I would have said "You're crazy!" if you had told me a few months ago that I would now be reading a book about psychotherapy. Somewhere in the footnotes of the always giving Escaping Flatland, I found a link to Carl Rogers' On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy. He describes his learnings from talking to children in therapy sessions on how to live a good life. I really enjoyed the way he described how he finds that being yourself makes you a more effective person, the quote "The Facts are Friendly" in how having your theories disproven is actually a good — the facts are helping you, and how every gut decision he made in life turned out to be the best choice compared to those where he made the decision with the perfect methods and data.
Now, to segway from therapy to clowns, my friend @jonah sent me a link to this Jack Tucker comedy special. I first thought it was standup comedy, but it's actually a modern-day clown show! My mind flipped between finding it genuinely funny and thinking about how it was actually recorded & filmed — the audio and video work is insane. I asked my friend @nate about this because he does improv and knows some actual clowns and he said "The LA clowns are a real thing". Well, the LA clowns are a real thing!
In the last now I wrote, I talked a bit about how I wanted to try alternatives to Claude code for writing software. To my surprise, and within a matter of hours, I was up and running with the open source coding agent pi (great related talk here) and DeepSeek V4 Pro via OpenRouter. Right off the bat, this combination felt just as good if not better than Claude Code with Opus 4.7. On a per token basis, DeepSeek V4 Pro is x11.5 cheaper than Opus 4.7. This combo genuinely feels better, at least for how I'm using these coding tools. Last comment here - the Claude Code subscriptions may actually be cheaper at the moment but that's simply because we are in the Uber Black Car phase. We will think about these days like we do for the days of riding in Uber limos and in the front seat of Lyfts with pink mustaches across San Francisco for $9. Oh, and also, you should read this beautiful article on coding and Phish.
Speaking of jam bands, I will sometimes scroll through Joe Rogan episodes looking for non MMA or Comedian guests (maybe I shouldn't skip the comedians — I would have learned about clowns earlier!) and I found the episode with Marcus King. Oh man, this guy can sing and he absolutely shreds on the guitar. He also describes how his band operates like a jam band. And with that, I think I'll end this Now post with a link to this video of Marcus King and Billy Strings shredding together.