Posts

Every weather app happily tells me it will be 14°C and cloudy at 3pm. Not one of them answers the thing I actually care about: when should I go for a walk today? That question is why I built Walk When. It takes the weather forecast, gives every hour of the day a score from 0 to 100 for how pleasant it would be outside, and surfaces the best three to five windows. You don’t need to do the mental math yourself. The app does it for you. ...

We worry about AI turning evil, but the real danger is competence. The apocalypse won’t be an act of war; it will be an act of optimization. If you ask a sufficiently powerful machine to do something simple, it will destroy you to get it done. It creates a parking lot out of your house because it needs space. It uses your atoms because they are raw materials. Malice is unnecessary when you have efficiency. ...

How many piano tuners are there in Chicago? Physicist Enrico Fermi used to ask his students this. Most people freeze. They have no idea, so they assume the only way to know is to look it up. But you don’t need the exact answer. You just need to get close. This is what’s known as a Fermi problem. It’s a way to break a big, scary guess into small, easy ones. ...

We’re allergic to boredom. The second it creeps in, we reach for our phones. A five-second wait at a red light, a lull in conversation, the silence before a meeting starts, and modern life has trained us to escape all of it instantly. But boredom isn’t a problem to solve. It’s a feature, and it’s where creativity sneaks in. The Forgotten Value of Nothingness Think about kids. Hand them a stick and a patch of dirt and they’ll invent a game. The boredom isn’t a void, it’s a spark. Take away the stimulation and imagination has to come online. ...

Computational thinking sounds like something reserved for programmers. It’s really just structured problem-solving, the mental framework that keeps you moving when everything feels overwhelming. The pillars are simple: decomposition, pattern recognition, abstraction, and algorithms. Add two supporting mindsets, keeping it light and celebrating small wins, and you’ve got a way to handle almost any challenge without spiraling. Let’s walk through them with examples. Decomposition: Break Problems Until They’re Silly Not to Do Big problems paralyze us. Start a business. Change careers. Get healthy. The scope is so broad that doing nothing feels safer. ...

Engineers love clean architecture. It feels good to design something elegant, layered, and future-proof. But “clean” isn’t free. Every abstraction adds weight, and when you multiply that weight across dozens of pipelines, the cost sneaks up on you: fragility, maintenance, and lost sanity. The Spaceship Problem Say you need to cross the street. You could just walk. Or you could spend three years designing a spaceship that technically gets you across too: oxygen tanks, heat shields, navigation controls, all to go buy groceries. ...

Paper wasps recognize and remember faces. Their unique markings act like name tags, and their brains process faces as a whole. They pull off facial recognition with under a million neurons.

Nearly every piece of media ever made is a click away. So why do most of us spend longer scrolling the catalog than actually watching anything? Browsing as the New Watching Streaming has a signature loop: open app, browse, get overwhelmed, close app. It’s the paradox of choice in action. More options don’t make us happier, they just leave us paralyzed. That’s not surprising if you think about the data. Human decision-making is noisy and inconsistent to begin with. Pile on a few hundred options and the mental load goes up while the value you place on any single one goes down. ...

Life breaks like code, and both can be debugged. We hit runtime errors all the time: burnout, bad decisions, habits that don’t scale. Sometimes the stack trace is obvious. Other times it’s buried five layers deep. Either way, fixing things looks a lot like debugging software, and that’s good news, because debugging is a skill you can get better at. Step 1: Reproduce the Bug In engineering, the first step is always reproducibility. If you can’t reproduce a bug, you can’t fix it. ...

Why do we brush our teeth every single day of our lives? Because it only takes 2 to 3 minutes and it would be incredibly hard to justify not spending such a small amount of time on our maintaining our own personal hygiene. What if exercising becomes as simple and habitual as brushing our teeth? So much so that you’ll have no excuse to skip it. If you don’t feel like exercising, just tell yourself this: how busy can I be to not even take 15 minutes out of my day to take care of my own body? Yes, exercising for only 15 minutes a day won’t result in massive weight loss or muscle gain. But it’s the perfect amount of time to start with to turn it into an unbreakable lifelong habit. ...