Coleman McCormick — Unified Feed

2010: Odyssey Two

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 10:11:02 GMT

Michael Whelan’s inspiring cover art for Arthur C. Clarke’s 2010: Odyssey Two.

Brian and Thomas Owens sing Sam Cooke

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 09:30:58 GMT

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Father/son duo Brian Owens and Thomas Owens, Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come.”

What a phenomenal duet.

C.S. Lewis's tips for writing

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 22:39:34 GMT

C.S. Lewis’s tips for becoming a better writer.

How quaint to think of a time when the radio was the only external stimulus.

10M

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 16:16:51 GMT

10M

Search an archive of artworks by mood, feeling, style, or similarity.

Vin Varma's notetaking system

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 18:08:59 GMT

How I Take Notes in the West End of Toronto

Vin Varma’s thoughtful notes on his note-taking process.

As my understanding deepens, it naturally precipitates into action.

Projects start to emerge at various scales.

The form follows the understanding. As confusion decreases, experimentation naturally increases.

For collaborative projects, crystallization takes on another dimension. My role often becomes directional, translating insights and patterns into clear documentation or prototypes that guides team decisions.

Also worth observing his latest workflow merging Obsidian and Claude, on Greg Isenberg’s recent podcast.

Flexport Atlas

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 09:41:17 GMT

Flexport Atlas

Flexport built a slick app for visualizing global shipping and rail traffic.

Two roads to longevity

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 14:59:48 GMT

The latest issue of Res Extensa draws parallels between the story of Ford and Rolls-Royce and Stewart Brand’s framework of Low Road and High Road design, from How Buildings Learn.

We have polar opposite philosophies of design and construction that each is capable of producing things that well outlast their owners, and this applies to buildings, vehicles, and anything else we bring into our lives.

The Rolls endured through reliability. The Model T endured through repairability.

One inspired the devotion of its owner. The other devoted itself to its owner.

Initiation Well

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 16:31:30 GMT

The Initiation Well at the Quinta da Regaleira estate in Portugal.

Isometric NYC

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 09:16:16 GMT

Using a combination of Claude, Opus, Nano Banana, and lots of satellite imagery, Andy Coenen built this incredible pixel art map of New York City. It’s like flying over a realistic version of SimCity 2000.

In this post he details his process for building it.

See the full resolution, zoomable map here.

Mysticism

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 00:07:41 GMT

Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland. He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but (unlike the agnostic of today) free also to believe in them. He has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and contradiction along with them. His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that. Thus, he has always believed that there was such a thing as fate, but such a thing as free will also.

Agent-native architecture

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 18:20:00 GMT

The folks over at Every published this excellent guide to a new paradigm for software, using what they call “agent-native architecture.”

In short the idea is that your mental model for thinking about what you’re building shouldn’t be focused only on user interaction, but anything you build should be usable by an agent, too.

So software should now be built around concepts like composability, reusable, callable primitives, and emergence. Sometimes an AI can find uses and things your product can do (and that users want to do) that you didn’t plan for. Thinking agent-native will have you building and prioritizing things with a different architecture in mind.

When we can design software around users setting goals and having agents pursue them, we end up with something much different than thinking only in database schemas and CRUD.

Resistance is signal

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 09:00:24 GMT

Luca Dellanna on Resistance:

The point is that going to the gym is an activity, like many others, where you can technically produce its inputs in a negative mental state, but they won’t be good enough to bring satisfying results unless done with confidence. Therefore, chronic resistance is not something to dismiss or power through, but something to acknowledge, dissect, and address until resolved.

“Just powering through” resistance makes it more difficult to resolve its causes. In my view, the persistence and grit you develop getting used to powering through is a skill in itself, but Luca’s point is that resistance is telling you something about its causes. If you think deeply enough about the chain of causes, you can diagnose and treat at least certain aspects of the resistance to lessen its effect over time.

Running in 2025

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 16:59:04 GMT

I started out the year with the goal to run 1,000 miles. No other rules or restrictions, just get the miles in.

That meant keeping a steady pace throughout the whole year. It worked out to 2.74 miles/day, the hardest annual goal I’ve ever set by almost double. I did 650 a few years back.

I didn’t want to push the mileage too hard for fear of getting injured, but also didn’t want to lag more than a few miles off the pace in case I ended up sick or otherwise indisposed.

Here are some of the notable stats on the year.

Totals

Stat	Value
Total Runs	174
Total Miles	1,003.26 mi
Total Time	167 hours (7 full days)
Total Calories	119,362
Total Elevation Gain	32,180 ft

Averages

Metric	Value
Miles per activity	5.77 mi
Running time	57:37
Average pace	9:59/mi
Average heart rate	151 bpm
Temperature	79°F

Extremes

Metric	Value
Longest run	40.03 miles (Pinellas Trail Challenge)
Max heart rate	178 bpm
Hottest run	93°F
Coldest run	44°F

A method for changing systems

Tue, 20 Jan 2026 16:39:31 GMT

What the American Constitution established was not simply a particular system but a process for changing systems, practices, and leaders, together with a method of constraining whoever or whatever was ascendant at any given time.

The Turkish gulet

Tue, 20 Jan 2026 16:37:31 GMT

In today’s accidental internet discovery, I ran across the “gulet”, a two-masted style of sailboat from Turkey.

Mores, then laws, then geography

Tue, 20 Jan 2026 16:24:06 GMT

But the strongest prop of American order, Tocqueville found, was their body of moral habits. “I here mean the term ‘mores’ (moeurs) to have its original Latin meaning; I mean it to apply not only to “moeurs” in the strict sense, which might be called the habits of the heart, but also to the different notions possessed by men, the various opinions current among them, and the sum of ideas that shape mental habits.” Their religious beliefs in particular, and also their general literacy and their education through practical experience, gave to the Americans a set of moral convictions—one almost might say moral prejudices, as Edmund Burke would have put it—that compensated for the lack of imaginative leadership and institutional controls.

“It is their mores, then, that make the Americans of the United States, alone among Americans, capable of maintaining the rule of democracy; and it is mores again that make the various Anglo-American democracies more or less orderly and prosperous,” Tocqueville concluded.

“Europeans exaggerate the influence of geography on the lasting powers of democratic institutions. Too much importance is attached to laws and too little to mores. Unquestionably those are the three great influences which regulate and direct American democracy, but if they are to be classed in order, I should say that the contribution of physical causes is less than that of the laws, and that of laws less than mores… The importance of mores is a universal truth to which study and experience continually bring us back. I find it occupies the central position in my thoughts; all my ideas come back to it in the end.”

One good habit at a time

Tue, 20 Jan 2026 16:18:45 GMT

For the rest, we should look for the improvement of society, as we seek our own individual improvement, in relatively minute particulars. We cannot say: ‘I shall make myself into a different person’; we can only say: ‘I will give up this bad habit, and endeavour to contract this good one.’

So of society we can only say: ‘We shall try to improve it in this respect or the other, where excess or defect is evident; we must try at the same time to embrace so much in our view, that we may avoid, in putting one thing right, putting something else wrong.’

Gridfinity Generator

Fri, 09 Jan 2026 09:07:03 GMT

We’re deep into 3D printing over here after getting a Bambu Lab P2S for Christmas.

Mostly so far it’s been Everett and I finding models on the web and printing in different colors. Learning the basics of the slicer software and parameters, tweaking print settings. I’ve only just started dabbling back in CAD (and the skills are rusted all the way through). Fusion 360 is powerful, though. Planning to get Everett in there and learning some basics like I did when I was young — but back then it was like AutoCAD 5.0 or something.

One thing I wanted to do with this was create organization containers for drawers around the house. I discovered the Gridfinity system, which is an open source spec for printing modular trays and bins.

Then I found this Gridfinity Generator tool by Marcus Svensson. A slick web-based CAD for quickly creating custom grids and bins.

How terminals work

Thu, 08 Jan 2026 16:55:46 GMT

Software builders already spent quite a bit of time on the terminal. AI coding (especially Claude Code) has made the terminal not only an I/O mechanism for working with a system, but also an IDE and complete interface for building software.

Brian Lovin posted on X this site he built to explain the underlying tech of terminals.

We’re only seeing the very beginnings of the cool stuff that’s now possible — or rather worthwhile — to build when it only costs you a few prompts.

Herbie Hancock's start with Miles

Fri, 19 Dec 2025 16:10:04 GMT

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Herbie Hancock on his introduction to Miles Davis.

Herbie got his start with Donald Byrd. And Byrd gave him the push to go seize the opportunity to join Miles’s second great quintet.

My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file

Fri, 19 Dec 2025 08:59:59 GMT

My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file

Jeff Huang writes about his 14 year old productivity system of simply using an ever-growing single text file to house everything.

To-dos, meeting notes, ideas. Everything.

Good reminder that you can have a high production function without 27 productivity tools.

Poverty of attention

Tue, 16 Dec 2025 23:18:19 GMT

In a wealth of information there is a poverty of attention.

Leuven Town Hall

Tue, 16 Dec 2025 23:04:46 GMT

Leuven Town Hall. Flemish Brabant, Belgium.

Making a Steinway piano

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 15:40:51 GMT

I ran across this documentary about the making of a Steinway grand piano.

The process of constructing one of these takes a year or more. It’s a great example of handmade craftsmanship in a world where we’ve mechanized every step, and oriented so much manufacturing to mass production. A Steinway is still made by a hundred masters, each honing a skillset for decades.

In a world where most everything is mass-produced, it’s no surprise that hand craftsmanship becomes a luxury good. As costs drop on manufactured versions, demand for the art form of hand tooling falls, skilled artisans begin to disappear.

I hope in more domains we’ll have a renaissance of handcrafted things. Not just on the demand side — with more people interested in buying them — but also in the supply: more kids interested in becoming furniture makers instead of financiers, artisans instead of attorneys.

One note I love on the Steinway process (and would be the same for many other crafts) is how many of its makers are working class locals, people with the nugget of a talent or a knack for craft that found a calling, showing up to the factory every day and filing that skill to a razor sharp point.

One day I’ll find a spare $100K for my own 9 foot ebony grand.

Organized knowledge

Tue, 09 Dec 2025 22:04:09 GMT

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

Storehouses of history

Sun, 07 Dec 2025 12:01:39 GMT

As I was reading this article from Ted Gioia the other day, I noticed in this image he used a logo I recognized:

This is Hollywood Boulevard from the 1930s. Notice the Kress Building on the far side of the street.

It reminded me of our own Kress Building in downtown St. Petersburg, FL:

And the one in Tampa:

SH Kress & Co was a five-and-dime store chain that’s been defunct for over 20 years. Though you’d think there’s nothing noteworthy about a chain of the dollar stores of their day, they’ve left a legacy of interesting preservation-worthy architecture in cities across the United States.

Many of these still stand as beautiful specimens of historical architectural styles. The St. Pete one in Beaux-Arts style, Tampa in a Renaissance Revival. Or this gorgeous Art Deco example from Fort Worth, Texas:

In our modern culture of thrifty, modern, utilitarian design, there’s no way a corporation would invest in this kind of general public good.

In their day, these buildings functioned as stores: places to sell cheap things people needed. But they doubled as beautiful additions to the cityscape.

Are there any going concerns today about which we could say the same? What generic commercial building erected in the 2000s or beyond will be worthy of preservation and reuse in the 2100s?

Return to smoke-filled rooms

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 12:23:39 GMT

Jonah Goldberg with one of his classic broadsides against our broken primary system:

People hate on “smoke-filled rooms” because they think such venues give the rich and powerful undue influence over the nominating process. That is surely the case, though it did produce some pretty good presidents. It also produced some bad ones, though the blame for their failures can rarely be put at the feet of Fat Cats and Robber Barons. But the brief against smoke-filled rooms leaves out the fact that primaries are steamy garbage dumps for the same forces. The “money primary” and the “media primary” aren’t pristine processes either. Indeed, the primaries provide a form of “democracy washing” the influence of big money and rampant demagoguery—by the candidates and their donors and media boosters. What the primary system does is cut out the gatekeepers, the institutionalists, the small-r republican figures who care about the integrity of the party, the salience of various unsexy issues, and this thing called “governance.” When the party is in control, it still cares a lot about winning, but it also cares about the long-term viability of the party, its issues, and down-ballot candidates. Congressmen who want to get reelected might want a more boring presidential candidate that will put the party above his own ego and self-interest.

When some, like Jonah, want a return to smoke-filled rooms, the democracy-above-all crowd screams that with elites and gatekeepers between The People and their choices, it’s some kind of tyranny. What they fail to appreciate is how patently undemocratic the existing primary system is.

“Democracy washing” is such a great term to describe the current system. Pure, popular-democracy primaries give us a simulacrum of choice, without the underlying reality. If we don’t slog through the messy horse-trading and argumentation of the old 1880 style Jonah writes about during Garfield’s time, we trade better results for the ability to pretend The People are in the driver’s seat.

The patient slog through debate and argument is the process of better results simmering in the oven. Sure, we can bake the ribs in the toaster, but let me know how those turn out compared to giving them time to braise.

Like many things in our immature culture, we get so preoccupied with processes looking the way we want them to that we never do the mental trade-offs to determine if we’re getting better or worse results. Or if the thing we think is happening is even happening in the first place.

(The link to the article might be paywalled. But take that as tip to subscribe to The Dispatch.)

Return to Forever, Live from Jazzaldia

Tue, 18 Nov 2025 11:04:40 GMT

Watch video (youtube)

Return to Forever, Live from Jazzaldia San Sebastian, 2008.

A great live concert from a reunion of legends. Each of these guys was a noteworthy player in his own right. Return to Forever is one of the great jazz fusion projects. The whole discography is transformative.

I got to see Stanley Clarke live sometime around 2000. Incredible show and band.

Wes Montgomery, Live in '65

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 17:01:27 GMT

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Wes Montgomery, Live in ‘65.

Ahmad Jamal in France

Wed, 29 Oct 2025 17:30:13 GMT

Watch video (youtube)

Ahmad Jamal live in France, 1971.

The Abstraction of AI

Wed, 01 Oct 2025 11:08:02 GMT

OpenAI launched a major update to Sora yesterday.

There’s something about AI video that just doesn’t get me excited.

Sound on. pic.twitter.com/QHDxq6ubGt
— OpenAI (@OpenAI) September 30, 2025

Sure, it’s impressive: we’ve created black magic-levels of technology that can summon real-looking images from the ether. We can type a request and generate whatever movie we want.

But one of the things that makes film exciting is not only its quality or entertainment value, but the knowledge that a human produced it. There’s an aesthetic to the depth of human involvement in the process that Sora can’t substitute for. The more we close the uncanny valley visually, the more repulsed we are when we do find out it was “just AI.” We assumed human achievement, but we’ve been lied to.

I know, I know. We’ve had CGI in film for years. What’s the difference between Sora or Veo and the machine-assisted CGI from Transformers or something? This actually admits to the problem. People have disliked the overuse of CGI for years. The practical filmmaking of Christopher Nolan or George Miller or Ridley Scott stands out in a field full of CGI slop. CGI was once simply the seasoning on the meal, now it’s become the meal itself.

There Will Be Blood is impressive as a human feat of planning and executing on a vision, creating a collection of ideas and making them real – from script writing to performance to location selection to cinematography. The oil derrick explosion scene is impressive not just for what it is to look at, but because wow, humans made that happen.

Or think about music. Bach’s compositions aren’t merely impressive for their technical complexity or because they sound beautiful; what sits with you after hearing the Well-Tempered Clavier is that a human came up with that out of thin eighteenth-century air. The idea itself that a regular person could create something so original, textured, and interesting is an essential part if its value.

AI-generated media is stripped of this humanity. If we know a server farm generated those pixels or sound waves, we find ourselves disconnected from the impressiveness of human achievement. We have no way to relate to it. I know that playing a guitar is hard, but typing a prompt to get the computer to do it? I have no idea. Definitely sounds a lot less hard to me.

The AI bulls will claim the creativity is in the prompting, that talent will emerge able to steer these models toward genius originality. There’s something to this, for sure. All creators and craftsmen leverage the tools at their disposal. Modern woodworkers have power tools to assist in furniture making. Musicians have precision instruments and recording gear that allow them to realize a closer representation of their vision. Every advance inserts a new layer of abstraction between human imagination and a realized idea.

But as we move up the abstraction ladder of creativity, I’m less impressed by the human aspects of the achievement. Our hand is further removed from the output. Am I impressed by a song composition piped into a computer for a computer to play back? Sure, maybe. But I’m all the more impressed when the composer sits at the piano and plays it with their own hands.

I can simultaneously believe a CNC-sculpted statue is impressive to look at, while I consider the David to be both an impressive sight and impressive employment of human craftsmanship. Both require skills, but one requires more skills.

There will always be a market for authenticity. We have an appreciation for the humanity conveyed by a Van Gogh that simply isn’t there and can’t be there in a Midjourney image. No matter how fancy the prompt engineering.

Can you still be human?

Fri, 19 Sep 2025 15:35:56 GMT

Iain McGilchrist:

Who does not now find themselves constantly busy? The young, the middle-aged and the old feel it alike. We are all time-poor; and time is not worth nothing. Time is life. Everything now is freighted with so much bureaucracy; and the bureaucracy is in an unholy alliance with AI. Together they massively, colossally, waste our time.

As he reminds us in this piece, we’ve got to stay vigilant here. Bureaucracy + AI is a dangerous combination for all our sanity (and likely worse).

We’ve already seen the enshittification of everything powered by financialization and dehumanization and “optimizations” for efficiencies, or for economies of scale. AI is superfuel for this nonsense.

I’m bullish on free markets and humans selecting against this world, as long as we have options. Let’s build and maintain those options.

Humongous Fungus

Fri, 12 Sep 2025 11:41:28 GMT

In LibertyRPF’s latest newsletter, he makes brief mention of the “Humongous fungus”, an Armillaria ostoyae fungus that covers roughly 2,385 acres of Oregon forest, and weighs an estimated 35,000 tons.

When you read enough about mycology, you find some science fiction-level stuff:

Most of this giant fungus is underground as a network of mycelium and rhizomorphs, black or dark brown structures that are kind of like roots or shoelaces.

The mushrooms you might see on a hike in the forest are just temporary fruiting bodies, like apples on a tree. The real organism is this vast, interconnected web beneath the forest floor that slowly spreads by feeding on tree roots.

Why are we looking for aliens in space? They’re already here on Earth.

patternlanguage.cc

Tue, 02 Sep 2025 14:41:18 GMT

I’ve been diving back into Alexander’s A Pattern Language the past few days.

As I was making notes in Obsidian, it occurred to me that APL, with its interlinked system of patterns, could be an interesting medium for building a relationship graph around. Patterns connected to patterns.

Then looking around I ran across essentially this exact thing: a web-published version of an Obsidian graph of patterns.

Browsing to any pattern shows you the subgraph of adjacent patterns, with backlinks to each one. A neat way to traverse the relationships of Alexander’s system.

Murray On English

Tue, 02 Sep 2025 14:14:53 GMT

The circle of the English language has a well-defined centre, but no discernible circumference.

Scruton Inheritance

Fri, 22 Aug 2025 08:55:21 GMT

We do not merely study the past: we inherit it, and inheritance brings with it not only the rights of ownership, but the duties of trusteeship. Things fought for & died for should not be idly squandered. For they are the property of others, who are not yet born.

Gratitude on the 4th of July

Wed, 09 Jul 2025 14:38:42 GMT

My latest post on the importance of remembering what makes the American flavor of independence unique:

Something unique about the American Founders’ flavor of revolution was that it was the first (only?) of the revolutionary movements of the past 300 years that took human nature into account. Many of the revolutions in the time since — the French Revolution, those of the 1840s, the Russian Revolution — had toppling despotic authoritarian regimes in mind.

In that respect the American Revolution shared a causal relationship in what brought it about.

Where the American version differed, though, was not in its origins, but its ends. It sought to replace an oppressive monarchy with something rooted in bottom-up individualism. A republican (small r) system of government that accepted human fallibility: one designed around the unchangeable essence of the “crooked timber of humanity.”

Forget estimates, start with appetite

Fri, 13 Jun 2025 12:01:21 GMT

In the latest issue of Building Blocks, I dove into Shape Up and its idea of setting the appetite for a project.

Fundamentally, appetite inverts the question we begin with when planning a project.

Instead of starting with “Here’s a spec. How long will it take?”, we start with a time window we’re comfortable spending on the problem and ask “What can we get done inside this box?”

Rather than define a richly-detailed design of what we want, appetite requires us to start with a problem definition, and refine that first. If we narrow the problem down, we also narrow the solution space. Solutions are allowed to be smaller and more focused.

The appetite starts with time boundary and works backward to a design that fits inside.

Appetites define sound and acceptable constraints up front. And constraints are wonderful tools for generating creativity.

Conversational Interfaces

Mon, 12 May 2025 16:09:30 GMT

Julian Lehr wrote an interesting post recently on the problems with conversational interfaces, with the fitting title “The case against conversational interfaces”. Here’s Julian:

We keep telling ourselves that previous voice interfaces like Alexa or Siri didn’t succeed because the underlying AI wasn’t smart enough, but that’s only half of the story. The core problem was never the quality of the output function, but the inconvenience of the input function: A natural language prompt like “Hey Google, what’s the weather in San Francisco today?” just takes 10x longer than simply tapping the weather app on your homescreen.

Voice works so well in human-to-human communication because it’s enormously flexible on both ends — for speaker and listener. Through speech we can both communicate and understand just about any idea using the same framework of 26 letters and a couple thousand words.

The speaker can walk up to anyone fluent in the language and fairly effectively communicate just about anything — commands, requests, thoughts, ideas, emotions — and have the listener comprehend.

But conversation is slow. The “bitrate” for conversational speech is peanuts compared to what you can do with hand signals or ideograms or jpegs. A set of hand signals could convey a message much faster, but at the expense of loss of range, and easier misinterpretation. Spoken language trades bandwidth and information density for flexibility, nuance, and error tolerance. All major utilities when talking with a stranger, but not with our computers.

We keep chasing conversational interfaces in computing because of ease-of-access and the promise of flexibility. But in commanding the computer, the loss of compression, low bandwidth, and ambiguity are annoyances rather than assets. When we have a conversation with a clerk at the store, these are features. When it’s with our computers, they feel like bugs.

Julian goes on to talk about how we might think more creatively with fitting LLMs into this picture:

We spend too much time thinking about AI as a substitute (for interfaces, workflows, and jobs) and too little time about AI as a complement. Progress rarely follows a simple path of replacement. It unlocks new, previously unimaginable things rather than merely displacing what came before.

As AI seeps in everywhere, we need to think positive-sum in how it helps the human-computer interaction problem. It holds the potential to generate background threads of activity as we’re using our slow-but-flexible inputs like speech or typing: retrieving information and summarizing and performing interstitial actions while we’re in the middle of other tasks.

Craft is the Antidote to Slop

Wed, 30 Apr 2025 07:09:03 GMT

Will Manidis:

The demonic recognizes in our shortcuts the perfect opportunity: tempt humans away from the difficult labor of making, growing, and building with our own hands and minds. Instead, offer an endless stream of effortless consumption—images without artists, music without musicians, stories without storytellers. The devil’s oldest strategy is, of course, promising godlike creation without godlike effort.

Every feed, every product shelf, every book rack, even restaurant and menu, now overflowing with slop. If we’re being honest, the slop movement — mass produced, carbon-copied, no connection to humans — predates AI. But AI turbocharges the ability to churn this stuff out.

Brain-Computer Interfaces

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 15:53:17 GMT

When we think about brain-computer interfaces, why do we always jump to the chip-in-the-head? Or the wire dongle with an antenna behind our ear? The Larry Niven “wirehead”?

Maybe it’s just a bandwidth thing.

Aren’t our phones a low-bandwidth version of a BCI? Certainly phones and social media and other modern tech modify our brains in similar ways.

Or perhaps it’s both the high-bandwidth abilities enabling so much more combined with the idea that they’re uncontrollable in some way. A piece of hardware pinging electrical signals inside our heads that we can’t be consciously aware of. We don’t know what they’re doing, and “unplugging” doesn’t give the airgap of leaving your phone at home when going for a walk.

There’s probably also a visceral feeling it gives us of an inhuman piece of inorganic matter being embedded in our heads. And our heads are our “selves”. The brain barrier is a special one to us, even though it’s technically no different than another organ, in terms of its make-up.

Essay Architecture

Fri, 18 Apr 2025 11:29:39 GMT

I just watched this excellent interview with Michael Dean on the How I Write podcast.

Michael is an architect and writer, and his writing project is fascinating.

He’s built a framework for thinking about writing that adapts Christopher Alexander’s concept of pattern languages to writing.

If you’re unfamiliar, Alexander created a way of thinking about design and functionality that gave us a modular, nested framework for how to build spaces — from whole cities down to features within rooms. A “pattern” is a loose and modifiable guideline for how a component of a system should work. More defined than a rule-of-thumb, but less rigid than a rule. So patterns can be refined and adjusted to adapt to different settings.

A diagram of the pattern language framework for writing

Thinking about writing this way is interesting. Language has similarities to other complex systems: letters, words, sentences, phrases, paragraphs, stories, narratives. It’s made of modular components that nest together in a hierarchy, where ideas (“wholes”) emerge from the interactions between parts, even at different levels in the hierarchy.

Michael’s system gets more abstract than the simple physical form of the words and sentences, into things like voice and tone, cohesion, motifs, stakes, rhythm, and repetition.

Need to spend some more time with these ideas.

Rhetoric Poetry

Wed, 16 Apr 2025 12:00:00 GMT

Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.

Exploiting Locality

Fri, 11 Apr 2025 08:30:00 GMT

I recently wrote about the tendency of creators to keep messy versus clean workspaces.

While sometimes the mess is a certifiable inefficient disaster resulting from laziness, the “organized chaoos” messy space acts like a mental buffer.

Here’s computer scientist Jim Gray on the purpose of buffering in a programming context, from his book Transaction Processing:

The main idea behind buffering is to exploit locality. Everybody employs it without even thinking about it. A desk should serve as a buffer of the things one needs to perform the current tasks.

Keeping things “in the buffer” redounds to productivity (and ideally, creativity). If something is closer at hand, it lowers the transaction costs of retrieval.

Memorization works this way, too. People question the benefits of rote memorization in school, but this is a useful metaphor for understanding its value. Memorizing reusable data keeps it “in RAM” for faster retrieval.

Faster retrieval reduces friction, which means faster feedback loops, faster learning.

The Gradient of User Value

Thu, 10 Apr 2025 15:18:00 GMT

Saw this from John Carmack today on X:

Feedback beats planning.

My plea at Meta was “No grand plans, follow the gradient of user value”.

I love this. If you just keep persistently pushing up the gradient toward more value, it’s winning in the long term. Durable and sustainable success is that which happens gradually.

This reminds of a conversation I was just having earlier today about Fulcrum and our positive net retention. Our product fit was good enough that no one ever left. That didn’t mean infinite growth or hockey-stick revenue, but it created a durable foundation from which to grow gradually.

With the bottom-up adoption model, the continuous shipping of new features, and modest evolution of pricing and packaging with time, that combo enabled a gradual climb up the gradient.

You don’t always need that comprehensive 5-year strategy doc or holistic product redesign or earth-shaking press release. You just need that next nugget of feedback on the adjacent missing links in the value chain that you can iterate toward solving.

Keep climbing the gradient, and success will follow.

Past, Present, and Future

Thu, 10 Apr 2025 11:49:29 GMT

Here’s a useful way of thinking about the domains of our three branches of government, from Yuval Levin’s American Covenant:

It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the Congress is expected to frame for the future, the president is expected to act in the present, and the courts are expected to assess the past. These boundaries are not perfectly clean, of course.

How distinct this delineation of roles is between the branches of government is up for debate, but this is a useful way to think about the Framers’ intention in designing the balanced separation of powers.

Legislators frame laws for the future
The president acts on them today
Judges compare what’s happening today and planned for tomorrow against precedents set in the past

We tend to run into trouble when any of the branches strays outside its primary domain.

When the executive is designing Big Plans for the future, or when the judiciary is issuing punishments in the present, or (in what I’d say is our worst problem today) the legislative isn’t doing anything, we get into fraught territory.

While each of these has its primary focus on a particular time horizon, they aren’t the sole arbiters of decision making with respect to their domain. Our complex array of checks allows each to assert influence over other areas. I just find this a useful compression of the general model of the system.

Joe Henrich And Dwarkesh Patel

Wed, 12 Mar 2025 15:59:33 GMT

Watch video (youtube)

Great interview with the author of one of my favorite books from the last several years, Joe Henrich. The WEIRDest People in the World is a fascinating look at the origins of human culture and the evolution of human psychology.

MVPs with Cursor

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 09:14:21 GMT

Good stuff here on building with Cursor. Some takeaways:

Use starter kits to bootstrap project directories
Build assistive docs to help the Agent. Remember that the Agent behaves a lot like a human:
- A human with minimal guidance doesn’t infer the right choices
- PRDs, app flows, tech stacks / API docs, frontend/backend guidelines all help it do what you want
project rules over .cursorrules
- More flexible
- Sync across teams
- Fine-tune based on tech stack

I’ve had much better results getting in the weeds with PRDs well before having agents go off and build. And you can have multiple AIs work on and refine your documents, too.

Angelz

Thu, 06 Mar 2025 16:40:00 GMT

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MF DOOM / Ghostface Killah - Angelz, 2004.

Expected and Unexpected

Thu, 06 Mar 2025 13:48:00 GMT

Some technologies are unpredicted, but evolve. Others are predicted don’t seem to materialize (or not yet). Then there are those that are expected AND appear. The unexpected tend to be the most disruptive — no one’s had the chance to prepare.

But the expected, if they do finally arrive, have been ruminated on for a long time. When we eventually realize the expected, we’re more prepared socially for their impacts. Though often we’re wrong about their societal impacts until they show up.

Kevin Kelly writes about this in the context of AI, a technology long-predicted, but always with a bent toward the negative. Toward the destructive social consequences of creating artificial beings.

Artificial beings – robots, AI – are in the Expected category. They have been so long anticipated that there has been no other technology or invention as widely or thoroughly anticipated before it arrived as AI. What invention might even be second to AI in terms of anticipation? Flying machines may have been longer desired, but there was relatively little thought put into imagining what their consequences might be. Whereas from the start of the machine age, humans have not only expected intelligent machines, but have expected significant social ramifications from them as well. We’ve spent a full century contemplating what robots and AI would do when it arrived. And, sorry to say, most of our predictions are worrisome.

Here’s the example list from Arthur C. Clarke’s 1963 book, Profiles of the Future:

Blue Ghost Moon Landing

Wed, 05 Mar 2025 13:54:00 GMT

Watch video (youtube)

Firefly Aerospace became the first private company to land a spacecraft on the moon when Blue Ghost lunar lander touched down on the moon on March 2nd.

What an incredible achievement – and that 4K video from the lunar surface is just mesmerizing.

Roman Ruins At Schonbrunn

Tue, 04 Mar 2025 16:45:00 GMT

Roman ruins at Schönbrunn. Carl Moll, 1892.

Volos Harbor At Night

Tue, 04 Mar 2025 12:00:00 GMT

Volos harbor at night. Volanakis Κonstantinos.

Topographic Beauty

Mon, 03 Mar 2025 15:36:00 GMT

“Topographic beauties straight from old geography books”, @egeberkina.

The Fall Of The Damned

Mon, 03 Mar 2025 12:00:00 GMT

The Fall of the Damned. Peter Paul Rubens, 1620.

Dana Gioia on Writing

Mon, 03 Mar 2025 10:43:00 GMT

This is a phenomenal extended (3 hour!) interview with Dana Gioia on his background, poetry, his writing process, and the habits he’s curated that make him into a prolific and interesting writer.

We Did All This Discovery, Now How Do We Decide?

Tue, 25 Feb 2025 10:17:00 GMT

When capturing hundreds of problems during product discovery, we generate at least as many potential solutions. We can’t build everything at once, so how do we decide what to tackle first? Ryan Singer has a suggestion:

The counterintuitive thing is, we often feel like our task is to get to a “yes.” But what we actually need is a way to say “no.” It’s the ability to eliminate many, many things that aligns us on the one thing. It’s the “no, no, no, … YES!” that gives us the power to move forward and to stick with a project.

Finding the “reasons to build” for any given solution is easy — every idea is “good” on some continuum. When faced with a hundred ideas, each with compelling reasons to build it, we’re left with the fuzzy question of “how good?”

Ryan’s suggestion inverts the question: look for the reasons to not build it. Is there a workaround? Is it merely annoying but not a dealbreaker? What are users doing today instead? What are the real consequences of the status quo?

This inversion approach is more likely to highlight the acute pains — the missing solutions causing real negative consequences, the ones with no good alternatives or workarounds.

The first key to prioritizing is to triage the obvious “not now”s first. If we can cut our list down significantly, we can focus attention on where we’ll make the biggest impact.

What Matters in the Age of AI is Taste

Mon, 24 Feb 2025 12:00:00 GMT

In this AI era, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means for humans in the loop of formerly human tasks. When AI is inserted in all layers of the stack, what’s left for us?

Sari Azout hits on something I agree with: that the intangibles are (at least for now) resistant to AI. And these areas tend to be where we humans find joy in creativity in the first place. Taste, building context, intersecting divergent ideas, a respect for the tactile, the ephemeral, the unpredictable.

First, you need to cultivate a deeper relationship with your gut. The more our world becomes measurable and quantifiable, the more we need spaces that preserve what can’t be measured—the hunches we can’t explain, the patterns we feel but can’t prove. A jazz musician knows when to break rules in ways no theory explains. A good copywriter can feel what words will land without having a single data point to prove it. Taste isn’t some mysterious gift bestowed at birth—it’s simply what happens when you pay close attention to what moves you.

Our minds are good at finding patterns in the unquantifiable.

Copy First, Create Later

Fri, 21 Feb 2025 18:30:00 GMT

As I watch my kids learn, it sits with me how much we learn by copying. Imitation isn’t the enemy of originality — it’s the foundation of it. We learn by copying, refine through practice, and ultimately create something uniquely ours. My latest post on Res Extensa:

In our rush to be original, we often dismiss copying as somehow lesser than “true” learning. But mimicry isn’t just a shortcut — it’s fundamental to how we master skills. We see it in my daughter’s creative reproductions, in my son’s workbench discoveries, and in every artist who’s traced the footsteps of masters before them.

The path to originality paradoxically begins with imitation. First, we copy to build competence. Then we understand. Finally, we create.

We Live Like Royalty and Don't Know It

Thu, 20 Feb 2025 11:58:00 GMT

Charles Mann on the unseen, unappreciated wonders of modern infrastructure:

The great European cathedrals were built over generations by thousands of people and sustained entire communities. Similarly, the electric grid, the public-water supply, the food-distribution network, and the public-health system took the collective labor of thousands of people over many decades. They are the cathedrals of our secular era. They are high among the great accomplishments of our civilization. But they don’t inspire bestselling novels or blockbuster films. No poets celebrate the sewage treatment plants that prevent them from dying of dysentery. Like almost everyone else, they rarely note the existence of the systems around them, let alone understand how they work.

The invisible, yet essential, layer of infrastructure he’s describing becomes extremely visible during something like an extended power outage during a hurricane. Even with our communications still up, generators in our yards, and food in our refrigerators, even a few days without power are like an eternity.

New Space

Tue, 18 Feb 2025 11:00:00 GMT

Jason Carman’s S3 project has been relaunched (no pun intended) as The Story Company, continuing his incredible work on documenting the hard tech scene.

At the start of the year they published their first feature documentary, New Space. A story about the current state of the space industry, and what’s different this time in the marriage between government-backed and private spaceflight.

A Funny Thing About Curiosity

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 14:41:00 GMT

A great little paean to curiosity from Henrik Karlsson:

There is something frustratingly Tao about curiosity. (1) It is by following your curiosity that you can bring something new and beautiful into the world as a gift to others. But (2) to go there you have to do things that you fear others will think are stupid or embarrassing. That is, you can only find the Tao by not looking for the Tao. By losing yourself in your line.

Materials and Mastery

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 09:02:30 GMT

In the latest Res Extensa, I explored how craftsmen build expertise through deep understanding of their medium. It starts with the nature and properties of their raw materials, then moves to the individual parts, assemblies of parts, and their relationships to one another.

All sorts of woodworking, done well, benefit from skillful selection of material. The furniture builder making an arch at the top of a dresser will help themselves if they find a board with grain that flows in the direction that agrees with their design. You want your material to move with you, not fight against you.

This process perfectly illustrates a fundamental truth: mastery requires rich understanding of your craft’s raw materials. The path to expertise runs through the mastery of your medium.

Bell Labs Holmdel

Fri, 14 Feb 2025 12:58:00 GMT

Bell Labs Holmdel. From Severance season 2, episode 5.

Muse Prompts For Journaling

Wed, 29 Jan 2025 14:36:00 GMT

Muse – Prompts for journaling

Sometimes in a journaling session it’s hard to get yourself writing. You need a kickstart, an idea to latch onto and get your brain moving. I know I do when it’s 5:30am and I sit down to write.

So I built a simple tool for displaying journaling prompts called Muse. It’s open source on GitHub. You can run it yourself and edit a single file to add or modify the prompts it uses.

This is the first entry in my mission to ship at least one small tool or product each month this year.

Muse, a tool for journaling prompts

Wed, 29 Jan 2025 09:59:22 GMT

So far this year I’ve gone headlong into what’s possible with AI development, specifically using Cursor. I’ve been using it to write code, write blogs, and even write this post.

The potential for “personal software” is profound here. There’ve been a few times already where I wanted a simple script for automating something, and it wasn’t even worth bothering to look around for pre-existing ones. I just had Cursor help me make my own. So I’ve decided to ship something once a month: a full project hosted and usable around a single idea.

When it comes to journaling and Morning Pages, I occasionally reference a list of journaling prompts I keep to help me get going. So in that spirit I built this tool, Muse.

Using a bulleted list of prompts in a markdown file, Muse will randomly display a prompt with each roll of the dice. I decided to build it with React and Expo to potentially make it available on mobile.

I’m not sure how much I’ll use it, but it’s a fun little project.

The source is on GitHub here. You can modify the prompts.md file to edit or add any of your own prompts, too.

Oblique Strategies

Tue, 21 Jan 2025 12:14:00 GMT

Oblique Strategies was originally a set of cards created by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt back in 1975. Each card contains effectively a single prompt intended to help get you unstuck creatively. Prompts like:

Use an old idea.
State the problem in words as clearly as possible.
Only one element of each kind.
What would your closest friend do?
What to increase? What to reduce?

This site is an online version, each refresh showing a new random card. Interesting.

Personal Software

Fri, 17 Jan 2025 08:50:00 GMT

A common problem I encounter with computers is the everyday minor friction in workflow: the repetitive but only occasional task, or the tedious multi-step process.

Perfect example: the other day I wanted to batch resize and compress a bunch of images. It’s something I’ve had to do before, but not an everyday problem.

When you have a problem software can solve, it has to be painful enough to warrant the effort and overhead required to build something. Given my level of knowledge, I could thrash my way through writing a shell script to do this resizing operation (probably). But it’d take me a couple hours of Googling and trying and retrying to eventually get something that works — all for an operation that might take 7 minutes to just do manually. So rather than automate, I just deal with it.

This means dozens of daily nags go on nagging —they don’t nag enough to warrant the cost of solving. And they aren’t painful enough to search for and buy software to fix. So I go on muddling through with hacks, workarounds, and unanswered wishes.

But yesterday with a few prompts Cursor, in 15 minutes I made (or the AI made) a shell script to handle images that I can reuse next time. I didn’t even look at the code it wrote. Just typed 3 bullets of a description of what I wanted in a readme file, and out comes the code. An annoying process goes away, never having to search around for existing tools. Even if a solution did exist, it’d probably be part of a bundle of other features I don’t need; I’d pay for the Cadillac when I only need a taxi.

We’re moving into a new phase where personal software like this might often be the simplest path to a solution. In a world where we’re used to going to Google or GitHub, it’s now even faster to make your own. It’s cracked open new possibilities for people formerly incapable of creating their own tools.

Software used to be costly enough that those “hey this might be cool” ideas were quickly set aside when the cost/benefit wasn’t there. There’s potential for this new paradigm of digital goods production to radically alter the landscape of what gets built.

New York And Erie Railroad

Thu, 16 Jan 2025 15:19:00 GMT

New York and Erie Railroad diagram, 1855.

The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work

Tue, 14 Jan 2025 10:02:00 GMT

This latest issue of Res Extensa riffs on an idea from wiki-inventor Ward Cunningham:

“Given what we’re trying to do now, what is the simplest thing that could possibly work?” In other words, let’s focus on the goal. The goal right now is to make this routine do this thing. Let’s not worry about what somebody reading the code tomorrow is going to think. Let’s not worry about whether it’s efficient. Let’s not even worry about whether it will work. Let’s just write the simplest thing that could possibly work.

I love this. I’m a huge proponent of getting started on something as an antidote to stuckness. Writer’s block, uncertainty, fogginess. There’s no panacea that’ll give you all the answers, but the best tool for clarity is action. Getting started is the fastest path to finding what’s next.

When Cunningham says “the mere act of writing it organized our thoughts,” he’s speaking to this idea that it’s rarely possible to know the specifics of the goal (or the means to get there) until you get started. Starting on the thing kickstarts the discovery engine.

Nearly every time I’m doing anything creative — building a software feature, writing an article, building something in my shop — the final state ends up somewhere other than what I predicted at the start. During the process of making, I learned things, or I came to realize things I didn’t know I needed or wanted.

When you’re just getting started, you don’t know what the possibilities are yet. To know what to build, you’ve got to start building.

Things Hidden

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 23:00:00 GMT

I found and watched this this morning. Phenomenal documentary on the life and ideas of Rene Girard.

A lot of direct interviews with Girard himself, as well as many of his colleagues, collaborators, and those influenced by his ideas.

Technovelgy

Mon, 16 Dec 2024 17:52:00 GMT

An archive of concepts drawn from works of science fiction. Over 3800 entries.

Reminiscent of TV Tropes’s listing of fiction ideas and story structures.

Herbie Hancock Headhunters

Tue, 10 Dec 2024 15:01:00 GMT

Watch video (youtube)

The Headhunters perform “Sly”, 1974.

Sade

Thu, 05 Dec 2024 11:03:00 GMT

Two phenomenal records to start a recording career.

Western Electric Plant

Mon, 25 Nov 2024 16:00:00 GMT

Western Electric Plant. Cicero, IL.

Western Electric was the captive equipment arm of the Bell System and produced the majority of the telephones and related equipment used in the U.S. for almost 100 years.

Nantucket Sleigh Ride

Mon, 25 Nov 2024 08:00:00 GMT

Nantucket Sleigh Ride. John Stobart.

A Chapel In The High Mountains

Sun, 24 Nov 2024 16:00:00 GMT

A Chapel in the High Mountains. Hugo Hodiener.

The Flood

Sun, 24 Nov 2024 15:05:00 GMT

The Flood. Paul Merwart, 1889.

They Died To Make The Desert Bloom

Sun, 24 Nov 2024 08:00:00 GMT

“They died to make the desert bloom”

Hoover Dam bas relief.

Bell Labs Holmdel Complex

Sat, 23 Nov 2024 16:00:00 GMT

Bell Labs Holmdel Complex. New Jersey.

Winged Figures Of The Republic

Sat, 23 Nov 2024 13:56:00 GMT

Winged Figures of the Republic. By Oskar Hansen at Hoover Dam, 1937.

Places to Intervene in Systems

Fri, 22 Nov 2024 16:45:00 GMT

Gordon Brander explores Meadows’s list of intervention points in systems, from her excellent book Thinking in Systems:

All systems are fictions that we project onto our environment for our own instrumental purposes. Those purposes are determined by our mindset, by the way we see the world around us.

If the pursuit of our instrumental goals results in catastrophe, perhaps it is possible to change our mindset, the mindset or paradigm out of which the system — its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters — arises?

Her list is a useful set of reminders for how we can modify complex systems to tilt them toward desired goals.

Dana Gioia on Beauty

Thu, 21 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT

“Truth is beauty, and beauty, truth” —John Keats

I’ve been on a kick lately trying to understand what informs the concept of “taste.” When we say someone “has good taste,” what do we mean?

I’ll have more to say on taste later. But this thread of curiosity led me to reading on aesthetics and what constitutes beauty. Sir Roger Scruton’s Beauty is a great introduction to the subject, one I just finished earler this week.

In this short lecture, poet laureate Dana Gioia investigates the subject.

Is “beauty” a physical characteristic? Does it just mean something that “looks nice”? Something deeper is going on here that’s worth exploring.

Experiencing beauty happens in 4 stages:

The arresting of attention
The thrill of pleasure
A heightened perception of the shape or meaning of things
The moment vanishes

Initially we’re attracted to an unstateable something about the beautiful. The work of art, the pleasant mountain valley, the few lines from CS Lewis that get stuck in our brains. Then comes the pleasurable sensation; we want to stay in that place and absorb it. We notice something about the beautiful thing that seems to connect to a richer underlying reality — as when a mathematical fractal resembles the braided river or the veins in our bodies. Then before we can capture it the moment disappears, leaving us wanting to find it once again.

He also discusses the tension between beauty and practicality, suggesting that beauty has the power to transform and inspire, fulfilling a deep human longing.

Where You Work Shapes How You Work

Wed, 20 Nov 2024 07:18:00 GMT

Where You Work Shapes How You Work

Our levels of productivity, creativity, and inspiration have an intimate, hard-to-articulate connection to our environments. And we all have different predilections — quiet vs. noisy, calm vs. bustling, light vs. dark. Each quality creates a climate that pulls something different out of us.

Our surroundings shape how we work, yet we also have the power to choose and to mold them ourselves.

Fantasy Landscape With Buildings By A Lagoon

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 16:37:00 GMT

Fantasy Landscape with Buildings by a Lagoon. Francesco Guardí, 1790.

Bell Telephone System

Mon, 18 Nov 2024 11:11:00 GMT

Map of the Bell Telephone System , 1909.

Bird Absolutely Locked In

Fri, 08 Nov 2024 16:00:00 GMT

Bird absolutely locked in. Charlie Parker and Tommy Potter, 1947.

The Count And The Duke

Fri, 08 Nov 2024 14:16:00 GMT

The Count and the Duke. Count Basie and Duke Ellington.

The Dome Of Sta Maria Della Salute

Wed, 06 Nov 2024 16:00:00 GMT

The dome of Sta Maria Della Salute. Venice.

Bernini In Marble

Wed, 06 Nov 2024 11:48:00 GMT

Bernini in marble.

Canyon De Chelly

Tue, 05 Nov 2024 16:00:00 GMT

Canyon de Chelly. Edgar Alwin Payne, c. 1916.

Cotopaxi

Tue, 05 Nov 2024 08:00:00 GMT

Cotopaxi. Frederic Edwin Church, 1862.

Natures Barbell Strategy

Mon, 04 Nov 2024 16:00:00 GMT

Nature's Barbell Strategy

Evolution has generated two opposed modes for organisms to find fitness:

r-selection is about speed: rapid reproduction, fast growth, many offspring

K-selection is about carrying capacity: slow development, robust fitness, few offspring

What can we learn to harness both approaches in work and life?

The Colossi Of Memnon In A Sandstorm

Mon, 04 Nov 2024 13:22:00 GMT

The Colossi of Memnon in a Sandstorm. Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach, 1896.

Gratitude And Resilience

Thu, 17 Oct 2024 16:14:00 GMT

Gratitude and Resilience

Gratitude is how we maintain the fragile, critical systems of relationships that come to our rescue when things go bad. Strong institutions get that way through the effortful work of the grateful to nurture them on.