an accommodating fellow Screenshot 2025-07-14 at 6 ...
If you haven't had Belvita breakfast cookies, you have probably had Biscoff cookies, which are similar. These are a classic airline snack. You've probably had one along with a Coke with ice in a plastic cup, and thought to yourself, 'these cookies suck.' That is a fair assessment. I'm not talking about Biscoff, though. Those are Belvita breakfast cookie's sweeter counterpart. I'm talking about…
My wife gave birth on June 24, 2026. Before she gave birth, I would describe myself as helplessly ambitious, obsessed with abstract, inconsequential cognitive games (debating ideas with friends and reading/writing nonfiction and autobiographical poetry), and calmly hedonistic. I’m using hedonism here literally, to mean ‘avoiding suffering and optimizing pleasure’. I wasn’t partying or having crazy…
Yesterday I was looking at YC jobs to see if there were any interesting small startups hiring in my area (while I otherwise love my current fully-remote job, I'm looking for hybrid). I found one that advertised an opening they called "GTM". I thought that was cool re: no specific scope, just someone who could make their product attractive to buyers however they can. Product seemed good (ETL type…
I grew up in a Catholic family in Boston. As you can imagine, this was an especially Catholic upbringing. I loved being religious. For my first communion, my grandmother gave me a gold cross on a gold chain. I would kiss the cross before walking up to the plate at my little league baseball games, feeling the grooves of the gum I’d packed in my lip with my tongue to settle my nerves against a…
Skepticism is a vital function of a healthy, open mind. It keeps us from taking each piece of information that's thrown like a ninja star at our heads at face value. And now that nearly every digital surface we encounter is pre-processed by an opinionated algorithm, skepticism is one of our most useful human skills. I'd go so far as to say it is among the top 5 skills that we must never outsource…
I work in tech, the industry of optimization, monetization, efficiency, and frictionlessness. I’m generally opposed to what it 'stands for', but I love the work and I appreciate the money. My job makes being a mid skater and writing/reading poems a hallowed act. What I love about skating and poems is that they are commercially dead-on-arrival (skateboarding can be lucrative but not if ur mid.)…
I've befriended some of the most thoughtful, brilliant, curious, eccentric, and sincere people I've ever met in the tech industry. Many of my dearest friends are former coworkers. I've also encountered the most egocentric, delusional, irritating personalities imaginable in tech. It is a mixed bag, like anything. But increasingly, the egomaniacs are not only taking center stage at the most…
At 4am most mornings I go onto my sun porch in the dark and I watch the deep navy sky slowly blanch in degrees until 6 am or so, when it turns pale white. I listen to jazz and I drink coffee and I go on Hacker News or MIT Press and hunt for something intellectually stimulating. If I read something and sense it was even AI-assisted, I close the browser tab and I look for something else somewhere…
Right now, we're on a plane that has been hijacked by 5-10 really smart but misanthropic people. They have a lot of money. They have made a long series of good decisions in their lives, and now they're in a position where their influence is hundreds of multiples larger/bigger than that of comparably smart, but less moneyed people. So we're all on this plane. We are headed for disaster. The…
Every morning that we open our phones and laptops, we are staring pitifully at a necrotic digital organism. It's sad and fucked up, no way around it, and there is no reason to go on what I'll call the Obvious Internet at all anymore IMO unless you are morbidly curious about how far we have fallen. There are tiny safe zones, like secret closed invite-only forums (i am part of one and it is great),…