2025-09-13 20:30:35
We know these platforms are bad for us, so why are they still so widely used? They tell a compelling story: that all of your frantic tapping and swiping makes you a key part of a political revolution, or a fearless investigator, or a righteous protestor – that when you’re online, you’re someone important, doing important things during an important time.
But this, for the most part, is an illusion. In reality, you’re toiling anonymously in an attention factory, while billionaire overseers mock your efforts and celebrate their growing net worths.
After troubling national events, there’s often a public conversation about the appropriate way to respond. Here’s one option to consider: Quit using these social platforms. Find other ways to keep up with the news, or spread ideas, or be entertained. Be a responsible grown-up who does useful things; someone who serves real people in the real world.
2025-09-10 06:49:01
The programming language is called "cursed". It's cursed in its lexical structure, it's cursed in how it was built, it's cursed that this is possible, it's cursed in how cheap this was, and it's cursed through how many times I've sworn at Claude.
Absolutely dying at this.
2025-09-01 21:21:00
I’ve been listening to a lot of Donald Lawrence and the Tri-City Singers lately. Big, powerful gospel choir music feels pretty dang good right now.1
This gospel choir-fueled version of the U2 hit is something else.
I actually got to be part of a gospel choir in college, and it was one of the best experiences I had at the U. ↩
2025-08-31 20:44:24
Behind every seemingly effortless success lies a landscape of invisible battles: endless meetings, self-doubts, and moments of near-total collapse.
What truly separates people isn’t some magical talent, but an almost irrational commitment to pushing through pain that would break most people.
Everything around you—every convenience you enjoy, every space you inhabit, every service you use—was one person’s refusal to accept the world as it was.
The world progresses from a collection of irrational dedication.
Related: glory means nothing without sacrifice. Personally, I’m sometimes quick to want the glory without the sacrifice, which results in a fairly hallow glory.
2025-08-29 21:00:00
I’ve cut social media almost entirely out of my life (10/10 recommend), but I still drop into LinkedIn every so often. And honestly? I get exhausted fast by all the heavy, depressing posts.
Yes, there’s a lot of real suffering and injustice in the world. If you’re in the thick of it right now, I hope you’re able to keep hanging in there.
But if you’d like a little break from the bleak hellscape that is 21st-century journalism, check out the latest issue of Fix the News. Or, if you just want the highlights, here are a few that stood out to me:
Billions of people have gained clean water, sanitation, and hygiene in the last nine years. (Billions with a B.)
In the 12 months prior to June, Africa imported over 15GW of solar panels. Sierra Leone alone imported enough to cover 65% of its entire generating capacity.
Google estimates the median LLM prompt uses 0.24 Wh (about nine seconds of TV), emitting 0.03 g of CO₂ and five drops of water. (How many of you leave the TV on while doing chores?)
Wildfires are terrifying, but between 2002 and 2021, global burned area actually fell 26%.
A gentle reminder: news and social media are designed to keep you engaged by stoking fear, outrage, and anxiety. That cycle is hard to break, and a lot of my friends worry that looking away even for a moment means we will collectively slide into totalitarianism and ruin.
That’s a lot of weight to carry alone. Yes, we need to stay vigilant and hold leaders accountable, but we can’t live paralyzed by fear. There are countless good people stepping up, trying to make the world better (including many of you). Try to hold onto that truth alongside the bleak!
2025-08-24 00:03:51
Big O notation is a way of describing the performance of a function without using time. Rather than timing a function from start to finish, big O describes how the time grows as the input size increases. It is used to help understand how programs will perform across a range of inputs.
In this post I'm going to cover 4 frequently-used categories of big O notation: constant, logarithmic, linear, and quadratic. Don't worry if these words mean nothing to you right now. I'm going to talk about them in detail, as well as visualise them, throughout this post.
I have a minor in computer science, and I remember sitting through many explanations of the importance of Big O notation, yet it hasn’t really mattered much in my career until recently.
If you have heard of Big O but aren’t clear on how it works, give this post a shot. It contains a lot of great visualizations to help drive the point home.