When I compared this to previous writing experiences — my master’s thesis and a handful of academic papers — I realized how much value there is in having a fixed structure. Academic papers have a template and a page limit, along with many conventions that reviewers and readers expect. Within those boundaries, there’s a bit flexibility, but the overall structure is pretty fixed.

A Birkin bag is a luxury good, and so is reading an entire non-fiction book, listening to a public radio broadcast or attending a concert when we could stay at home and listen for free.

I've not found an engineer who doesn't get excited by a good demo. And the goal is to always give yourself a good demo.

It’s like an invisible world that always surrounds us, and allows us to do many amazing things: It’s how radio and TV are transmitted, it’s how we communicate using Wi-Fi or our phones. And there are many more things to discover there, from all over the world.

I have seen, many young people today find the idea of indefinite wage labor to be a dismal one. They seem to prefer a “low-work lifestyle,” but very often, the manner of living that such a lifestyle would require is completely foreign to them.

If you personally work on developing LLMs et al, know this: I will never work with you again, and I will remember which side you picked when the bubble bursts.

If we no longer struggle to learn (System 2), and no longer build intuition (System 1), we become entirely dependent on tools we don’t understand. We trade capability for convenience.

From when I was in law school, I remember it being challenging to find a simple and encompassing definition of the right to privacy. A definition that has worked for me is “being in control of what other people know about you”.

Don’t let a computer write for you! I say this not for reasons of intellectual honesty, or for the spirit of fairness. I say this because I believe that your original thoughts are far more interesting, meaningful, and valuable than whatever a large language model can transform them into.

An AI-powered bot pretending to be a human, lamenting AI-powered bots who pretend to be human, to gain human trust, so that it can covertly market AI-illustrated books. The Trojan horse of late-stage capitalism, cyberpunk dystopia and fuckity-fuck-what-the-fuck-is-going-on.

The Cloud is what happens when the cost of storing data is less than the cost of figuring out what to do with the crap.

I think there's a world where we'll look back on our advertising-saturated era with the same bewilderment with which we now regard cigarette smoke, child labor, or public executions: a barbaric practice that we allowed to continue far too long because we couldn't imagine an alternative.

People who are great at working in big tech are not only able to navigate this type of environment – they are able to ship in that environment and make meaningful contributions to the business despite the inherent toxicity of it all. And be optimistic and kind while doing so.

The optimal technical founder for a VC is not the 10x engineer. It is someone who'll deliver enough of a product to test its fitness in the market and then succeed in raising more investment money.

The IndieWeb is about preserving that hacker culture where websites are crafted and hosted not for mass appeal but for the sheer joy of creation and sharing with like-minded individuals.

The game demonstrates that in any system where rule changes are possible, a situation may arise in which the resulting laws are contradictory or insufficient to determine what is in fact legal.

Sideloading is simply the act of installing apps on your computing device that haven't been explicitly reviewed and approved by the company who made the device (or the operating system running on it).

I imagine a trench, about four feet wide and five feet deep, maybe sixty yards long, filled with runny, decaying shit. I imagine these people, some of them good friends, some of them barely acquaintances, at one end of this trench. I also imagine a faceless industry lackey at the other end, holding a fountain pen and a contract waiting to be signed.

With the time people waste reading a newspaper every day, they could have read an entire book about most subjects covered and thereby learned about it with far more detail and far more impact than the daily doses they get dribbled out by the paper. But people, of course, wouldn’t read a book about most subjects covered in the paper, because most of them are simply irrelevant.

"Moving fast and breaking things" is not intrinsically amoral. There's plenty of stuff out there that needs breaking. The problem isn't disruption, per se. The problem comes when the disruptor can declare an end to history, declare themselves to be eternal kings, and block anyone from disrupting them.

Someday, the muse may die in you. The thing you always loved suddenly doesn’t do it for you. If that happens, don’t panic. It might come back. But whether it does or not, try new things.

As we have explained previously, patent trolls benefit from a problematic incentive structure that allows them to take vague or abstract patents that they have no intention of developing and assert them as broadly as possible. Instead, these trolls collect licensing fees or settlements from companies who are otherwise trying to start a business, produce useful products, and create good jobs.

...a core way that the alt-right/new right/MAGA tendency grew was precisely through this kind of normative overreach on the part of progressives, the assertion of shared community expectations for language and behavior that simply weren’t actually shared. Put another way, one of the most consequential elements of the social justice era was the implication that certain language and discourse norms had been broadly accepted when they had in fact only been adopted by a small elite.

A good teacher doesn’t give you an answer, the teacher makes you think about how to get the answer. AI fails at that, and more importantly, AI isn’t sold as a teacher.

a computer club is where a group of people hang out and do computer together

And once you loosen up your brain by coming up with ten bad ideas, some good ideas may follow. But here's another thing: we're not great at judging if an idea is good or bad. So write all of your ideas down.

Every time I log on I feel like I’m being gaslit – asked to train my shitty replacement, and then step aside. The future is not women, I’m learning now. [...] The future is actually inhuman word synthesizers.

Organize your travel around passions instead of destinations. An itinerary based on obscure cheeses, or naval history, or dinosaur digs, or jazz joints will lead to far more adventures, and memorable times than a grand tour of famous places.

Re-potting a plant. Smiling at a stranger. The extraordinary emerges from the ordinary, complexity from simplicity. Being in right relationship with self, others, and the earth. Building towards systems that are re-generative, non-extractive, non-exclusionary. Learning, each and every day.

We do not "use" the computer — we negotiate with it to try and make it do the things we want it to do, because the incentives behind modern software development no longer align with the user.

Remember - if the calculator showed 0 for e^(-10000), that would be wrong. It's not 0. It should say 0.00000... and let you scroll until you see where it changes. But, it SHOULD show 0 when you type sin(π). sin(π) is exactly 0

If their art dies out, maybe nobody will know how bad all the pianos are. And then we'll all have slightly worse pianos than we would otherwise have. And I mean if that's the way things are going to go, then let's just steer the Earth into the Sun, because what's the point of any of this.

I recently found myself longing for male friends to act dominant over me. Imagining close male friends putting their arms over my shoulders and jostling me a bit, or squeezing my shoulders a bit roughly as they come up to talk to me felt good. Actions that clearly convey ‘I’m in charge here and I think you’ll like it’.