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Experience shapes perception far more than evidence.

It takes an entire lifetime to learn all the subtle details of any particular profession. That should humble anyone.

"The measure of education will no longer be the accumulation of facts, but the refinement of awareness: how clearly one perceives, how deeply one listens, how responsibly one acts."

216-character memories and recollections from the early internet.

"But it is a collective progress, of distributed bets. Most of our work will be waste—random mutations fed into the evolutionary maw."

I've been a bit obsessed with the idea of friction, and the folly of trying to remove every last trace of it.

"[The] complete removal of friction means standing still. A completely predictable future is no future, but a continuous present."

"An agentic future elevates design into pure strategy, which is what the best designers have wanted all along."

The predecessor to 1984 and some of the best writing on the vague, all-encompassing feelings of childhood memories.

"Attention allocation was outsourced to the machines. Algorithms for search, recommendations, social media feeds, entertainment, and news became the foundation of an enormous new economy."

Major figures in the AI world are less bullish on LLMs being the best path forward.

The poetry of leadership.

Thought leaders in the field are questioning whether current LLMs can ever get us there.

Microtransactions conducted entirely between agents.

Artificial General Cleverness, blobs vs stars, and the vast differences between species in what constitutes intelligence.

"...it is not collaborative work. It is confederated work."

Some always-satisfying Tahoe UI hate.

The dangers of knowledge homogeneity which AI makes worse; the loss of local wisdom honed over centuries and generations.

The predictably unpredictable future.

either you grow with us, and share access to your secret sauce and your network on a reasonable schedule, or you grow entirely alone, and we shut you out.

When the material evolves, leadership is called to action again.

You can't use magic to build something that feels like magic.

"What appears to be happening is simple: large financial institutions are issuing debt without doing the necessary due diligence or considering the future financial health of the companies involved."

Young men are fueling "casino capitalism".

Best case: we’re in a bubble. Worst case: the people profiting most know exactly what they’re doing.

On building for permanence in an age of obsolescence

"Or to just hope—to hope that we’re handing the world over to something that will save us, and not to a drug dealer that’s a trillion dollars in debt."

LLMs can generate thousands of idea variations, but it can’t tell you which one is right for every scenario.

Two visions for the future of computing

Hysterical FOMO fuels huge leaps in innovation

"As new intelligence grows, it would actually know how to want better than us"

"...and the enterprise agentic workforce is a blurry JPEG of two Google Docs."

Mining you for data while you train their agents.

The many, costly hidden layers.

Tech is offering poor solutions to the problems it helped create.

Four decades ago, the first domain was registered and the initial batch of top-level domains came to be.

Spirited Away as an allegory for AI.

“The friction that the political project of AI promises to remove is, by and large, the same friction that authoritarianism promises to remove: other people.”

Millions of non-developers are crafting their own super-niche software

The return of Stalinist-style show trials in Russia.

To trust autonomous agents, we need alignment and care. We're not close.

Most people that work in AI say we should just treat it like any other technology.

Time to move up the skill chain.

We need to reject the coming claims that LLMs are conscious.

What can we learn by comparing shipping containerization to AI? Quite a bit it seems.

In a world where AI can replicate knowledge and experience can be hired, taste is what actually sets you apart.

A civic-minded re-wilding of the web.

What does technology inadvertently force us to leave behind?

as the hype cycle winds down, boring (but good) wins out

perhaps we can still return to the beautiful independence of the early aughts

Tech gets the headlines, org change gets the results

A tiny minority of online extremists are making our politics worse in every way

but there's finally a better way

Substack is encroaching on what was a once a respectably literate walled garden.

"We were hoping to get one super-genius, but we ended up with 10,000 morons stapled together."

Current models expect us to make up for their shortcomings

The absense of commitment makes satisfaction impossible

Pessimism is a luxury we can no longer afford

Not just for startups anymore

How incredibly lucky we are to be living in the modern era

The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new

The human folly of fixation

Utilitarian vs experiential content. Or: transactional vs enjoyment; head vs heart

Far from being "stochastic parrots"?

Attention is no longer a bridge to power; it is the power

and the man who ate himself

An exploration of the Internet to come

We have debts, but they are the debts of kings

Should we direct LLMs to daydream to provoke novel insights?

The ai market cap is much lower than VC's would have you believe

"In a day, a lot of the problems that a large percentage of researchers were working on — they just disappeared."

From an insider that launched Codex.

Maybe I don't need all these lists...

Ads coming soon to a chatbot near you.

The insatiable appetite of an American Dream.

AI sucks left of code: discovery, long-term strategy, planning. For now at least.

Con man coming-of-age story set in the great depression. The intricate descriptions of the cons has led to a lot of reflection on the times I've been had.