Tertulia

Caught up on flashcards, did some grammar, did some listening. Current pain point is discrimination between types of requests — e.g. asking permission, vs. asking how to do something, vs. asking for a favor — and request direction/actors — e.g. asking to borrow something, vs. asking someone else to lend you something. All the forms are familiar. How they're combined, and in which context, is new.

Realized this evening that I was so busy Thursday reading papers on context collapse and messing with Tertulia's multi-user system I forgot to do any flashcards!

Played catch-up today, but it's late and there are still 75 due. I'll handle them tomorrow. I did learn at least one new, fun word: 掲示板 — bulletin board! That one's stuck. I've completed maybe 10-15% of 新完全マスター聴解. Definitely worried during the 問題紹介 that I was doomed. It hasn't been as bad as I thought, given the initial challenge: my troubles are generally elisions that lead to incorrect verb choices, a few missed set patterns I haven't learned yet (e.g. ～させて＋もらえる？ to ask permission), etc. So far, no super unknown or mysterious grammar, which gives me some hope. I haven't spent as much time in my grammar book this week as I've wanted either. Some days learning Japanese feels like continuously pouring water into a sieve. But my metrics bear witness: I am improving. The only question is whether I'll be ready for the December 6th N3 JLPT or not, or if it'd be better to wait until July's exam.

I'm sitting on a full multi-user version of Tertulia. It's off in a branch I've been riffing on with Claude Code.

Every user gets their own journal — a space to think, which is how I use Tertulia myself. Other people can follow you, and you decide how to grant access to the people in your network.

That design comes out of thinking seriously about context collapse after living through it on Facebook. For me, most of that came around the Israel/Palestine conflict: experiences that dragged my entire network into debates over the definition of antisemitism. Conversations a lot of people didn't feel safe having, because they saw only downside — real social and professional risk — and no upside beyond signaling that you're against crimes against humanity.

Thinking a lot about audience management and social media; there's a sort of flattening that happens on FB, where your private posts become the world's fodder; your high school friends bump into your college friends on a post; your new community and its politics ring off in the distance, in a community, hundreds of miles away. I don't want this platform to have addictive features, but I do think it could become a multiuser platform. The hard question is: how do you avoid Facebook's mistakes? What does a social-science informed social media platform look like? Is it worth doing at all if the tradeoff means focusing more on social dynamics than the posting experience, which was the real reason I built this thing at all?

I received a really fantastic code review for Apollo, one I've been thinking about all day. It's about `EitherT[IO, Throwable, Option[Entity]]` having two error channels, specifically when using `cats.effect.IO`, and Apollo using them inconsistently. I'll probably post a write-up here soon: resisting the urge to have Claude Code fix it and do it myself.

I was chatting with a friend about his military career. He's late 30s, stellar career. On deck to become a Command Sergeant Major (if he waits long enough). He's asked me point-blank why I haven't become a reservist, or considered a military technology career.

And my honest answer is: they won't take me.

A 22-year-old with a fresh degree in any field is eligible for a commission. I'm not — sixteen years of shipping and securing federal systems, yet the missing credential makes me ineligible at any rank, through any door. The same credential that has never once blocked my career as a technology expert. I served three years at GS-15, senior expert advisor to a Deputy Assistant Secretary at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Still can't be direct commissioned. Service policy requires a degree to commission at all; and even if a service secretary decided my experience justified an exception, 10 U.S.C. § 12205 states:

No person may be appointed to a grade above the grade of first lieutenant in the Army Reserve, Air Force…