Blog

Dopamine is powerful. It has been exploited in a hundred different ways to addict and enslave us… But, it is also something that drive us to pursue what we want to pursue. It can be abused in order to trap, or harnessed to express freedom. The cool thing is, the choice is ours! We can choose what we give our time to. We can choose where we put our focus. We can choose what we spend our time getting excited about … What makes our brain buzz with dopamine. ...

I was recently asked to teach a small session on using prompt engineering to get the most value from AI tools. These are the notes on that class. 😊 👷🏼‍♂️ What is Prompt Engineering? By this point, most of us have used some kind of LLM chat bot, such as Deepseek, ChatGPT, or Claude, at least a few times. (Some of us use them basically all, day every day 😅) And most of us have also had a similar experience of sometimes getting really great output from these AI tools, and other times getting complete garbage. ...

This past week I’ve been listening to Ryan North’s audiobook, How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler, which seeks to provide instructions for how to invent every major technology required for a thriving civilization. The idea being, if you were to travel back in time tens of thousands of years and wanted to majorly short-cut how long it took humanity to progress from our hunter-gatherer, living-in-caves days to thriving civilizations with cars and electricity and computers, you could do that. ...

I’ve continued to have people reaching out wanting to know more about the Interlinear Audio Bible tool I created last year! So, here are 2 quick announcements and updates about that! 1. Code is now Open Source! I’ve put a version of the tool I created on GitHub, where it can be used by anyone to create their own interlinear audio chapters, whether for scripture, or otherwise… in over 1,000 different languages! ...

Did you know that you have access to resources that increase the more you spend them and use them? This feels counter-intuitive. If you spend money, you will have less money. If you eat food, and you will have less food. If you use an eraser, you will have less eraser. Most things decrease when we use them or spend them. We rarely think of the resources that you and I have that increase the more we spend and use them. ...

Simon Willison has a rule and belief I think I want to adopt: “I believe that the price you have to pay for taking on a project is writing about it afterwards.” I LOVE THIS! Another way he puts it: “I recommend adding ‘write about it’ to your definition of ‘done’ for anything that you build or create.” I want to work towards adopting this practice, at least for my personal projects; perhaps for the work projects I’m involved in which I am able to publicize, as well! ...

Two years ago, on February 6, 2023, two massive earthquakes hit the south eastern region of Türkiye and the north western region of Syria. These earthquakes ended up being responsible for over 60,000 deaths. As I wrote about and gave video updates about, I and a number of friends drove to the earthquake zone, and started providing aid within about 72 hours after the quakes hit. We continued to provide aid in the region for several months after. ...

A few years ago I came across Steph Ango’s 40 Questions to ask Yourself Every Year. Since then, I’ve made it a practice in the last week of the year to work through those questions in my Bullet Journal. I’ve really loved the practice. I love the last few days of December every year — the closing of one chapter and the opening of a new chapter feels so hope-giving to me. ...

I’m a fan of the idea behind /now pages, /uses pages, and /hello pages. The basic vision behind each of these is that there’s a place on one’s personal websites where visitors can go to see interesting, noteworthy, and useful things about the site’s owner. So, /now pages are where you can go to see what that person is currently up to. A /hello page is a quick introduction, as well as an explanation of how that person likes to communicate online. And /uses (mostly used by programmers and developers) is where to go to see what kind of technology, hardware, and software that person uses. ...

I want to hear about how you got into “Your Thing”. You know what I mean — the thing that you’re passionate about. Maybe the thing that you’re known for, or just the thing that you care a lot about. It might be something that you consider to be part of your identity… The hobby, or skill, or job, or passion, or style, or drive, or commitment, or affiliation, or whatever “thing” is you. ...