We know these platforms are bad for us, so why are they still so widely used? They tell a compelling story: that all of your frantic tapping and swiping makes you a key part of a political revolution, or a fearless investigator, or a righteous protestor – that when you’re online, you’re someone important, doing important things during an important time.

But this, for the most part, is an illusion. In reality, you’re toiling anonymously in an attention factory, while billionaire overseers mock your efforts and celebrate their growing net worths.

After troubling national events, there’s often a public conversation about the appropriate way to respond. Here’s one option to consider: Quit using these social platforms. Find other ways to keep up with the news, or spread ideas, or be entertained. Be a responsible grown-up who does useful things; someone who serves real people in the real world.

The programming language is called "cursed". It's cursed in its lexical structure, it's cursed in how it was built, it's cursed that this is possible, it's cursed in how cheap this was, and it's cursed through how many times I've sworn at Claude.

Absolutely dying at this.

I’ve been listening to a lot of Donald Lawrence and the Tri-City Singers lately. Big, powerful gospel choir music feels pretty dang good right now.¹

This gospel choir-fueled version of the U2 hit is something else.

Behind every seemingly effortless success lies a landscape of invisible battles: endless meetings, self-doubts, and moments of near-total collapse.

What truly separates people isn’t some magical talent, but an almost irrational commitment to pushing through pain that would break most people.

Everything around you—every convenience you enjoy, every space you inhabit, every service you use—was one person’s refusal to accept the world as it was.

The world progresses from a collection of irrational dedication.

Related: glory means nothing without sacrifice. Personally, I’m sometimes quick to want the glory without the sacrifice, which results in a fairly hallow glory.

I’ve cut social media almost entirely out of my life (10/10 recommend), but I still drop into LinkedIn every so often. And honestly? I get exhausted fast by all the heavy, depressing posts.

Yes, there’s a lot of real suffering and injustice in the world. If you’re in the thick of it right now, I hope you’re able to keep hanging in there.

But if you’d like a little break from the bleak hellscape that is 21st-century journalism, check out the latest issue of Fix the News. Or, if you just want the highlights, here are a few that stood out to me:

• Billions of people have gained clean water, sanitation, and hygiene in the last nine years. (Billions with a B.)

• In the 12 months prior to June, Africa imported over 15GW of solar panels. Sierra Leone alone imported enough to cover 65% of its entire generating capacity.

• Google estimates the median LLM prompt uses 0.24 Wh (about nine seconds of TV), emitting 0.03 g of CO₂ and five drops of water. (How many of you leave the TV on while doing chores?)

• Wildfires are terrifying, but between 2002 and 2021, global burned area actually fell 26%.

A gentle reminder: news and social media are designed to keep you engaged by stoking fear, outrage, and anxiety. That cycle is hard to break, and a lot of my friends worry that looking away even for a moment means we will collectively slide into totalitarianism and ruin.

That’s a lot of weight to carry alone. Yes, we need to stay vigilant and hold leaders accountable, but we can’t live paralyzed by fear. There are countless good people stepping up, trying to make the world better (including many of you). Try to hold onto that truth alongside the bleak!

Big O notation is a way of describing the performance of a function without using time. Rather than timing a function from start to finish, big O describes how the time grows as the input size increases. It is used to help understand how programs will perform across a range of inputs.

In this post I'm going to cover 4 frequently-used categories of big O notation: constant, logarithmic, linear, and quadratic. Don't worry if these words mean nothing to you right now. I'm going to talk about them in detail, as well as visualise them, throughout this post.

I have a minor in computer science, and I remember sitting through many explanations of the importance of Big O notation, yet it hasn’t really mattered much in my career until recently.

If you have heard of Big O but aren’t clear on how it works, give this post a shot. It contains a lot of great visualizations to help drive the point home.

By many peoples’ standards, I don’t actually actually own a lot of books. But, of the books I do own, I’ve probably read only about 70% of them. And of that 70%, I can’t even admit to reading each book in its entirety. This is intentional. I like cultivating a “home library,” which I believe must include an inventory of unread books awaiting future serendipitous re-discovery. I’m not alone in this. In Reading Well, Simon Sarris describes a similar personal philosophy:

You should buy books on a whim, whenever possible, enough that you start to forget about them. You shouldn’t know the whole contents of your own shelves. If you create a home library it should act as one: It is there for you to discover and rediscover, to get lost in.

For me, it’s a library, but for music.

I was thinking today about how I feel like I’m in a rut with my music library. I’ve spent an hour or two every day for weeks now cultivating my collection of music that has followed me for decades.

And I’m tired. All that weeding is hard work, even if it’s “just” carefully adding ID3 tags and the highest album art you can possibly find for each piece of music you have.

But the payoff is that I have an amazing garden, a well curated selection of tunes that provide answers to many of the questions I ask that can’t be specifically answered by books.

I also enjoy the Whim concept that Sean describes here. As I’m finding my attention being drawn away from the music (or, if I find my attention is drawn back into the music in a non-harmonious way), I pull it from the garden.

After all: if an album was meant to fit into my life somehow, it’ll find its way back in there.

I think we’ve barely scratched the surface of AI as intellectual partner and tool for thought . Neither the prompts, nor the model, nor the current interfaces – generic or tailored – enable it well. This is rapidly becoming my central research obsession, particularly the interface design piece. It’s a problem I need to work on in some form.

When I read Candide in my freshman humanities course, Voltaire might have been challenging me to question naïve optimism, but he wasn’t able to respond to me in real time, prodding me to go deeper into why it’s problematic, rethink my assumptions, or spawn dozens of research agents to read, synthesise, and contextualise everything written on Panglossian philosophy and Enlightenment ethics.

In fact, at eighteen, I didn’t get Candide at all. It wasn’t contextualised well by my professor or the curriculum, and the whole thing went right over my head. I lacked a tiny thinking partner in my pocket who could help me appreciate the text; a patient character to discuss, debate, and develop my own opinions with.

I can’t agree more. I would love to help as well in this area of research. It sounds extremely rewarding.

Every day the imps of optimization whisper seductively: measure this, track that, finish this, optimize all the things. But the perfectly optimized life exists beyond a horizon that recedes as we approach it—there’s always another metric to track, another improvement to make. Instead of chasing this impossible goal, maybe we can cultivate a counterbalancing skill: the ability to discern between that which requires optimization and that which deserves reverence.

Some activities—work projects, athletic training, learning new skills—genuinely benefit from measurement and improvement. But others—walking, sleeping, reading, meditation, meals with family and friends—perhaps these are things to be savored. And if so, we should hold them sacred. We should allow walks to remain unmeasured wanderings, meals to be consumed without photographic evidence, books to be read mindfully and without hurry.

In a culture obsessed with achievement and self-optimization, this might be the most countercultural act possible: to leave some things unmeasured, untracked, unoptimized, unpublicized.

All the while, the imps will keep whispering.

I’ve had a similar arc with tracking my steps. I used to be extremely diligent, reaching 20,000 steps a day on average back when I was training for ultramarathons.

These days, though, I hardly track my fitness. I have a couple metrics that I watch to make sure I’m on the right track, but I don’t monitor things like my weight, my step count, or my resting heart rate.

And I’ve reached a similar conclusion: some things are just meant to be enjoyed.

Walking around the neighborhood is an extreme luxury when you do it without feeling the pang of guilt associated with being slightly behind your normal pace.

Listening to music is amazing when you are feeling it rather than tracking every song you listen to.

I should pare back more, to be honest. Like, why do I care about scrobbling every single song I’ve ever heard to my last.fm account?

The old timers who built the early web are coding with AI like it's 1995.

Think about it: They gave blockchain the sniff test and walked away. Ignored crypto (and yeah, we're not rich now). NFTs got a collective eye roll.

But AI? Different story. The same folks who hand-coded HTML while listening to dial-up modems sing are now vibe-coding with the kids. Building things. Breaking things. Giddy about it.

We Gen X'ers have seen enough gold rushes to know the real thing. This one's got all the usual crap—bad actors, inflated claims, VCs throwing money at anything with "AI" in the pitch deck. Gross behavior all around. Normal for a paradigm shift, but still gross.

The people who helped wire up the internet recognize what's happening. When the folks who've been through every tech cycle since gopher start acting like excited newbies again, that tells you something.

Really feels weird to link to a LinkedIn post, but if it’s good enough for Simon, it’s good enough for me!

It’s not just Gen Xers who feel it. I don’t think I’ve been as excited about any new technology in years.

Playing with LLMs locally is mind-blowingly awesome. There’s not much need to use ChatGPT when I can host my own models on my own machine without fearing what’ll happen to my private info.