Brian Wiesner

there is a third way, the Goldilocks Zone : we get increasingly smart and capable helpers without eliminating the need for humans, or birthing beings that have any desire to eliminate humans.

That is the implication of agreeing with Leopold’s curve but disagreeing with the mapping. It’s what you get when you believe in straight lines on a graph... See more

The fundamental message of marketing must change from "we want your money" to "we share your interests".

People choose places; places shape people; people go on to shape other people. We should be thoughtful about the kind of transformation we opt into.

Death and Life became the most famous book on urban planning. It is fundamentally about the natural origins and benefits of “the spontaneous order.” Written a third of a century after Euclid normalized centralized planning, Death and Life rejected that precedent, arguing that throughout human history, cities had been built on spontaneity, with... See more

A very common trope is to treat LLMs as if they were intelligent agents going out in the world and doing things. That’s just a category mistake. A much better way of thinking about them is as a technology that allows humans to access information from many other humans and use that information to make decisions. We have been doing this for as long... See more

To state the obvious: it is very hard to work a full-time job and also write a book. I cannot imagine doing both of those things while also raising a family. You have to carve out time in the mornings and nights, and ideally block weekends because the best thing to have as a writer IMO—with novels, especially—are extended blocks of time. The brain... See more

Spain's fix for a lonely planet