Writing

• Jul 3, 2026

  The Freedom Mutation

  As we enter America’s 250th year, I want to take a second to reflect on what makes this country so great. I think when you grow up in America, you are taught a lot about American exceptionalism, and the city on a hill, and all these ideas that are sort of hard to fully appreciate when you are young. We also live in an era in which the U.S. has been so financially and militarily dominant that most of what gets said about America ends up being critique. Pointing out where America is not so great. Pointing out its flaws. Pointing out the whataboutisms. And while I do not want to undermine those critiques, I do think it is worth trying to formulate what I think makes this country truly, truly unique, and what I hope sustains it through the next 250 years.

• Nov 3, 2025

  Life is an Ensemble Model

  In 2008, Netflix held an open competition that offered $1 million to the team that could best improve its recommendation system to suggest users films. The team that won didn't use a single traditional model like linear regression. Instead, they created a new kind of model called an ensemble model.

• Sep 11, 2025

  Built Upon Pillars of Sand

  The microprocessors in our smartphones and computers start as quartz sand. The sand is heated to over 1,400 degrees C to extract pure silicon, then precision-shaped into flawless-looking wafers, and stacked with more than a hundred layers only atoms thick.

• Feb 13, 2025

  Credit Cards vs Mortgages

  Credit card debt and mortgages are two very different types of debt. What makes credit card debt so insidious is that it is often accrued accidentally and grows incredibly quickly.

• Feb 8, 2025

  On Bad Code

  I spent many years working at Airbnb and Amazon and have friends all over the valley in places like Facebook and Google. One thing that shocked me -- both from my own experience and from conversations with friends -- is that all of these companies have a lot of bad code, even within critical systems.

• Jan 5, 2025

  Lightbulbs to TVs

  What would it mean for AI to grow at a rate similar to that of the light bulb? In short, we don't know.