A Rant About “Technology” (2005)
Ursula K. Le Guin on the presence of technology in her work
Ursula K. Le Guin on the presence of technology in her work
Writing requires thinking, don't let an AI do the thinking for you.
Front-end antics and typographic mischievousness
Pool your money and give your friends batteries that lower their electricity bills and keep essential devices running during outages.
I've befriended some of the most thoughtful, brilliant, curious, eccentric, and sincere people I've ever met in the tech industry. Many of my dearest friends...
What the web looks like when you subscribe to 2,000 RSS feeds.
I just attended my thirtieth college reunion, and there were some clear trends among my mid-life peers. First among them: grave concern for what AI means for our future and for the future of our (broadly young adult) kids.
There was a joke at the time that although the National Security Agency had opened up in recent years and started taking their defensive role more seriously, the one aspect of cryptography which they would never discuss publicly was side channel attacks — and this itself constituted a side channel, revealing the…
Elite circles have their own cultural knowledge. So does the bottom 40%. Here's some of mine.
I'm driven by the belief that we must not sacrifice our humanness for technology.
How electrons flowing through billions of microscopic switches etched into silicon become arithmetic, memory, and the software you use every day.
You can tell how tired someone is of the always-online life pretty easily. When they get home, watch the distance between the phone and the body. The people who love being connected never let the thing leave them be it pocket, palm, face-down next to the fork. Everyone
On the responsibility of engineers
Code is read more than written, code is run more than read. I think this line of thought can be extended beyond code-writing, and used as a rule of thumb to identify problems and make decisions.
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
These past few weeks, I’ve been conducting interviews, and I often open with “make sure you articulate your thoughts out loud, so I can follow along with your thinking”. This is primarily because I…
Why not benchmark with physical experiments?
Every one of us depends on others; the only difference is how visible that dependence is.
I touched "every" OS so you don't have to
This week has been… eventful. And when I say eventful, I can say this has been the funniest pentest I have ever been on in my life. Let me tell you about it!
TLDR: Please remove @gmail.com as my primary email address and substitute removed . I will try to respond to email sent to @gmail.com but no guarantees.
Let’s Explore a Little Math
If you often get static electricity shocks when touching your laptop or your office chair, or your monitor goes black when you stand up, this may interest you.
Yesterday, I timeboxed 45 minutes to write down every single rule of good social skills I could come up with, wrote a tweet thread, then it went somewhat viral !
John Addison (1930–2025) died March 7, 2025, at the age of 95. He was my PhD advisor at UC Berkeley, and I count myself extraordinarily lucky to have worked under his guidance. My condolences go ou…
I just finished Oliver Sacks’ excellent Everything in Its Place. In it, he mentioned as an aside that the Ginkgo biloba tree is hundreds of millions of years old, and its phenotype has been practically frozen since then – a living fossil.
Who else hates putting their hands on an icy metal laptop after it's been riding outside in your cold backpack? Here's a one-line solution.
"Cognitive debt," Claude Code, and the negative space around AI
The pale is growing
Documenting my journey switching away from Mac to a Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14