Field Notes
Essays on the systems we inherit, the assumptions we stop noticing, and the choices we still have.
Each note begins with something concrete: a technical system, an institutional document, a working practice, or a moment in history. Then it follows the question until the neat account stops carrying the whole truth. Along the way you’ll meet Gödel and the Thirty Years’ War, HyperCard and the leap second, a Senate committee, and a sysadmin doing Hamlet.
Underneath, the notes keep returning to one question: how do we stay capable of learning, choosing, and caring inside systems that outlive their designers and exceed any one person’s understanding?
Some notes are serious, some are playful, and a few are long. All are written to reward your attention rather than compete for it. They stand alone, but they aren’t isolated: they revisit one another, and when I change my mind or get something important wrong, I say so on the page rather than quietly revising it. Field Note Zero sets out what I promise in return for your time.
New notes arrive when they are ready.
— Trey
Start here¶
New to Field Notes? Four doors in, chosen to show the range. No background in security or infrastructure required.
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The Sysadmin’s Soliloquy
For anyone who keeps systems running, or works beside someone who does: Hamlet, rewritten for a sysadmin weighing a patch against the downtime. -
Westphalia, or How to End a War Without Anybody Winning
For readers drawn to history: how a continent exhausted by thirty years of war learned to live with disagreements it could not resolve. -
Kurt Gödel and the Limits of Certainty
For readers drawn to ideas: why some limits are structural rather than failures, and why claims of total certainty should worry us. -
The Rick & Morty Team Ritual
For people who work in teams: a ten-minute weekly experiment in trust-building, and why trust cannot be rented.
Latest¶
Field Note #14 ∷ On the Use of Time ¶
Twenty years of todo lists and a calendar hack called calmoji. What they taught me about finite weeks, survivable mistakes, and the tasks worth letting go.
I had mistaken persistence for obligation.
Why these notes are free¶
Years ago, Brian Thomas’ wonderful HyperCard project If Monks Had Macs introduced me to the White Rose, and I went on to read the diaries of those brave young students who resisted the Third Reich. Something shared freely can stay with a reader for decades. I’d like the Field Notes to have that kind of longevity, which is why they are free to read.
Read by email or RSS¶
Get new Field Notes by email, never more than twice a month, or use the full-text RSS feed in any reader.
Archive¶
Every note, newest first. Reading times are approximate and include footnotes.
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Field Note #14 ∷ On the Use of Time
Twenty years of todo lists, a calendar hack called calmoji, and learning which intentions to lay down.
∷ 17 min read -
Field Note #13 ∷ Reading the Seams
A postmortem on a postmortem: six ways to read an institutional document against the grain, tested on the US Senate’s Y2K report.
∷ 26 min read -
Field Note #12 ∷ The Rick & Morty Team Ritual
A ten-minute Friday ritual for rebuilding team trust, with a candid note on the limits of its own equation.
∷ 11 min read -
Field Note #11 ∷ On Cultivating Trust as a Reflex
The informal trust networks that hold incident response together, seen through the 2021 Exchange crisis.
∷ with Tom Millar ∷ 19 min read -
Field Note #10 ∷ On Trusting Trust, Revisited
Ken Thompson’s compiler backdoor, a 2005 sabotage framework that went unrecognised for two decades, and the discipline of making trust visible.
∷ 18 min read -
Field Note #9 ∷ The Dangling Pointer
Metaphor as an unvalidated instruction: from Leuven and Corcyra to AI systems that shape how people reason.
∷ 38 min read -
Field Note #8 ∷ The Stack That Should Have Been Networked
Bill Atkinson, HyperCard, what the web forgot about ownership, and a proposal for durable preservation.
∷ 12 min read -
Field Note #7 ∷ On the Need for Updating One’s Priors
Parkinson, Kuhn, and how institutions calcify around their own success, with the question finally turned on its author.
∷ 8 min read -
Field Note #6 ∷ A Brief History of Consensus
Four thousand years of arguing about what time lunch is, from local noon to UTC.
∷ 8 min read -
Field Note #5 ∷ Westphalia, or How to End a War Without Anybody Winning
How exhausted negotiators ended the Thirty Years’ War without a victor, revisited later with a harder verdict.
∷ 5 min read -
Field Note #4 ∷ The Sysadmin’s Soliloquy
Hamlet, rewritten for the person deciding whether to patch, and a thank-you to every organisation’s neutrons.
∷ 2 min read -
Field Note #3 ∷ On Gatekeeping and Curation
When complaints about quality are really a defence of status, and how to tell curation from gatekeeping.
∷ 4 min read -
Field Note #2 ∷ What Is Truth?
AI-mediated writing, selective scepticism, and why careful reading matters more than provenance theatre.
∷ 3 min read -
Field Note #1 ∷ Kurt Gödel and the Limits of Certainty
Why the limits of certainty are structural rather than defects, in mathematics and in the institutions that forget it.
∷ 6 min read -
Field Note Zero ∷ Statement of Work
What the series promises in return for your attention, and what it won’t do.
∷ 4 min read
A note on delivery¶
This site is static HTML. Email subscriptions are the exception: list management runs through a self-hosted Listmonk instance at herald.propertools.be, with delivery through Postmark .
RSS remains the simpler fallback: no account, no mailing list, and no dependency on the subscription service.
If the form misbehaves, email hello@propertools.be. I will subscribe you manually and then go find the loose wire.