world wide web benji-style
From the desk of Benji Welner in Mexico City. Casting six aluminum statues was among the most challening things I have ever done . So, looking to take it easy the following quarter, I took a course all about casting: DESIGN223 . Silver Pendant was a fun jaunt through an unusual sort of making and a great hack for sourcing unique graduation presents. Investment casting—the process used in…
From the desk of Benji Welner in Austin, TX. In The Dark by Brian Gitt. Finished on June 27, 2026. Rating: ☆☆☆☆☆ I finally got around to reading In The Dark . It was terrible. I was going to rate it one star until I realized that I control the rating system around here and thus can give it a zero. Gitt consistently and willfully abuses statistics. Take this blatant and infuriating statement: The…
From the desk of Benji Welner in the sky between Austin and the Hamptons. I continue to insist that winter is the best quarter at Stanford. And that late is better than never. Academics Classes were sort of hit-or-miss. I don’t know how that should translate into my enrollment practices going forward but I will certainly consider my options. ME103: Product Realization (Design and Making) Woah! As…
From the desk of Benji Welner in Austin, TX. How to Rule the World by Theo Baker. Finished on June 06, 2026. Rating: ★★★☆☆ I vaguely know Theo Baker, and heard from a mutual friend that he had published a book. But I only realized that I would have to read it when it appeared in a Robber Barons sketch comedy show to boos from the audience. If How to Rule the World was to become a central cultural…
I mostly don’t use the Google Suite—but when I stumbled on these through Sheets, I genuinely thought there was a rendering error in Safari. ★
Like Dreamers by Yossi Klein Halevi. Finished on May 22, 2026. Rating: ★★★★★ Update: I wrote my final paper for POLISCI114 on this book, which I’ve uploaded for you to peruse should you be interested. The original, much shorter, and somewhat less formal review is preserved below (with a tweak to the penultimate paragraph, which contains a new direct quote). When I first picked out this book, I…
In ME103 you build a “high-fidelity product or object… with the PRL’s manufacturing resources.” I knew from the outset that I wanted to make something a bit humorous but that I would actually use in my day-to-day life. So in the funky spirit of co-opting projects to do things I want to do anyways , I set out to learn something of what I’m missing out on now that ME263 is no more. Ultimately, I…
It took me two decades to learn that coconut water does not taste like sweat. Rather, some bottles on the grocery store shelf are full of sweat while others are not. I tried them all so now I can tell you which is which. Once Upon a Coconut Coaqua Harmless Harvest These are the kings of coconut water. Somehow, they manage to taste toasted . I don’t understand how you do that. Delicious. Notes and…
Welcome back to our regularly scheduled programming! Junior year has been downright blissful. Let me tell you about it. Academics I discovered two important things about scheduling this quarter: If you plan things right—or just get lucky and stumble into it, I’ll let you guess how I found out—you can have no finals at all. This may be the consequence of a necessarily project-focused physical…
Sweetness and Blood by Michael Scott Moore. Finished on February 01, 2026. Rating: ★★★☆☆ A little over three years ago when I read The Desert and the Sea , I noted that Michael Scott Moore had also written a book about surfing. As the life-long Californian that I am, the sport and its aesthetic associations are familiar to me. But it took until a recent tropical obsession to convince me to pick up…
Began: 30 Jun 2025 Concluded: 19 Sep 2025 Many people say the job market is a mess. Fewer people find themselves on a layover relocating for a job only to have the second leg of the trip cancelled as a war broke out mid-flight. This was the situation I found myself in one evening in New York—and I began to form a new plan. There was a mysterious place I had heard of, from internet celebrities and…
Many years ago, my family discovered a secret about the Grand Wailea : amongst all their wonderful amenities, none managed to surpass the quality of their in-room body wash. A good product and a great one are worlds apart, and until recently, the Honey Mango scrub was one of the best. I want to take a moment to appreciate what it was and honor a beautiful work by observing its passing. Three…
Flinging an object a distance is perhaps humanity’s oldest challenge—and it’s one I faced with my teammates for the final project of ME102: Foundations of Product Realization . Building a machine to achieve this feat covers a fairly vast problem space: fortunately, we were provided with some constraints. This narrowed our work to answering three fundamental questions. How might we propel a ping…
The Making of Prince of Persia by Jordan Mechner. Finished on November 29, 2025. Rating: ★★★★☆ Stripe is bursting with side quests these days. In addition to providing the “financial infrastructure to grow your revenue” that we all know and love , they run a print magazine and a publishing company . Scrolling through the website of the latter and feeling jealous of their stunning visuals, I…
Steve Klabnik, as found on Lobsters : some of my friends have started a new company, ERSC , which is going to be building a new platform for developer collaboration on top of jj . GitHub delenda est. I currently have no self-hosted solution , so I’m stranded in the digital bazaar. The above seems neat but far away. Tangled looks promising: it hits the self-hostable but accepting broad…
For the second project of ME102: Foundations of Product Realization , you are assigned a mechanism and instructed to build something with it. My group was assigned a 19th-century spiral feed system . We reimagined this historical mechanism as part of a vault door locking system, using the spiral’s gradual rotary-to-linear translation to control four locking arms. This new use-case captures the…
I burnt vastly too much time on this today, after having already figured this out a week ago, so here it goes in writing. In one sentence: format everything in exFAT and use the Master Boot Record partition scheme. Spoiler for my Y3Q1 quarterly reflection: this year my dorm room is awesome. One of the new goodies that we have is a TV, and so I brought my basically unused Switch out of retirement…
There is an ancient Jewish story told about a wise man who used to walk around with two pieces of paper, one in each of his pockets. On one piece of paper was written “the world was made for me” (Sanhedrin 4:5), and on the other, “I am dust and ashes” (Bereshit 18:27). The ability to hold on to two mutually contradictory truths equally tightly is a core aspect of Judaism, in my mind, and a skill I…
The Counterlife by Philip Roth. Finished on September 17, 2025. Rating: ★★★☆☆ i just finished the counterlife Oh wow Thoughts? I honestly don’t remember it all that well anymore i understand that the whole point is that the book was an interpolation of the same story in many different interpretations but it made it a very confusing read What was the conflict between the brothers One of them was…
An Odyssey by Daniel Mendelsohn. Finished on June 12, 2025. Rating: ★★★★☆ I should really read the source material. But a touching journey nonetheless, which I am glad the author has shared.
In the vast apparatus of the internet, I have my own little hideaway: an Alpine Linux box hosted on Hetzner . The website you’re reading lives on this very server, alongside numerous other personal services. Running these myself allows me to be completely independent of major service providers like Google, a choice with serious benefits for my privacy. It has also helped me accrue real-world…
When Apple announced that visionOS 26 was bringing wall-mounted widgets to their face-mounted headset, I was very excited. For one thing, I am most interested in the device for its ability to create interactions between the digital and the physical worlds—which this feature enhanced in a particularly compelling way. But also, I was excited because as I looked around at my walls I saw at minimum…
The de-facto standard for event invitations at Stanford is Partiful . It’s a great platform: it looks cool and makes gathering RSVPs easy. But what if you want less of a party vibe, and more of an air of mystery? Less “join the herd” and more “you, individually, have been chosen.” For that, you might need Cordially . There was of course a time before Partiful, when Paperless Post was dominent. And…
I enjoy many things. Two in particular are alternative display technologies and using the right tool for the job. These combined in a truly joyful project when I wrote a script for the Rapid Riter. When I first walked into the Recurse Center , the large red LED matrix mounted on the wall caught my eye immediately. I’ve been in a good number of hacker spaces, all strewn with exciting toys in…
Night by Elie Wiesel. Finished on June 20, 2025.
How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell. Finished on January 07, 2025. Rating: ★★☆☆☆ I was assigned Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing as part of the Three Books program. I didn’t take a COLLEGE course in the fall , so I have relatively less of an idea if the program was taken seriously, but from my perspective it was comprised of a) an email that told me it existed, b) a free book that was—I…
Blind Date A Book is part ecommerce website and part art project. I first encountered its physical counterpart at a Barnes and Noble some five years ago: I remember thinking to myself even then that it was a perfect candidate for digitization. At long last, using the approach to making I picked up in DESIGN11 , I’ve hacked together a boutique version of this experience accessible for anyone with…
There is a feeling coursing through the populace. It is just now bubbling over, spilling through the cracks and taking its many shapes. The world changed forever with the introduction of the iPhone in 2007—it is a fool who thinks it can’t change again. I am a fool who thinks it is going to change very imminently. Let’s be honest, making a new primary device is effectively impossible. We probably…
Robin Rendle, himself responding to another post on “digital gardening”: How many bangers on this here website are lost to the feed of new stuff and are only hard to find because of the chronological list I’ve slapped together? There’s so much stuff that I’d like to revise or tweak or scratch out—but keep a record of that change of mind for the future. Wouldn’t that be so neat? Going back over…
Last year my friends would often pointedly remind me that I was a freshman. So it’s been a little weird this quarter no longer holding that title. However, as far as beginnings go, I’d say it’s off to a fine start. Academics This quarter is what Stanford is supposed to be. I learned. A ton. I was enrolled in: MATH 21: Calculus COMPLIT 37Q: Zionism and the Novel SUSTAIN 345: Sustainable Societies…
I continue to set new records in how long-overdue something can be. Nevertheless, I refuse to let this summery meditation slip away. I have written already at length about my internship . This can, for the most part, take the place of the usual section on academics. Too much time has passed for me to recall any other projects I pursued that might be grouped in with my work to some alternative…
Om, on his blog: Unlike search engines, AI platforms are built on precision and summaries. They’re unlikely to be a major source of traffic or advertising revenue. What about getting paid for the summaries OpenAI serves in response to prompts? These prompts will vary widely, as will the responses, breaking the traditional mass-media revenue model. As I explained in my “future of browser” article,…
Israel Alone by Bernard-Henri Lévy. Finished on December 19, 2024. Rating: ★★★☆☆ I got this book (and had it signed) on Election Night. Lévy had come to visit the Stanford Hillel, to philosophize with students and watch as the votes were called. A student asked him at one point how he could be so certain that the West and its allies would triumph over the rising Axis of Resistance. I remember I…
Roll Call is a jury-rigged receipt printer that sits on my desk and dictates my morning routine. Every morning, it prints out a briefing of all the critical information I need to catapult me into the day that awaits. Phones are great—but I don’t like checking mine when I wake up. I want my brain fresh and undistracted. I first ideated what would become Roll Call on a post-it note on the wall of my…
Rocket by Marc Tarpenning. Finished on December 15, 2024. Rating: ★★★☆☆ I stumbled onto Altamira during my usual daily web surfing, though exactly how I can’t quite remember nor discern from my browser history. What I do remember is that I was there for In The Dark . Rocket was a delightful surprise. It’s not hard to discern from my previous writing that I think Marc Tarpenning is a smart fellow.…
One Hundred Saturdays by Michael Frank. Finished on December 15, 2024. Rating: ★★★★★ This is the most vibrant, imagery-inducing work that I may have ever come upon. The first half of the book is dedicated to breathing life into the long-since vanished world of Rhodes’ Juderia. I have always been prone to feelings of nostalgia for times that I never experienced. 1 This book exploits that tendency…
The above image was created as my final project for CS148 , under the auspices of renown bodybuilder and occasional professor Ron Fedkiw . Everything in the scene was made from scratch in Blender, while the final image was rendered with the Cycles engine. All my work in the class was done in collaboration with my good friend Naama. The scene was inspired by the movie Inside Out, in particular when…
Waking Lions by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen. Finished on November 28, 2024. Rating: ★★★★☆ Author’s Note: This review is an adaptation of the final paper I wrote for Russell Berman’s wonderful Zionism and the Novel . For another artifact of my work in the class, check out my review of The Illusion of Return . Abstract This paper seeks to investigate Ayelet Gundar-Goshen’s novel Waking Lions as a work of…
I was very fortunate to have the opportunity to hear Marc Tarpenning, cofounder of Tesla, speak at the beginning of this quarter. It was the most exciting and impactful talk I’ve attended at Stanford thus far. This is really saying something. In his talk, Tarpenning elucidated a theory of innovation and disruption that feels to me to have been “lost to time.” It is a measured, idea-first strategy…
A funky list of two for my own use mostly. Facebook’s VR Platform ‘Horizon’ Sucks The Things They Carried
The Illusion of Return by Samir El-Youssef. Finished on October 23, 2024. Rating: ★★★☆☆ Author’s Note: I write everything in a conversational tone, so I doubt anybody reading this will notice much difference, but this review was originally a presentation. It is one of two I gave in Russell Berman’s wonderful Zionism and the Novel . It was first written in iA Presenter . The title I have given the…
I was walking around the other day, listening to the sounds of the night, when I had a thought about AirPods. This is not the first time this has happened: previously, I have wondered about the percentage of sound I hear that comes filtered through Apple’s transparency software, a number that is likely shockingly high. On this particular occasion, I thought it merited a blog post, mostly because I…
Mitchell Hashimoto, announcing the release of his new terminal emulator: …I am nostalgic for the days when software was released when it was ready. I like to imagine that if stores like CompUSA still existed, Ghostty 1.0 would be boxed, shrink-wrapped, and on the shelf ready for purchase (but also free and open-source). It’s a delicate balance. I could actually summon a hundred anecdotes on the…
Reading yesterday’s Register Spill post I got hooked on this sentence: Is [the success of frequent and significant rewrites by the founders of Zed] because they have been working on text editors for over a decade and know the domain well and how things should work and how they currently work is just a detail? I love the idea of seeing something for how it should be with its current workings as…
UNSONG by Scott Alexander. Finished on September 20, 2024. Rating: ★★★★★ The overt meaning of UNSONG is “a book written by pseudonymous rationalist blogger Scott Alexander published as a website in 2017.” The kabbalistic meaning of UNSONG is “the nerdiest, most niche work one can consume, whose physical size as a massive tome may make carrying it around in a backpack across several countries more…
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Finished on July 04, 2024. Rating: ★★★★★ I read this and imagined it contained in a small pocket-sized book, and myself quite the intellectual, amused by quaint fictions. I sought to divine from the tale of hedonism and grandeur exactly the line where one crosses over from glory into excess. A selfish goal, to be sure. I watched the movie shortly after…
Began: 17 Jun 2024 Concluded: 06 Sep 2024 YCombinator’s job board has high signal to noise for interesting work, but it’s not every day that their internship tab has as compelling a phrase as “SwiftUI Engineer.” I’ve been in love with SwiftUI, Apple’s modern app-building framework, for a long time . Something about its declarative nature just clicks with how I think. I sent in an application, sat…
Began: 05 Jun 2023 Concluded: 01 Sep 2023 As the summer of 2023 rolled around, I found myself opening up a bunch of tabs in Safari to check if any cool companies I had heard of on the orange site were hiring. I remember being shocked and excited when I saw that Beeper had a listing. Their app was built on top of an open, secure, and decentralized protocol called Matrix. I had used Matrix through…
I would also note that the behavior I am calling for — more innovation and competition, not just from Google’s competitors, but Google itself — is the exact opposite of what the European Union is pushing for , which is product stasis . I think the E.U. is mistaken for the exact same reasons I think Judge Mehta is right. Though I have more complex thoughts as to the actual anti-trust case against…
There are many, many git forges to pick from. I’m going to make another one—but before I do, I’m going to do a little thinking out loud, and outline the what and why of this side project I’m embarking upon. Decentralization is hugely important for the long-term health of the internet. Indeed, this quality has been fundamental to the network since its inception. This is easy to forget, and hard to…