Years ago, I was standing in a cage in some guy's basement. The guy was someone I had hired to do personal training in San Francisco, so it wasn't quite as weird or terrifying as it sounds.

As I was standing there, lifting weights improperly, the trainer said something that stuck with me years later and transcended the context of gym workouts, joining the world of software development: "Look straight ahead."

It doesn't seem like it should matter where you look when doing something unrelated to your eyeballs, such as making a salad, or riding a bike. After all, the eyes move independent of the rest of the body, right? So why is it relevant where we look when lifting a weight, if all the other parts of the body are moving properly?

An experiment you can try: next time you are on a bicycle, start biking straight. Then, while going straight, look over to your left and focus on an object in the distance. Despite your best efforts, the wheel of the bike will gradually tend toward the left. Why?

As humans, we want to know where we're going. But also, due to our psychology, we tend to go where we are knowing. If we know about left, we will go left, almost involuntarily. And if you look straight down while lifting a weight, your back and neck will do bad things they were never supposed to do.

This insight is relevant to the workplace. If we know where we are going, we will go there, even if unwittingly. But if we don't know, we might look somewhere else and land ourselves in trouble by going somewhere else.

And for managers, if your reports cannot be given any time specifically to attaining a goal, just having them know the direction alone, and knowing your team's goals, can get your organization closer to achieving them.

When screws are being made, they undergo rigorous bending and rolling. This is often known as working the metal. Once fully wrought, these metal pellets are fired in an oven, which might seem strange at first. After all, why take something after it’s been shaped and soften it up by heating?

Well, the process of forming the screws¹, while necessary, introduces microscopic regions of high torque, high compression, and high rarefaction. These stresses and imperfections make the screws problematic to work with, since they can cause the fasteners to break prematurely, leading to issues or even injury. You wouldn’t want to build a building with these overworked screws.

Luckily, there is a solution: heat. Since metal is in many ways a kind of crystal, the increased motion of the atoms with heat allows the metal to recrystallize. Regions of high stress and high internal torque are allowed to reduce and even disappear. (This is one of the rare cases in life where two wrongs can make a right.) Once the screws have been heated, they are returned to normal temperature, and are significantly stronger than before. Now, they are ready to be used in projects.

are easily introduced, increasing obstacles and decreasing project velocity. You could even think of this like laundry or dishes accumulating in the home; a bit is fine, but too much and everything becomes unnavigable.

If we can add even a low-effort refactor phase in our development cycle, we can consistently cause these sticking points to be relaxed, making our next iteration faster and more effective. The next time you are planning a project, I would recommend to try budgeting at least 15% of time to performing refactors and micro-rewrites, and see how the project velocity responds.

Footnotes:

1. For our purposes, it’s simplest to call them screws, but actually we are speaking of bolts, and you can watch the manufacturing process in this video.

In the pursuance of disaster-tolerance, sometimes we must tread new ground. QUINE Global has now developed a stateless configuration for its entire host of services.

In terms of tech, it uses Nix, but an alternative, Guix, was also considered. Guix is probably a good idea, but both systems rely on a daemon for constructing the system, meaning they cannot easily be containerized. Guix could probably be the future, but since it is a GNU project, it is at least 15% cursed. A new release of the .iso has not been cut for several years.

There is also Tvix, which is a rewrite of Nix (in Rust, if that matters). Tvix makes several modifications to the way Nix works, but largely aims to handle everything that Nix can handle. It is the estimation of the QUINE Global organization that if Nix were to be rewritten in Rust, it would be more easily iterated on by changing syntax. Regardless, Nix definitely needs an iteration or two. It has remained largely unreimplemented for over a decade, and as we know, the number of iterations on software is correlated with its overall level of quality.

The overall architecture includes a system daemon, pullomatic, to be running and refreshing checked-out Git repositories. By name, this makes a pull-based deployment model. Since the server is essentially stateless, any disaster will be easily recovered from with a simple

nix --extra-experimental-features flakes --extra-experimental-features nix-command run --debug github:numtide/nixos-anywhere --verbose -- --flake .#nixos root@host.name.here.com

NixOS has finally allowed QUINE Global to escape the ever-creeping forces of entropy and bitrot. We declare victory, as the blog.quineglobal.com domain rises out of the ashes and into the realm of serving requests.

We also have a new logo!

The quine then, serves as a powerful metaphor for our world. “We’re here because we’re here,” as some have said.

Global health does not occur in a vacuum. It requires the attentive energy of millions, and determination that can only be attained through vivid self-reflection.

It is with these insights that QUINE Global has been formed and sets off into the wild unknown. What are the major blockers to human health? There is much yet left to discover. QUINE therefore then dedicates itself to uncovering truth and insights through the form of simple business blogs. But we’re not just about blogging. We also produce and open-source our own software, and hold a strong conviction that software is both, in some ways, what got us into this mess – and what will get us out of it.

The principal crises of this world include pollution, lack of access to solutions, and lack of clarity. Quine dedicates itself to solve all three. But we can only do it with your help.

43% of Americans now identify as politically Independent. Only 28% are Republican. Another 28% are Democrat. The numbers are not ambiguous. If elections reflected reality, we would have an Independent president, or at least a contest that allowed for one — but we don't. Instead, we have a legacy system, "first-past-the-post voting", which continues because of its simplicity, not because it gives representation.

There is a rot that sets in when systems persist too long without iteration or modification. In software, this becomes technical debt. In governance, it becomes misalignment so severe that even consensus is invisible. Voters are told they must choose between two options they do not prefer. Any third option is "spoiler," "vanity," "waste." The will of the majority is not lost — it is structurally excluded.

There are ways out: Ranked-choice voting. Approval voting. Basic patches to a system now brittle from neglect. These aren't theoretical; they are mathematically sound, already deployed in cities and countries that understand the stakes. They allow systems to reflect who is actually there, not just what legacy powers once were.

Democracy without feedback is just inertia. And inertia, left unchecked, becomes entropy. A misrepresented public cannot respond to crisis. Not ecological, not economic, not moral. The clock is running. The majority is here. The system is late.

We stand together on our lack of unification. Our lack of group identity is our distinct identity. We are not Anonymous, since we have a name, but the name must mean nothing to all people or the name must change.

We have no allegiances. We produce no product. We believe, of course, in production, but also reject that belief. We always invalidate our own arguments and disclaim every claim.

We respect data, but choose not to collect it. We respect conclusions, but refuse to make any. We respect authority, but concede that we should not be the ones with any.

Anything you hate about us is automatically invalid, since we are both everything and nothing.

Hyper is built on top of the excellent open-source Hyper project. Our goal was simple: give people a terminal that gets out of the way. Clean defaults, calm typography, nothing demanding your attention that isn't your own work.

This release includes updated dependencies, a collection of bugfixes, and new features. Downloads and release notes are available at hyper.quineglobal.com.

Quine Hyper is available today for:

• macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel)
• Windows (x64)
• Linux (x64 and ARM64, AppImage and RPM)