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thesephist

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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

  1. Compose tasks, not implementations
  2. Radio City
  3. Wonder engines

2024 16

  1. Joining Thrive Capital
  2. Good creative tools are virtuosic and open-ended
  3. What makes a good human interface?
  4. Instrumental interfaces, engaged interfaces
  5. A beginner’s guide to exploration
  6. A notebook for seeing with language models
  7. Create things that come alive
  8. Epistemic calibration and searching the space of truth
  9. The quotes on my wall
  10. Synthesizer for thought
  11. Prism: mapping interpretable concepts and features in a latent space of language
  12. Personalization, measuring with taste, and intrinsic interfaces
  13. Some applied research problems in machine learning
  14. In the beginning… was the command line
  15. Like rocks, like water
  16. Continuity

2023 2

  1. Notion, AI, and Me
  2. Backpropagating through reasoning

2022 12

  1. Build UNIX, not Uber
  2. Design with materials, not features
  3. Hyperlink maximalism
  4. Knowledge tools, finite and infinite
  5. Resonant
  6. Thoughts at the boundary between machine and mind
  7. Imagining better interfaces to language models
  8. Legal documents are pushing text interfaces forward
  9. On proving yourself
  10. A GPS for the mind
  11. Navigate, don't search
  12. Notational intelligence

2021 34

  1. Towards a research community for better thinking tools
  2. AI as a creative collaborator
  3. The web browser as a tool of thought
  4. The Generative Library
  5. Building Monocle, a universal personal search engine for life
  6. Note-taking in the wild: living with the Surface Duo
  7. Incremental note-taking
  8. Liquidity of skill
  9. Made of love
  10. Habitcrafting and tool-making
  11. How to commit to the few right things
  12. Capabilities × motivation × access
  13. Everything as processes
  14. What I've learned about good prototyping
  15. On Dorm Room Fund
  16. Surfing, hacking, and what they demand of us
  17. Welcome to New York
  18. Love, purpose, and creatorhood
  19. Controversy budget
  20. Designing a better thinking-writing medium
  21. Work, play, and motivation
  22. Why do we keep making music?
  23. Bet on the sprinters
  24. Find your own axis
  25. Good ideas on tool-making from the story of UNIX
  26. Taylor Swift: a venture investment thesis
  27. My role models, or, a few stories of others to live by
  28. "Write short sentences" is bad advice
  29. I'm joining Ideaflow to build a universe of better tools for ideas
  30. Creative shadow-casting
  31. The long future of artificial intelligence
  32. How to do impossible things
  33. On the edge of life and death
  34. My goals for 2021, interesting lives, and other considerations

2020 68

  1. Building Lucerne, a Twitter experience tailored to me
  2. Beyond customization: build tools that grow with us
  3. Laws of individuals, laws of masses
  4. Cloudchasers
  5. How I make music
  6. What would the next Y Combinator look like?
  7. Creative paradise
  8. Honesty in craft
  9. You don't have to be busy to be prolific
  10. How to find focus
  11. How to kill the university
  12. Software, the boundless machine
  13. Extralinguistics
  14. Higher perspectives
  15. Reality whispers
  16. Name your ideas
  17. The job of a writer
  18. On networking
  19. Blackbird. Pixar. iPhone.
  20. Prolific focus
  21. Multidimensional tactility
  22. The future of community: a future for communities
  23. Communities are micro-economies
  24. Life as becoming
  25. Distance traveled
  26. What doesn't work yet
  27. Forgotten beauty, once known
  28. I'm Linus, and I'm from the Midwest
  29. To build a community, elevate the storytellers
  30. Travel tips for you and for me
  31. Tomorrow, the fog will lift
  32. History is momentum
  33. How to find your people, or, my story
  34. On leading change in the tech industry
  35. It's the programming environment, not the programming language
  36. Build tools around workflows, not workflows around tools
  37. A cellular theory of communities
  38. The courtyard and the public radio
  39. The hypertext Web is the real Metaverse
  40. Software is architecture
  41. On ownership
  42. Price of purpose
  43. Extremely difficult but not impossible
  44. Making Unim.press
  45. Experiments with word and letter frequencies in writing
  46. Lovecroft: a mailing list manager for static sites
  47. Finding it
  48. Trends in my writing over time
  49. The lexicon of justice
  50. Frieden: my personal availability calendar
  51. In defense of natural language
  52. Text as an interface
  53. How I write
  54. Build your own programming language
  55. Conservation of complexity
  56. Unbundling cloud
  57. A runtime for structured thought
  58. Interesting things about the Lua interpreter
  59. Software complexity and degrees of freedom
  60. How we measure time
  61. Technical sympathy
  62. Computing literacy is power
  63. My favorite projects
  64. When the quarantine ends
  65. Mira v0: my personal people notes app
  66. Moving forward
  67. Time spent thinking deeply is not wasted time
  68. Twenty-twenty

2019 7

  1. Where Cal founders come from
  2. Things I'm learning about in sales
  3. Thank you Repl.it, Hello Hack Club
  4. How I side project
  5. What to do if you’re a high schooler interested in a career in software
  6. Newsletters and blogs I'm reading
  7. Where, what, and why -- what creates powerful communities?

2018 12

  1. Winning the race
  2. A computer for the rest of us
  3. My goals for 2019
  4. How to grow a budding startup community
  5. Hustling efficiently
  6. The Diversification Point, or what comes after Moore’s Law
  7. Learning from the deep end
  8. The alphabet of pixels
  9. Saying no to almost everything is the most important skill I was never taught
  10. Five things high school didn’t teach me about writing
  11. Big problems aren’t better than small problems
  12. What are you the average of?

2017 17

  1. What's more important than STEM?
  2. Starting a company is the most educational thing I’ve done
  3. What ignited the fuel
  4. Do work that you are proud of
  5. 5 ways that gap years will ruin your life
  6. Lessons from Google I/O and SPAN: getting more out of industry events
  7. Stay hungry, stay foolish.
  8. In praise of the analog world
  9. I flew a plane!
  10. The cost of a polarizing choice
  11. Two ways to become better
  12. Purdue has more entrepreneurs
  13. My information diet
  14. When failure is success
  15. Stay hungry
  16. Some small lessons from accidentally doing citations for 16,000 people
  17. Finding passion

2016 4

  1. My goals for 2017
  2. How to buy what you can't buy
  3. What makes you
  4. What are YOU doing?

Undated 141

  1. What's left
  2. The value of the Gap
  3. Fear of being normal
  4. The art of living
  5. Lost in translation
  6. Design is not art
  7. Please forget my age
  8. Because you care
  9. Why Cafe Avant-Garde would never be a school club
  10. Terminal impact
  11. Three words
  12. On natural talent
  13. A broken stereotype
  14. No more newsroom
  15. Chasing time
  16. On powerlessness
  17. Connect the dots
  18. Micro-UX's
  19. The Maker's High
  20. World 3
  21. Lemon juice
  22. Grade Point Identity
  23. Banning books into silence
  24. A look back
  25. Elixir of mortality
  26. Taking a break
  27. Intoxication by ideation
  28. Taste fights excellence
  29. Holding gaze
  30. Run away
  31. Why I don't like school
  32. The democratization revolution
  33. Make
  34. Usain Bolt's creativity
  35. Splitting time
  36. Not quite
  37. Rebellious clocks
  38. The consumption culture
  39. The battle of choice
  40. Achievement factory
  41. The asking economy
  42. The Facebook birthday effect
  43. Internet 2.0
  44. Once upon a time
  45. The gap
  46. The filter of authenticity
  47. Counting to 100
  48. The blind spot
  49. Fixed in time
  50. An open letter to you, a human
  51. The finish line
  52. Double reality
  53. Beautiful strangers
  54. Falling upwards
  55. Without reason
  56. Dieting and education
  57. The paradox of Vegas
  58. Loyal dreams
  59. Missing out
  60. The price of speech
  61. Means of communication
  62. The new privacy
  63. The rights to become
  64. Victims of circumstance
  65. In the name of progress
  66. The artist's motivation
  67. The miracle of trust
  68. The eternal podcast
  69. You are alone
  70. The real war
  71. All arts, created equal
  72. The blip: chasing down social justice
  73. Change without change
  74. History on repeat
  75. Fences of transparency
  76. The future streams
  77. The speed of innovation
  78. Behind invisible bars
  79. Failure to fail
  80. The reflection bias
  81. Re-wiring the wheel
  82. Making the maker
  83. Living biographies
  84. The Jabberwocky mentality
  85. A tale of two stories
  86. The infinite staircase
  87. The Truman Reality
  88. Heads up
  89. The Union
  90. Resolved: debate is like Silicon Valley
  91. The rights to ... technology?
  92. The room for everyone
  93. In vivo silico
  94. The topic of debate
  95. The invisible eyes
  96. Broadcast yourself
  97. Schooling standstill
  98. We are the Capitol
  99. Facing forward
  100. The monologue
  101. A page turn
  102. Thoughts for 2014
  103. The blurred lines of intelligence
  104. The hashtag poets
  105. Code, the new second language
  106. The discrimi-nation's looking glass
  107. The global amnesia
  108. The formality paradox
  109. Your own Santa Claus
  110. The paradox of online dating
  111. Ferguson and the blind virtue
  112. The open-sourced future
  113. The ads and the tip jar
  114. Banning books from the Internet shelves
  115. Why aren't you doing it?
  116. The case on equality
  117. The evolution of communication
  118. Dieting and education
  119. Nothing fits in cages!
  120. Dear idle critics of popular culture
  121. Who grants us the rights?
  122. Learning in the i-generation
  123. Time-saving tips for the connected
  124. Shifting directions...
  125. A new UI for social change
  126. Changing rules of the Olympics
  127. Digital privacy: more than hacking Facebook
  128. Is there good art?
  129. The hidden colors
  130. The binary enlightenment
  131. Are numbers real?
  132. Heisenberg, quarantines, and the benefit of risks
  133. Not about the milestones
  134. The human factor
  135. How to make your ideas real
  136. Here's to the Crazy Ones
  137. Living in the future
  138. Teach yourself: 10 tips on how to un-school
  139. Meaning, not definition
  140. Complicated itineraries
  141. Connections and walls