Building this site with Claude Code
304 commits in a month. What happens when you rebuild a personal site through conversation with an AI collaborator.
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Everything I share — writing, short curated lists, and links. You can also find me on Threads.
The Authoritarian AI Crisis Has Arrived ✦ must read
This might low-key be one of the most consequential stories of the year. Not only because of the stakes, but because of how it has so effectively pushed Anthropic to the front page of the news day in and day out. They are taking the moral high ground, have the superior product, and are on a truly monumental run as a company. Good for them.
Why I'm Endorsing Texas Rep. James Talarico for U.S. Senate ✦
There’s an unpretentious genuineness in how he carries himself, and his deeply ingrained empathy—as reflected in his policy positions—is particularly attractive in these divided and ugly times we live in. Additionally, Talarico’s clear-eyed view of who some of the worst bad guys are (Billionaires and their elected servants) transcends party lines and is very good evidence that he “gets it.”
James Talarico Puts His Faith in Texas Voters ✦ must read
Talarico, still hot, suggested, “Let’s just say, ‘This is why everyone hates the Democratic Party.’ ”
The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis ✦ must read
Over the past fifty years, the U.S. economy built a giant rent-extraction layer on top of human limitations: things take time, patience runs out, brand familiarity substitutes for diligence, and most people are willing to accept a bad price to avoid more clicks. Trillions of dollars of enterprise value depended on those constraints persisting.
Taste for Makers ✦
Saying that taste is just personal preference is a good way to prevent disputes. The trouble is, it's not true. You feel this when you start to design things.
Machines of Loving Grace ✦
Prevention of Alzheimer’s. We’ve had a very hard time figuring out what causes Alzheimer’s (it is somehow related to beta-amyloid protein, but the actual details seem to be very complex). It seems like exactly the type of problem that can be solved with better measurement tools that isolate biological effects; thus I am bullish about AI’s ability to solve it. There is a good chance it can eventually be prevented with relatively simple interventions, once we actually understand what is going on. That said, damage from already-existing Alzheimer’s may be very difficult to reverse.
An ode to Foursquare
A few days ago, Josh Williams (co-founder of Gowalla, Foursquare's old competitor) posted something that finally pushed me to do a little tinkering with all this data.
How One Entrepreneur Used Customer Service to Disrupt a Traditional Industry ✦
Having been a mover himself, Popovic knows what movers like and don’t like. As a result, he resolved to create the best workplace for his team of movers by investing heavily in training, providing them with the best equipment and paying the most competitive wages. As Popovic says, “Our product is our people.”
Interest Is Everything ✦
When you’re procrastinating on a project, wondering why your outwardly successful career doesn’t feel as vibrant as it could, or feeling stuck on a difficult life-choice, it’s worth asking if you’ve forgotten the importance of building your days, as far as you’re able, around what actually interests you.
My Enneagram- 3, 6, 9 ✦
it can be hard to get real vulnerability from them, unless they will directly benefit from it. This is why Bill Clinton is my archetypal 3. “Blank gleam” is a 3 tell for me, an impersonal suavity.
My Enneagram- 4, 1, 7 ✦
4, 1, and 7 are referred to as the “frustration” trio, or triad if you’re fancy. These types all have an idealized vision of how things should be, and experience constant frustration at the gap between their ideal and reality. The 4 tries to close it by cultivating specialness, in themselves and their experience. The 1 tries to close this gap through perfection and correction. The 7 tries to close it by reframing everything as positive and seeking constant novelty.
There are nine wolves inside of you ✦
People say you know you’ve found your type when you feel mortified by its description
This Time It’s Not Fatigue, but Disconnection ✦
*It’s like I’ve been playing this game called Tech for the past 30+ years of my life and I just don’t feel engaged anymore, but not because I got bored of the game — like it happens with many regular games. It’s not boredom or fatigue. It’s more because the game has gone through a series of updates that have ultimately made it so much worse.*
The problem with the 40 hour workweek ✦
Sitting around doing meaningless work, feeling as if you are wasting a third of your day that drains you (making it difficult to want to do anything in the second third), which makes you want to stay up late to “get the most out of your day,” which ruins the last third.
No, we won’t have a video call for that! ✦
Nothing has as dire an impact on productivity as poor communications.
Enough ✦
Doing more of the same is easy. It’s self-reinforcing. But it can also be a trap.
How to Think Clearly in a World of Noise ✦
When you can’t express what you mean, it’s usually because you don’t know what you mean.
The Internet Was Doomed From the Start ✦
While having so much internet real estate in the hands of just a few slumlords is a big problem, it’s not the *main* issue. It’s that these companies actively encourage people to share *whatever* they want, with little regard to truth, public health, or safety — all because outrage is the best way to maintain viewership which leads to more ads and more product sales.
The Goon Squad ✦
These were porn *shrines.* In hindsight, they were also leading indicators of some of the very serious psychological damage the lockdowns had wrought on the world. Those early-COVID images of depopulated city streets—these were their precise corollary. They showed you where the people went. Or where at least some of them did, likely the ones who were not exactly models of stability and robust mental health to begin with. Even so, it seemed beyond dispute that sixty years ago some of these gooners would have been fathers. Small-business owners. Dependable men in hats riding slow commuter trains, their mindscapes perfumed with thoughts of stocks, bonds, lawn care. Well, what could you do? Certain social systems had failed, certain historical trend lines had converged, and now we had these guys to deal with.
Yes, Things Are Pretty Bad Right Now. ✦
the honest truth, as I see it, is that things are actually pretty bad right now. Nearly everything in the political arena — the candidates, the policies, the extremism, the AI slop, the punditry, the writing, the thinking, the principles — it all seems to be getting worse in basically every meaningful way.
Bad Ideas Are Fun ✦
The next time you're coming up with ideas, tell yourself, *Forget about good ideas, let's come up with a list of ten bad ideas.* The dumber the better! I bet you’ll find that easy.
Honkish ✦
Presence also extended beyond simple typing into features like reactions. Double-tapping a friend's chat bubble placed a heart exactly where you tapped, along with a faint animated circle and a simultaneous haptic felt by both users. This visually (and physically) pinpointed precisely what you were reacting to and when, creating the sense of a truly shared space.
Not All Growth Is Created Equal ✦
There is a sickness, a striving, that pollutes the purity of what building a business should be. Because growth attracts headlines and seduces investors, companies over-optimize on growth metrics in their early years. In the end, it ruins them.
Taste Is the New Intelligence ✦
In an age where AI can generate anything, the question is no longer "can it be made?" but "is it worth making?" The frontier isn’t volume—it’s *discernment*. And in that shift, taste has become a survival skill.
That Dropped Call With Customer Service It Was on Purpose. ✦
Taken separately, these hassles and indignities were funny anecdotes. Together, they suggested something unreckoned with. And everyone agreed: It was all somehow getting worse. In 2023 (the most recent year for which data are available), the National Customer Rage Survey showed that American consumers were, well, full of rage. The percentage seeking revenge—revenge!—for their hassles had tripled in just three years.
So, About That Study on Chatbots and Using Our Brains... ✦
using LLMs is making you dumb, it’s that there’s a societal deficit of caring about both the value of learning and knowledge, or following our rules.
Every’s Master Plan ✦
There’s a tremendous friction that arises when you don’t allow yourself to do what you really want to do with your life. You make a lot of halfway decisions to negotiate your competing priorities: what you want, and what you *want* to want.
I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is (Again) ✦
Unfortunately, very few people consume media this way. And so the protests follow the choose-your-own-adventure quality of a fractured media ecosystem, where, depending on the prism one chooses, what’s happening in L.A. varies considerably.
The Gentle Singularity ✦
In the most important ways, the 2030s may not be wildly different. People will still love their families, express their creativity, play games, and swim in lakes.
The 2016 Election ✦
His racist, isolationist policies would divide our country, and American innovation would suffer. But the man himself is even more dangerous than his policies. He's erratic, abusive, and prone to fits of rage.
May we all be universal philosophers
On knowledge, curation, and the hope for modern polymaths in an age of information overload.
Shortlist #9 – Weird internet corners
Ten more things today. Mostly weird corners of the internet I've been enjoying.
Unnamed Document ✦
it’s worth deliberately and consciously *practicing* disappointing others, letting the associated feelings sink into your bones, and generally spending time hanging out in the space of ‘being a disappointment’.
How to Claim Your Life- D.H. Lawrence on the Most Important Choice Within ✦
Only a fool or an egomaniac would deny that chance shapes the vast majority of life. The time, place, culture, family, body, brain, and biochemistry we are born into, the people who cross our path, the accidents that befall us — these dwarf in consequence the sum total of our choices. Still, our choices are the points of light that flicker against the opaque immensity of chance to illuminate our lives with meaning, just as stars, all the billions of them, comprise a mere 0.4% percent of a universe made mostly of dark energy and dark matter, and yet those same sparse stars made everything we know and are.
Henry Miller’s 11 Commandments of Writing and His Daily Creative Routine ✦
Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.
How to Think ✦
I believe that in this age, at a time when we get inundated with information from all directions, the ability to think is the most important skill we have.
Stay Right Here. danoshinsky.com ✦
I keep thinking about this line from poet Andrea Gibson in their book, “You Better Be Lightning”:
Welcome to the Future ✦
That was the future *I* grew up expecting — a neon-drenched, mostly earthbound world where humans would mingle with robots, escape into digital fantasies, and modify their bodies. Instead of bold space explorers firing ray guns at alien conquerors, the heroic figures of my fantasies were hackers and street samurai, battling the nefarious plots of shadowy corporations, insane billionaires, and dystopian surveillance states.
Why You Should Get Lost More Often ✦
[A project] is about making a living, and it's about finding fulfillment, but it's also about having fun.
Cosmic Maelstrom ✦
we've decided to call this prototype-building phase *Cosmic Maelstrom*. Patrick mentioned that what we're doing reminds him of how NASA's space exploration, which might seem outlandish, even pointless, can actually lead (and has led) to unexpected discoveries that benefit our lives on earth (such as the memory foam that's in my pillow––*thank you, NASA!*). Obviously we're not comparing what we're doing to NASA, but it's fun to imagine ourselves as space explorers! Besides, *Cosmic Maelstrom* just sounds cool.
Exceptional People Are Wonderful and I’d Like to Have More of Them ✦
We often conflate being exceptional with being lucky—born rich, connected, or privileged—but hey, did you know less than 7% of the variation in SAT scores can be explained by family income?
How Brazil Built a World-Beating Aircraft Manufacturer ✦
Embraer was founded as a majority owned state company, with its founders coming from both ITA and DCTA. The company understood early on that it would need to focus on a niche product and said initial product would be the EMB-110, a small commuter plane for both military and civilian use that could operate well in areas with poor infrastructure, as was the case in Brazil.
On Impact & on What We Should Do With Our Lives ✦
So what should we do with our lives? I wrote recently that I’m probably literally the worst person in the world to be asking this question, but my conclusion– at least for now– is pretty straightforward:
The Golden Sardine ✦
Fascism is, in my estimation, a direct linear function of us vs. them.
Date night in the time of parenting ✦
This, I tell Lauren, this very thing - the wide open expanse to think my thoughts without needing to respond or reprimand or worry - is what feels so nice.
The Echoes and Rhymes of 1920s Paris in Austin Today ✦
"Austin combines three elements," I explained. "Modern Silicon Valley, 1950s Detroit, and 1920s Paris. Digital tech, physical and industrial innovation at scale, and a mixture of creatives and intellectuals."
The Imperfectionist- Three ideas for turbulent times ✦
But “if we can recognise that change and uncertainty are basic principles,” as the futurist and environmentalist Hazel Henderson put it, “we can greet the future… with the understanding that we do not know enough to be pessimistic.”
Tim Ferriss- What Might This Look Like if It Were Easy ✦
It’s a question of ‘Where do you spend your life energy?’ Not ‘Where do you make the most money?’
How Chatbots Could Spark the Next Big Mental Health Crisis ✦
Heavy use of ChatGPT was correlated with increased loneliness, emotional dependence, and reduced social interaction, the studies found.