Betterment

Back when he was still running Microsoft in the 1980s, Bill Gates would vanish into the woods for a week each year. No communication. No meetings - just

Selfish is easy. Short term is easy. Complacent is easy. Turning our head and ignoring the problem is easy. Going along to get along is easy. But easy isn’t the point. Better is. Challenging the st…

On what to do after work

Technology and the cost of convenience, explained.

In a mountain village in mid-20th-century Crete, a young shepherd creeps toward his neighbor’s flock before dawn to steal his goats. His heart races. Not because he fears capture. But because the raid represents his chance to prove he can thrive in uncertainty — to prove his manhood. A century earlier and half a world […]

Most of our activities can be seen as nested plans, to achieve nested goals.

From debugging nightmares to tech burnout, here’s how to survive the toughest challenges every coder faces.

Want to write a technical book? Think twice. Here is my story of self-publishing a software architecture book—from the initial decision through writing, pricing, and real sales numbers.

Buried in a talk on AI from an artist who is doing cutting-edge video work was the following nugget that entirely sums up the zeitgeist: “The tools are changing so fast that artists can’t keep up w…

The ramblings, thoughts, and channeling of Kin Lane.

It’s time to bring back the sewing kit to stretch out the life of your favorite togs.

// This was originally a Google Doc where I gathered hard-won life lessons; eventually I open sourced it. It got a great response, including a shoutout from Tim Ferriss, so here it is on Substack.

Note: Sinclair Lewis once said that one of the “two insults no human will endure” is “the assertion that he has no sense of humor” (the other is the “assertion that he has never known trouble”). Why is saying someone lacks a sense of humor such a damning indictment? Why do we like to think […]

Decisions are easy, choices are hard. A good decision is our best analysis of the facts, options and risks. If it’s too close to call, flip a coin, because it’s too close to call. On th…

Cursing is a part of human language that has existed for centuries, but can it be done in a gentlemanly manner? Let’s find out how to curse like a gentleman.

The product of software development is not code but a mental model, a theory: a specific way of explaining the world.

It’s better to generate some ideas, even if some don’t work, than to have no ideas because you’re afraid of being wrong.

It costs more than you think. Last month, I hit the old stock on the Avery labels in my office cabinet. I had a bunch of things to send out, and off they went. It turns out, who knew, that old labe…

Adulthood & productivity.

Hackaday was at Chaos Communication Congress last week, and it’s one of those big hacker events that leaves you with so much to think about that I’m still processing it. Just for scope, the 38th CC…

The California-based blogger Kevin Drum has a good post up today with the title Why don’t we do more prescribed burning? An explainer. There’s a lot of great detail in the post, but the bit t…

Every successful SNL sketch, every bestselling book, every landslide-winning candidate… every single one… had skeptics. Someone in the writer’s room, or on the editorial board or …

No.339 — Did OpenAI just solve abstract reasoning? ⊗ Kind and wicked learning environments ⊗ Foresight Timeline ⊗ DeepSeek outpaces tech giants

We finally saw Ridley Scott’s movie, "Napoleon" the other day. It’s a good movie, much better than we expected after hearing initial complaints that it

Almost all car crashes would be avoided if the driver were just going a bit slower. (That’s why it’s more accurate to call them “crashes” and not “accidents.”) T…

The $5M figure for the last training run should not be your basis for how much frontier AI models cost.

Sheep are not like ideas. 200 years ago, William Foster Lloyd began pointing out that if land is shared, ranchers will all have an incentive to overgraze their sheep–if they don’t, the thinki…

Listen now | Essential tools for deep work

We all know the classic Hero’s Journey. Made famous by Joseph Campbell.  Farm boy answers the call to adventure, faces many challenges, finally slays the