Posts

The AI Landslide Is Happening

When it comes to AI changing the tech world, we’re at a juncture where you’ve either:

  • seen some shit with your own eyes or you believe your imagination of where this is going
  • or, you haven’t and you’re dubious

It feels like people are living in a fractured reality. For the moment, that is stable. But reality is not completely subjective. The way we each get to live in the world is shaped by things outside of our subjective perspective. That is going to hit all of us, regardless of what we believe.

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CDAP: a revolutionary way of working with AI agents

I have adopted a new way of taking on complex projects, and it is radically increasing my productivity. The idea is simple: I use documents as the shared canvas for collaboration between myself and chatbot sessions. The result is far more powerful than the sum of its parts.

I call it chatbot+document-assisted projects, or CDAPs.

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Took my first Ritalin, AMA

The silhouette of a head, crammed full of images representing an overwhelming number of ideas competing
My brain, not on drugs

As a child of the 90s, it’s a bit surreal to be taking Ritalin for the first time. Growing up, ADHD was kids bouncing off the walls, causing disruptions in class and having trouble with school. Ritalin was what they got in their daily trips to the nurse. This didn’t describe me.

However, as I came to understand the modern perspective of ADHD, I realized I pretty clearly have had it all along.

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Truly persistent terminals in VSCode and Cursor

There are times when I am embarrassed to realize that I have accepted a painful limitation for years. In this case, it is my resistance to restarting my IDEs because I don’t want to lose my terminals. Now, thanks to a burst of motivation and a modern chatbot, I’m setup for my IDEs to resume exactly where they left off.

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You might actually need it

There’s a saying that changed my life as a programmer:

YAGNI: You ain’t gonna need it

It’s the antidote to perfectionism. YAGNI comes from the observation that we are very bad at predicting the needs of the future. Adopting YAGNI changed how I code. I also try to apply that to decluttering my life. But every now and then, something you have held on to for years actually does come in handy.

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$5 millionaire for a week: riches to rags in the startup world

For a few brief moments, my stock holdings in my former employer were hypothetically worth $5 million. This is the wild story of how I realized less than 1% of that value.

I’ll be pretty specific about some of the numbers, because equity compensation is a mystery to most people. Until I went through this, I never knew what’s possible and what’s normal. It’s a very complicated topic, but I hope that by sharing a real world situation, someone else might be able to learn something useful.

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Ready or not: The Fake Story of Music

A cartoon rocket ship launching, leaving behind an exhaust cloud and musical notes

For almost a year, I have been crafting and re-crafting a project I call The Fake Story of Music. It has been stuck in its present state for more than half of that time, and there’s so much more I want to do before it matches the vision in my head. However, I think it’s already pretty good and I’m letting go of my perfectionism.

Start with the story behind the fake story, or jump right in.

Let me know what you think in the comments on this post.

Edtuchen: Should my town merge?

Screenshot of Google Maps centered on Metuchen, NJ, showing how it is completely surrounded by Edison, NJ.

In my town, a surefire way to make everyone mad at you is to suggest that we consider merging with the much larger town that completely surrounds us. But I can’t resist.

New Jersey is a high tax state, and the property taxes in Metuchen are the highest in Middlesex County. Some people are interested only in using this as a political cudgel, but I’m interested in the question of why, and what options are there to bring the costs down? The question of whether merging with Edison, our neighbor on all sides, would bring down our taxes is an obvious question to consider.

I decided to do some digging.

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