Andreea

Having a garden is a source of so much work but also so much joy. There’s always something to do, research, plan and try.

And honestly it’s the best place to relax in, to the point where I don’t feel like I need a holiday from my life as it is. Just stepping out in the garden on a nice day is good enough.

#gardening

We spent a lot of this year building an end-to-end encrypted app that we call #Rhizo (short for Rhizome).

It’s been in our heads for years and we’re finally getting to the stage where it’s about to escape into internal testing and validation.

Rhizo is built for when a secure group chat stops working when trying to organize something, and the only alternatives are often paid corporate tools; some secure, some not, and some where the ownership/values “ick” is real for people we talked to.

We’re a few months from being out of the early infrastructure weeds, which means it’s still very early BUT there’s finally something worth sharing instead of just building (which often looked like key and identity talks during toddler naps and late night coding for @siwek@social.tooinconsistent.com).

Beyond open sourcing it this year, the next big step is making all the technical documentation public and legible so other people can look at it, poke the thing, and maybe contribute code, ideas, words, etc.

While I’m here, I’m also coopting #BuildingRhizo so I can look back on it and remember it one day (when we’re older and sleeping more).

Onwards, and looking forward to any ideas, questions, suggestions and even intros or tagging people who might need it and we should meet on this journey!

Trying really hard not to read about those child deaths in France where parents forget them in cars. But they find me anyway. And f*** they make me so angry. A kid almost the same age as my boy died in a car instead of being dropped off at daycare. It’s just so tragic.

I’ve seen the threads where people discuss those seatbelt clamps that send you alerts three you left the child in the car. People argue whether 5 or 15 beeps and notifications is best. Yes, a lifesaving device.

But hardly anyone is talking about the fact that it’s so goddamn depressing that we have to have these things in the first place.

That we’ve normalized going to work tired and exhausted, that we leave parents, shift workers and others like them vulnerable, leading to this “autopilot” mode everyone talked about.

I grew up with a very different understanding of what “autopilot” meant. Something more of a muscle memory thing; like, you don’t think about how you pedal on the bike once you know how. You just do it.

But “autopilot” today is almost too nice of a word for what it really is. It means looks more like zombie unthinking mode: driving into rivers because the GPS nav tells you and you’re no longer looking. Being so deep in your own thoughts and exhaustion that you forget you have children. Who are in the car with you.

I also grew up with a checklist mentality. It was so normal I didn’t even know you could live otherwise. Like, you don’t do anything complex without a checklist. Getting in and out of a car comes with a checklist that you have to perform instinctively too. Did you turn the lights off? Engine? Also, are there still any passengers with you still in the car??

These poor, poor children didn’t deserve this. RIP.

Over the weekend I spent some time clearing out my desk. Sifting through a box of old postcards, it was like doing a bit of archaeology of childhood friendship.

Handwritten letters and cards were most frequent when I was 10-14. We used to write to each other when we were more than ten kilometres apart for two weeks and they all sound like dispatches from another world.

My neighbor wrote formally from the mountains to inform me I was her best friend, and asked me not to forget her during the two weeks she was gone. Another friend reported from the Black Sea. Someone sent three lines about an elderflower Fanta flavor of the season. “It’s good, I just had one here, I think you’d like it. Looking forward to trying it together.” That was the whole thing. Another one said: “I’m bored but the nice kind. Looking forward to being bored together again when I’m back.”

Looking forward to being bored. Different times indeed.

We used to put sooo much effort into it all. Finding the right cards, writing a few of them for your friends back home, buying the stamp, going to the post office, waiting. You sent a piece of yourself into the slow machinery of the post and hoped it arrived before the moment had passed. Usually it did, barely so, which made it feel like a kind of miracle every time. I loved checking mail every day and remember the thrill of getting something.

"According to the Harris Billionaires Survey, 73 percent of Americans believe that wealth inequality is a serious national issue, up from 66 percent in 2022. A UMass Amherst poll found 58 percent of Americans saying that billionaires are a threat to democracy, with 45 percent saying that America is an oligarchy, “a government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes.” Only 28 percent disagreed."

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/elon-musk-the-new-hero-of-populism

Weekend, therefore time to work in the garden!

We said goodbye to an 30-ish-year-old plum tree that was sadly battered by two storms, a bad one last year and one last week, and threatened to fall over at the next one.

A new tree will soon take its place, very likely a local gingko biloba cultivar developed by a local university. More research needed to make sure it will work but fingers crossed.

Until then, a strawberry lemonade 🍓 🍋 to slide into the weekend.

Random European developers on LinkedIn, HN and beyond are just now discovering the US can turn off their coding agent.

Cute. They could’ve turned it off whenever. But that’s not the scary part.

The scary part is that 23 out of 28 European countries run their national defense systems on US cloud infrastructure, with very few exceptions. Most European countries are classified as “at high risk” due to their exposure to US cloud providers.

Not having access to an LLM model should be the least of our concerns.

See: https://futureinstitute.tech/assets/doc/FOTICloudDefenceReport26.pdf

Today is an exciting day.

Summer at our house means we’re building a CNC machine, our idea of holiday fun.

The parts start arriving today, and so is an ice cream maker. Since neither is easy to find where we are, guess we have to roll our own.

RE: @malb@ioc.exchange

Today's mission: read the entirety of this. I remember vividly when the arrests started across Europe but had no idea of the extent of this enterprise. Really eager to get through this, toddler and work allowing.

TIL that in the recent heatwave, rich Parisians booked hotels with AC to deal with pregnancy.

If it gets too hot, you may start to get contractions - and there's no worse time to give birth than when hospitals are already at capacity.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jun/30/how-i-survived-record-paris-heatwave-while-seven-months-pregnant

This article about overpriced and now useless Google smoke detectors is funny and yes a bit sad.

It takes you back to the era when Google wanted to do an Apple and each product, including mesh hardware that everyone in SF was lusting after, cost a few hundred dollars more than your average hardware that worked but didn’t come with Design and Branding.

Google promised 10 years of support. Spoiler: they didn’t. Google is not run by design lovers, as some people used to think, but by finance types who turned off the tap quick and left consumers out to dry.

It’s literally every “I built an app with AI” post right now, but Google’s very expensive version of it.

Building it isn’t the hard part now. Supporting it, promoting it, fixing its bugs. It’s a long term relationship. It’s more maintenance than most people think.

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/google-made-a-sad-boomer-mark-out

Sometimes I have to end a work email on a “PS: hope you’re all OK in the office l, I’ve been reading about a lot of bear incidents in your city lately” meaning at least several bears shot in the last few weeks after disturbing houses, tourist areas and other public places.

Cancelled Proton mail this week after seeing how they handled the political influencer situation.

It was a small subscription that won’t hurt their coffers but doing it is the point to me. There were signs before but it’s weird to see them spend their credibility this way.

We’d already moved off them on the business side. Now I’m tidying up the personal.

I left honest feedback in their recent annual survey. The political theatre was the final straw, but the drift had been ongoing; their messaging and NPD gave me the feeling they are chasing an audience that is not me.

They sent a mass cancellation-related apology email today specifically about this incident which might mean others did the same. Twelve years in marketing, and I swear I cannot explain how companies this size end up with people making these calls. Maybe they studied the recent Framework school of marketing thought.

I’m putting money into the business and you’re doing *what* with it? It’s exhausting.

For a while I couldn’t figure out how to connect two things publicly: how to write about our attempts to sustainably restore a 140-year-old house alongside the software work that we do.

In my heart and head they’re expressions of the same thing. We do both sustainably, climate-resilient, a little solarpunk inspired (which is a broad and vague concept but more on that later).

And the more we live inside it, the more obvious it becomes: everything we believe about building software is reflected in what we’re doing to these walls.

I think the people we most want to work with would immediately understand why.

I think I know how to write about it now, or at least start. A post incoming. As soon as I find a good illustration, which may take me…some time.

If this sounds interesting to you, what would you most want to hear about?

Sometimes I think it would be nice to start the house renovation and that waiting for planning permission is tedious, but then again it's better that we're doing potty training on floors that will be ripped out anyway

Bees have started pollinating the willow tree in the garden 🐝

To new followers joining from a boosted post: hello, hi, and thank you.

I’ll be honest: I’m not at my most composed right now. I’ve been struggling to find my words lately. I’ve been grieving from a distance for mothers and fathers burying their children after indiscriminate bombings. For families rationing food in tents elsewhere. All engineered or prolonged by men with no skin in the game, who aren’t facing any consequences.

I think about everyone but I can’t stop thinking about the parents and what they are going through.

The international, and particularly European response has been one of the great disappointments of my lifetime. We can do better than this. We must.

From my journalist friends I’ve learned that when someone renames their climate newsletter to “energy”, it means the climate reporting is dead, and it’s been bought by big corporate interests.

It’s either explicitly fossil fuels, or just someone who doesn’t want to offend fossil fuel-adjacent businesses like advertisers and conferences.

Recent examples they quote:
POLITICO absorbing E&E News, an outlet that wrote about air and water pollution, public lands and utilities. It will now publish energy-focused newsletters.

Axios turned Generate, its daily energy and climate newsletter, into "Axios Future of Energy”.

Semafor turned Semafor Climate newsletter into Semafor Energy in 2024.

Somewhat related, NPR also eliminated a climate desk.

There are so few serious sources left. All that’s left is, as before: #SupportIndependentMedia that still writes about uncomfortable things we need to hear.

Two things I read this week stuck with me: first, about weapons manufacturers who don’t just profit from war but fund the story that keeps war going. Then I read this piece about how much media (including ones I used to like) has been quietly bought.

They merged to give me a weird, ominous dream of a Kafkaesque place, not too different from the one we already live in, where systems move slowly and indifferently, shaped by forces that profit specifically from confusion and passivity.

Then I woke up with an unease that still hasn’t fully lifted.

The world now feels small because weapons manufacturers need to manufacture consent so wars run long enough to be profitable for some. Tech cycles that will continue until certain people are obscenely richer.

Attention, infrastructure, narrative are all consolidating fast into what feels like very few hands. It’s not even any one person or one company that bothers me these days, but the fact that it all feels like contempt for the things I care about: attention, care, craft, whatever you want to call it.

Most social feeds feel the same: like something dark, power-hungry and extractive no longer held in check is dominating the shared psychic landscape.

It feels like the air getting thinner. Like contamination. Like a shrinking. That’s why the unease feels claustrophobic some days.

These forces are loud, have money, and have captured too many rooms and minds. But I know there are places and things they haven’t captured, because they don’t understand them. They don’t have the patience or awareness of self to deal with them. They don’t understand what doesn’t make noise or can’t make money tomorrow. But luckily plenty of things an people still speak a language these people don’t.

The dream, in its strange way, made me feel like it’s worthwhile to continue focusing on those things and building for what I believe in, so people who are also quietly looking for a world that still makes sense find a door to go though in times of need. Creating this feels worth my energy.

https://broligarchy.substack.com/p/the-broligarchys-war-on-journalism

Love this post by Mike Monteiro on how to find hope and keep doing what you love in an industry that you’ve come to hate.

I arrived at very similar conclusions last year and this year, but he puts it so eloquently:

“There are still people out there building useful things. There are still people out there designing useful things. And, there are still companies out there making useful things. They may be small, they may be unglamorous, there may be less amenities, and they may not pay as well, but there is always a premium for doing abattoir work for butchers who didn’t look too closely at where the meat was coming from.

The work we need to do, and want to do, hasn’t gone away, it’s still there. And the need for useful people certainly hasn’t gone away. There’s plenty of misery in the world that useful people certainly have their work cut out for them. Your town still needs you. Your city still needs you. Your neighbors still need you. Your kids’ school still needs you.

[…] I think it starts with talking to people, because it always starts with talking to people. And let people know you want to continue being useful. Ask your neighbors what help they might need. Ask your developer friends what they’ve always wanted to build. Ask your designer friends what they’ve always wanted to make. Find out what’s missing in people’s lives.”

https://buttondown.com/monteiro/archive/how-to-do-the-work/

Summer solstice, what better way to “celebrate” the moment than two code orange weather advisories for both temperature and thunderstorms?

We got battered a bit last night by strong winds by thunder and a hailstorm and now we’re back to the ongoing heatwave.

Real feel is supposedly warmer. Whatever it is, it’s oppressive.

#ClimateDiary

RE: @BrideOfLinux@mastodon.opencloud.lu

Nothing about software is inevitable. People choose to do this, even when it costs others.

Loved this Carole Cadwalladr piece.

I’m glad someone else spelled it out too. The world stopped making sense in a way that used to be journalism’s job to partially help with. I used to find a long magazine piece or a careful bit of reporting and feel like, ah, yes, here’s the general shape of things. Now I read the news and feel more disoriented afterward than before.

I don’t know if sense-making moved to 3-hour-long “podcasts” aka people just talking for a long time because working and parenting a toddler render me immune to this format. But somehow I don’t think so.

https://broligarchy.substack.com/p/is-this-the-broligarchys-first-world

The local municipality has spent all morning cutting about half the trees that line the village for currently mysterious reasons and the sound of chainsaws hacking at them all morning has rubbed me totally the wrong way.

This quote from the late Robert Kime is for you if you're also the kind of person who puts soul into their work and wonders if it's all worth it. It is. To the right people who can see it and read it, it is:

“I don't know how you describe romance actually... but some objects have it, they just have something that is more than themselves. If you're interested in them you can communicate it and they can communicate it too, and it's just magic, it's just how life is." - Robert Kime

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcHluAF8oU8

Really love and am excited for the work project going on right now, but equally excited for it to be the weekend to dig into Cabana Magazine's Atlas of Craftsmanship stories

https://cabanamagazine.com/blogs/atlas-of-craftsmanship

• I don’t care what it’s made of

The conversation around renewable energy is clearly now that people start talking about plug in solar panels in Lidl and Aldi offering cheap electric bikes

@gotofritz@hachyderm.io as far as I read it, it makes the point that people should know whether AI did or didn’t play a role; and if yes, which—because so far everything has been swept under the rug and no one is even asking anymore.

As for the rest, depends what you think the target is, but the whole title of the newsletter already hints at it. And it’s not even a niche view that tech billionaires, amongst others, helped get Trump into power and lead the world here. https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-billionaires-war

Either way, her comments are open!