Two essays argued there's a tradeoff GDP can't see: a society's power to take up the new against the debt that freezes it. I measured debt as the amount owed; it pointed the wrong way. The tax isn't the debt's size but whether a shock can end you, and America's thin spot is skills, not a fragile balance sheet.
GDP and the balance sheet book the loan, the payment, the house, all of it as strength: the account holds the debt on the asset's side. The freedom it takes away shows up nowhere. That gap is the flexibility tax, and the society carrying less of it is the more adaptable one.
Four companies spent more than $380 billion building the machines for the future last year. Almost no one can use it yet. We fund what we can measure, the machine, and strand what we can't, the person's crossing to a new trade, and then we book the person's debt as their wealth.
Every fifty years a new kind of gold appears, and we ride past the thing worth keeping to go dig it up. We are doing it again.
I'm a builder, and I'm about to stop building to drive my family through every national park in the country. Not a midlife crisis. A crossing — the one an old Swiss doctor said we all have to make, and that nobody in my world is taught how to survive.
Sandboxing is thirty years old and has barely changed. What changed is who's in the box: an agent that reads its next instruction off the open internet and can't tell a command from a trap, which is why the OS is reorganizing around it. A line from chroot in 1979 to Microsoft's MXC in 2026, and the trade we made along the way.
The federal minimum wage has been $7.25 since 2009. The senators who kept it there call themselves moderate. I built a dataset of 85 polls and the funder profiles of ten think tanks and ran the analysis. The 'moderate' position polls at the size of the far right.
BYD's claim of 500 kilometers of range in five minutes is real, independently observed, and on a $27,400 sedan. The chemistry is public knowledge. So why can't you do this in Bentonville? This is the consumer companion to the AI infrastructure story: five thousand megachargers, four V4 sites, one fired team, one frozen program.
A breakdown of the supply chain behind the AI buildout: a 38-year-old transformer, a single steel mill in Butler, Pennsylvania, a 5-year wait on turbines, half a million missing electricians, and a lengthening list of people who said no to the check. What AI needs to run at scale, and where those needs collide with ours.
The loom is a computer. It has been one for 30,000 years. The Inca had 7-bit ASCII in string. Lacemakers ran a two-opcode instruction set. NASA called the women who wove the Apollo computer 'Little Old Ladies,' then erased their names.
My kids can refuse to play each other's game. Adults in America can't. A long argument for the right to not compete, and for protecting the alternatives to capitalism the way we protect Yellowstone.
The history, the stigma, the neuroscience, and what it's like to have a brain that doesn't run on importance. A personal post about ADHD from someone who has it.
A simple slash command that forces your agent to walk you through decisions one at a time instead of dumping a plan you won't read.
Defect rate per line rises with codebase size. At 10x speed you hit the sprint where rework consumes more capacity than new work. I built a model to find that sprint and ran it through four scenarios.
Pretext measures text 300x faster than the browser by replacing layout reflows with arithmetic. Cursor already shipped it. The use cases that matter most are in 3D, on servers, and in CI.
AI agents fail in production because of mutable state, hidden dependencies, and side effects the agent can't see. The fix is functional programming. SUPER and SPIRALS are the frameworks I use.
An AI agent overwrote hours of uncommitted edits. Git couldn't help. So I built Unfudged, then Hacker News told me to open-source it.
KV cache quantization explained: why compressing LLM memory below 4 bits breaks attention, and how Google's TurboQuant (PolarQuant + QJL) fixes it. Compares KIVI, KVQuant, QuaRot, MLA, and H2O. Updated April 2026 with framework support for vLLM, SGLang, llama.cpp, and TensorRT-LLM.
For sixty years, self-improving AI was the apocalypse scenario. It arrived as a sampling temperature tweak. The gains are real anyway.
A response to the idea that the best engineers optimize systems — and why I look for something different.
in reply to @javarevisited
Gilens and Page found US citizens have near-zero impact on policy. If Americans can't control their government, why are we punishing 90 million Iranians for theirs? An Iranian American developer on sanctions, the Versailles playbook, and why the tech community needs to speak up.
AI labs trained on everyone's data without asking. Now they're furious that other AI labs are training on their outputs. The pattern is older than electricity.
A kitchen-sink post that exercises every typographic element — headings, blockquotes, images, code, lists, and more — so the design configurator has something real to chew on.
America's energy and water infrastructure cannot sustain AI buildout without radical change.
Coding productivity metrics are rising, but the real question is whether human judgment is becoming more valuable.
High taste is a superpower in review, but a liability during creation—separating judgment from making is the skill creators need most.
Raw compute scaling is hitting limits; the next breakthroughs require hardware-software co-design and specialization.
Code generation speed isn't the bottleneck—understanding and verifying AI-generated code is, and current tools optimize the wrong 5% of development.
Uncertainty has shaped human decision-making for millennia—from ancient dice to modern language models—teaching us to work with randomness, not against it.
Reflecting on D&D world-building skills and what generative world models mean for the future of storytelling and creative expression.
Using agentic development to prototype Swift apps that solve personal problems with privacy, ownership, and connection at their core.
The real opportunity in AI is disrupting incumbents and creating new products, not building more AI platforms.
As AI handles optimization, human superpower shifts to ideation and the courage to create badly—making and learning without measuring.
Mobile blindsided many companies that moved slowly; AI will repeat this cycle—start small, measure, and upgrade every quarter.
Framework for understanding AI autonomy levels outside self-driving, from copy-paste to full autonomous systems.
Learning at speed to build AI-enabled products that return people to the real world, moving beyond screens.
A rap parody celebrating AI Paired Programming—the synergy between humans and AI in software development.
Willpower and resilience are finite resources that must be managed strategically, not glorified into burnout.
Economic pressure and frozen job markets will drive a new generation to build, sparking another wave of founder-led disruption.
Most individual contributor developers will need to re-skill within five years as AI agents take over execution work.
Conway's Law shows why organizations keep building what they did yesterday—and why Tesla's system reimagining beat a hundred years of optimization.
Sora's outputs remain largely unusable at current pricing; the model needs dramatic improvements in consistency to justify its value.
The raw material constraints for 10B humanoid robots by 2040 are severe—especially lithium and rare earth elements.
San Francisco's tech community gathering places have vanished, taking with them the energy that built the startup ecosystem.
Binary neural networks achieve comparable performance to 16-bit models while using 3x less memory, 4x less GPU resources, and 100x less energy.
Understanding that AI agents represent a fundamental shift beyond smarter tools—a genuinely new form of intelligence with exponential capability.
Google's open-source Gemma launch failed to account for community infrastructure, creating a poor first impression with key stakeholders.
Reflecting on a transformative period of recovery, exploration, and the decision to build something new in the age of AI agents.
When risk-averse leadership replaces visionary founders, the focus shifts from innovation to asset protection.
People aren't inspired by a hero's journey of suffering—they're inspired by movement and momentum. Entrepreneurship is just another path.
My first company failed because I tried to solve everything at once, lacked product-market fit, and didn't listen to users.
After co-founder disagreement, shutting down the project in an evening freed me to find a new direction within a week.
In 2010, I left a great role to build a product focused on fair algorithms. Years before the movement existed.
A tribute to Allen Romero—a fellow founder who persevered for ten years on a mission to bring people closer together IRL.
Compete with yourself, not others. Define you and be the greatest possible version of that.
If you manage a work queue, you already know feature prioritization. Apply the same discipline to open questions.
Countless companies try to kill the spreadsheet. There's more value in doing the hard work within the legacy ecosystem.
You have a cultural problem. Leaders who skip self-care send a signal that trickles down into burnout and risk aversion.
A decade of hustle culture experiments that made me no more successful—just less enjoyable to be around.
Thoughts on the Expensify email blast—I agree with the message but object to the channel. Apply the inverse test.
Written March 2020—the remote work shift has already happened. Employers who think everyone's returning to offices will find a rude awakening.
Algorithmic bias is a known problem. Two years after Tyrant in the Code, the debate rages on but the demographics haven't changed.
Two years ago, Lime was a great addition to guacamole, rather than a sidewalk.
The top 10 tech companies spent $4.7 billion on healthcare acquisitions since 2012. What are they after?
Trump blames Amazon for the Postal Service losing billions. The real story is more complicated.
Autonomous cars will eat short-haul air travel. Comfort, price, and flexibility all favor the ground.
The next land rush might not involve land. Autonomous fleets could replace storefronts and reshape commercial real estate.
Would you be comfortable buying glasses sight-unseen?
Americans spend 29.6 billion hours a year commuting. Hyperloop and autonomous cars will reshape where we live, work, and settle.
Amazon is buying Whole Foods for $14 billion. It's not about groceries -- it's about fulfillment locations, delivery fleets, and drone landing pads.
AI isn't biased because it's evil. It's biased because its creators are a sea of dudes building scissors for right-handed people.
You’ve won. Congratulations!
Apple's slow-squeeze strategy against Google's search revenue is becoming clear. Four moves to check the king.
Understanding that reality is constantly changing and absolutes are rare; learning to accept uncertainty.
Accessibility is a huge problem in the tech world that we don’t talk enough about.
The story of why Social Media couldn’t scale to provide us all a voice.
You’re too good for clickbait, so you should read this. Seriously. Because, Gigaom.
There isn't a pundit criticizing Mayer that has ever managed a turnaround at a large company. Turnarounds take time.
More toxic than vanity metrics is the celebrity worship within the entrepreneurial community. We should challenge one another, not pander to celebs.
When you read advice from folks like Evan Williams and others who have a well-known brand, it’s important to step back and realize that…
I'm not a fan of many models beyond: 1) talk to people, 2) build something, 3) try said something. But Nir Eyal's Hooked model is worth understanding.
The best is yet to come.
I take a lot of steps every day.
Us and them.
Baby steps to happiness.
After spending some time with Glass, I wanted to address questions I’ve received, provide tips for new Glass owners, and share some of the shortcomings of the alpha device.
Posts and photos require more subtle notification methods.
Learning to start cold conversations.
Please, for the love of God or in spite of Her, stop reading and writing articles about the “Ten Best Ways to Launch a Company,” “Marketing Secrets of the Super Rich,” or the “Seven Biggest Failures You Never Knew About.
2am and there was a fire in my downtown San Francisco apartment complex.
I’m thankful for the fact that when I couldn’t speak, she understood me.
We’ve all sat across from someone who’s in a bind and ends a story with, “What do you think I should do?