A notebook for thoughts that keep coming back.
Essays, book notes, technical deep-dives, and small papers, published slowly, from a small desk in a quiet room.
Boredom is a feature
The answer to the problem I'm stuck on almost never shows up while I'm stuck on it. It shows up in the empty time I now spend all day deleting.
The mercy of the default
We treat the on-by-default toggle as something done to us. Most of the time I am glad it was done, and that is the part that should worry us.
The gap is the point
When I turned the AI assistant off for three days, I found a formula in my own code that I could not explain. Vygotsky had a name for what had been happening.
Is your IDE part of your mind?
Clark and Chalmers argued in 1998 that a notebook counts as part of Otto's cognition. Your code editor passes the same test. The interesting question is what we're measuring once it starts writing back.
Build the alarms before you need them
A component sat in a fault state for hours and paged no one. The dashboard knew. No human did. That gap (between monitoring and alerting) is where most reliability is won or lost, and AI writing the code is making it wider.
The bug that didn't fire
Two engineers ship the same mistake. One's system is live, so the gap in their understanding becomes visible. The other's isn't. Thomas Nagel called this circumstantial luck, and software engineering is full of it.
Attention as a craft, not a resource
We talk about attention like it's a budget to spend. What if it's a skill, practiced, sharpened, and slowly lost when we stop using it?
A field note on agent evaluation
A rising benchmark score now tells you more about the benchmark than the agent. Notes from the other side of trusting one.
The case for small models on your own machine
After six months running everything locally, here's what I learned about latency, privacy, and the surprising creativity of constrained systems.
Weeknote #02: quiet weeks count
Three small things I shipped, two books I started, one walk I'll remember.
Weeknote #01: the cost of context switching
What three days of single-tasking taught me, and what fell apart on the fourth.
Letter 01: on finishing things
A short letter to subscribers about the difference between done and abandoned.
Writing in the open is a different skill
Publishing rough thoughts in public taught me something I didn't expect: that polish and clarity are different muscles.
Slow Productivity: reading notes
Cal Newport, 2024. The diagnosis is sharper than the cure: a great name for why knowledge work feels broken, and a quiet silence about who actually gets to fix it.
Scaling laws revisited — what 2025 taught us
Five empirical updates to the Chinchilla picture, with implications for how labs spend their next billion.
Mythos: reading notes
Stephen Fry, 2017. I came for the Greek myths and spent the whole book underlining words: the stories never ended, they just turned into our language.
Nineteen Eighty-Four: reading notes
George Orwell, 1949. I expected a novel about being watched. What stayed was the ending: the Party won't kill you until you genuinely believe.
Homo Deus: reading notes
Yuval Noah Harari, 2016. I came for the Sapiens sequel and spent a week arguing with one chapter. Notes on free will, ownership, and who gets to rewrite your algorithm.
Creativity, Inc.: reading notes
Ed Catmull, 2014. A Pixar memoir that turns out to be about entropy: why a creative culture is never finished, only maintained against its own decay.
An occasional letter, when something's worth sending.
Sent when a new post lands or a paragraph is worth passing along. No fixed cadence. No tracking.