Benjamin Boorowski 👻

Hello, new friends! 👋 I'm Ben. I'm a software/product guy and one of the world's top Notion experts. I make software and currently run the NotionMastery.com program. Connect with me if you're interested in my favorite topics: Systems, Complexity, Permaculture. Here are my favorite books:

I am not surprised. I think humans are complex—immensely creative yet also incredibly crass when presented w/ opportunities to exploit systems. I won't try to deny it in myself—I've created and exploited digital systems for my benefit my whole career. It's why I'm a skeptic: AI's a mirror to desire.

a little sketch i wrote about bees this summer. very wide. dig the panning effects. #playbleton

My fav thing is people saying "wordpress is insecure because of AI hacking, I'm going to use a static site builder" while also running claude directly on their daily driver without even a virtual sandbox and connecting everything though MCP. 👌

wife to me: "I can tell you have a deadline because the house is spotless and you're working on music a lot this week" lfg, who needs their email at inbox zero, dm me!

Is there a middle ground for weapons that end the competition for good, and then after that the roboscorpions saunter off to the ocean and mend corals?

Related: I’m still looking for leads and help on jobs, fellowships, and freelance contracts on drones, GIS, aid, disaster, OSINT, tech ethics, and journalism. I simply will not work for evil people and/or weapons manufacturers, which is also why I haven’t had paying work since Trump 2.0 began.

one of the best things our area does is the sunshine coast art crawl. visit studios, talk about/buy art, get to know all the cool people making things with their hands/hearts. @mariepoulin.com and i decided we're going to start creating a new body of art/music next year so we can join ca. 2028.

ed's really doing fantastic sense-making work in this space. i have honestly been desperate for this type of mindful technology pursuit and it feels born from an acknowledgement of our connection to the "natural" world and each other. thoughtful and inspiring stuff.

i am not seeing any halloween display names and avatars on here, you all are going to make me look and go insane

had to take a lil work break to add a 4x4 transition to "taking it easy". bit of a bop. might be on the new lp. #playbleton

Working this wknd, on my "Coding with Notion" workshop. Lot of folks still struggling w/getting started, even w/coding agents. Ran this as a 2-hour off-the-cuff version for the Ambassadors + now I'm making it cohesive for our students. Still out here teaching basics in a post-INT age, I don't care.

making a point to not end my requests for support with "no worries if you don't have time" going forwards. must self-normalize mutual aid, considering how active I am in supplying it.

time to drink 3/4 of 6 cups of coffee and perseverate

The distinction between Cassandra warning about the Trojan horse and Cassandra running a successful Trojan horse distribution business is that the latter probably has some explaining to do.

Finally got around to watching Fargo and Malvo is something else. All-time baddies, man. BBT is sensantional. Had to give 'er another shot after seeing Noah Hawley was involved. Legion sold me.

i mean, I'm pretty damn covered in tattoos. something like 70 hours worth. i'm telling you i would rather die that suffer the torture of healing from a full body tattoo all at once. 😂

Hilarious for my health insurance to email with stuff like "When things feel hard, support can help" offering a theoretically depressed me the opportunity to talk to someone from BLUE SHIELD lmao yeah man that'll fucking help, just what I needed

Not quite as stupid as the person I saw once on twitter giving the advice "if you don't understand the measure you're voting on, vote no," but aspirational.

It must be very difficult to express how language would be used in the future and convey any sort of actual conversational meaning in the present, so you sort of are forced into "hello, fellow kids" as a writer or find a clever way to otherwise establish meaning in background definition.

One of the hardest parts of being a volunteer firefighter is when a page hits I switch identities so quickly and rapidly that I often forget my other responsibilities.I often realize I missed a meeting when I get home. Most folks I work with know the deal, but I still feel like I have to grovel.

Explaining Notion's billing model (serious). Honestly: two token model changes and a subscription raise in the last three months is pretty wild. A lot my business customers are very annoyed and the solo customers are wondering why they should buy tokens from Notion at all.

Oh shit. Oh fuck.

that plus I think they are very likely looking at your name, email domain(s), etc. to build psychographic profiles and system prompts around. ultimately, i think the goal is to make it feel like an extension of mind, such that ceasing use would feel like some kind of cognitive disorder.

"I don't understand, Claude works fine for this, why is Notion AI not able to do this..." We have such a gaping hole in AI education. Probably bc AI companies keep telling users "it's automation! put in instructions and never think of this again and it's exactly the same for each run everywhere!"

Accurate, as with most Ed Takes. Kinda reminds me of my dotfiles repo. Helpful if you need to grab a setting, have a "what's this for?" moment, or see what I might be using, but ain't nobody in its history just "installed" it on a new machine but me.

evolving "eridani" this weekend a bit. lots of good serum learning in this project. #playbleton

The Party Won't Stop in Control is the funniest mission in a video game ever. Cry laughing. I'm so so sorry 💀🕺

It does feel like everyone's a temporarily inconvenienced harness developer at the moment.

Agreed. Why I also think modern software's/tech-adjacent success will drift towards deeply human connected support. If support is a chatbot, people will simply move towards DIY because the xp is AI in both cases. Want to make good software? Build community and connection first.

I think the fallacy here is that pre-musk twitter was "fun". It stopped being fun around 2010 when promoted tweets started. At the point of targeted ads, platforms become capture farms and you start optimizing expression for engagement. More addiction than fun.