essay
- The Surcharge of Big Tech — The delta between a Big Tech salary and an agency salary is a bullshit surcharge
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.
- "Vibe Coding" vs Reality
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 Doesn't Need to "Take Off" — It's like saying that gardening hasn't taken off because most people buy their vegetables at the supermarket.
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.
- I Hate the News - Aaron Swartz
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.
- The Day the Muse Died — What should you do if what you did disappears?
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.
- "The R-Slur," Inner Circle and Outer
...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.
- The Incuriosity Engine — nice take on what Pirsig calls "Lateral Knowledge", and what I talk about a lot in my book Debugging Javascript
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.
- Bad Ideas Are Fun
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.
- Tech continues to be political — And the politics aren’t looking great
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.
- 50 Years of Travel Tips
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.
- what makes a meaningful life?
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.
- What We're Fighting For
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.
- Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog — Great piece of advice if you just have started writing independently, like myself, or are going to
- Submission and dominance among friends — Status dynamics are weirder than you might think.
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’.
- You don't know how bad most things are nor precisely how they're bad — Quality you cannot measure and barely can feel
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.
2025