It gets under your skin — I pour myself another cup of coffee: two scoops into the Aeropress, a gentle pour of boiling water, a quick stir. I leave the plastic stirrer in the tube like a tombstone while the water percolates through the grounds. Quiet mornings are hard to come by. I had a conversation…

There’s no world where nationalists get what they want. — While I don’t think the guy who runs racist factories is necessarily the right person to buy a prominent social media company in order to “save democracy”, he’s right about one thing: if Twitter is to truly be a public square, the algorithm needs to be open sourced. Over the…

Not everything has to be a business. — I don’t think the web could happen again. A public-minded developer, operating in a public service research institution, built an open knowledge-base with no eye on profit or even productizing it. Because of its openness and simplicity, it spread to other like-minded researchers, and then beyond. It wasn’t a product…

Using the Yerkes-Dodson Law to craft a better, calmer life. — It’s no secret that I’ve been pretty stressed out. Someone I trust said that my writing lately has given the impression of “a man on the edge”. I think of it slightly differently — there’s a lot going on and I feel like I’m dealing with it in good humor…

The internet, community, and finally being yourself — I was always a pretty good kid: good-natured, good in school, imaginative, and curious. I’d get up early every day to draw comic books before school; during the breaks between lessons on the school playground, I’d pretend I was putting on plays for astronauts. Afterwards, I’d muck about on our…

Instead of a review of the year, let’s look ahead. — I don’t know that any of us need a review of the year. I’m also not up for making predictions for next year: I just don’t know what’s going to happen. So instead, here are some hopes I have for 2022. I don’t think they’re a sure thing by any…

A short story — I took a sip of my whiskey — synthetic, of course, nobody could get the real stuff anymore — and leaned back in my chair. The town was moving again, but our replacement suspension had worked its magic and everything was still. The only clue that we weren’t a fixed-place…

A short story about machine learning, the climate crisis, and change — The day we discovered our machine learning models were wrong was the day the earth began to catch fire and didn’t stop. For years, we’d been fighting brush fires every September and October. One year, they spread into the villages in the foothills. The next, the towns were under threat…

A short story about the future of work — I logged on and checked meeting notes for the last day. There were a few action items that I might need to deal with later if they were assigned to me, but mostly these were policy decisions that I needed to know about. I checked in with my goals for…