Most of what I write starts as an itch. Some fact lodges sideways and won't come out: a limpet that spends months grinding a groove into rock until the groov...
Point an ordinary webcam at your face for about thirty seconds and, with the right software, it can tell you your heart rate. Not because it's reading a sensor. Blood moving through the vessels under your skin changes its color, very slightly, on every beat, in a pattern invisible to another person looking at you but perfectly legible to a camera doing frequency analysis on the footage. You are…
You've seen the posting. Ten years of experience in a framework that's three years old. A "visionary" who's also "extremely detail-oriented." Someone who "moves fast and breaks things" and also "never drops a ball." Calm under fire, relentless under pressure, a builder who's also a diplomat, a strategist who's happy doing the unglamorous grind nobody else wants. Recruiters call this a unicorn…
You can build this today, and plenty of teams already have. Give an agent everything a project has produced: every Slack message, every deck, every status update since kickoff. Put a dashboard and a chatbot on top, so anyone can ask where things actually stand and get the real answer instead of the curated one. Call it a panopticon over the project, because that's what it is, and nobody in the…
A friend of mine has been at the same company for eleven years. Three teams, two promotions, one internal transfer he describes as the most interesting year of his career. He's not coasting. He knows which VP to call for which problem. He knows which meetings are theater and which ones move things. He's been through two reorgs and come out with more scope each time. He's genuinely good at what he…
My father spoke beautifully about presence. The recordings he left behind are full of careful attention to the texture of things, the kind of speaking that makes you feel someone has actually looked at the world. He was also absent. Not as contradiction, exactly, just as the thing that was simultaneously true. Spiritual vocabulary doesn't determine what you build with it. It runs through character…
In 1964, two Harvard psychologists trained pigeons to sort photographs of people from photographs without people. The birds learned quickly. Given new photographs they'd never seen, they generalized correctly at rates well above chance. Herrnstein and Loveland published the result in Science as a demonstration of animal visual concept formation, then noted in the discussion section that impressive…
There's a specific way I use these conversations that I've been calling "thinking out loud." I bring a half-formed idea, the model develops it, I read back something that sounds like my thinking but more organized and further along than I'd have gotten on my own. It feels like productive intellectual work. Whether I'd be able to reconstruct the argument without the transcript is a question I've…
The essay was real. The event of writing it was not. That's the thing I've been trying to find language for. A 2025 study out of MIT's Media Lab found that 83% of students who used AI assistance to write essays couldn't quote their own work afterward. Not just struggled to. Couldn't. Zero percent provided a correct quotation from something they'd just submitted. 54 students, 20-minute essays, four…
In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council required something that contemporary therapeutic culture has spent eight centuries slowly forgetting. Individual confession to a priest, not just private repentance. Naming, out loud, to another person. And then penance: restitution, repair, acts that cost something. The Catholic Catechism still says it plainly: "Absolution takes away sin, but it does not remedy…
I'm holding a physical object I designed. I've never done 3D modeling. I barely know CAD. But last week I prompted an image with Nano Banana Pro, ran it through an image-to-3D model (Hitem3D), cleaned up the mesh in software I'd never opened before, and printed it on my Bambu Lab P2S. The whole pipeline took an afternoon. I'm not getting faster at skills I already have. I'm acquiring entirely new…