Process

In other words, every new technology promises better clarity, yet its essence is determined by the noise it produces. The friction of limits is what gives a technology its character, so when a system becomes too smooth, too all-encompassing, or too accommodating, it stops having a signature at all. Here’s Eno again from earlier this year:

“I can see... See more

As LLMs improve, they’re becoming adept at deciphering our incoherent ramblings. You can throw a jumbled idea at them—“I want something that does this, kind of”—and they’ll figure out your real intention, delivering a workable starting point. It’s reminiscent of a parent interpreting a child’s babbling needs: it might sound fanciful, but it’s... See more

Whenever you’re debating what to do, explicitly ask yourself “what do I predict will happen if I choose option A?” and try to unroll the trajectory. Even if you think you’re already intuitively predicting the results of your choices, I’ve found it helps surprisingly much to be explicit—one of my manager role models asks me this (“what do you think... See more

I’ve noticed a lot of people underestimate their own taste, because they expect having good taste to feel like being very smart or competent or good at things. Unfortunately, I am here to tell you that, at least if you are similar to me, you will never feel smart, competent, or good at things; instead, you will just start feeling more and more like... See more

Over long periods of time spent in physical archives, you develop a holistic picture of a slice of history that is necessarily individual to you, as the researcher, because you can’t control or even fully understand what your brain finds interesting in a set of documents. They’re just ... interesting . Maybe not to anyone else, at first. But over... See more

I wouldn’t want an irregular AI in my bank app, but in a creative workflow, hallucinating feels like the point of it all.

As the tools evolve, the metaphors we use to understand them must also be updated. Herndon and Dryhurst describe this next phase as the move from sampling to spawning. Sampling was the logic of the 20th century. You took a slice of a record—a James Brown breakbeat, a horn stab from a jazz LP—and folded it into a new track. It was transformative,... See more

Take an Avoidance Inventory

We all have them — those seemingly simple tasks that keep migrating from one to-do list to the next: the overdue email response, the financial paperwork, the home repair project. These persistent items don’t just clutter our lists; they create invisible barriers to flow, weighing us down and preventing us from embracing... See more