Essays
Thinking out loud.
Not tutorials. Slower pieces on the things I keep turning over — AI and the shape it's giving the world, how we build and learn, the odd bit of economics or product thinking. I write these to ask better questions, not to sound certain.
Filter by topic below; multi-part reads are gathered into series. Shorter, build-focused posts live in Writing.
Not sure where to start?
Judgment Calls
Building & Craft2-part series · 11 min in total
- 01Clarity Out of AmbiguityIn 2011 Google tore up its org chart and, almost by accident, worked out how to measure growth properly. The framework that came out of it is the clearest thing I've found for describing what actually changes as a career grows — mine included.
- 02The Eigen QuestionMost decisions drown in twenty reasonable-sounding questions. Good judgment, I've come to think, is mostly the skill of finding the one question underneath all of them — the one whose answer doesn't move no matter how the argument gets reframed.
Deep Roots
Systems & Tech4-part series · 39 min in total
- 01The First Bit Was a SyllableAround 2,200 years ago an Indian scholar named Piṅgala set out to count the rhythms of poetry — and on the way invented binary numbers, the Fibonacci sequence, Pascal's triangle, and a fast way to raise numbers to powers. Here is how counting verse built the logic your phone runs on, explained from scratch.
- 02The First Program Was a GrammarTwenty-five centuries ago, Pāṇini described the whole of Sanskrit as a formal system of some four thousand rules — a machine that generates a language. It is, by any honest reckoning, the ancestor of the programming language, the compiler, and the way we teach machines to handle words. Here is how a grammar became the first algorithm.
- 03The Oldest GameThe most ancient thing humans made that you can still sit down and do today isn't a tool or a text — it's a game. A cheerful romp from a 4,600-year-old board dug out of the ground to the day a machine played a move no human would dare, and what our endless love of play says about us.
- 04God's DiceHumans threw dice for five thousand years before working out what chance even was — and it turns out we still hadn't finished the job. A grounded tour of the difference between 'unpredictable' and 'truly random,' Einstein's famous objection, the experiment that settled it, and what Google's Willow chip actually demonstrated in December 2024.
Notes from the Winter
AI & Society5-part series · 67 min in total
- 01The Good WinterWe seem to be living through a Fourth Turning — a once-in-a-lifetime crisis season. Here is the case, built on data rather than dread, that it is the best possible time to build, learn, and help each other — and how to actually use it.
- 02Something in the AirThe uncanny feeling that ideas arrive to many of us at the same moment is real — and it is not mystical. A grounded tour of multiple discovery, the adjacent possible, the collective brain, synchronization, and what the algorithm is doing to all of it.
- 03Seeing Early, Thinking SidewaysA step-by-step, science-backed field manual for the two skills every founder secretly needs: spotting the ripe idea before the crowd, and reaching the one nobody else can see. With three thousand years of examples — from Vedic-era India to the modern feed — and a recipe you can actually run.
- 04More LightIn 1865 a young economist noticed something strange: making coal-burning more efficient made Britain burn far more coal, not less. That paradox is usually quoted as a warning. Read it forward into the age of cheap intelligence and it becomes, I think, the most hopeful thing you can say about what comes next.
- 05The Last InventionIn 1965 a mathematician wrote that the first truly intelligent machine would be the last invention humanity ever needed to make. Sixty years on, that sentence is worth taking seriously — not as prophecy, but as the honest, unsettled, genuinely fascinating question it actually is.
The Temperature of Thought
Heat measurably dulls the mind — and as another record summer bakes Europe and the world, that small fact opens onto some very large questions. About history and who got to be curious, about the room we're cooling while we cook the planet, and, in the end, about what conditions a good life and a clear mind actually need.
The weight of a thought
Every clever answer an AI gives has a physical cost — electricity, water, heat, metal. Here is the real footprint of modern AI, why training is only half the story, and how progress and a livable planet might actually share a future.
The Programmable Network
Systems & Tech3-part series · 12 min in total
- 01Your phone network is quietly getting a brainFor a century it was a dumb, reliable pipe. In one decade it learned to take instructions. In the next, it starts to think. Here's the whole arc — no telco degree required.
- 02The network grew superpowers (and handed you the remote)Knowing where a device really is. Sensing that a SIM was just swapped. Promising a fast connection on demand. These used to be telco magic. Now they're a function call — and there's a 'universal remote' making it work everywhere.
- 03When AI holds the keysGive an AI agent API keys and every superpower becomes a door it can open — fast, tireless, and at machine scale. What I took from apidays, why most breaches are gloriously unexotic, and how not to get robbed.
The economy runs on stories (and now the machines write them)
Robert Shiller's uncomfortable idea: markets move on contagious stories, not just fundamentals. Add knowledge representation, the randomness of what goes viral, and the algorithms now amplifying it all — and you get the real operating system of the modern economy.
Learn to fall early
We are born fearless problem-solvers — thousands of falls a day, and we call it learning to walk. Then we spend years training it out. A case for taking real risks early, while they are still cheap.
Who is AI actually for?
The most interesting question about a technology is rarely what it can do. It is who it is for.
We keep asking if AI is smart. I keep asking if we are being wise.
Intelligence is a property of the machine. Wisdom is a property of the people building it. We have spent far more on the first.
What we lose if we stop struggling
AI is brilliant at handing us the answer. I keep wondering what happens to us when the struggle to find it goes away.