I can't even just prove ownership of the domain and take it back because whomever set it up tied the GSuite subscription in via the a Weebly reseller portal and we can't take it away via Google's interface. We have to get Weebly support to do something to let our account go. Then we can give Google a credit card and keep all the company emails.

After 3 weeks with Weebly support all I can say is that they're inept. It shouldn't take my 12+ hours with support to give them money. I shouldn't have to send in a picture of a driver's license to prove identity and then get ghosted for 2 weeks about what's going on with the account.

Want to help, share a link to the post with as many social locations as you can so maybe bad press gets them to finally support a customer that want's to pay a bill. I always think it's a total failure within a company when only social pressure ends up fixing things, but I'll use that method if I have to.

Honestly this is so bad I would strongly hesitate to recommend their parent company Square for anything as well. Their support is just as bad.

Next month we're going to read Utopia for Realists. Join the book club to get all the discussion.

In many ways I feel like most of the books I've read this year have been poor choices. None of them have had profound impacts on my thinking. They haven't changed my productivity practice, or changed my mind on any topics. Subtract isn't any different, but maybe I know why now.

Near the end of Subtract, Leidy Klotz cites Cal Newport and his books like Digital Minimalism or Deep Work as originating works that told us to subtract from our workload to get better work done. Since I've read both of those, and found Deep Work in particular life changing, and also read many other books of similar ilk maybe I'm just done learning about the topic of subtraction as a method towards better outcomes.

I felt similar when I read Essentialism. So many people cited it as a formidable book in the genre that changed how they thought about their work. It was cited in many other books I read, but by the time I got to it I had read no fewer than 12 books in the genre and even if Essentialism started the wave, I felt it was simply rehashing a bunch of stuff I had already read.

That's how I feel about Subtract, it's rehashing many things I've already read about creating limits on your work. I already take book notes by hand as a forcing function to ensure that whatever notes I'm taking are high enough quality to warrant the effort of writing anything down. I subtracted 99% of my meetings and reject every single one I can so that I have time to do hard thinking work.

I've even paired down my writing in the last few years. If you clicked on my Deep Work post above you'll find a 6000 word epic post. I remember looking at my writing at the time and figuring that if I had lots of citations to the book and other books then it was clearly a good post. Much like Klotz¹ says I used length of argument as a proxy for it's quality.

So what did I get out of Subtract, not that much but I've already been on a journey that included subtraction.

Should you read Subtract by Leidy Klotz, it depends. If you've already read books like Deep Work, Digital Minimalism and Essentialism I don't think that Klotz will add much to your understanding of how to remove things from your life. If you haven't read other books like it, then it's as good a place to start as any other.

• Purchase Subtract by Leidy Klotz

Footnotes

¹ Subtract Pg 153

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It's me not the tools

Matthew talks about how he is enticed by new tools and then his realisation that the issue isn't the tool, it's him.

I agree with Matthew, it's the systems I use with the tools that trip me up, not the tool itself in almost every case but not always. Testing nvim-orgmode was a good test, but Emacs and proper orgmode is far better than the port into Neovim.

Just because Emacs works for my task management and work notes doesn't mean that I should go all in though and drop my current shell and NeoVim workflow to do everything in Emacs. I left Vim/NeoVim many times to try whatever the latest editor was, and after a few months always came back because they just work like I want them to.

Before you look at switching, evaluate your systems.

Comparing the wrong thing

Even if you're into bikes, when you're comparing make sure you're comparing the right things for you. As the video says, if you'd never spend $8k on a bike, why are you whining about its price. It's not for you so spend your time worrying about something else.

Once you realise that not every product is for you it's much easier to let some pass you by without being put out by a product that was never meant for you.

The McPhee Method

I always love reading about others' research and writing workflows so go read about The McPhee Method. One thing that strikes me is how much research is done on a topic before you start filing things into buckets and then eventually writing about them.

I've always been someone that writes with far less research than is suggested above, but maybe that's because I write for the web medium on my own site instead of for news websites.

When you don't put the device away, then the dangled treat disappears. Then you're almost double punished. You likely get in trouble for not getting off the device, and you don't get the dangled reward.

Instead how about not charging the device, then you can't use it.

I do this subtraction method for desired behaviour in myself. I try to not have cookies and other treats in the house because my willpower is low and I'll just eat them. I'll look at fruit and grab a cookie or chocolate. Then I'll go back and have more cookies until they're gone. I recognize that eating all the cookies isn't what I want to do, but still I do it.

The same thing happens for many with devices. We don't want to spend our time scrolling, yet the device is in our pocket so we spend time scrolling. It's a hard decision to subtract the device from our pockets and put it in it's unmobile location.

Rewards can be good, but simply removing the temptations can be even better.

Some writing tips

Oliver Burkeman has a few writing tips for us this week. I like the first one the most, the right stuff will come. Waiting for something perfect is merely procrastination disguised as good work. Write down what you've got and revise.

You can't vote with your wallet

Cory Doctorow argues that you can't vote with your wallet because the wallets of the rich are so much larger than your wallet that the vote you made won't even be seen at all next to their massive vote.

At the very least, you can't only vote with your wallet. You need to get out there and participate in politics and movements. Nora Loreto discussed this in Take Back the Fight, that we need to get back to forming groups and working together to make politicians recognize our needs. Though Bregman also noted that we have a hard time forming these coalitions now because everyone must virtue signal as hard as the most extreme position held by anyone. You can't just fight poverty, you also must align and be as militant about trans rights or veganism.

The bottleneck isn't what you think it is

While this is programming specific, it's a great article on finding bottlenecks. I think about this at work. AI has helped me get some big features done, but the bottleneck is still my validation of the problem.

I have security issues cropping up that drive emergency work. I have security issues I know about but can't get back to with a full day or two so I can focus on them and deploy them across our entire stack in one big go. Any time I can look at them, it's 2 hours to the end of the day and I can't sit on it and test them.

The bottleneck is rarely writing code. It's my time to understand issues and then validate any code meets all the requirements we have.

How do you subtract when you see good opportunities come up. Opportunities you want to do because it could lead to the type of life you've always wanted to lead.

Maybe I'm just fooling myself into thinking that I can turn it into something because it's so hard to say no.

Keep Your No Close

It's good to have a reminder about keeping your no close at hand. Over 10 years ago I said that No is the most productive word in your vocabulary but it's easy to forget about it because you want to be the type of person that does....whatever.

It's a good feeling to be relied on, but it's also easy to over commit and then not be able to do anything you said you'd do.

Better to say yes to very few things and do them well.

Sentences in books that change you

Prompted by Derek Sivers here are some books that changed me.

Debt of Honor

Debt of Honor has a stock market crash and the solution is that if it's not written down it didn't happen. In the book this means that since all the records were lost let's just reset and start where we were.

I took the statement and used it to remember that if I don't write my tasks down, then I'm not going to get to them. Remember to write your tasks down if you want to get to them.

Oathbringer

“I will take responsibility for what I have done,” Dalinar whispered. “If I must fall, I will rise each time a better man.”

It's easy to take responsibility when things are good and you're doing well. It's harder when you have made a mistake or failed, but taking responsibility for your actions when you're at fault speaks louder about your character than when things are going well.

Deep Work

This one prompted a long review and got me to focus on doing good work and ignoring distractions. I even coined my own version I called The Mullet Method which helped me do good work without feeling overwhelmed.

Also see books that changed my business.

The ability to make good decisions, and how that happens, was the goal of Farsighted as well. Johnson showed us that one of the best ways was to include people unlike ourselves in the search for viable outcomes¹.

So really Subtract is backing those ideas up. That we need to have a larger volume of options to choose from when taking the next step. Where Farsighted encouraged us to seek diverse opinions, Subtract is looking specifically at how we can make the option to subtract be a viable choice.

This had me thinking about having valuable stuff in my notes. I feel that my notes and my blog are a history of my evolving thinking. I don't prune them, unlike my read later lists. In fact I have a process to search my old notes for ideas that aren't currently top of mind so that I can continue to connect older ideas into newer ones.

If pruning is good, and I do believe that it is, I don't have a process for pruning older ideas from my notes. Do you?

Footnotes

¹ Farsighted 51

Cory's Memex Method

I'm always interested in reading about how other writers take good notes for future projects and came across Cory Doctorow's Memex Method this week thanks to Richard.

It's worth noting the power of text files, with Cory having some that still work from the 1980s. Markdown has been my choice, and with a file extension change it's just text anyway so that feels like a safe choice too.

I also like Cory's push towards blogging the fragments of his ideas. By blogging the fragments he has an online record and people have a chance to bounce off his ideas and provide feedback which can yield new insights. Secondarily, it's marketing for the writer and it can be hard to make it as a writer if you want to feed your family.

Cory's whole article is worth a read and echoes my thoughts that you should be blogging.

Back to Richard

Richard's post was a response to mine from late in 2025 where I said read later is garbage. I assert that for most people, most of the time, it's a long list of obligations to read stuff that seems interesting in the moment but you'll never get back to. As the list grows guilt increases because you're not dealing with it.

We spent a month looking at this idea with Meditations for Mortals in book club last year. He feels we should let go of performative reading goals and that we can't possibly care about everything that needs changing in the world so we have to pick our battles¹.

Richard recognizes that he likely saves too much stuff and needs to triage it. The lack of triage is where most people fall down. They don't delete enough clinging to the hope that one day they'll have time to get through the backlog.

But if you don't have time today, or in the next few days, you're unlikely to have more time in the future. You're simply deferring the decision.

As always, you do what works for you, but be free with letting go of stuff you won't ever get to.

Gauging the value of your system

In The PARA Method, Tiago Forte says that the way to judge if your system for dealing with notes is any good is by what it outputs². While I found much of Forte's work really about building a new GTD method that everyone would use, here I have to agree with him.

If whatever system you use to handle articles that are interesting to read works for you and produces good thoughts, doesn't overburden you with crap you're never going to get to, then it has value.

If it's just a growing pile of stuff that you never deal with, it's not a good system and you need to leave it behind no matter what some online creator claims the system will yield in your life.

It's been at least 5 years since I tried another editor for coding though after realizing that I'd just go back to Neovim, which brings me to my Emacs adventures. I tried nvim-orgmode and it sort of worked but had issues that I was never able to work through. Then I went back to Todoist for a bit and missed orgmode, even if it was a hobbled form in Neovim.

This led me to Emacs and orgmode which I've been loving for about a year now. Still I keep wondering if I should move my coding workflow to Emacs and abandon Neovim?

There is a pull to just use one tool.

May I recommend....keep it simple. Don't grab 50 new things from some video or blog post that some creator put up. People do that because it looks cool and then they over complicate their systems and abandon them. They layer complexity that looks cool over a system that already is working for them to solve problems they don't have with solutions often produced by people whose job is to get a new piece of content out that will go viral and pay their bills.

Many times it doesn't even seem like the creator uses the system at all, it just looked cool and had the proper keywords for what's popular right now.

I say, identify a problem you actually have. Spend some time researching options. Try out a few of them to see what works. Then stop messing around with your system and get work done.

• I always hear about the carnival from Sacha

I've been using the original book search plugin for years but it hasn't been getting updates and my problems were continuing to pile up. Unfortunately the developer hasn't been responsive to issues either so I've forked it at created Obsidian Book Search Plus which fixes a bunch of the issues with the old plugin and will remain maintained.

You can install in with BRAT if you're interested while I wait to get into the Obsidian plugin directory.

More insidious than than reaching for recent ideas though is our tendency to view the past more favourably than it really was. This happen for the same reasons as we cling to more recent ideas. We remember that bad things that have happened recently more easily than those that happened in the decades before. Grafton Tanner says this tendency to recency breeds nostalgia which is the uncanny ability to wrench people from the present into an idealized moment in the past² that they'd rather inhabit³.

Last month's book talked about this as well, that extreme poverty has halved in the last 20 years⁴ yet we remember vivid anecdotes on the news better than the boring statistics⁵ so we discount the progress that society has made. Yes there continue to be shortfalls, and backtracking, but over the course of history we're in a position that is enviable compared to any other time in history.

How do you try and combat recency bias and rosy retrospection?

Footnotes

¹ Subtract Pg 37

² This is called rosy retrospection

³ Foreverism Pg 6

⁴ Perils of Perception Pg 205-207

⁵ Perils of Perception Pg 98

Searching for something to write about today I came across my notes on Normal Sucks which highlighted that school values how fast you can retrieve information over the depth of understanding of that information¹. Revisionist History covered the same idea when it looked at the LSAT exam valuing speed over deep thinking in the field of law.

Relating to today, this seems to be what the promise of AI tooling brings to the table. You'll be able to get more done faster which also ties into the ideas from this month's book club book that we never subtract we always add things to our plate. This doing more stuff doesn't mean we do the same amount faster and then call it a day. Instead we do more. We increase our workload so that we're constantly in overload mode.

Worse, we may not even understand what the tooling is doing for us. We ask for an explanation, but that barely scratches the surface of our tasks. Sure, the former hard-won struggle took days, maybe weeks to win our knowledge, but then we truly understood what we were doing.

Eric Barker echoes this idea in Barking up the Wrong Tree as he talks about the struggle needed for meaning². He contends without struggle there is no meaning in our effort that we don't leave a mark and don't feel like we accomplished something. We don't own the struggle so we don't own the outcome and feel triumph.

Nothing is Maintenance Free

The myth that many note takers cling to is that the perfect system is out there, one that requires no maintenance. It doesn't exist; every system accumulates cruft and needs to be reorganized. Notes get buried and you forget about them. If you want to surface good ideas from your notes you need a method to force yourself to look back through them.

I use Random Notes for this, but I'm sure there are other methods. The thing is, they all take time, time where you're not adding new ideas, but looking through older ideas and then connecting them to newer ideas. Time where you may look at 100 different ideas and have nothing to write.

It's easy for this work to feel like a waste of time, but it's crucial work if you want to make the most of any note system.

For instance, this idea was found spelunking and finding my notes on Strong Towns.

A man is what he is most passionate about

“A man is what he has passion about,” Breeze said. “I’ve found that if you give up what you want most for what you think you should want more, you’ll just end up miserable.” - Mistborn

This was our book club book for April. Next month we're reading Subtract by Leidy Klotz.

When I started this book I was hopeful that it would help further my understanding of cognitive biases and how to talk with people with divergent opinions. Unfortunately, Duffy's book is heavy on a bunch of trivia about our misperceptions and light on what we do about it at a societal level. In this regard books like The Data Detective and Think Again offer a much better read. The Data Detective goes far deeper into how to combat our cognitive biases and see a path through to rigorous thinking about statistical matters. Think Again is far better for showing us how to converse with those we don't agree with.

Duffy works to help us frame our conversations and our perceptions around reality, but does little to show us how this is used in the real world to influence perception. Here Dark PR does a far better job at showing us how cognitive biases are used by companies to influence how we frame the conversation around their, sometimes appalling, products.

Duffy's book has a few points that I can see myself continuing to reference though. First, we tie ourselves too closely to the opinions we hold, often defining our identity as a human by an idea¹. Once we've tied our identity to an idea, changing our mind feels like turning our backs on something fundamental inside ourselves, thus we're far less likely to be willing to investigate opinions that dissent from our identity. This also ties into work done in Think Again, because trying to convince someone of a different opinion may in fact be asking them to turn their backs on a crucial part of the identity they've given themselves.

Second, it's interesting to note that we figure most people agree with the beliefs we have². That means that those you differ from, figure that most people agree with them just as you assume that most people agree with you. This false-consensus bias can mean you're less likely to evaluate your stance because you figure you're on the correct side and most people would agree with you.

While I said that Duffy doesn't spend much time telling us what to do about misperceptions, he does actually devote the last chapter to it. Unfortunately, the 10 rules³ he provides us are mostly just chapter title recaps with little in the way of actionable advice the reader can take away. His last rule is really just an encouragement that we can engage deeper, without much in the way of how one would go about doing that.

Should you read The Perils of Perception by Bobby Duffy? No, I think that any of the three books I cited above are a far more complete look at the topic of how to deal with our misperceptions, and talk with those that we disagree with.

• Purchase The Perils of Perception by Bobby Duffy

Footnotes

¹ The Perils of Perception Pg 65

² The Perils of Perception Pg 191

³ Starting on The Perils of Perception Pg 238

Tracy shares her overwhelmed feeling and that she needs to recalibrate her reading for thinking.

I did some of this when Trump got in office and continued to attack my country. Yes I could read everything he said, but he'd change his mind the next day and then I'd waste more time being stressed about whatever new stupid thing he said. I turned to some magazines to filter the information that would come my way.

On the whole, my withdrawal from political media has been excellent. I read about what is deemed important enough on a monthly cadence and don't worry so much about the rest of it.

My only issue is that as soon as I gave my address to these magazines one of them sold it to other companies and I get offers for so many things I don't care about.

I wish companies didn't do that.

I've also found that I'm reading less right now, which is actually normal for me. The sun comes out and I ride my bike more so reading time declines. I'll likely go from 10 - 12 books a month down to 2 or 3 until September comes around.

Life ebbs and flows, don't beat yourself up about that, do what's best for you and those around you.

Own your subscribers

Tom has a fairly frightening story for those that live on their publishing income. He thought he moved all his users from Substack to his new platform, but missed some and then when they saw renewal charges for a newsletter they weren't getting they got annoyed and disputed the charges.

I run my book club and this newsletter through Kit and use their payment services for the membership and to sell Analogue Productivity. At some point you do have to trust some platform because I'm not going to create relationships with banks to process payments, but I really hope in this instance that I do have good control of the emails and transactions I do have.

Oh yeah, if you like my writing you should become a member.

Upgrade yourself

Yup, investing in yourself is the best upgrade you can make most of the time. Don't go looking for the latest software, learn something so you can do your work better. So that you can be a better person.

To get a better picture we need to look at previous reading. Reaching back to a prior book club book, Think Again asserted that the smarter you are the harder it is to rethink your position³. This parallels Duffy who finds that the more we tie an idea to our identity the harder it is for us to give it up, because it's giving up a part of ourselves⁴. Tim Harford came to a similar conclusion in The Data Detective when he said that being educated can be a detriment because you notice fine details that are probably irrelevant and then get led astray focusing on those issues⁵.

So the evidence I've read leans towards education not insulating you from misperceptions. That you tie being smart enough to know better to your identity and thus are less likely to rethink your positions.

Don't tie ideas to identity.

Footnotes

¹ The Perils of Perception Pg 161

² The Perils of Perception Pg 225

³ Think Again Pg 25

⁴ The Perils of Perception Pg 65

⁵ The Data Detective Pg 33

Is Mythos Dangerous?

On April 7th Anthropic published news that their new LLM was too dangerous to release, but we've heard these types of claims before though. Back in 2019 OpenAI claimed GPT2 was too dangerous to release on cybersecurity grounds. They ended up doing a staged rollout, and the claimed threats didn't materialize. Heck, just days after the Mythos announcement OpenAI basically said they have the same thing.

Opinions on the truth of the Anthropic announcement vary from assertions that this is a nothing burger, to more tempered evaluations that this is just another step forward, to those that think our software security is totally fucked.

I think I fall with Steve Gibson, Mythos is impressive and we have an opportunity now to run current versions of LLM tools against our code to find bugs and start to get ahead of any future bug finding capabilities. Human coders are often really bad at seeing subtle bugs, but AI doesn't have this problem. It can run and run, testing many variations of hacks or data input/output and find the problems.

At my job we've done this and found weird edge cases that we've been chasing for months, and a number of code enhancements that tighten up the security of our WordPress plugins and our infrastructure. We're using it to help generate the reports and then fixing them by hand. We've been lucky and not found any big issues, and some of the highlighted issues are actually working as intended, but we've found a number of ways to make the code we run safer.

I know some of the readers here are totally against AI. Yes these companies did take the work of the general public without asking. Yes AI is causing pricing of computer parts to skyrocket. Yes these big AI companies claim to be working for public good, but are really just looking to make a bunch of money.

My job is to make sure our customers have fast secure sites. I use many tools to do this, and one of them is certainly Claude Code. Over the last few months I've used it to fix subtle bugs, ship new tools in a few days that would have taken weeks without the help of Claude. I have to take a pragmatic approach and use the tools that help me get my job done quickly with secure code.

Claude is one of those tools.

AI taking Jobs?

Jesse has a great post about making yourself obsolete. He worries that giving AI tools to those without foundational skills breaks the pipeline to build good coders.

Adoption of AI assistants threaten to disrupt journeys like mine, circumventing the years I spent in search of my own obsolescence where I built the foundation I still stand on today. They provide the automation, but not the architecture. It makes employees immediately more responsible without affording them the time to learn what having that responsibility really means. To a degree, giving an employee an AI assistant is like promoting them to a mini-manager. We should take care to avoid promoting someone to their level of respective incompetence. Similar to managing a junior role, AI assistants require guidance via the provision of abundant context and what they produce requires review. If we shortcut the career pathways of junior developers and make them mini-managers, we should consider what their foundations will be built out of.

I worry about the same thing, and even worry that my skills as a programmer will atrophy if I get the LLM to do too much of my job. My current attempt to continue to keep my skills sharp is to do more writing about the code I'm working with. To share the code I write with the help of Claude so that I understand what we did and why.

Will this work? Really I won't know for a few years. Until some day when the current LLM tool that's got the lead is unavailable. Can I continue to produce good work without the tool?

To be sure, my job has changed a bit. I write far less boilerplate than I used to which means I get to ship things faster. I spend part of that time reviewing the boilerplate so that it's set up properly, and part of that time trying to ensure I'm learning. That has still left me with more time to work on the next task and ship more features for my company.

Be nice to your chatbot?

Yes it would seem that your LLM might perform better if you're nice to it which seems a bit crazy to me. The LLM doesn't "feel" anything and we need to be careful about anthropomorphizing it lest we fall in love with our chatbot, but telling the AI it's doing a good job and is smart enough to do the work makes it perform better.

Honestly the more I look at AI the crazier some of this shit feels.

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This is the book club book for June 2026

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This is the book club book for May 2026.

I've read other books in the genre so I didn't find this book to be ground breaking. It rehashed things I've read many times. If you haven't read Deep Work, Essentialism, and other books of that type then this as a good a place to start your journey to subtracting things from your life as any of the others.

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Here we follow our 4 heroes as they abandon each other under the unknowing influence of malevolent forces. They all go on their own journey's get beatings, and grow into the warriors that the world needs to fight the Fae.

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This is the book for book club in April 2026.

While Duffy provides a lot of interesting facts that you're likely to get wrong, I'm not convinced that he adds a lot to the discussion about helping change peoples minds with facts. Oh sure he's got a few ideas, but a book like The Data Detective does a much better job at helping us learn to combat our own biases and Think Again does a far better job teaching us to converse with those we don't agree with in a manner that is beneficial.

Duffy mostly shows us that we're going to be wrong with most of our guesses on topics like how many immigrants our country has, or how what is the percentage of drug users, without providing many in depth solutions to fixing these systemic issues.

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Dederer explores what it means to love the work of a monster, and confronts the parts of her life that caused harm to her and those in her spheres of influence.

The final few chapters really summed it up for me when Dederer talked about an abusive or addicted parent. We may understand that their acts have impacted us negatively, that we shouldn't love them, but when we get down to it, we still do. We can't help but love them.

This was an excellent read.

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We also get to learn about the creation of Irpa by Kest, Lorgon, and the other spirits of the world who have withdrawn.

Again, the art is excellent.

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I enjoyed all the stories, and enjoyed the insights into parts of the world that were referenced in the original series, without being expanded on. We get to see why the Mars colony didn't work, it was the fault of Scythe's not the Thunderhead's lack of ability to manage the colony as we're told elsewhere. We see the creation of Scythe Goddard and the future of Scythe Marie Currie.

It's going on my shelf for a future reread.

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But, Fisher has a bunch of good stuff to say about dealing with conversations. His best writing is about how you're in control of your responses in a conversation. No one makes you yell, or be mean, you choose to do that. Sometimes you choose it because you're trying to be mean, and other times you choose it because you're bad at self-control.

Instead take a deep breath, do a body scan, release your tension, breath out as your first word, then communicate in a way that builds connection with those you're speaking with.

Then Fisher spends a bunch of time telling readers how to be assertive and confident. Yes all of his advice would work for me, but I'm a middle aged white dude, I can get away with lots and be viewed as a leader. He never acknowledges the fact that women using these tactics are viewed as bitchy or catty or just plain mean. He never acknowledges that people of colour will be doubted far more often and have many of the same stereotypes applied to their "assertive" behaviour.

This is a maybe read book. It's got some good advice, and it's a fast read, in fact you can skim long chunks of this book because it's repeating the same things it already said. If you want some advice on how to control your responses the section on saying your words with control is very good.

This is clearly a book to advertise his services, and there is even a workbook, but if you take it for what it is, you'll learn something.

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Muderbot takes the direct route as usual, though it has to be a bit more careful because of the promises it made to station security about not hacking their systems. Still, Murderbot doesn't waffle around, it just goes out and collects information to solve the murder, and find humans being smuggled away from slavery before they die.

What continues to fascinate me about these quick stories is the humanity seen in all of the bots we meet. From the "dumbest" haulers, to the most sophisticated bots like Murderbot, there is a real personality behind the bot that humans never get to see.

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