2025: My Year in Books
Reading kept me sane in 2025. Between two young children, a hectic travel schedule, and an industry in the throes of transformation, books were the constant.
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2025
2025: The Year I Became A Cyborg
In chemistry, activation energy is the minimum energy required to start a reaction. It's the barrier between potential and action, between "I could" and "I
Read essayThe Same Window For Everything
I've been thinking about how I use AI tools lately. They're clearly useful. What interests me is how the experience feels.
Read essayIlya Sutskever, the Scaling Hypothesis, and the Art of Talking Your Book
If you've just raised $3 billion to build a new god, it helps to question the faith in the old one.
Read essayIs Your AI Playing Roulette, Poker, or War?
On May 6, 2010, the Dow Jones dropped nearly 1,000 points in minutes. A trillion dollars vanished. And then the market bounced back. The whole thing took
Read essayPrompting Is All You Need
Agents are supposed to be the future of how we build AI software. I am not so sure.
Read essayWhy is LLM writing so weird?
AI writing is strange. The models continue to improve, yet they still struggle to cross the uncanny valley that separates AI-generated content from
Read essay5 Mental Models to understand the current AI Moment.
Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."AI usage is a terrible metric. Using AI for what? We end up with initiatives
Read essayBuilding a Truth-Seeking AI is a Sisyphean Endeavor
Elon Musk's goal for xAI's Grok model is to be "maximally truth-seeking." When Grok generated responses that were not aligned with Musk's ideas of Truth, he
Read essayReview: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies
by Elizier Yudkowsky and Nate Soares (2025)
Read essayWe’re DDoS-ing ourselves with AI Slop.
A DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack overwhelms a scarce resource with a flood of traffic, making it unavailable to its intended users.
Read essayHow do LLMs understand Gujarati?
One of my favorite ways of testing LLM-powered apps at Jeavio is to ask them questions in transliterated Hindi or Gujarati. I ask questions in Latin script
Read essayWhy do LLMs hallucinate?
Your palms are sweaty, knees are weak, arms are heavy - it’s not a rap battle but a test for a class which you may or may not have slept through for the
Read essayMIT Study – 95% of Generative AI Investments Fail (or do they?)
MIT released a study showing that 95% of organizations are getting zero return from their GenAI investments.
Read essayRoadtrippin’
Fifteen hours alone in a minivan will take your mind to strange places.Last weekend, as I drove from the Gulf Shore back home, mine wandered from gas station
Read essayA most pleasant parking lot
I have spent the last week in a small cabin that is slowly being devoured by carpenter bees. It has a small porch that looks out over big open space. Away to
Read essayDo agentic coding tools make us less productive?
Are agentic coding tools like Cursor making us less productive?
Read essayAgency and LLMs as Mentors
Cate Hall, writing on Substack, suggested that a way to do hard things is to ask "What would someone 10x better do?" and then do it. Reading the post made me
Read essayWhat is a vibe coder really?
20+ years ago, in my first job (junior business analyst - first class), I developed two critical skills: the ability to type fast and the ability to click
Read essayTo replit or not to replit ..
As a summer treat to myself, I spent a few bucks on replit to build a GoodReads style app - just so I could do a vibe-check on the current state of .. vibe
Read essayChatGPT rotting your brain? .. maybe?
“For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing,
Read essayAI, Friction, and Credibility
I got caught in a thunderstorm just outside the town of Lovettsville, VA on Friday. I pulled into a gas station and spent thirty minutes in the company of a
Read essayBuilding hyper-personalized AI Apps..
I'm a PowerPoint jockey and a very rusty programmer. Yet, over the weekend, I built something that had been an idea for years.
Read essayAI safety in 2025
Two years ago, the Future of Life Institute called for a 6-month pause in AI development due to fears of misalignment. Elon Musk and hundreds of other
Read essayAgentic coding tools and the problems of agency
Claude Code, OpenAI Codex and other agentic coding tools have a problem with .. “agency”.
Read essayDispatches from Mediocristan
LLMs are powerful tools - but credulous users risk being stuck in a dangerous place: Mediocristan, the land of the average.
Read essayThe AI Leadership Paradox: When Slowing Down Becomes a Competitive Advantage
AI tools are supercharging individual productivity—but are they also undermining team cohesion?
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