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🙏 Request: if you like this episode, would you forward it to a friend? Just a single one is perfect <3

You can view the transcript of this episode by opening this page on Substack and clicking the “transcript” button.

===

Shownotes

• Download Ollama here: https://ollama.com/download

• Huggingface: https://hf.co

  • Venice model (NOT FOR OLLAMA): https://huggingface.co/dphn/Dolphin-Mistral-24B-Venice-Edition

  • Venice model (✅ GGUF for Ollama): https://huggingface.co/DevQuasar/dphn.Dolphin-Mistral-24B-Venice-Edition-GGUF

• Terminal command to run any Huggingface model: ollama run hf.co/username/model.

  • Example: ollama run DevQuasar/dphn.Dolphin-Mistral-24B-Venice-Edition-GGUF

• Terminal command to wipe ollama history: rm ~/.ollama/history

💡 Remember you can get free copies of my books here.

I love creating things. Writing code has always just been a means to do that. Claude Code (and tools like it) have allowed me to prototype software in a CRAZY was over the past months.

What I like to do:

1. Open the Claude App in voice mode and say: “I am about to ramble an app idea at you, your job is to write a structured specification markdown file that I will feed into Claude Code. <and then I ramble for 5 minutes>.

2. Create a folder on my laptop, plop in the specification file, open Claude Code and say “given what you know about my preferences, rewrite this specification file to suit my coding style”

3. Tell Claude “implement the specification”

Here is the problem:

Either I need to pay attention, or I enable the “dangerously skip permissions mode”

And since I have an actual job and a todo list the size of a contract with a crossroads demon, I don’t want to hand-hold Claude.

What’s a nerd to do?

Permissions are more like guidelines

And since Claude can run shell commands, there is no way in hell I will tell it to do whatever it wants. There are too many sensitive things on my laptop, from cryptographic keys that nobody should ever see, to files I don’t want to lose under any circumstance.

The “rules” you give Claude Code are often not as deterministic as you think. Much of the Claude settings files are more like pinky promises than hard security limits. That is why skipping permissions is explicitly labeled as “dangerous”.

It’s like what Captain Barbosa says about the Pirate Code: “more what you’d call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules”.

Infinite permissions in a limited container

I’m a big fan of Docker. It allows you to create pseudo virtual machines that create little isolated environments that you can give permissions as you please. So last weekend I thought, what if I take Claude and:

• Give it superuser access (passwordless sudo access)

• Enable “dangerously bypass permissions”

• Give it a system prompt that says “do everything without asking for confirmation”

• But put it in a docker container that only mounts the current directory as read/write

If I mount the host Claude folder I could basically wrap Claude in a safety blanket that means it can just go yolo and run with anything I tell it to do

Enter: Sir Claudius.

It ended up taking a few hours of experimentation, but I now almost exclusively use Sir Claudius, which I call as a command line utility called “claudius”.

My above workflow of creating a specification through audio and then letting Claude play now ends with running: “claudius yolo”. Which runs claudius in Yolo mode, meaning it:

• Enables --dangerously-skip-permissions

• Adds a system prompt saying “you should do as much as possible without user interaction”

• Tells claudius to commit but not push it’s work (it couldn’t even do that because your host ssh keys are not available in the Docker container)

I’m having crazy amounts of fun telling it to make little projects and just letting it run in vibe mode.

It’s completely useless for my actual job, but for low-effort side projects it is AMAZING.

Some examples

What did I make claudius do this week?

• claudius sandbox yolo (no file access, autonomous): give it my Porkbun API keys and tell it “find me 100 available one-word domain names, I am looking for a domain to host my pet projects, it should be easy to say and write”. It took 3 hours to run and I’m window shopping the domains now.

• claudius yolo: make me an ereader app that uses an OpenAI API key to translate any ebook I upload to a language of my choice, but let me select the language level. Example: take in a Shakespeare play but translate it to kid-level Albanian (which I’m trying to get better at). It took 30 minutes, it works and I’m looking at hosting it now

• claudius mudbox yolo (read only access to files): brainstorm names for this app, feel free to run the app and click through it with the Playwright MCP

It’s amazing what you can let AI do if you don’t need to worry about it breaking things.

How to try it

If you want to enlist Sir Claudius to your laptop, all instructions can be found at this Github repository I maintain. Installation takes 5 seconds and it uses your existing Claude auth (Claudius is just Claude with an extra cape).

💡 Remember you can get free copies of my books here.

💡 Remember you can get free copies of my books here.

This is the Monthly(ish) Mentor of .

• [ Personal ] - short term battery full, long term battery drained. Our house is still being renovated and I’m reminded that I’m the kind of person that needs to feel tethered to a home to feel grounded.

• [ Read ] Taste for Makers - a 2002 Paul Graham post about how perception of beauty and taste is something that will become more and more important. In the AI age, this will only increase I suspect. (link)

• [ Watch 25:26 ] Why Google Maps fails in Amsterdam - an interesting breakdown of traffic pattern planning and how this makes Google Maps act badly in Amsterdam (link)

• [ Buy ] Switchbot CO2 mater (portable) - the cheapest yet high quality CO2 meter I found that works both at home and on the go. I hope to bring this around so I can gauge the ventilation in spaces I’m in which influences for example how well I’ll be able to focus and the likelyhood someone in the room might infect me with an inconvenient virus or something (link)

Enjoy your week friends!

~ Mentor

💡 Remember you can get free copies of my books here.

• Spotify

• Apple Podcasts

• Google Podcasts

• Podcast RSS feed

🙏 Request: if you like this episode, would you forward it to a friend? Just a single one is perfect <3

You can view the transcript of this episode by opening this page on Substack and clicking the “transcript” button.

• Spotify

• Apple Podcasts

• Google Podcasts

• Podcast RSS feed

🙏 Request: if you like this episode, would you forward it to a friend? Just a single one is perfect <3

You can view the transcript of this episode by opening this page on Substack and clicking the “transcript” button.

• Plex: https://www.plex.tv

• Jellyfin: https://jellyfin.org

• VLC Media Player: https://www.videolan.org/vlc/

• QuickTime Player: https://support.apple.com/quicktime

Download clients

• Deluge (BitTorrent client): https://deluge-torrent.org

• SABnzbd (Usenet downloader): https://sabnzbd.org

Automation and indexer management (*arr stack)

• Radarr (movies): https://radarr.video

• Sonarr (TV series): https://sonarr.tv

• Readarr (books): https://readarr.com

• Lidarr (music): https://lidarr.audio

• Prowlarr (indexer management): https://prowlarr.com

Request and discovery frontend

• Overseerr: https://overseerr.dev

Torrent and content index sites

• The Pirate Bay: https://thepiratebay.org

The Monthly Mentor is an easy to skim bullet point list of things I enjoyed this month, usually a personal update and something to: read, watch, and buy.

💡 Remember you can get free copies of my books here.

This is the Monthly(ish) Mentor of November/December 2025.

[ Personal ] - A bit overwhelmed, as expected - November and December are a whirlwind of social activity. I’m looking forward to focussing on work (and snow) in jan/feb. My EOY reflections resulted in the intention to spend more time on deepening my relationships, making time for embodied play, and reducing the social caretaking load I put on myself. Finally, a big thank you to everyone who participated in the donation matching, I matched €750 all thanks to your generosity. Well done.

[ Read ] Are all the good men married? (link)

An interesting overview of the wage dynamics between married and unmarried people. Importantly it does an analysis on WHY there is a difference. And it’s not what popped into your head just now.

[ Watch 10:48 ] Europe is Sitting on a Trillion Euro Opportunity - The Single Market (link)

Highly recommend this channel in general, but this video in particular. With all the Trump tariff hoo haa it’s extra ironic to see that the core business of the EU (the single market) is so neglected that it in effect tariffs ourselves 44-110%.

[ Buy ] Røde Wireless Pro microphones (link)

Since I intend to do more audio podcasting this year I wanted to get some gear that would make it more likely that I end up actually doing it. In my case that means it needs to be: portable, versatile, and require little after editing. These units have 2 transmitters (microphones) and one receiver (can be plugged into phone, prof camera, laptop). The setup is exactly 0 seconds, they just work and are auto-paired to eachother.

[ Favor ] Let me know if you enjoy the audio versions of posts like this. I realised I just really enjoy audio, so if there are at least one or two of you that like it, that is enough for me to do it.

Enjoy your week friends!

~ Mentor

💡 Remember you can get free copies of my books here.

In this audio I briefly describe how I reflect on a year and set intentions for 2026. This can be a gentle and relatively unstructured endeavour, but I find that it helps a lot in gathering some actionable insights.

💡 Remember you can get free copies of my books here.

In august I wrote Left vs right is stupid: a personal manifesto. A few of the principles in there included:

• Actions speak louder than words

• Incentives are more powerful than morals

• Results matter more than feelings

So today, I would like to get you to take action through an incentive so we can affect a result in the real world.

In addition to my usual donations, I will be matching donations that you guys do up to €1000.

I’ve pre-selected charities

To make your life easy, and to prevent some trolls from getting me to match their donation to a silly charity, I have curated some charities that I believe to be high quality and high integrity.

1. Givewell - tracks how much impact a donation to a charity actually has. I will match donations to any of their top charities (or Givewell’s funds). See the list here.

2. World Central Kitchen - food support for people in crisis. From Gaza to Ukraine to Brazil, they feed those who are impacted by disasters of natural and human origin.

3. Electronic Frontier Foundation (🇳🇱 or Bits of Freedom) - these are strong supporters of privacy rights (especially online) in the US and the Netherlands (and EU more broadly). Privacy is what protects us from centralised powers of tyranny. And before you think “I have nothing to hide”, ask yourself: would you have nothing to hide from an evil regime? Perhaps a future where your government no longer likes people like you? Would you want a potential evil power to have access to everything?

Send me the receipt before the 30th

Before December 30th 2025, send me the receipt of your donation, and I will tally up the donations made by you and readers like you. I’ll donate to those charities by the same amount, and post the receipts on this platform.

You can send your receipt:

1. To matchdonations2025@palokaj.co

2. On WhatsApp/Signal if we know each other IRL

You should 100% brag about donating

Ok maybe brag is too strong a word. But if you believe results matter more than feelings, then you should think about telling those around you that you donated to a charity you like, and that they should consider the same.

If you are someone who likes to brag. Do that. You have my blessing.

If you’re an introvert like me, write about it instead and tell others to brag about it. Whatever gets the word out.

Want to join the match pool?

If you want to join this matching pool, I welcome your support. Send me a message or comment and we’ll sort out logistics. You can join the matching pool by name or anonymously.

💡 Remember you can get free copies of my books here.

💡 Remember you can get free copies of my books here.

Last Monthly Mentor I asked you if you wanted a pre-black friday shopping list, and/or a walkthrough of my house where I go through some of my favorite objects. I’m late. Sorry.

The audio of this post is me walking through my house and describing the objects in my house that I enjoy. Below is a long list of links to the specific things I own, where possible. Some things have newer models, so I linked those instead.

Enjoy your Christmas and New Years!

Hallway

• LCD temperature and humidity sensor

• Aqara zigbee button

• Anker Solix c300 backup battery

• Unifi G4 instant camera

• Icybox 4 drive Raid enclosure

• Home Wizard plug-in home battery

• Ring intercom audio

• Dyson Vacuum

• Vivobarefoot shoes

Kitchen

• Ourplace Titanium Always Pan Pro

• Pika stainless steel tupperwares

• Aarke Carbonator Pro

• Aarke Kettle

• Karasu Knives Amsterdam

• Eco Brotbox Cup

• Tap water filter

• Silicone cup lids

• Silicone spatula aka “Salazars”

• Flair Espresso machine

• Foodsaver vacuum sealer

• Foodsaver portable

• Vacuum reusable seal bags

• Dopper Steel bottle

• Kitchenaid artisan food processor

• Ankarsrum dough mixer

• Phillips airfrier (I have an older model)

Living Room

• Lazy prism glasses

• Manduka Eko mat

• Cork block

• Backbuddy massage tool

• Fascia massage set

• Beurer massage machine

• Regentech massage gun

• Battery powered plant watering

• Tide pens (turns out they are for sale in the NL now!)

• Awair Element air quality meter

• Switchbot curtain 3 robots

• Roborock vacuum (I have an old S8)

Office

• Pull up bar

• Standing desk with treadmill and split keyboard

• USB c dock

• Battery charge meter

• Fornuftig air purifier

• Unifi networking equipment

• Duux silent fan

• Quad button zigbee switch (portable)

• Retrofit bidet

• Airthings air quality meter (incl Radon)

• Cordless waterpik

• Ultrasonic cleaner

• NFC Stickers

💡 Remember you can get free copies of my books here.

The Monthly Mentor is an easy to skim bullet point list of things I enjoyed this month, usually a personal update and something to: read, watch, and buy.

💡 Remember you can get free copies of my books here.

This is the Monthly(ish) Mentor of September/October 2025.

[ Personal ] - I’ve managed to go skydiving a few times again

I love the feeling of jumping out of a plane, and sleep like a baby after doing so. For those in the Netherlands, Teuge is a really nice dropzone with fun people and good equipment. Shoutout to Rhys who got his skydiving AFF licence! Work-wise we just deployed a whole network upgrade making our decentralised VPN swarm capable of infinite scaling (readme for the nerds).

[ Read ] In the economy of user effort, be a bargain, not a scam (link)

A very detailed and practical overview of how to think about user experience and effort. The main thing that stuck with me: “Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible”. I redid a bunch of couchcaster.app to try to adhere to that.

[ Watch 20:53 ] The alarm bells are sounding for young men. Will we listen? | Richard Reeves (link)

This topic lands on my radar periodically1. In many western countries boys and men aren’t doing well. And talking about that is precarious because it often triggers a "are you implying women don’t need support” reaction in conversation. Reeves is very good at describing the issue and how it is not a men vs women thing, but a “us together” thing.

[ Watch 2:30 (bonus) ] Partij tegen de Burger feat Vincent Karremans (link) - For the Dutch: de meest hilarische politieke video die ik dit verkiezingsseizoen gezien heb. Met de echte meneer Karremans die heerlijk meespeelt.

[ Buy ] Senz micro storm umbrella (link)

Their smallest one yet. 196 grams, windproof up to 70 km/h, 2 year warranty. Perfect as an every day carry item in autumn.

[ Favor ] I’m considering writing two object related posts: 1) a walk through my house covering my favorite purchases. 2) my shopping list for this black friday. As you all know I have many little gadgets I love, and I like sharing them. But I don’t want to turn these emails into an infomercial if you guys don’t want that. Please hit reply on this email (or comment on substack) with “1” or “2” or “1, 2” so I know which you would enjoy.

Ps. Manu I have not forgotten about the post that explains why millennials can’t buy a house and why that is not a capitalism problem. I need a bit more space in my calendar to properly write that up. It will happen and I can’t want for our in person debating.

Enjoy your week friends!

~ Mentor

💡 Remember you can get free copies of my books here.

The Monthly Mentor is an easy to skim bullet point list of things I enjoyed this month, usually a personal update and something to: read, watch, and buy.

This is the Monthly(ish) Mentor of July/August 2025.

[ Personal ] - We intended to pack less travel and commitments into our 2025 summer than last years. We failed. All of it has been fun so far though. Italy with friends, 2ish weeks offline in Luxemburg, Berlin with Sandboxers. The only real bummers: the weather was too bad to do my skydive refresher jump, and I did indeed fail my HAM radio exam (by one question dammit). One thing I learned: my Quest VR headset with a Bobovr M3 holo strap and replaceable batteries is great for working on trains.

[ Read ] Corporations aren't the reason your rent is too high - Written in a US American context, but true of many western countries including my own Netherlands (link)

• [ Watch ] The Dutch iceberg level 1 - this in in Dutch (worth it with subtitles), and it is HILARIOUS yet very educational. Requires a certain appreciation of internet/meme culture (link)
  

• [ Buy ] Comply foam tips for your earbuds - I have the Bose QC Ultra buds, which have great noise cancelling, but I wanted more. Comply makes tips for many earbud types, the tips are those foamy squashable ones that really insulate the outside world (link)
  

• [ Favor ] Please hit me up with your favorite podcasts. I’m enjoying my regulars but someone recently recommended Hidden Forces and it made me realise there is a lot of great stuff out there I’m not aware of.
  

Enjoy your week friends!

~ Mentor

💡 Remember you can get free copies of my books here.

💡 Remember you can get free copies of my books here.

Two months ago I was enjoying an evening of wine and debate like a proper European. A favourite new friend (hi Clare 👋) during a debate on economics casually dropped something like “you're pretty right wing”. As Michael Jordan once said “and I took that personally”.

To be fair. My views don't fit in a neat left/right box. But the whole point is that most people's don't. So that casual discussion triggered this semi-socialist pseudo-capitalist Dutchman to write down my views in words. A bit for you dear reader, but mostly for myself.

In this Manifesto I will declare my (current):

• Definition of politics

• My Axioms: beliefs I cannot prove

• Foundational truths: facts that guide me

• Guiding principles: my decision shortcuts

I hope to be able to refer back to this document when I’m thinking through what I think about whatever I’m forming an opinion on at the time. I also expect my opinions to change over time, and look forward to this document being a time capsule of 2025 Mentor.

This page is mostly written to myself, but have included some external links that will help you understand my positions. Assume that when I say “should” in this document, I’m directing it at myself.

Politics is how groups decide

Politics is the process of making decisions about organising your society/group. E.g. company politics is how decisions get made at work. Family politics is how decisions get made in the fam, etc.

This section covers my basic views on what politics is, and thus what this document is for: deciding what to believe and what to do with regards to group dynamics.

Left and right do not exist

The concept of “left” and “right” politics comes from the French National Assembly after the 1789 revolution, where the radicals/reformists sat on the left of the room, and the monarchists/conservatives on the right. And to this day we use left for “wants change” and right for “wants to keep things as they are”.

Tell me: do you want to change all things in your life? Or want to keep everything the same? What about your country, do you want to change everything about it? Or keep everything the same?

It’s stupid thinking.

If you think about it for more than 2 seconds, there is no reason that someone’s belief about taxes would tell you anything about their opinion on religion or abortion. So why do so many people cluster their beliefs?

People don’t believe packages of left/right beliefs until you socialise them into them.

In other words: if you tell people “there are two groups, one of them believes a/b/c and the other believes x/y/z, now choose” then they will choose a package. And they will let their social monkey brain talk them into thinking “this is what our group believes so so must I”.

But if you don’t believe there are only 2 groups, you don’t believe the packages:

• Here is a good video explaining the research into this: The political spectrum is a myth

• Here is an academic article: Understanding the Determinants of Political Ideology: Implications of Structural Complexity (full text at Annas Archive)

You don’t have to choose a camp. You can just form opinions on things.

Personal politics are how YOU think/decide/act in a group

Politics is inherently about groups. The idea of personal politics points then to how you personally relate to how your groups organise. For me, personal politics fall into a few categories:

1. what do you think is important

2. what do you think about those important things

3. what do you want to do about those important things

Of course, any single person is a part of many groups. That is one of the interesting, beautiful, and complex things about being human. Your position in different groups can differ a lot. At work you might be responsible for many things. In your friend group your opinion may be valued. At family dinners you might have very little to say.

I personally like to behave from the same principles in all social groups, even if my position is different in them. This document is a collection of beliefs, truths, and principles that I use to decide how I want to think about things, decide things, and do things in a group context.

Axioms/beliefs

These are things I hold to be true but cannot fundamentally prove. I assume these to be true but acknowledge that they are beliefs and not facts.

Reality is coherent

I believe that the universe in which I live has rules, and that those rules do not change.

It is no coincidence that the world's biggest metaphysics and religions all converged on this.

I reject the notion that reality is incoherent or inconsistent. Even if it turns out that physical reality is a shadow of consciousness.

The logic of reality is knowable

I believe that through structured analysis I can get closer to the truth. The best current method for that is the toolkit of science. That is not to say taking the word of scientists, it means using the actual tools of logic.

I don't claim to know what the rules of the universe are. They are discovered over time, and what I think is true will change over time.

Responsibility is a perspective

Cause and effect are deterministic. Responsibility is a chosen perspective. Sunburns are caused by sunlight, but who is responsible for sunburns depends.

Responsibility is not about guilt or cause, it is about which point of leverage you choose to exercise in order to affect change.

“You are responsible” means “I think you're the best person to affect change and I want you to affect that change”. Or perhaps “you are uniquely suited”. Same goes for past tense.

In the case of sunburns, an adult is responsible for themselves. In the case of a child, who is uniquely suited to prevent sunburns? The child is definitely not the best person to make responsible.

Enjoying life is good

Both for me as a person and humanity as a whole, enjoying life is a good thing. Reducing suffering is a good thing.

What enjoyment means is more complicated. There can be great joy in chosen struggles that you choose to overcome. Pain doesn't have to mean suffering, and hedonism doesn't have to mean enjoyment.

Foundational truths

These are things I can prove. They are facts so important that I think about them often and use them to make decisions.

Copykitten is the best long term cooperation strategy

You should take 30 minutes to play the evolution of trust. The essential conclusion I draw from this is today you should:

• Always start from an intention of cooperation

• Always punish those that take advantage of your cooperation

• Always forgive after punishing

Because:

• Cooperation generally leads to the maximum gain by all parties

• Both taking advantage of people and letting others get away with taking advantage of you are bad strategies

• Forgiveness is the cure for miscommunication and personal development

But only if:

• you are in a context that is not dominated by people taking advantage of others

• in repeated interactions, because in a single interaction it's hard to punish meaning there is no cost to bad behavior. Which explains why multi-interaction yet cheap sales people (i.e. local coffee place staff) are stereotypically trustworthy, and single-interaction sales people are often known as untrustworthy (car sales, kitchens, mattresses etc)

Rich people are happier than poor people

The idea that money doesn't make you happy is a classic case of a “luxury belief”. You get to believe it when you're already rich. If you can't afford food, shelter, education, healthcare and so forth, you'll never believe something that silly.

Those who claim otherwise should hang this chart on their wall and stare at it every day:

It's true that on an individual level the effect of wealth flattens out at some point. It's also true rich people can be miserable. But just because you know of someone who smoked their whole life and lived to 95 doesn't mean smoking doesn't cause cancer.

Read an AI overview of the evidence.

Rule of Law is required for wealth

An economy is a complex web of cooperation. The more advanced a society gets, the more complex the web of cooperation gets. The stability of that complexity depends on stability.

If I can't know if agreements I make today will be honoured 5 years from now, how could I ever build any long term project?

Empirically we can observe this, countries with strong rule of law are richer and happier. That shouldn't be confusing:

Read an AI overview of the evidence.

Improvement of life is gained through technology

The big changes on quality of life tend to happen because of improvements in knowledge and technology.

Ask yourself what is the source of all the things modern societies enjoy:

• Improved lifespan

• Ubiquitous cheap food

• Widespread access to knowledge

The big jumps in human flourishing agent because we optimise the resources we have, it's because we create explosions of new wealth. An example of this is how many people die because they do or do not have access to modern fuel (gas instead of wood):

Fighting poverty through money redistribution is good. But don't mistake it for the route to extreme improvements for humanity. It isn't and has never been.

Read an AI overview of the evidence.

Everyone is born with an innate range of capacity

If you are very short, you're unlikely to become a professional basketball player. Rigorous training can make you a better player, but you have a built in limit.

The same is true for many things. Including mental and emotional ones. Some people find math easy. Some have a hot temper. Education can help with math, and emotional maturity with temper, but everyone has a range of things that are easy for them, and a range of things that are hard for them.

Guiding principles

These are heuristics (mental shorthands) that I use to make decisions.

Actions speak louder than words

Put more energy into the outcome you want than than talking about it. Telling others about what you do is optional. Personally, I tend only to do it if I think it will make people take similar action.

Don't respect outrage. Words are cheap. And guess what, often so is action. Hold yourself to this, and feel free to adjust your view of others based on this.

Are you rage tweeting about Palestinian and Sudanese war victims? Donate to relief organizations first (I use world central kitchen). Greta Thunberg fan? Offset environmental damage (I offset carbon through Toucan and pay for experimental SO2 injections through make sunsets). Ranting about the world becoming totalitarian and fascist? Support the EFF and other freedom/privacy orgs and tools (I donate to the EFF, run a Tor exit node, and coordinate OnionDAO).

Incentives are more powerful than morals

Both on personal and societal levels, what you make easy and hard makes more difference than what you call right and wrong. If you want to affect change, think about making what you want easy/profitable and what you want to avoid hard/punished. In the words of Charlie Munger: “show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome”.

An alcoholic shouldn’t rely on their sense of what is good behaviour, they should not have alcohol in the house. Likewise if you want to go to the gym more, make sure your gym is close to where you live/work.

Do not rely on morals and will power when you want to get things done.

Results matter more than feelings

If you care about results, be willing to prioritise them over your feelings. When I was 15, my mother told me about a project she was proud of but for which she got no credit. I got indignantly upset that my mother was treated like that. She responded: “I got what I wanted” and seemed unperturbed about the price she paid. That woman gets things done.

This principle leads me to accept and even celebrate things other people find icky, for example: rich people donating money and bragging about it. If you badmouth a billionaire for donating food to poor people you are putting your feelings over the full bellies of the hungry. You won’t be getting my respect for that. If the price for improving the lives of others is that I need to stroke the ego of a billionaire, I will stroke with as much sensual passion as I have.

Some specific positions

I hesitated whether to include this. This document is about my larger philosophy and political principles. But I also know that to many people it will be unclear what this means for my position on things. So just for the fun of it, I’m adding some specific stances I have.

Note that these can change rapidly if I learn new information. I don’t mind changing my mind on things. I’ll try to pick some fun controversial positions. Enjoy.

• Energy use is wealth. And since wealth makes people happy, and being happy is good, we should get everyone to use as much energy as possible. To do that we need to make energy cheap. To make energy cheap we need to stimulate production and remove taxes on energy. If we want to have that energy be green: deregulate and subsidise all carbon neutral energy production (solar, wind, nuclear, tidal, etc).

• Climate change is real, and I’m not that worried about it. Solar energy is eating the world, and most climate changes can be solved with technology. People dying of climate/weather events has been going down over time. But it is an engineering problem, not an existential crisis. The world will go green because it is cheaper (soon), and if we want to offset our environmental impact during the 10-20 years it will take to go from fossil to green, we should inject SO2 into the stratosphere immediately.

• We should institute a negative income tax for low incomes. The best way to fight poverty is to support the poor. The easiest way to do that without disincentivising work is to for example charge -20% on your first 10k of income (in effect paying you extra if you are poor) but make it a sliding scale so with every bit of extra work you do you still earn more. This prevents effects like people deciding not to work more because it would void a bunch of subsidies and make it barely pay off to work more.

• We should legalise every drug that is less harmful than alcohol, and institute a “substance license” similar to a driving license where you have to take a test about the effects and risks of each substance before you can buy them. The test should cost money, and should entitle you only to a limited amount of purchases per week/month.

• Education should be treated like venture capital investments: you invest in people, not knowing which will make crazy amounts of money, but knowing some will and those will pay for everyone who doesn’t. You could align incentives by making education “free” but allowing schools/universities to charge up to 5% of the income of a student up to 10 years after graduation (perhaps including their wealth, in case they create some crazy company).

• The Netherlands should stop using the Euro, and exempt itself from every EU rule that is not explicitly about trade (which is what the EU is supposed to do anyway). Having one monetary policy for the whole EU is like having a thermostat that changes the temperature in all the houses of the EU at the same time. Different countries have different needs, and this system is creating imbalances that will make things explode sooner or later.

• Every company above a certain size should allow employees to buy equity in the company. This is obviously already true for large public companies, but I think giving people this option on a small scale would align incentives and make everyone feel ownership over how they spend their days. Consider it opt-in socialism.

• Everywhere where there is a speed limit there should be a speed camera. The proceeds of the fines that are paid because of that camera go to the neighbourhood budget where that camera is. It has always baffled me how little speed cameras exist. Either don’t set a speed limit, or enforce it.

💡 Remember you can get free copies of my books here.

The Monthly Mentor is an easy to skim bullet point list of things I enjoyed this month, usually a personal update and something to: read, watch, and buy.

This is the Monthly(ish) Mentor of May/June 2025.

• [ Personal ] - Summer is in full swing. Lots of travel, lots of work. I’m excited to be picking up skydiving again next weekend. Turns out the little airstrip near my hometown is quite known for skydiving and even hosts the world championships this year. Who knew. I’ve also started violin lessons and hope to not suck in about 12 months. I also expect to fail my HAM radio exam this weekend.
  

  

• [ Read ] High agency in 30 minutes - a motivating read about cultivating yourself as a high agency person. If you read anything today, make it this. (link)
  

  

  
  

• [ Watch ] Murderbot - Robot hacks himself into freedom. Decides to spend most time watching terrible romcoms. Gets hired by space hippies. Chaos. I’m enjoying this so much. (link)
  

• [ Buy ] Custom fake tattoos - I had these made as a fun marketing thing for an event. You just upload any picture (logo, design, anything) and they send you those childhood memory “put it on your arm and put some water on it” tattoos that stick around for 1-3 days depending on heat/sweat. (link)
  

• [ Nerd corner ] Immich - a fully self hosted alternative to Google Photos. I started running this on my home server a few weeks ago and love it. Google Photos has no export API, so I have no way of easily backing up my personal pictures, and this beautiful piece of FOSS solved that for me. (link)
  

• [ Favor ] If you are at ETHCC, let me know! I’ll be here until friday morning. If you’re a fellow crypto-bro(ette), you can watch my first ever EthCC talk here.
  

Enjoy your week friends!

~ Mentor

💡 Remember you can get free copies of my books here.

💡 Remember you can get free copies of my books here.

This article is inspired by talks with a cryptographer friend who keeps trying to think of blockchain-less designs that offer the same advantages as blockchains. Hi Jonas 👋

I’m a fan of blockchains, but also wrote Blockchains are Mostly Useless. In that little book I cover what characteristics blockchains offer, and when it is useful (rarely). What the aforementioned Jonas keeps pointing out is that there are alternative cryptographic tools to do most things that blockchains do.

If I may summarise my friends’ positions:

1. Ledgers - a blockchain is a ledger, but so is an Excel spreadsheet

2. Immutable - blockchains are append-only and do not rewrite history. Centralised databases can do this too.

3. Distributed - the distributed nature of blockchains is cool, but there are plenty of non-blockchain distributed systems

4. Permissionless - blockchains allow anyone to access them under the same rules, no privileged access. This is in many ways possible without blockchains.

5. Trustless - blockchains remove the need to trust an authority at their word.

To be clear, I think blockchains are a beautiful cocktail of the things above. But in theory there are other ways to do those things. I think they would suck. But that is not the point of this post.

Can I prove I’m in Amsterdam?

If I upload a picture of me in Amsterdam to instagram today, with the intention to prove I am here, what guarantees to you have?

• You know I claim I took the picture today

• You know I claim to post the picture today

• You know Instagram claims I posted the picture today

On the current Instagram I do not cryptographically claim (ie sign a message) the above, and neither does Instagram.

But what if we did? What if we both signed with our cryptographic keys/wallets that we claim the above?

You know for sure that:

• I claim that I took the picture and posted it today

• Instagram claims to have posted the picture today

• You are 100% certain that I and Insta claimed this (assuming our keys are not compromised).

What do you not know for sure:

• You do NOT know my claim is true

• You do NOT know Instas claim is true

Proving time is a relative thing

Think about any case where we want to claim something happened at a certain point in spacetime.

• Movies using newspapers as proof they are in the future

• Crime witnesses testifying that they saw something happen

• Video evidence that something happened

All of these are circumstantial evidence, because fundamentally we cannot prove anything about the past. We can only look at the state of the present.

Even claims about the past with sophisticated methods like carbon dating are really just claims about the present, combined with a theory of what that means in the past.

The trustworthiness of claims about the past increases with the amount and randomness of the data points we are using.

• Did 1 cellphone video show a UFO above NYC? Probably just a cloud with weird lighting

• Did 10 cellphones see the same? Interesting news story, but probably the same cloud

• Did 1000 cellphones, 50 satellites, and 5 F16 sensors see it? Ok fine the invaders are here.

The reason the spread and randomness is considered “proof” is for 2 reasons:

1. Different points of view - ie in the example of a single cellphone it might just be the angle of the phone relative to the sun that makes it do something weird

2. The incentives - the cellphone user might want to get TikTok famous and might lie or exaggerate. But the camera on the ATM machine on the corner? They don’t have that incentive.

While not always true, the accuracy of claims about time increases the more disparate data points you collect.

Blockchains are a spread out consensus machine

The nature of blockchains means that every claim about the current state of the blockchain can only be coherent is the past was not tampered with.

It’s like a domino or butterfly effect. Trying to change even a small thing in a blockchain entry a year ago would require rewriting the entire blockchain from that point.

So what if you put a time claim on a blockchain?

What if me and Instagram post the fingerprint and claims of my picture on a blockchain? You would know for sure that when you see that proof:

• I claimed to have taken and posted the picture on that day

• Insta will claim to have posted that picture on that day

• EVERYONE using that blockchain corroborates our claims

Who is everyone using that blockchain and what are their incentives?

• Financial applications, for example those managing $245,613,892,557 of stable coins at the time of writing1

• People trading useless meme tokens, which is silly but a few billion dollars nonetheless

• Validators/miners with billions at stake when they lie

What is the worst the people running validation or RPC nodes can do?

• They can try to rewrite history - And you would be able to very cheaply prove that their claim on my or Instagrams behalf is a lie (because of the way the cryptography works)

• They could erase the claim from history - But it would take only one copy of the true original history to prove that my claims about the past are coherent

Imagine how many people and organisations I would have to coerce into trying to rewrite history. Imagine the time and money required. That is the protection you have against lies on a blockchain. In theory you can tamper with them if you get the whole world with all of its incentives to go along. But you most likely won’t be able to.

The timestamp machine is amazing

So there you have it. Blockchains are timestamp machines.

Why does that matter?

Because the coherence of the important things in life depend on claims and when they are made.

Ask yourself:

• What proof do you have of your bank balance? If you had to dispute a fraudulent bank? What if they show a printed balance overview from last week that shows 0, and yours at home shows more? What do you claim? You claim yours came first.

• What proof do you have that you own the lease or title to your house? What if someone makes a fake contract showing they own the house? Will you claim truth based on the color of the paper? No, you claim your documentation is older.

• Two van Gogh paintings are offered for sale. One is a fake. One is real. What do you try to figure out about them? The first thing is probably their age. The only question is how.

Timestamps matter.

💡 Remember you can get free copies of my books here.

The Monthly Mentor is an easy to skim bullet point list of things I enjoyed this month. Email context: you were subscribed to one of my email lists, but a few months we moved to Substack.

This is the Monthly(ish) Mentor of April 2025.

• [ Personal ] The past months have been very full. We organiser our yearly event for 70ish people (hello boxies 👋) and caught up with a lot of friends. The picture below is me and my youngest brother at the event venue. Our business pivot payed off, and the market cap of the network I’m responsible for (decentralised VPN infra) is hovering around $1 million as of the time of writing.

  

  

• [ Read ] Industrial Greatness Requires Economic Depressions (link) - There are some fundamental truths that are nonetheless seen as being super controversial. This article covers a few. One quote that stuck with me: “Prosperity Comes From Technology, Not From Full Employment”. As I reminder of why this kind of thing happens: richer people are happier people.

  

• [ Watch ] Spain blocks half the internet (link) - shit like this will turn you into an anti-government person really quick. The video is a bit technical, but in essence Spain allows the soccer broadcaster to block what they see as “pirate” ip addrsses. Which includes infrastructure providers like Cloudflare. This is insanity. INSANITY.

• [ Buy ] Home Wizard home battery (link) - Mostly relevant if you have solar panels at home. This 2.7 kWh beauty stores your solar energy when it is cheap (the day) and feeds it back into your house when electricity is expensive (at night). Works exceptionally well with a dynamic energy contract (the ones that change the power price every hour). The best part: you can just plug it into the power socket, just like the solar panels I use.
  

  

• [ Favor ] Share me your favorite house upgrades. We are upgrading some stuff over the coming weeks (floor, sound insulating walls, kitchen) and I’m in the “what else can I do” mindset. Tell me your favorite house upgrades. Anything from favorite paint to smart home stuff.

See you next month(ish)!

~ Mentor

💡 Remember you can get free copies of my books here.

The Monthly Mentor is an easy to skim bullet point list of things I enjoyed this month. Email context: you were subscribed to one of my email lists, but a few months we moved to Substack.

This is the Month Mentor of February 2025. My apologies for missing Dec and Jan.

• [ Personal ] the past months had ups (snowboarding) and downs (lost a terminally ill aunt). We’ve pivoted to new priorities at work, and spring is shaping up to be filled with fun events in Amsterdam. One of my ongoing side projects is design designing a protein bar recipe that is not sweet but savoury, I think I'm 70% of the way there. I've gotten to the point where I am not the only person in the universe that thinks these things don't taste terrible.

• [ Read ] The Stormlight Archives by Brendon Sanderson (link) - The final book in one of my favorite recent fantasy series just released (Wind and Truth). Brandan Sanderson is an excellent fantasy writers. His Mistborm books were the first ones I read by him, but the stormlight archives are my faves. It is a pleasant blend of interesting narrative, flawed characters, and cool world building.

• [ Watch ] Brendon Sanderson at Tim Ferriss (link) - unlike most authors, Brendon Sanderson is very public about his process and how he thinks about his writing. Hearing him speak about how he constructs worlds and narratives is very inspiring. I also love that he thinks specifically about the business angle of running his business. This is something many authors seem not to think about.

• [ Buy ] Anova Sous Vide stick (link) - in December I bought a vacuum sealer and I knew this would allow me to cook epic sous vide meat dishes. So far, I had been winging the water temperature by just adding hot water to a pan, measuring the right temperature, and then wrapping it in a towel and hoping for the best, which was often honestly quite good. This sous vide stick however is a huge upgrade, it looks like a rod mixer but allows precise temperature control controls over a large period of time. I honestly believe part of being an ethical meat eater is respecting the animal you're eating by cooking the meat in an excellent way.

• [ Favor ] Let me know if you like or dislike me putting images in these monthly emails by hitting reply on this email (or commenting on Substack).

See you next month(ish)!

~ Mentor

💡 Remember you can get free copies of my books here.

💡 Remember you can get free copies of my books here.

I really wanted to add solar energy to our house, but we weren’t going to sacrifice the rooftop terrace. A few months in, we now have about 3kWp of solar installed. This is how I did it.

Spoiler: the new solar sets can just be plugged into a power socket.

Important context

• I am in the Netherlands:

  • if I say something is allowed, I mean it’s allowed in the Netherlands

  • if I say something is safe, I mean it’s safe on the Dutch grid

  • my yield calculations use Dutch sun hours and seasons

• I live in a house we own, but much of this works in rentals too

For my Dutchies: doe dit. Het is extreem makkelijk en scheelt meteen in je energieverbruik.

Context 1: Solar is simpler than you think

To add solar energy to your house (bought or rental, doesn’t matter), you need three things:

1. Solar panels (those make the power)

2. An inverter (this changes the solar voltage to grid voltage)

3. A power socket you plug the inverter into

There are some caveats and gotchas, but this is basically it.

In a traditional setup, you pay someone to put panels on your roof, then add a big inverter box, and they will lay cable to your utility closet to link the inverter to your house.

In 2025, you can buy micro inverters. This means that the inverter box is relatively low power and can be plugged straight into a power socket. No electrician needed. There is a limit to the amount of panels you can plug into a power socket for safety reasons, but we’ll cover that later.

If you have a power socket on the outside of the house, the hardest part of installing solar is putting the panels down and adding ballast or using zipties to attach them (that’s not as crazy at it sounds).

You don’t need a permit for this. You just need to tell the grid provider on a super easy website.

Context 2: solar is cheaper than you think

Solar used to be expensive. Now it is cheap. The ROI time of a full solar set (panels, inverter, etc) is 2-3 years.

A rule of thumb, in the Netherlands 1 Watt of solar capacity generates about 1 kWh of power in a year. So a 400 Watt panel creates about 400 kWh a year. That is about 400 * €0.3 = €120 of electricity cost saved per panel.

The cheapest 400 Watt panel on my local solar outlet webshop costs €47.

That means the panel itself takes about 6 months to pay itself back.

DO YOU UNDERSTAND HOW CRAZY THAT IS?!

I mean sure, you still need the micro inverter (which costs quite a bit), and that rule of thumb is quite optimistic. Which is why I calculate a 2-3 year ROI time.

After that?

Free power baby.

What I did: two sets

I had two spots that were potentially solar friendly:

• a little roof space above my kitchen (sized like a queen sized bed approximately)

• the fence around my rooftop terrace (approx 5 by 5 meters)

I started with the flat roof above my kitchen. Because I knew I wanted to add quite a bit of solar, I asked an electrician to pull a new cable from my utility closet to the roof. Having the panels on a dedicated group means I can go up to approximately 3500 Watts of power1.

Installation 1: 2x 400Wp for €400

The Dutch company Simply Solar B.V. makes both ready-made and DIY kits for home solar. I bought this DIY set. The manual pdf indicated that I needed a certain amount of ballast, so a trip to the local hardware store added about €100 to the price in basic weighted tiles.

The hardest part of this installation was carrying the ballast up the stairs.

The installation itself was simple:

• The panels come with metal legs that you screw into them

• The metal legs come with rubber tiles that you place the panel on

• The panels have an MC4 connector, which is as simple as plugging in a USB cable

• The micro inverter has plugs for the MC4 cables

• The inverter also comes with a cable that you plug into the inverter in one end, and a power socket in the other

I literally plugged the device in, and it immediately started providing solar to the house.

The micro inverter comes with an app, which allows you to monitor it. And for my fellow nerds, you can enable the local API so it ties into home assistant without a cloud connection.

Installation 2: 2400Wp flexible lightweight panels for €2400

This was my favorite part. I had called multiple solar installation companies asking if they would add solar panels to the outside of the fence of my rooftop balcony. They all told me they wouldn’t do it, and that “it would be inefficient anyway”.

They are right that solar panels yield the best results when angled towards the midday sun. But that wasn’t an option for me. And more importantly: even if it would reduce yields by 20-50%, that would mean that the panels would take 3-6 years to pay themselves back rather than 2-3. Still an epic investment.

The same solar company as above offers a set of flexible panels, meaning that they are lightweight plastic panels that instead of a rigid frame and glass covering have semi-rigid plastic frames with a bendable plastic covering.

They are attached with — drumrols — metal zipties.

The plastic frames have these little slits, and the set comes with a bag of thick metal zipties that you can use to attach them to anything you like.

The inverter they come with is the same as the above, so installing is as simple as:

1. Ziptie the panels to the fence

2. Plug the cables into the inverter

3. Plug the inverter into the house

And that’s it.

For me that was not all of course, because I put so much power up there. For cable management reasons I again cut the ends of the power cables and combined them in a waterproof combiner box.

Nerd corner: home assistant

If you are a nerd like me, you like pretty chart and needlessly detailed data. If you use the open source smart home system Home Assistant, you can add your data to your local server and get beautiful data like how much you produce and consume:

And if you use smart plugs, you can split that by device too:

Note that these are old screenshots from when I had only the 800W solar set. I have since added the extra panels, and a bunch of smart plugs to keep track of the untracked consumption.

If you want to get data like this, I recommend getting a Home Wizard wireless P1 meter which reads out your electricity and gas usage from the utility closet.

If you have any questions, let me know. I’d love to help you get set up.

💡 Remember you can get free copies of my books here.

Those include the questions:

1. What makes people happy

2. What causes countries to be rich

This short article is a concise layout of how I think about those things. TL;DR: clear and enforced rules make places rich, and being rich makes people happy.

Rich countries are happy countries

I’m not sure why this one is controversial, but apparently it is:

• If you don’t have food and shelter, that makes you less happy

• If you struggle more than you want, you will be less happy

Money doesn’t solve all problems, but it solves a lot of them.

This is not a gut feeling I have, nor an ideological position. There is a well-researched metric that a 5 year old can understand: you can ask people if they are happy. And guess what, asking people if they feel happy is easy research to do, so it has been done.

A few things should stick out on this chart:

1. People in rich countries report themselves happier than those in poor countries

2. There is still variation (e.g. see Lebanon and Vietnam), so money is not the only thing that matters

3. The correlation is so clear you can see it with your naked eye

There are plenty of criticisms of a chart like this, ranging from “GDP is an imperfect measure” to “correlation doesn’t mean causation”. Using those to dismiss this chart is a simple denial of a reality that most people know for a fact: being poor is less nice than being rich.

The simple fact is that given what we know about human psychology, seeing this chart should be a “yeah duh” moment not a “but but” moment.

Stable countries are rich countries

If you don’t know if you can rely on the rules, you can’t plan ahead. Without stable courts, law enforcement, and other institutions building a complex system (like an advanced economy) is almost impossible.

This is again a well-researched fact.

A few thing stand out in this chart:

1. Better rule of law correlates very strongly with wealth

2. The benefit increases more and more as you become more stable

3. Again the effect is so obvious and unsubtle that you can see it with the naked eye

Countries aren’t rich or poor because of a lack of natural resources, or because people there are exceptionally unintelligent, or because they are being plundered by other nations. Injustice in the world exists. Historical injustices do too. But in the context of prosperity they are shiny objects that distract from what really matters: strong rule of law.

If you (like me) are from a rich western nation, you might scoff at this. “Pff you are blowing things out of proportion”. I invite you to look up why Argentina, which has HUGE oil and gas reserves, commonly has lines at their gas stations due to shortages. And then ask ChatGPT whether that kind of thing is exceptional or the norm globally1.

I want everyone to be rich

My base attitude is that human happiness is good, perhaps the highest of goods. Knowing that making people wealthy achieves that, I want every country in the world to attain wealth. Knowing what we do about stable institutions and their effect on wealth, I can’t do anything other than wish strong and predictable institutions upon everyone.

I occasionally have a friendly argument with people who say things like “but economic growth isn’t everything”, and seem to imply that we need to make people happier and healthier without economic growth.

This is a weirdly neocolonial and paternalistic impulse, implying that “we” know better than those poor undeveloped nations. That those nations are being foolish by pursuing economic growth.

The facts are simple: if you want happiness, grow the economy. If you want to do that, make stable institutions.

This is not arcane knowledge

If the above data is new to you, this is not because the research is new or groundbreaking. It’s the kind of thing that is well known in circles of those who study the health and wealth of nations. A good introduction to thinking about this is the book “Why nations fail” by Acemoglu and Robinson.

The data is out there. Unhidden. I’ll leave you with a collage of a few African nations bordering each-other:

The Monthly Mentor is an easy to skim bullet point list of things I enjoyed this month. Email context: you were subscribed to one of my email lists, but last month we moved to Substack.

This is the Month Mentor of November 2024.

• [ Personal ] the past months have been a bit intense with work with systems we were working with not living up to their promises. That combined with a deep feeling of wanting to live up to the expectations of my little brother (who is my employer in this project) has been a bit of a load. On the flip side, I’m having fun building stuff. If you’re a crypto person, this is the project we’re building now.
  

• [ Read ] Stablecoin Update Q3 2024 (link) - stablecoins are crypto tokens that maintain 1:1 value to a regular currency like the dollar. Their usage has grown IMMENSELY. This report was made by a crypto analytics firm to give an overview of how they are developing.
  

• [ Watch ] What the Upcoming Geomagnetic Reversal Will Do to Earth (link) - someone in a podcast I was listening to casually mentioned “the magnetic poles are shifting about 80km per year”. I thought that was bullshit. Turns out pole shifts are actually something we know quite a bit about! And they can have huge consequences.
  

• [ Buy ] Flir One Thermal Imaging Camera (link) - I’ve been wanting to analyse the thermal insulation of my house for a while now, and this little thermal camera hooks into my phone, and makes a nifty thermal image that I’m using to find “heat leaks” in my home that I should insulate.
  

• [ Favor ] Let me know if you’d like to receive Monthly Mentor emails as audio/video podcasts. Just reply “audio”/”video”/”no” to this email. Thank you!

See you next month(ish)!

~ Mentor

💡 Remember you can get free copies of my books here.