To subscribe to new posts, follow the RSS feed for my site. If you don’t know how to use RSS, don’t worry, that link has instructions. I strongly recommend using RSS to subscribe to all your favourite websites.
If you’re a sicko who actually prefers e-mail, I have a Substack where I announce new essays. Just essays though, not other writing like riffs and notes. So I don’t particularly recommend it over RSS.
The list below consists of long content made up of essays and notes that I hope will always be worth reading. Essays are the bold items.
Personal
i feel dizzy (again) is my most popular personal essay on Substack. It’s about reactions to AI progress (boring!), so I recommend you read my other pages instead. I’m particularly fond of Things I Do To Procrastinate and my Screenshots page.
Recs
Of all the collections I’ve curated, I’m particularly proud of my (hand-saved) Twitter Bookmarks and mixture of mine and others’ Aphorisms. There rest are quite good too:
Design
I coined the term Interface Anxiety, and it continues to be one of my main focuses when designing apps. Software Design Ideas I Dislike is a good “via negativa” description of my overall approach to design.
Software
I am a self-taught programmer (insofar as learning from people’s writing can be called “self-taught”) and approach it as a very serious hobbyist. I’ve historically been very interested in Local-first Software and adjacent topics like Databases (duh).
Websites
This is my field of professional expertise. I started out in 2022, and I now consider myself world class at website-making. So, of course, I have opinions on things like Better Blog Design.
Advice
Unfortunately, Bad Advice has proved to be one of my most popular posts. To clarify, I do mean it when I say you shouldn’t do these things — I only list them because I’ve seen them work out well.
Actually helpful advice can be found in Pro Tips and the Project Management notebook.
Epistemics
What do your ideas want from you? and Form is Fake are both among my most successful essays on Substack. They both discuss what I’ve started calling “the tyranny of ideas” over the human mind.
AI
Agents Need Work Data was co-written with Anjali Shrivastava. We still stand by most of it, but it needs some editing re. some of the specifics (e.g. labs seem to be relying on data & environment vendors more than their own product traces).
Economics
I like thinking about tradeoffs, coordination mechanisms, and the exchange of value. Simple as.
- The problem of too much money, on Substack
Pedagogy
I’ve been “self-taught” at everything I do; I can’t remember a time I wasn’t learning about how to learn.
- Practice, with Nihal Sahu