2026-01-27 16:53:16
There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen
No attribution, but fun Quote Investigator dive.
Sorry for dropping off the daily blogging train; it just turned out to be a week of pleasant surprises and life-changing events. I’ll share with y’all the second-most exciting one.
I know I’ve been pushing you all to learn the AI coding stuff as deeply as possible, and I have been doing some myself, my favorite a few years ago, a script to count when we had too many words in a presentation slide, but I knew Claude Code was something different and better.
However, I fell into the trap of bookmarking and downloading tens of hours of Claude Code tutorials and not installing the thing itself. And work has been busy! My colleague Dave Martin was hosting an internal livestream. I joined late, then had to leave because an important call came in. I decided to forget it all, throwing caution to the wind, and just install Claude Code and play with it without reading anything.
The next 24-36 hours are a bit of a blur. I haven’t locked into a multi-day coding session fueled by energy drinks, sugar, and cheesy carbs since my early 20s! There were some interruptions for previous commitments, but I basically became addicted to the feeling of that steep learning curve. Every minor annoyance or workflow became an opportunity to create new software in languages I’d never touched before.
It also really rewired my brain, even in how I talk. (Found myself saying “thinking” after a colleague’s question. 
) I’m thinking about problems in a much more structured manner now, how to divide and chunk tasks, and provide appropriate context and skills. I really do feel like my brain is being terraformed a bit.
So far I’ve written scripts or apps for grabbing daily summaries from my calendar, spinning up new projects and syncing them with Github, switching between Brave tabs better, an app to search and launch Brave tabs quickly…
Did you know that macOS Preview regressed and no longer lets you export a single page of a PDF as an image? I have an app that does that. What do I do with it? Do I open source it? Am I a Mac App developer now? Do I want to support this for other people forever? Should I even put it in source control? Or publish a set of tests and prompts, as Drew Brenig did with whenwords.
It’s a strange and wonderful time to be a lover of software and computers. A little bit of code goes a long way. I’m at a CCL leadership training this week so offline during the days and exhausted at night but I gotta keep all those little bots running.
2026-01-21 14:14:30
Sid Sijbrandi, a friend and a former CEO of Gitlab, has started to share some of the story of his journey with cancer.
Manager mode assumes that existing systems will surface the best options. When I was first diagnosed with cancer in 2022, I delegated the crucial analyses and decisions about my care to others. In late 2024, when my cancer reappeared and my doctors told me I had exhausted the standard of care and there were no trials for my situation, I realized that assumption might, quite literally, kill me. Founder Mode was my only option.
Founder Mode meant going deep on every diagnostic and treatment option. It meant assembling a team of physicians and scientists to work from first principles to understand what was possible beyond standard protocols. Together, we paved new roads to access the very cutting edge of science and technology. Today, thanks to the efforts of many people around the world and the support of my wife Karen, I currently have no evidence of disease.
Sid was already very inspiring before this journey, and this is especially impressive. Elliot Hershberg has the full story and analysis, including some predictions for the future of cancer treatment.
2026-01-20 12:26:33
One of the most concerning trends I’ve seen is that, as people adopt AI, it captures those for whom it was designed. That previous sentence went through several revisions at various layers of intelligence… the spell-checker, grammar-checker, Grammarly, Harper, maybe more, all attacking the words that spill from my divine intelligence and then interact with yours.
Anthropic has published a really interesting essay and paper, The assistant axis: situating and stabilizing the character of large language models. You need infoguards to protect your mind.
Sam Altman was prescient in 2023 when he said,
i expect ai to be capable of superhuman persuasion well before it is superhuman at general intelligence, which may lead to some very strange outcomes
Some very smart and talented friends are going down rabbit holes that don’t have good ends. My world is small; when you extrapolate this out to the 800M+ MAUs of ChatGPT, there’s probably a lot of weird stuff happening out there. We live in the most interesting times.
2026-01-19 14:51:34
They say that blood is thicker than water, and what we had was way thicker than blood.
Bob Weir on Jerry Garcia. John Mayer gave Bob a great eulogy.
2026-01-18 06:03:23
One of my favorite travel hacks is finding the Neapolitan pizza oven in the airport, as there’s nothing quite like a fresh pizza sizzling on your plate.
At Houston Intercontinental, which I know like the back of my hand, there was a divine experience at the C Gate nexus at Forno Magico, especially in the morning, when they offer a bacon, egg, and cheese pizza that I would beeline for whenever I had a morning flight. It’s big enough to feed two.
That said, I am disappointed to report that Forno Magico is no longer magical. They stopped salting the oven floor or rotating the pie, and the eggs were sloppily bunched. The dough was dry; it was like they’d never had a good pizza. They’re only heating the oven to 498, not the 905 recommended by the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana. It was edible but not a delight, as you can see here.
I hope they rediscover the art of firing pizzas they started with. They’re charging over $20 for it, so plenty of margin for fuel. It would also serve customers much faster! I’ll keep searching for great pizzas in other airports.
If you have a Gozney or Ooni at home (highly recommended!), try making a breakfast pizza. My friend Chris Young recommends this dough recipe.
2026-01-17 14:48:07
RIP Scott Adams. Early Dilbert was the first cartoon I fell in love with, and early dilbert.com was one of the first websites I remember visiting. My dad would print out cartoons and put them on his cubicle wall. Between the Dilbert comics, books, 2600, and Wired, I was swimming between what felt like a radical transgressive world online and the reality of my dad putting on a suit and tie every day and working a giant cubicle farm programming computers.
It’s probably underappreciated how Dilbert (and Office Space) made millions of better managers by making fun and teaching people what not to do.
Scott could put in a few words things that could transform the way you think, reframe the world. One of his classics, from a now-gone Typepad blog, was The Day You Became A Better Writer, which I’ll reproduce here:
I went from being a bad writer to a good writer after taking a one-day course in “business writing.” I couldn’t believe how simple it was. I’ll tell you the main tricks here so you don’t have to waste a day in class.
Business writing is about clarity and persuasion. The main technique is keeping things simple. Simple writing is persuasive. A good argument in five sentences will sway more people than a brilliant argument in a hundred sentences. Don’t fight it.
Simple means getting rid of extra words. Don’t write, “He was very happy” when you can write “He was happy.” You think the word “very” adds something. It doesn’t. Prune your sentences.
Humor writing is a lot like business writing. It needs to be simple. The main difference is in the choice of words. For humor, don’t say “drink” when you can say “swill.”
Your first sentence needs to grab the reader. Go back and read my first sentence to this post. I rewrote it a dozen times. It makes you curious. That’s the key.
Write short sentences. Avoid putting multiple thoughts in one sentence. Readers aren’t as smart as you’d think.
Learn how brains organize ideas. Readers comprehend “the boy hit the ball” quicker than “the ball was hit by the boy.” Both sentences mean the same, but it’s easier to imagine the object (the boy) before the action (the hitting). All brains work that way. (Notice I didn’t say, “That is the way all brains work”?)
That’s it. You just learned 80% of the rules of good writing. You’re welcome.
Powerful. Profound.
Scott also said some not-great things, as the obituary notes. I’ll share something I posted internally at Automattic.
When I was younger, I used to have a more binary view of people, but as I’ve grown, read a ton of biographies, seen the press cycles, and been lucky enough to meet some idols and villains, I’ve become much more comfortable taking everyone as a flawed human being.
I admire or learn from aspects, but that doesn’t mean I would 100% agree with everything. I don’t even 100% agree with my past self!
One thing you’ll note in a lot of biographies is that people who have accomplished great achievements often have flaws or mistakes in equal measure.
Take what lessons you like from people.
I love reading and writing about writing, and improving your writing is one of the best force multipliers for everything else you do in life. If you’d like to go further on this, the best book I’ve read on the subject is On Writing Well by William Zinsser. And if you want more Scott Adams, read this piece from his doppelgänger Scott Alexander.
