thesephist
Recent content on thesephist
- Posts
- 316 from 21 Nov 2016 to 17 Aug 2025
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- now and then
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- personal blog
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2025 3
2024 16
- Joining Thrive Capital
- Good creative tools are virtuosic and open-ended
- What makes a good human interface?
- Instrumental interfaces, engaged interfaces
- A beginner’s guide to exploration
- A notebook for seeing with language models
- Create things that come alive
- Epistemic calibration and searching the space of truth
- The quotes on my wall
- Synthesizer for thought
- Prism: mapping interpretable concepts and features in a latent space of language
- Personalization, measuring with taste, and intrinsic interfaces
- Some applied research problems in machine learning
- In the beginning… was the command line
- Like rocks, like water
- Continuity
2023 2
2022 12
- Build UNIX, not Uber
- Design with materials, not features
- Hyperlink maximalism
- Knowledge tools, finite and infinite
- Resonant
- Thoughts at the boundary between machine and mind
- Imagining better interfaces to language models
- Legal documents are pushing text interfaces forward
- On proving yourself
- A GPS for the mind
- Navigate, don't search
- Notational intelligence
2021 34
- Towards a research community for better thinking tools
- AI as a creative collaborator
- The web browser as a tool of thought
- The Generative Library
- Building Monocle, a universal personal search engine for life
- Note-taking in the wild: living with the Surface Duo
- Incremental note-taking
- Liquidity of skill
- Made of love
- Habitcrafting and tool-making
- How to commit to the few right things
- Capabilities × motivation × access
- Everything as processes
- What I've learned about good prototyping
- On Dorm Room Fund
- Surfing, hacking, and what they demand of us
- Welcome to New York
- Love, purpose, and creatorhood
- Controversy budget
- Designing a better thinking-writing medium
- Work, play, and motivation
- Why do we keep making music?
- Bet on the sprinters
- Find your own axis
- Good ideas on tool-making from the story of UNIX
- Taylor Swift: a venture investment thesis
- My role models, or, a few stories of others to live by
- "Write short sentences" is bad advice
- I'm joining Ideaflow to build a universe of better tools for ideas
- Creative shadow-casting
- The long future of artificial intelligence
- How to do impossible things
- On the edge of life and death
- My goals for 2021, interesting lives, and other considerations
2020 68
- Building Lucerne, a Twitter experience tailored to me
- Beyond customization: build tools that grow with us
- Laws of individuals, laws of masses
- Cloudchasers
- How I make music
- What would the next Y Combinator look like?
- Creative paradise
- Honesty in craft
- You don't have to be busy to be prolific
- How to find focus
- How to kill the university
- Software, the boundless machine
- Extralinguistics
- Higher perspectives
- Reality whispers
- Name your ideas
- The job of a writer
- On networking
- Blackbird. Pixar. iPhone.
- Prolific focus
- Multidimensional tactility
- The future of community: a future for communities
- Communities are micro-economies
- Life as becoming
- Distance traveled
- What doesn't work yet
- Forgotten beauty, once known
- I'm Linus, and I'm from the Midwest
- To build a community, elevate the storytellers
- Travel tips for you and for me
- Tomorrow, the fog will lift
- History is momentum
- How to find your people, or, my story
- On leading change in the tech industry
- It's the programming environment, not the programming language
- Build tools around workflows, not workflows around tools
- A cellular theory of communities
- The courtyard and the public radio
- The hypertext Web is the real Metaverse
- Software is architecture
- On ownership
- Price of purpose
- Extremely difficult but not impossible
- Making Unim.press
- Experiments with word and letter frequencies in writing
- Lovecroft: a mailing list manager for static sites
- Finding it
- Trends in my writing over time
- The lexicon of justice
- Frieden: my personal availability calendar
- In defense of natural language
- Text as an interface
- How I write
- Build your own programming language
- Conservation of complexity
- Unbundling cloud
- A runtime for structured thought
- Interesting things about the Lua interpreter
- Software complexity and degrees of freedom
- How we measure time
- Technical sympathy
- Computing literacy is power
- My favorite projects
- When the quarantine ends
- Mira v0: my personal people notes app
- Moving forward
- Time spent thinking deeply is not wasted time
- Twenty-twenty
2019 7
2018 12
- Winning the race
- A computer for the rest of us
- My goals for 2019
- How to grow a budding startup community
- Hustling efficiently
- The Diversification Point, or what comes after Moore’s Law
- Learning from the deep end
- The alphabet of pixels
- Saying no to almost everything is the most important skill I was never taught
- Five things high school didn’t teach me about writing
- Big problems aren’t better than small problems
- What are you the average of?
2017 17
- What's more important than STEM?
- Starting a company is the most educational thing I’ve done
- What ignited the fuel
- Do work that you are proud of
- 5 ways that gap years will ruin your life
- Lessons from Google I/O and SPAN: getting more out of industry events
- Stay hungry, stay foolish.
- In praise of the analog world
- I flew a plane!
- The cost of a polarizing choice
- Two ways to become better
- Purdue has more entrepreneurs
- My information diet
- When failure is success
- Stay hungry
- Some small lessons from accidentally doing citations for 16,000 people
- Finding passion
2016 4
Undated 141
- What's left
- The value of the Gap
- Fear of being normal
- The art of living
- Lost in translation
- Design is not art
- Please forget my age
- Because you care
- Why Cafe Avant-Garde would never be a school club
- Terminal impact
- Three words
- On natural talent
- A broken stereotype
- No more newsroom
- Chasing time
- On powerlessness
- Connect the dots
- Micro-UX's
- The Maker's High
- World 3
- Lemon juice
- Grade Point Identity
- Banning books into silence
- A look back
- Elixir of mortality
- Taking a break
- Intoxication by ideation
- Taste fights excellence
- Holding gaze
- Run away
- Why I don't like school
- The democratization revolution
- Make
- Usain Bolt's creativity
- Splitting time
- Not quite
- Rebellious clocks
- The consumption culture
- The battle of choice
- Achievement factory
- The asking economy
- The Facebook birthday effect
- Internet 2.0
- Once upon a time
- The gap
- The filter of authenticity
- Counting to 100
- The blind spot
- Fixed in time
- An open letter to you, a human
- The finish line
- Double reality
- Beautiful strangers
- Falling upwards
- Without reason
- Dieting and education
- The paradox of Vegas
- Loyal dreams
- Missing out
- The price of speech
- Means of communication
- The new privacy
- The rights to become
- Victims of circumstance
- In the name of progress
- The artist's motivation
- The miracle of trust
- The eternal podcast
- You are alone
- The real war
- All arts, created equal
- The blip: chasing down social justice
- Change without change
- History on repeat
- Fences of transparency
- The future streams
- The speed of innovation
- Behind invisible bars
- Failure to fail
- The reflection bias
- Re-wiring the wheel
- Making the maker
- Living biographies
- The Jabberwocky mentality
- A tale of two stories
- The infinite staircase
- The Truman Reality
- Heads up
- The Union
- Resolved: debate is like Silicon Valley
- The rights to ... technology?
- The room for everyone
- In vivo silico
- The topic of debate
- The invisible eyes
- Broadcast yourself
- Schooling standstill
- We are the Capitol
- Facing forward
- The monologue
- A page turn
- Thoughts for 2014
- The blurred lines of intelligence
- The hashtag poets
- Code, the new second language
- The discrimi-nation's looking glass
- The global amnesia
- The formality paradox
- Your own Santa Claus
- The paradox of online dating
- Ferguson and the blind virtue
- The open-sourced future
- The ads and the tip jar
- Banning books from the Internet shelves
- Why aren't you doing it?
- The case on equality
- The evolution of communication
- Dieting and education
- Nothing fits in cages!
- Dear idle critics of popular culture
- Who grants us the rights?
- Learning in the i-generation
- Time-saving tips for the connected
- Shifting directions...
- A new UI for social change
- Changing rules of the Olympics
- Digital privacy: more than hacking Facebook
- Is there good art?
- The hidden colors
- The binary enlightenment
- Are numbers real?
- Heisenberg, quarantines, and the benefit of risks
- Not about the milestones
- The human factor
- How to make your ideas real
- Here's to the Crazy Ones
- Living in the future
- Teach yourself: 10 tips on how to un-school
- Meaning, not definition
- Complicated itineraries
- Connections and walls