomous weapons systems compressing kill chains from hours to minutes.

• Voice clones emptying bank accounts from a 15-second TikTok.

• Federal surveillance apps scanning faces in the field with no warrant required.

• Six companies building the most powerful technology in human history inside closed rooms the public never sees.

That's the short list.

The real fight over the next decade is centralized AI versus decentralized AI. Closed versus open. Rented intelligence versus owned intelligence.

Every query you send to somebody else's server is ground you gave up. Every query you run locally is ground you kept.

If you already run local models, contribute to open source, or just believe the future shouldn't belong to six companies and three governments, I want to meet you.

Sunday, April 26. 4:00pm. Room CC 236. LinuxFest Northwest, Bellingham.

Come find me after. I want to know who's building freedom.

From Chatbot to Coworker: The Replay Is Open

If you've been using Claude like a vending machine and wondering what people mean when they say "agent" or "Cowork," this is the on-ramp.

Full 90-minute workshop replay still available, broken into walkthroughs. A Notion guidebook you move through at your own pace. A zip of the exact skills I run every day, ready to upload. New section on Claude Design. AI Memory System workshop bundled in.

One link. Open it and lose some sleep building.

Our Phones? On Time-Out!

In a move that probably made Mark Zuckerberg cry into his Cheerios

My wife and I decided to put our phones in “time out.”

We banished those little attention-vampires to a box in our bedroom, and honestly

If you’ve been feeling a bit too glued to your screen, try it out and let me know how it works for you!

Tech Corner:

• Claude Live Artifacts. Artifacts launched six months ago but you couldn't share them or get them to self-update. That changed this week. Live artifacts are shareable dashboards that refresh themselves, which turns Claude into an app maker for any of your connected tools.
  

  

• Claude Designs built my LinuxFest deck in 8 minutes. I recorded the full build. Slides for a 30-minute keynote, done before a cup of coffee cooled. Loom walkthrough
  

  

• ChatGPT image model upgrade. OpenAI dropped a new image model inside ChatGPT this week. Six fingers, gibberish text, wandering faces, flat lighting, all gone. Magazine covers in a single prompt. Open it and make something you've been sitting on.
  

  

  That’s my wife’s business on the right https://ahzalhea.com

Today’s Takeaways:

1. The tradeoff between real life and online business is dead. Move the herd and build the funnel.

2. Clarity beats speed. Voice, vibe, offer. If those aren't locked, AI just makes the mess faster.

3. Where you run AI is where you keep your ground. Local matters. Open matters.

4. If Sunday is open, come find me in Room CC 236. I want to know who's building freedom.

I love reading the responses to these newsletters.

Hit reply and tell me what's landing. What you're building. Who in your life is still treating AI like a toy, and how close you feel to the edge of the tradeoff I just described.

Specific always beats polite. Tell me what clicked.

Stay grounded and free,

Joshua | The Holistic Tech Wizard

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