So much writing out there is someone else’s work. Not someone else’s words literally, although I’m sure every sentence that’s been written has been written somewhere else. Someone else’s thoughts to get to a predetermined endpoint, a fixed meaning. Using someone else’s constructions without realizing it. All because they have written a...

LLMs are notorious for the scale of their consumption. Massive amounts of energy and data are absolutely essential to train a model with a 7B+ parameters, with the quantities set to exponentially increase as we demand more from AI. While the energy use part is certainly alarming (at least as much as some small countries in a few years)...

I found this drawing of "A Modern Child's Conundrum" on Twitter recently: I think it's a hilarious, but sadly true, depiction of most American kids' suburban childhoods. 60% parking space, wide roads with speedy cars, some dead stores intermingled with some trendy smoothie shops and organic grocery stores, and "stranger danger" neighbo...

We're only a year-ish into the explosion of generative AI. From popular usage to tech companies, it seems that everyone who's anyone is using it or has an opinion about how it's the next Industrial Revolution in the making or is going to put a million people out of work. I honestly don't know what to make of it. But I think that lots o...

I used to be obsessed with systems to keep track of books, articles, podcasts, quotes, etc. that I wanted to consume. I'd fuss over the best app or notes system to make sure I captured every amazing TV show quote or magazine article that I would HAVE to come back to later. And so the list grew in both directions. Pending things to read...

Marc Andreessen, the world's most famous venture capitalist, published an article called The Techno Optimist Manifesto a few months ago. He discusses how we are being lied to about technology: we think that it is "on the verge of ruining everything" when in reality technology has pulled a billion people out of poverty. He argues that t...

I took Spanish in school for almost ten years. Fifty minute sessions a couple of times a week repeated from third grade to high school graduation. Where did that get me? Maybe to 70% fluency. TEN years of learning something should have made me ready to teach it to others. If you'd put me in Argentina for three months, I would've come b...

I wasn't around for the early days of the internet. I didn't see the wrangling between programmers over conventions and didn't see the development of key technologies that make any of this possible. Instead, the web for me has been a source of shiny new tech that is supposedly "revolutionary" (if a revolution happens every few months, ...

Originally published on my old blog in October 2022. Over the last few months, I’ve been learning Ruby on Rails and Hotwire, its default frontend framework. Rails has been both fascinating and frustrating and it has changed my assumptions about web app programming in surprising ways. It’s been fascinating because I can go from an empty...

I've started getting ads from the app I use to do my laundry. My laundry machine wants me to spend more money so that I can enter a laundry raffle to win $50. How dystopian! There's no doubt that having the app makes doing laundry much easier than putting quarters into the machine. But, it's not like I had any choice in the matter. The...

I've noticed a painful and sad trend in the world: everything looks like everything else. It's like we unknowingly decided on a style and everyone decided to roll with it. From logos to architecture, people take pride in things being "clean" and "modern" but the result is complete blandness. Here are some examples. Every logo looks exa...

“Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best. Don't think about what you want to be, but what yo...

Almost every single company website out there has something about "putting the customer first." Not only are these words empty, especially when you wait days for support to respond, but they are often the opposite of what the tech company values. Sure, the customer might come first because some management book told you it would help sa...

Just like a lot of other things, I first heard about the survivorship bias from Nassim Taleb. It's the idea that the winners are the ones who live to tell the tale, confounding the odds and characteristics of success. This is best demonstrated in the phrase "the winners write the history books." By definition, we don't hear from the lo...

For the longest time, I've wanted to write essays of my own. Inspired by the work of others, I wanted to develop the ability to articulate and develop my thoughts. However, each time I sat down to write, I stalled. I got stuck and made up excuses. I need my own website first, right? And the design has to be perfect before I can publish...