Tom Hosiawa
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Tom Hosiawa
@rigelblu.com
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Building @ http://rigelblu.com | Product | Generalist | Live to understand how things work and bring ideas to life
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Tom Hosiawa @rigelblu.com · Oct 26
Reading Patrick Collison's book rec from 1963, which looked at the conflict between innovation and conservation in the early 1900s, reminds me of an old quote "life cannot just be about solving problems. There needs to be things that inspire you and make you glad to wake up in the morning and /1
Despite the title, Morison’s topic in this book is not machines but innovation: not the production of material things, but the hyper-production of change that is the cause of the coming era of destruction. > Morison keeps returning to the conflict between innovation and conservation. He values technical innovation for satisfying human needs and desires. He also values conservation of human social structures, which are routinely destroyed by technical innovations. within the mechanical realm invention must meet not so much or not just-the claims of technical or financial requirements but the claims of human interest as well. The resourcefulness and understanding of engineers may well have to be enlarged if they are to build machinery that is not only efficient but satisfying even fun—to work with. Working at such a mechanism extended and sharpened a man's powers rather than withered them away. The thought here is not to return to man's first days. It is simply to suggest that effects first produced in innocence may still today, with systems infinitely more sophisticated be achieved by design.
rigelblu.com
"when someone breaks a perceived limit, it enables others to break the same limit. In short, social proof is very powerful.
...
just the fact of seeing someone read as many books as possible made an impact."
July 4, 2025 at 4:37 PM
rigelblu.com
Love this and a reminder why you need to care
June 27, 2025 at 3:28 PM
rigelblu.com
“the timeless way of building: learning the discipline — and shedding it.”

I’ve been thinking lately, do professionals still follow frameworks, processes, systems?

The timeless way of building articulated it better than I could. No, but it is a right of passage we must all go through.
June 24, 2025 at 12:38 PM
rigelblu.com
Unite the analytical with the creative

Before 2018, I was heavily influenced by what I read and watched. Everything should be based on what you can measure. But that summer I took IDEO's "Designing a Business" course and this line hit
> Unite the analytical with the creative
May 10, 2025 at 12:20 PM
rigelblu.com
Whenever this discussion happens, I can't get this analogy out of my head. Can't get around to acceptance of pure advocation for abundance.

At some point, abundance makes things lose meaning.

youtu.be/csR1EVxquMc?...
Slide showing > an undifferentiated mass of cells > also called a `tumor`
April 8, 2025 at 1:21 AM
rigelblu.com
I gave jj (jujutsu) a try after looking up how to do stacked PRs again

Never going back to git. I find it so much more intuitive on edge cases. I can do rebasing without thinking straight from the terminal

Stacking PRs feel pretty simple
screenshot of rebasing with jj (jujutsu)
March 11, 2025 at 12:57 AM
rigelblu.com
After hearing more about cursor, windsurf, cline, I got fatigued out of trying more editors

I read @addyosmani.bsky.social's post about mixing deepseek r1 and claude, so I tried to see how @zed.dev and @warp.dev play together

That moment that's clicking for everybody else just clicked for me
Screenshot of Zed editor + Warp terminal, with AI + Agent modes
February 9, 2025 at 8:43 PM
rigelblu.com
It’s interesting how LLMs are better doing one thing at a time, similar to people. Here’s an example, asking Claude this on a substack article

> What stories do they tell and what are they about?
Within a larger prompt, asking it to do many things Stories • Personal Experience: The author describes attending "Mere Mortals," a ballet combining Al-generated visuals, electronic music, and dance • Historical Context: The story of experiencing Wagner's Ring Cycle with an ex-boyfriend, which introduces the concept of gesamtkunstwerk • Interpretation Evolution: The author's journey from initial speechlessness to deeper understanding of the ballet's meaning
November 24, 2024 at 3:16 PM
rigelblu.com
Cool. Got mine now at rigelblu.com :)
justingarrison.com Justin Garrison @justingarrison.com · Nov 14
Yep!

Use a custom domain as username on Bluesky
youtu.be/lP3OVCwyqJA
November 14, 2024 at 11:28 PM
rigelblu.com
How deep can you go?
Tara Seshan shared a google doc on Internal software builders. It reminds me how you need to learn to appreciate going deep on a subject.
This post is less about my insights, and more appreciation post + one connection I made with data-orientated design
November 10, 2024 at 4:21 PM
rigelblu.com
AI is shifting us from making products with Prickles to making them with Goo
~ memory log ~ 2024.10.09 AI is shifting us from making products with Prickles to making them with Goo Making products until today was deterministic ー they do what you tell them to do. But AI is changing that. It’s evolving our world, where everything made is transitioning from being made with prickles to being made with goo. * Prickly: Particles, Parts, Precise, Structure, Shape, Clear Outline * Gooey: Waves, Fluid, Fuzzy, Abstract, Mystical Today, we are the potter, the carpenter, the architect who makes the stuff we have in the world. We shape it from the outside in, put things together and arrange its parts. But what if our world is moving where more things become gooey. We don’t put parts together; instead, we let things come to form from their initial seed.#### ~ memory log ~ 2024.10.09 #### AI is shifting us from making products with Prickles to making them with Goo Making products until today was deterministic ー they do what you tell them to do. But AI is changing that. It’s evolving our world, where everything made is transitioning from being made with prickles to being made with goo. * Prickly: Particles, Parts, Precise, Structure, Shape, Clear Outline * Gooey: Waves, Fluid, Fuzzy, Abstract, Mystical Today, we are the potter, the carpenter, the architect who makes the stuff we have in the world. We shape it from the outside in, put things together and arrange its parts. But what if our world is moving where more things become gooey. We don’t put parts together; instead, we let things come to form from their initial seed.
November 9, 2024 at 8:56 PM
rigelblu.com
You still need to think about a vision, even if it feels useless
You still need to think about a vision, even if it feels useless. Last September I made a connection on Steve Jobs famous speech. "**You can't connect the dots looking forward**; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever." Building and doing forces you to take something abstract, high in the clouds to the ground where it's concrete and clear, that no amount of thinking and **connecting the dots can do**. This week, I made a second connection. I know why most people don't put time into creating a purpose and vision for their team, their org. It feels useless! It fools us into thinking **we can connect the dots** into a future we can imagine. But as the saying goes, "I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable." It's also true for vision. As useless as it can feel, it defines your habits. Your behaviours. Your decisions. What you say yes and no to. So how do you create a vision? I think back to what I learned from IDEO > ***Purpose*** *is why your organization exists beyond making profit.* > ***Vision*** is how you embody the aspiration of your purpose. It's through the work you do, and the products, services, experiences you put out into the world. It's where you want to end up. Or a question I asked a founder in Founders Cafe who was struggling to convey how big their idea could be > Imagine it's 15 years in the future. It's 2037, you wake up in the morning. What's possible in this world that wouldn't be without Social Karma? Some other related quotes I've liked on vision > You need to give people a reason to care. Where they're headed. > Another of his favourite analogies was that building a company was like being on a wagon train headed west. On the long journey to the land of plenty, the pioneers would be full of purpose and united by the goal of reaching their destination. Once they arrived, he'd say, people would come and go, and that was as it should be. But the process of moving toward something—of having not yet arrived—was what he idealized. > — Ed Catmull, Creativity Inc > The whole thing is pointless unless someone has a vision. > So often at Stripe, we're discussing something and I mean, maybe yes, in theory we should do something in this space. > > But the real question is. Is there a specific person who has a vision here? > And there's a hundred things that we would love to go fund tomorrow if there was a specific person with a vision. > > Now, of course, as Hollywood shows and as is intuitively obvious, the vision is not enough. You have to have some degree of execution ability and whatever skills are required in the domain. But there's an illegible trait of, do they have the vision? And, and I guess, is the vision a good one? > — John & Patrick Collison
November 7, 2024 at 1:46 AM
rigelblu.com
Reading Patrick Collison's book rec from 1963, which looked at the conflict between innovation and conservation in the early 1900s, reminds me of an old quote "life cannot just be about solving problems. There needs to be things that inspire you and make you glad to wake up in the morning and /1
Despite the title, Morison’s topic in this book is not machines but innovation: not the production of material things, but the hyper-production of change that is the cause of the coming era of destruction. > Morison keeps returning to the conflict between innovation and conservation. He values technical innovation for satisfying human needs and desires. He also values conservation of human social structures, which are routinely destroyed by technical innovations. within the mechanical realm invention must meet not so much or not just-the claims of technical or financial requirements but the claims of human interest as well. The resourcefulness and understanding of engineers may well have to be enlarged if they are to build machinery that is not only efficient but satisfying even fun—to work with. Working at such a mechanism extended and sharpened a man's powers rather than withered them away. The thought here is not to return to man's first days. It is simply to suggest that effects first produced in innocence may still today, with systems infinitely more sophisticated be achieved by design.
October 26, 2024 at 6:05 PM