Our oldest child started 8th grade this year. For our school district, this is also the last year of middle school; next year, they'll make the leap to high school proper. It's about the age when the academics ease into the forefront, putting grades front-and-center in the four-year quest towards a worthy college.

When the kids were babies, my spouse and I had discussed—and firmly decided against—cutthroat academic competition. The Bay Area is certainly still a competitive place, but there are degrees of intensity, and we chose to avoid the renowned hotspots like Palo Alto, Cupertino, and Fremont. Still, the conversations around rigorous academic extracurriculars are unavoidable: summer prep classes, select sports with high "college ROI," weekend tutoring, volunteering, etc.

All of us parents will readily concede that we didn't stuff our own teenage schedules with neverending activities, but we all feel trapped in this educational tragedy of the commons. The premium placed on a college degree, though, raises the stakes. It's a stressful ordeal—for both the parents and the children.

I picked up Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic—and What We Can Do About It to read about how others deal with this exhausting race of achievement.

Immediately, the book identifies and empathizes with toxic achievement culture. It shares even more extreme examples, focusing on affluent neighborhoods where household wealth—rather than providing a safety net—instead amplifies academics as status. The author's solution is to focus on intrinsic motivation, to find "mattering" and purpose over comparisons and collegiate brand names. The strongest example in the book follows the arc of a disaffected student who, after volunteering for a local wilderness rescue team, internalized his goal of helping others. He used that motivation to reorient his attitude towards schoolwork, and it set a north star for his eventual field of study.

But the tell is that the substantive examples in the book… all end happily. Despite the admonishment against achievement culture, the book could not help itself in reassuring parents that these noble motivators do not distract. Rather, they can serve to keep kids on track to get kids into prestigious universities. That volunteer who found purpose by helping others? He improved his grades and landed at UCLA, already eyeing a pre-med track. How about a trio of high-achieving girls, all best friends, competing for a single editor-in-chief role in the school newspaper? The faculty sponsor defused their competition by assigning meaningful editor roles to each student, ensuring they garner the proper experience to burnish their college admission essays.

After all, it's the parents who opt their kids into intensity. We are the ones who, years before our kids even understand what college is, enroll them in Montessori programs and afterschool music lessons and mind-numbing Kumon classes^[1]. We ask each other for tips and dutifully follow the advice to try to give our kids a leg up on the competition. With so much of our own efforts absorbed into the process, college admissions are unabashedly a status symbol for parents as much as they are for the children.

I am reminded of how this dynamic is magnified within the intense educational systems found in many parts of Asia. For some countries like China and Korea, college placements are concentrated down to a singular examination: the gaokao for Chinese students, the CSAT for Korean high schoolers. Since the best companies recruit disproportionately from elite universities—to the point of ranking new grad candidates based on school brands—the university and its entrance exam really do have major career implications.

Contrast these massively consequential exams with the wide nets that major corporations cast for talent in our American system, in addition to the robust set of smaller companies and nascent startups that also recruit from all backgrounds. When we talked with friends and family in Asia this past summer, many of them held intense curiosity about the American school ecosystem. A couple even idly mused on the possibility of sending their kids overseas for high school.

It's not quite accurate to say that we're living through our children—many of the parents we know are themselves are alumni of top universities, when they were less competitive than they are today—but rather that their acceptance into an elite college in some way validates our parental oversight.

In group chats and casual Slack channels, my spouse and I often catch ourselves sucked into academic discussions more than we want. Parents are of course friendly and helpful, but there's that pervasive vibe of competition, hints of tiger parenting that we all feel. We thought we had opted out of the intensity, but the reality of raising kids has us searching for proof that our kids will be fine, that both parent and child feel like it's… enough.

I'm trying something new:

This is the executive coaching and advisory practice I've wanted to start for years.

First, though, the name. My daughter keeps on asking whether I'm reselling instruments, but first and second violins are string orchestra positions. Specifically, the first chair violin is the leader for the first violin section and represents the orchestra as a whole, while the second violin supports the first by complementing it with harmonies and rhythms. As a kid, I was my class's first violin player, but I didn't appreciate how tough the second violins had it, playing equally demanding parts without getting the spotlight.

As a former first violinist, I'm offering to be that second violin for virtuoso engineering leaders.

This breaks down into three areas where my experience can be valuable:

• Mentorship & Coaching. I have spent the past decade volunteering for the mentorship network Plato and have been involved with the leadership community ELC since its early days. In my experience, biweekly one-on-ones with an experienced operator help ground leaders who feel discombobulated and stretched, while independent 360 feedback reviews and assessments augment established HR procedures.
• Organizational Insights. For senior leaders, designing teams is one of the highest-leverage actions they can take, but the processes and outcomes are rarely examined. I have done everything from establishing team charters to rearranging global workforces and can help analyze, critique and refine organizational structures.
• Fractional Leadership. Early-stage startups sometimes just need someone who has done it before to fill the gaps. I have served in a fractional and interim capacity, assisting with hiring or processes or non-technical collaboration. The goal here is simple: find a full-time replacement and work myself out of the job.

It was a circuitous route to get here. After my last executive role, I needed some time off to recharge, work on side projects, and survey the AI landscape. I was ready to quit tech entirely and started to put together the materials to hunker down and write a book—my version of a midlife crisis. Meanwhile, I leaned into my stay-at-home dad responsibilities, making sure that the kids were reliably transported to school and various extracurricular activities. I also learned that they blab to their friends sitting in the backseat much more than to their uncool parents.

The upheaval AI has brought into software engineering—along with its downstream effects on engineering management—has taken its toll on the industry. The ELC Annual 2026 conference last week reinforced my conclusions. Through casual conversations and roundtables, I got the pervasive sense of anxiety from attendees. I talked with a number of leads and managers who felt outpaced by the speed of AI's advances, who are uncertain about their futures.

But it was through these discussions that I rediscovered the satisfaction of supporting others. Loose acquaintances, a few whom I had embarrassingly forgotten from past meetups and conferences, sought perspective and reassurance; I naturally slipped back into a coaching role to provide support, and found the interactions immediately gratifying. I decided to jump back in.

Now, I recognize that in an era when companies are slashing headcount and flattening management layers, they are often looking to invest more in tokens than people. But that's precisely why coaching and organizational design and leadership matter. When frontier LLMs are available to every company and every team, it's how teams work together that differentiates. It becomes important to preserve and evolve the human collaborative elements, be they simple standups or cultural interview rubrics.

If this perspective resonates, book a call on my calendar or shoot me an email. Even if it's a casual chat to compare notes or talk through a tricky situation, I'm here to play the part—as the second violin.

There is an unusual landmark a 20-minute drive away from our home: the Pulgas Water Temple. With classic Roman architecture and a grandiose name, you'd think this was a monument displaced halfway around the world, built by some industry magnate who imported their love of the old world onto the American frontier^[1]. Instead, it's one of the terminal locations for the Bay Area's extensive Hetch Hetchy water system, which provides drinking water for multiple Bay Area counties, sourced all the way in the Sierra Nevada mountains. But despite the mundane and utilitarian origins, it's still a pretty cool place, off the beaten path, to visit on a lazy weekday^[2].

Then again, if you are traveling halfway around the world to come to the Bay Area, the Water Temple—or any other piece of infrastructure managed by the SF Public Utilities Commission—is unlikely to make your list of must-see destinations. Local travel prioritizes convenience and comfort; the time and cost of international vacations impose a higher sightseeing bar. When people look for hidden gems outside popular vacation spots, it feels more like a kneejerk reaction to tourist overcrowding.

Underneath the debate is a more pertinent question: why do people travel in the first place? There are a bunch of reasons, but the three I'm interested in—those that are tied to the geography more than the traveller^[3]—are status, novelty, and immersion.

Status is the loudest form of travel, and it also has the most potential to be obnoxious. This is heading to an exotic location, and hitting all the 'gram spots for selfies or posting continuous updates to group chats. With social media amplifying the same locales, the same restaurants and activities, this concentration is ripe for overtourism, overwhelming areas not designed for the excess attention.

To be fair, I suspect the vast majority of travelers chase status in some form. Arguably, posts about vacation planning for Japan are a kind of flex, and casually discussing winter getaways with colleagues can be considered social signaling. When we host friends and family who travel to the Bay Area, we take them to the crowd-pleasers: blankets of fog rolling across the Golden Gate Bridge, cars slowly meandering down Lombard Street switchbacks, rich chocolate sundaes at Ghirardelli Square. Cliché, yes, but iconic.

Novelty is about going to an unfamiliar place, to attempt to see and experience things outside the daily rhythms of life. My parents, of the generation who couldn't afford to travel in their early years, made this our default raison d'être for travel as a family—that instinct has stuck with me. Thirty years later, we're dragging the kids to Volcanoes National Park and Taichung City in the dead of summer, so they aren't asking to go to the same phở restaurant every week, or worse, parking themselves in front of their iPads to whittle the days away on YouTube shorts.

This type of experience can be had locally. The canonical staycation is less drastic and disruptive to everyday life, but the Bay Area has a good blend of urban and outdoor destinations, local venues that we've steadily visited as the kids were growing up. When they were smaller, the Exploratorium and a trip out to Safari West were fine adventures; as they're getting older, we're hiking the nearby Pinnacles National Park or appreciating the horticulture of the Filoli gardens—stopping by the Pulgas Water Temple on the way, of course.

Immersion is probably the rarest form of travel that I've seen people try. It's the idea of going to a foreign place, and staying there for an extended amount of time to truly live as the locals do, but without the intention of fully becoming an expat and emigrating permanently. I once lived with a roommate whose main goal was to move to Osaka in Japan; last I heard, he figured it out and was enjoying his time there immensely.

To be clear, I'm categorizing immersive travel with the express intent to live among the local population and to integrate with their culture. There's the social media style of digital nomadic travel, whose proponents look for low-cost countries across Asia and Europe; I wouldn't categorize this as immersive travel. Instead, these travelers tend to stay in designated tourist locales, residing in scenic destinations while they intersperse work between luxuries; their lifestyles are closer to status travel, just with elongated stays.

Admittedly, we have not planned our travels for the purpose of immersing ourselves in the world's cultures; we sample them during vacations, and although I emphasize the contrast to the kids in the moment, I know that the tourist experience is sanitized.

Conversely, this is the type of travel that's impossible to replicate locally—I mean, we're already here. Rather, the Bay Area is one of the premier destinations in the world for immersion, just framed differently: people sometimes call it the California dream. They move here to look for opportunity, and to take part in the latest iteration of the proverbial gold rush. Certainly, some end up staying, but many come here to join in the rush; they will return home either when they've made their riches from the boom, or when they decide to leave amidst the inevitable bust.

Of course… that is my family's story as well. As a kid in Vancouver, our family went on road trips all the way down to our cousins in Sacramento, California: a 16-hour drive in a minivan with questionable AC. We saw the famous landmarks of the state as tourists, stopping a day in every major city for photos and memories. By college, I had moved out to the Bay Area to attend Cal, and stayed here post-graduation to take advantage of our abundant tech ecosystem. And, now settled here with my own family, we spend our weekends looking for novel experiences—in familiar confines.

Since its launch in 2008, I've been an avid user of the read-it-later app Instapaper^[1]. In 18 years' time, the app has saved some 47k articles, which comes out to around 7.2 articles read per day. The time span here encompasses a full spectrum of digital content: the initial phase with blogs and news articles; the subsequent evolution into bite-sized text on social media platforms; the eventual shift to videos in both long- and short-forms. Throughout, I insisted on saving and reading the internet's lingua franca—text.

Of course, I'm of the old school, a dying breed of text-first internet users. This article from the Atlantic spells out the precise problem:

The End of Reading is Here

Here is an exercise in irony, a 40-minute article that identifies and laments the decline in reading skill in contemporary society. In 2026, the reality of such a written piece of prose is that most of its points will be summarized with AI, its headline clipped for commentary, or key phrases snipped out and used as background in 10-second short video reactions. When ChatGPT launched, there were predictions about how outsourcing writing to AI will lead to lazier thinking, and four years later, we are realizing much of that loss.

The second-order effects are playing out now. With fewer readers of long-form text, the incentives and rewards for producing it have shrunk; there's just a much smaller audience of readers compared to consumers of other forms of media, be they social or visual. Reach is now firmly controlled by YouTube and TikTok, with other forms of social media lagging behind, and blogs/substacks bringing up the rear as a niche that doesn't even register.

My experience running and keeping this blog is a microcosm of this evolution.

Back in 2011, when I started writing consistently on this blog on technical topics (most of the time), I felt it was easier to share authentic thoughts and garner an audience. There weren't yet other mediums seriously competing with blogs and articles on many topics, while each subtopic was also covered by fewer authors. Some of my first posts—on Google interviews, on my fondness for JavaScript—made the front pages of Hacker News and Slashdot, despite my undeveloped writing style and technique.

By the mid-to-late 2010s, I noticed that most of my web referrers migrated to Twitter and Reddit, and that much of the discussion also happened on those platforms as well. I had been trying out various commenting plugins on the site—the latest one was Disqus—but ended up shutting it down due to lack of activity.

Now in the 2020s, it feels like the majority of eyeballs are pointed squarely at online video sites, a different format altogether. When I wrote one of the first reviews for an anticipated ergonomic keyboard, one of the first comments was asking for a video review instead of reading what I wrote. The primary bit of progress for text, perhaps in reaction to the strong control exercised by those social platforms, was Substack and its renewed emphasis on the newsletter; hence, my migration to Ghost and its subscription capabilities.

On top of these intrinsic challenges with the text format, the widespread use of LLMs further obfuscates the effort, and hence value, of writing. Much like my worry of AI decimating the senior engineer pipeline, the technology here threatens to lessen our level of literacy as a society. It is now trivial to generate overwhelming amounts of prose, and just as easily truncate carefully composed text into a few lines of summary. If we are better thinkers by engaging in literature—both in its reading and writing—then we are dulling our faculties by association.

The counterargument here is that good writing still requires human intuition to navigate the complexities of communication. But, if extrinsic incentives are shrinking by the day, how much of that writing will still be produced based on increasingly intrinsic motivations? That is, we're leaning increasingly on writing's own accord, on the platonic ideal of composing for yourself, with publishing rendered as afterthought. If a blog post gets written but no one is around to read it, does it make a difference?

I still save around 10 articles a day on Instapaper: nowadays, a combination of newsletters, posts written by professional media sites behind paywalls, and occasionally a techie article featured on Hacker News. But the app has changed with the times as well; over the years, it's had to support logged-in sites, as well as revamp integrations with YouTube and Twitter precisely due to their popularity. Its developer is simply responding to users' consumption patterns.

The bigger question is what the long-term impact of society's collective apathy towards literacy will be. Perhaps it's fine that video takes over as the de facto format of communication; between YouTube and TikTok, smartphones and AI, we have lowered the barriers of entry for capturing, generating, sharing, and consuming videos. And if communication is a precursor to thought, this generation, and generations thereafter, are training themselves to think in a completely new way.

Video games evoke a broad range of emotions. Satisfaction, when you get past a particularly difficult section. Frustration, getting sniped from across the map for the n^th time this round. Excitement, from unlocking a new character and envisioning the new gameplay possibilities. Boredom even, by design.

Yet, in the universe of human feelings, grief is rare in gaming. Genuine melancholy is a difficult emotion to express in any form of media; the agency that makes video games games makes it especially hard to pull off.

A decade ago, I played through an indie game called That Dragon, Cancer. It was made by a solo developer who embarked on his project as a tribute to his young son, who was diagnosed with cancer in early childhood and eventually passed away. At the time, he made the news for this unusual, but nevertheless touching, love letter.

Unfortunately, despite his heartbreaking backstory and widespread critical acclaim, his game did not achieve commercial success. After I finished the game, I wasn't convinced that grief as a unifying theme for games could ever work. Gamers played to escape reality and live their virtual fantasies; by and large they weren't necessarily looking to sob quietly in front of their PCs.

Since then, I've been on the lookout for other games ambitious enough to try to tug at these emotional strings. Video game writing has improved in the past decade, and the prevalence of indie game development has opened up more opportunities for new storytellers to experiment with the medium. The handful of games that left an impression, though, had more than just cutscenes and florid prose—they married the depth of story and environment with fundamental game mechanics to draw players totally into the world.

With each button press and analog stick movement, players implicate their own actions in the narrative.

Warning: major spoilers ahead. If you want to play these games and experience the full force of their storytelling, stop reading and go try out What Remains of Edith Finch, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.

What Remains of Edith Finch is a series of short vignettes that tell the story of a family stricken with continuous tragedy and death. I played as the sole survivor of the large extended Finch family, exploring a giant mansion and flashing back to relive the events that cost each relative their life. These deaths feel heavy from their individuality, where each standalone scene has its own, isolated gameplay mechanic. One scene has me as a baby looking up while the tub overflows with water; another features a simple rope swing at the edge of a cliff, where I gradually lose control of the pendulum.

As I discovered more rooms and replayed more last moments, their accumulated weight added to each successive macabre scene. There was a moment at the end, when I realized that my teenage character—the one trying to piece together her family history—was pregnant during the entire game. And had died in childbirth.

Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons doesn't bill itself as an overly emotional game. I went on an adventure with the two brothers, making progress by solving environmental puzzles along the journey. Its control scheme is unique: each brother is controlled by an analog stick and a trigger button, and solving these puzzles required me to use both sticks and triggers simultaneously to position, move, and coordinate the onscreen characters. Outside of this innovative use of the controller, though, its storyline and gameplay proceeded in fairly straightforward fashion. Until the end.

After defeating the final boss, an unfortunate turn of events injured and killed the older brother, on the literal precipice of the goal of their entire quest. After the younger brother buried his kin, I ended up controlling just one character on the return trip home. I encountered the same obstacles, but with only one half of my controls functional, my character was stuck—until I accidentally discovered that while the other analog stick had no character to control, the remaining brother still responded to his sibling's trigger. With each finger press, the younger sibling received an echo of brotherly support and love. I tapped that trigger so much that my hands cramped up.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is an old school JRPG of sorts. I control a party of characters and wander around the map, advancing the story via elaborate cutscenes while fighting monsters and gaining experience. When I finished the game last year, it had the same feeling as finishing a great book series, a Pixelache where I wanted more adventures in this world with these intricate characters.

The ingredient that made Clair Obscur's story special was its focus on grief. In the game's mythology, people who lived to a certain age died on their birthdays, and its society started launching expeditions to stop the decimation only for every single one to end in failure and more death. The intro cutscenes are masterfully directed, to impress upon players the overbearing sense of resignation running through the populace, the fatalistic reality of knowing exactly when each person will die.

But what stuck with me were the player moments of despair. The game put me up against bosses that could not be defeated, even as my party exhausted themselves to make a dent in the enemy's health bar. It reversed expectations halfway through battle, where the main antagonist started healing my party instead of attacking it, eventually revealing that we were mistaken about the expedition's premise. On multiple occasions, I genuinely did not want to continue, knowing fully that any resolution would be narratively devastating.

Video games are unique because they give players control, and the primary feeling that this invokes is a sense of wonder, exploration, and freedom. To convey other emotions, games often borrow techniques from traditional cinema, sometimes to the point where games "play like movies."

But it is possible to merge static story with dynamic player agency, binding the player to the narrative in a wonderfully gaming way. From That Dragon to What Remains to Brothers to Clair Obscur, what started as niche has graduated into the mainstream.

This year, our family summer vacation took us to Guangzhou (GZ), my spouse's hometown and the manufacturing capital of the world. Compared to Shenzhen or Hong Kong, it's an older city; most of its growth in industry and population occurred back in the 1950s. We walked down streets where old factories sat alongside contemporary skyscrapers, and mixed-use qilou buildings squeezed up against modern apartment complexes. I found a Huawei store, showcasing their latest EVs, two blocks away from the 80-year-old dim sum restaurant where we were enjoying brunch.

Beyond the imposing urban skyline or the robots skittering around food courts, the most striking novelty of my visit was navigating the hive of scooters that constantly buzzed alongside cars and pedestrians. Now, scooters are a common sight in Asia, but other cities like Taipei redesigned their roads to include mopeds as formal traffic. GZ takes a more laissez-faire approach: humans and e-bikes and cars all route and weave in and around each other, and with minimal dedicated infrastructure, the ubiquitous bikes crowd onto every open piece of asphalt. It all kinda works, although I witnessed my fair share of near-misses in my week's travel.

This dense web of transportation supports the world's largest dispatch network. As my cousin-in-law explained to me, e-commerce and near-instantaneous deliveries are just a fact of life in modern China; the shopping app Taobao alone serves nearly a billion users in the country. To make deliveries work at this scale, Meituan, one of the major players, employs over 3 million couriers, criss-crossing streets and neighborhoods to get hot food to doorsteps^[1] within 30 minutes.

This is the smart city realized.

Granted, this doesn't sound like the vision that was long promised in science fiction stories. Scooter swarms are a poor substitute for multilevel hovercar freeways, and simple billboards refuse to be replaced by neon holograms. People have imagined the possibility of drone deliveries for years, but even with drone tech maturing over a decade's time, the logistical challenges keep stalling progress. When they make the news, it's for the wrong reasons.

The biggest and flashiest instance of failed fantastical futurism is the Saudi Arabian megaproject NEOM. When the kingdom announced its intentions to build multiple cities and resorts in the middle of the desert, it sold its vision of modernity, enabled by civil engineering and financing at a ludicrous scale. There was the luxury ski resort, in a place that saw no natural snow at any time of the year; the manmade mansion islands that would require years of rigorous terraforming; and most famously, the baffling linear city buttressed with mirrored walls.

This project felt so over-the-top that it became a self-parody of the idea of smart cities. While they did eventually break ground on these sites, construction seems to have halted within a few years; with the expected costs expanding tenfold, investments have redirected toward other pieces of globalized infrastructure, i.e., data centers. Sure, 3D renders of megayachts docking in a floating, elevated port look much cooler than a hundred e-bikes idling at a busy intersection, but that latter vision already exists—deeply integrated into the ecosystem of Chinese cities.

Beyond the disappointment of seeing dingy mopeds instead of sleek robotic couriers, there is also the human cost of convenience that, upon inspection, feels a bit dystopian. I've been reading a memoir, I Deliver Parcels in Beijing, written by such a worker in China who spent his 20s hopping between low-paying jobs. He recalls the workplace dynamics: the types of workers who stay or leave, the various abuses heaped upon the lowest rungs of the gig economy, and how the workers themselves manage their own mentalities through the grind. At one point, he looks wistfully through apartment windows at people sprawled on the couch in the evening, after a hard day's work, pining for that same sense of satisfaction as he knows there's at least two more hours of deliveries before he can return back to the warehouse, and then another hour of listening to his boss lecture on team performance before crashing out at midnight.

This is how smart cities will actually evolve—fewer headlines and press releases, but instead, quiet integration into the fabric of the populace. Just as Waymo's autonomous cars normalized after years of service in the Bay Area, the sea of Meituan helmets on the street acclimated into the scenery: initially a novelty, but soon thereafter just an obstacle course to navigate.

We spent a week in Guangzhou and another week in Hong Kong before coming back stateside, and through the summer, I've been reflecting on the lifestyle differences between home and abroad. Here, we tried micromobility with on-demand e-bike rentals, but momentum stalled post-COVID, even in sunny California; now there are just these rusting bikes and scooters thrown onto sidewalks in my town. There's Uber Eats, but despite the pricier menu items and extractive tipping requirements, I find it faster to pick up orders myself than wait for a driver to drop it off. The robotic barista at SFO is out of order every time I walk by.

So perhaps the secret to the smart city is all the invisible people underneath.

I run dozens of bespoke little Mac apps: scratch notepads, screen resolution tuners, and even a mini-dashboard making use of that little bucktoothed notch atop MacBook screens. A simple but critical utility is an alternate app switcher—the default MacOS ⌘+⇥ (Cmd+Tab, or for Windows folks, Alt+Tab) switcher is glaringly basic, which makes it ripe for third-party improvement. The app I've used for the past decade has been Contexts; sadly, it has not seen any development activity since 2022, and, with the continued advancement of MacOS, is in danger of falling into complete incompatibility.

So you can guess what I spent a week building.

Before the current iteration of coding-focused LLMs, building a utility that integrates closely with the operating system felt like a daunting project. Web apps run within their browser sandbox; native apps are at their best when they hook into the operating system's multitude of subsystems. They tend to have richer notifications, snappier interfaces, and behave closer to the host OS in a dozen different, sometimes imperceptible ways.

The first thing that Switchboard—that's the name bestowed onto my Contexts replacement app—needed to do was monitor the global keyboard events queue, so it can capture and override the ⌘+⇥ combination. It also has to find and read the list of windows visible at the moment, delineated by Spaces^[1]. Just getting this far requires understanding the interaction model for this part of the operating system, reading through lots of API and documentation, and building a bunch of prototypes to deduce how the underlying systems are reacting to Switchboard's system requests.

This is where current-gen coding tools shine. They have absorbed the tricks of the trade from previous generations, and folded the best-practice workflows into their default coding strategy^[2]. Their harnesses are now advanced enough to work through these steps autonomously:

1. Reading documentation and support forums to get the shape of the problem;
2. Making system calls (with the user's permission) and capturing the responses to understand what it accepts and rejects;
3. Constructing a plan with phases to derisk the project, while clarifying requirements from the user;
4. Capturing screenshots and occasionally taking control (also with permission) to confirm its UI/UX renditions;
5. Building ad hoc debugging tools, grepping logs and system dumps to chase down crashes and errors;
6. Adding regression tests as it builds on top of its own work.

And this level of execution isn't just limited to MacOS either; I asked Claude to build a native reader app in HarmonyOS Next for a Huawei laptop, and it got to a fully functional app despite the scant Chinese documentation.

Coming back to Switchboard, Claude made tremendous progress, even without reference source code^[3] and having to figure out many partially-defined behaviors. Its gaps, though, hint at the real bottleneck.

To be fair, Claude's design skill is actually quite good, to the point that many recent software projects are saturated with its "AI design aesthetic." But its agreeable defaults are also the tell. The interface would look perfectly reasonable in a static screenshot, but user interactions would render unreadable text and nonsensical layouts. The AI agent would happily construct elaborate workflows on top of outdated authentication schemes and APIs that make those screens unreachable. Its edges are jagged, in ways that break the regular rhythms of software development.

Perhaps another way to frame this is that LLMs lack developer taste—the dozens of little coding and design decisions that evince a persistent human touch, resulting in an uncanny valley of software products. Granted, this is not a fatal flaw. As with software development pre-AI, one tried-and-true solution is to demand denser checkpoints, poke around and flag incongruent decisions made by the machine, and patiently adjust its approach. Taste can be incrementally instilled… just one prompt at a time.

Switchboard suffered from this at every step. In the switcher panel, the typeface interacted poorly with MacOS's liquid glass treatments and made the text unintelligible. Its mouseover selection would be too slow, hampered by the aggressive loop that was cobbled together by a previous prompt. At one point, the AI reconstructed a tab bar meticulously to resemble the native component, only for it to be off by two pixels, so upon my feedback, apologize and unceremoniously scrap its prior work.

Yet, even with all the back-and-forth, the neat thing about AI-centric development is how the core interaction has graduated from code to prose. Coding has always felt unnatural because it required humans to think like machines: sharp specificity over misinterpreted ambiguity. The exact syntax, structure, and logic all matter tremendously in how the software gets interpreted, and some of the most insidious bugs turn out to be subtle typos or misplaced lines of code.

Claude and its AI coding brethren weave large amounts of code from user specifications. In particular, the advent of reasoning models has improved how they work through complex requirements. But the more assumptions LLMs have to make to fill in gaps in explicit user instructions, the worse taste they develop, which then gets amplified with further iterations. By design, the coding agent is implementing an average; it cannot internalize a set of decisions that comes from sharp opinions hardened by experience. Taste is the antithesis of decisioning by (training data) committee.

It's this singular vision that makes building Switchboard so tremendously fun. The app features my strong personal preferences, which means it'll be much less useful to anybody else—unless I add enough features to fully productize it. But this is the irony of vibecoding: it's increasingly easy for someone else to do the same and prompt their way to a functional app, and if they care enough they can spend more time fine-tuning its features, and adding to its bells and whistles to their liking. With a lower barrier to entry, the effort to support commercial or even open-source software diminishes.

So I'll just keep this bespoke app switcher to myself.

As the kids get older, they are increasingly inquisitive about money. The curiosity reveals itself in their questions, which are usually naïve but occasionally insightful. Like: how do credit cards work? Or, why people choose to live where they do, and how much do their friends' parents make? Oh, and what happens to their red pocket money every Chinese New Year?^[1]

These can be challenging conversations^[2]. Some of it is simply due to the math of finance, with concepts like compound interest that are unintuitive. But more than that, it's that money is an abstraction, and abstractions are hard to reason through concretely. It's an invention where we assign agreed-upon numbers to objects and services, and trade with each other based on this mutual understanding.

Upon this wobbly tower rests the industry of finance.

I've been an avid reader of the Money Stuff newsletter for years. Its longtime author, Matt Levine, picks out 4–5 finance stories a day and dives deep into their peculiarities with a wry sense of humor. On one side, there are complex machinations, derivatives and longs and shorts and hedges and arbitrages, the instruments of finance employed to eke out profits at scale. On the other side, we have groups of humans, who may be into gambling or memes or ESG^[3] or fraud.

A Levine bit is that "everything is securities fraud." It's an inside joke with a dash of truth: when companies do bad things that are only tenuously related to their business—like mistreating animals or leaking customer data—they get hit with securities lawsuits anyway. These suits claim shareholder harm, as the bad news tends to drop the stock price, and public companies are required to disclose material risks in accordance with US securities law.

To be clear, the premise is darkly humorous, but still absurd. But the mechanism that makes this class of litigation possible is that a company's financial standing is defined by its equity (i.e., market capitalization and share price), and an entire universe of corporate and personal behaviors can be coupled to that financial representation. The real-world behaviors may be morally or logistically lacking, but the abstractions are the easy targets.

The intersection of the quantifiable and the human is what makes finance endlessly fascinating. Financialization builds a frictionless interface on top of reality.

The crude oil futures commodities market is probably the best example of financialization in practice. As the name suggests, it's the market where traders bet on the price of barrels of oil in the near future, but only the prices—the underlying hard asset, the crude oil itself, does not change hands the vast majority of the time. It's one of the simpler forms of a financial derivative, where the assets being bought and sold are related, but separate, from their underlying things.

And the reason oil futures exist is that an abstract market is much easier to work with. Rather than haul barrels of oil around, traders can add, subtract, and multiply numbers on computers, all hours of the day. Inevitably, traders built more abstractions on top of the existing futures market abstraction: hedges against jet fuel prices, leveraged bets on price movements.

For oil futures, their black swan event occurred in April 2020, a month into the COVID lockdowns, when the sudden plunge in demand and the glut of supply of oil briefly pushed the price negative—a historic first for the market. The implication was that traders would rather pay than have to take delivery of oil they already bought.

On a more positive note, there's some evidence that the discovery of trade and the ensuing invention of money helped advance civilizations; Money: A Story of Humanity lays out one such example in Florence. The strength of its trade and monetary systems gave rise to the mercantile class, and the need to manage capital led to innovations in bookkeeping and accounting. The mastery of money and its layered abstractions made Florence a rich and powerful city, which in turn used its wealth to advance the humanities, making it a cradle of the Italian Renaissance.

But, regardless of how we might feel about this abstraction personally, we live in a capitalist society, so fluency with money—and at least some of its aspects and abstractions—is critical. So every Sunday, my kids get their allowance: $x a week for x years of age. I insist, though, that instead of handing them cash^[4], we keep a notebook tallying their running totals: a credit for the allowance, and debits when they want to spend it. After a few years of this, it starts looking a bit like my bank statements, which was precisely the point.

Engineering Director.

Senior Engineer—wait, they're only two years out of school?

Three-time CEO… of companies with no employees, hm.

Vice President. Are we talking about a big tech company, a tiny startup, or a financial institution?

Job titles are funny things. They're these sticky labels, used to signify importance and authority—particularly in work-obsessed America. We line them up in our résumés and CVs, and we tell our managers about aspiring for a promotion to the next title^[1][2].

It therefore feels contrarian to do away with titles, yet there have been real attempts to wipe away the labels, either to tamp down corporate politics or flatten the organization or both^[3]. The result, then, is an organization that runs with only a handful of visible titles, as seen from the outside: no VPs or Directors, Senior Staff or Principals, Regional or National Managers. I experienced this a decade ago at Square, where the primary title descriptor beyond the job function was "lead." In more recent practice, some frontier AI labs have standardized on the Bell Labs-inspired "Member of Technical Staff" (MTS) as an all-encompassing title for all technical functions and levels.

Now, there is merit to the instinct of taking away titles as a distraction from the otherwise organic dynamics of the workplace. The depth, maturity and capability of your colleagues tend to reveal themselves through collaboration over time, in theory, so the value of their titles as signposts diminishes quickly regardless. In fact, some of the sharpest rebukes I've heard from coworkers are griping about the delta between someone's title and their actual performance.

With promotions, the chief mistake is confusing prescription for description—assuming that authority immediately and irrevocably flows from a new title, instead of the other way around. I'm reminded of an old LinkedIn post that properly delineated role from influence; in this particular anecdote, the author initially believed getting the "manager" title would grant them the necessary influence to make major changes. They later appreciated that they could earn that influence regardless of their official position, as managerial diktat produces the wrong outcomes anyway.

But here's the problem: removing the labels by which politics are explicitly legible doesn't remove the underlying power dynamics inherent in groups. I came across this theory while reading Why Managers Matter. Known as the Iron Law of Oligarchy, it was originally an observation about how socialist political parties in the early 20th century eventually and organically developed hierarchies—oligarchies—due to the basic mechanics of running any complex system. In the context of companies and organizations, this tendency suggests that groups of people naturally solve coordination problems by elevating and entrenching those coordinators into, well, management.

Refusing to formally name and label these roles just means the hierarchy exists informally instead. In the past, I've referred to these hidden norms and structures as Shadow Systems, and it was absolutely disorienting when I was thrust into a team with such a system running in the background. At Square, I learned to navigate 1:1 blitzes in office cabanas and to identify which unofficial Slack channels made the consequential product decisions.

Case in point: years later, a subdued Square published their internal career ladder publicly. They try really hard to avoid industry-standard titles, but a department leader certainly sounds like a Director-level manager; at least, levels.fyi's mapping seems to think so.

And the current iteration of the "flat/no titles" trend hides an insidious second-order effect. Titles serve as industry-wide shorthand, and indeed, a former CTO joining Anthropic as a plain MTS is newsworthy only because of their prior C-suite position. It's precisely those already secure in their accolades and previous roles who get to claim they're merely advancing an egalitarian structure. A billionaire who takes a token $1 salary isn't automatically virtuous.

Two things can be true: indexing on titles as a singular proxy for authority is bad, yet getting rid of all titles as a solution is also problematic. As silly as they sometimes feel, corporations adopted the scheme because it makes for more efficient processes—as unbelievable as that sounds. Yes, people attach themselves to status labels and distort their meaning, but I find that preferable to removing them in favor of playing a game of shadow hierarchies.

I picked up The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything when it came out in 2022, though I haven't gotten around to reading it until now. The author, Matthew Ball, was a venture capitalist known for elaborately long essays on video games; this book was a culmination of a number of his posts on the metaverse, strung together into a single volume.

In 2026, though, the metaverse isn't exactly en vogue, and many of the elements that he envisioned have fallen through. I went into this eyes wide open: I was more interested in where and why his predictions faltered. It became an exercise in critical reading, in watching how motivated reasoning twists a perfectly fine piece of technology beyond its capabilities. As the Upton Sinclair adage goes:

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

When The Metaverse was published, the momentum around digital-only technologies was at its peak. The pandemic drove all homestay entertainment, including video games and VR headsets. Facebook became Meta, and tried to brute force their Quest devices into the mainstream—only to scale back earlier this year after investing over $80 billion in their endeavors. Apple launched their own Vision Pro headset in 2024, and also discreetly deprioritized the platform.

As the chapters rolled on, it became more and more obvious that the book wasn't so much prescient analysis, as it was the promotional vehicle for Ball's venture investments, particularly his "world's largest" ETF that tracks companies involved in the Metaverse. It has not panned out; the ETF is still trading below its inception price, while the tech-heavy NASDAQ Composite has almost doubled in price in the same five years.

The skewed framing began with the definition of the Metaverse itself. Certainly, some advances in 21st century technology were inspired by the great science fiction of the 20th century, and popular shows like Star Trek still influence everything from iPads to humanoid robots. For the metaverse, Ball drew from books like Snow Crash and Ready Player One, and perhaps movies like Tron: virtual spaces accessible by plugging into an immersive headset, escaping from the real world and living purely digital lives in cyberspace.

Of course, we've already had most of these elements in place—for decades. The internet is a strong, interconnected network with billions of users, with interoperability via open standards like TCP and HTML, and with persistent user data across hundreds of major services. We haven't needed physics engines and realistic avatars to establish virtual communities, be they on social networks, chat groups or internet forums.

The book correctly noted that the vision of recreating the physical world digitally wasn't new. There have been many attempts to merge the breadth of the internet with simulated reality. Second Life, There.com, PlayStation Home, Meta's Horizon Worlds: most of these services have come and gone, bolstered by initial curiosity but unable to sustain interest^[1]. That's not to say that virtual worlds can't work. The handful of popular ones—Minecraft, Fortnite, Roblox—started as online games first and foremost, only tacking on social features in service to the gameplay and player usage patterns.

Then… there's the crypto pitch. The Metaverse makes a sketchy connection from virtual reality and gaming-related tech to stretch into the need for decentralization. Somehow, because mobile platforms have sorted themselves into just the App Store and Google Play Store, the metaverse will be fundamentally hampered without the ability to transact via blockchains and smart contracts. That premise led Ball to highlight the importance of NFTs and DAOs, plus the rest of the pile of crypto ventures that all peaked around the time the book was published.

The most damning development, though, isn't in this book: Ball revised and published an update to his book two years later, retitling it to The Metaverse: Building the Spatial Internet. Admittedly, I didn't read this version; I didn't know there was a newer version until I was researching for this post. But from the book's own landing page, the revision downplays all the crypto initiatives while adding new material on AI. That is, the metaverse narrative and its supporting elements are suspiciously malleable, closely following whatever is getting VC attention and money at the moment.

It gets more dramatic. The Xbox division has been underperforming for years, and Microsoft has shaken up its leadership in response. Xbox has had its share of innovations in gaming—the Xbox Live service, Game Pass, trophies—but it has also underwhelmed in recent years precisely by hopping onto the tail end of hype cycles. The Kinect, the always-connected Xbox One, the Activision acquisition; all were expensive strategic mistakes stuck in the past for one too many beats.

Guess who they brought on as Xbox's new Chief Strategy Officer.

If you scroll to the bottom of each post on the site, you may notice a curious badge:

It's a badge from the Not By AI group, a project that looks to explicitly tag creative content—writing, visual art, music—as created by humans, not machines. Whereas other mechanisms like SynthID relies on watermarks from the GenAI provider and apps like Pangram look for telltale signs of generated text, this effort relies on simple disclosure to draw an explicit line.

For this blog, the badge is to signify that the words on the page were not predicted by stochastic parrots. But that's not to say that AI isn't involved in its production; in fact, I've been using this site as an excuse to play around with the latest AI models, from my Wordpress migration to testing the image generation capabilities of Midjourney and Google Flow. It's also useful as a research partner, grammar checker, and tireless brainstorming zealot. The goal is to achieve the Not By AI 90% rule, where the content cannot exceed 10% of the final output.

Here's how my usage evolved over months of trial-and-error:

1. Early on, using LLMs for simple grammar and spell checking, merely replicating the functionality of Grammarly;
2. With the release of Claude Writing Styles, using my posts here as a corpus of post-training data and creating a writing profile;
3. Generating and revising post outlines;
4. Asking the AI to critique works in progress, from paragraphs to sections to drafts;
5. Further asking for a concrete numerical score and areas of improvement.

Within each step, there's an opportunity to run an optimization loop. That is, I can ask the AI to run through a step repeatedly, to hone in on grammatical nits and refine the writing flow, with incremental tweaks and feedback along the way to nudge the prose forward. Eventually, we will arrive at the local maximum, and Claude concludes with:

No notes left to add. Publish it.

Endearing. Albeit also patronizing.

But now I find myself staring at these pieces of writing that—while the words and structures and examples and insights are still my own—seem to have lost something in the AI-assisted refinement process.

Some of this feeling comes from AI's propensity to follow best practices to a fault. It's akin to running the prose by my high school English teacher, who happens to be a disciple of the 9th grade essay template that goes introduction → thesis → three pieces of supporting evidence → conclusion. Every time we go for another round of critiques and suggestions, my posts hone closer to this platonic ideal.

The bigger piece I've been missing, though, by outsourcing segments of the writing process to AI is the struggle to find the right words.

Here, I'm talking about an ability beyond finding technically correct words and sentences. The rhythm and texture of a sentence is something individual to the author; rhetorical devices like similes and metaphors, sharp examples and weird inclusions are deeply personal and form organic connections from the human author to the human reader. This is still something that current generation LLMs cannot produce, though Claude is often self-aware enough to point out these inclusions and urges me to keep the references.

The book On Writing Well hones in on precisely this element. The author, William Zinsser, wrote all of his articles and books well before any form of AI assistance^[1]. He was adamant that the work of writing well required real work, the iteration and repetition and refinement of singular sentences until they passed his stylistic bar. This was the craft of writing, of using the totality of the language to entertain and delight—and to not shy away from the toil and frustration and difficulty of the task.

Another way to frame Zinsser's perspective is that he's advocating for a depth of thinking at the most granular levels of prose. Years ago, I lamented the loss of thinking because it became trivial to create pages of text with a single prompt. There was so much low-effort content that we added the term "slop" to the vernicular, and it received the dubious distinction of Merriam-Webster's word of the year. But I'm finding that even when I restrict AI usage to only certain aspects or pieces of the writing process, risks the same outcome: technical competence, stylistically dull prose.

There are certainly elements of the process that have been either sped up or tackled more thoroughly with the help of Claude and ChatGPT. But every invocation increases the chance that the stochastic editor steps too far, makes it too easy to accept an adjacent logical suggestion. Ultimately, there is no detection app or recognition algorithm to catch when the underlying structures and thought processes were produced with artificial intelligence. We're measuring what we can access, the sentences and paragraphs and comparing them against known AI-generated tics. Even Not By AI is laying its claim on the final output, of individual words written by human hands.

But there's perhaps a bigger, more audacious claim: that the scaffolding to the prose has also been driven with human effort.

Which means I'm not done developing an earnest, complementary, AI-augmented writing workflow quite yet.

There are rumors that the entire Amazon Kindle lineup will be refreshed this year: more memory for AI, plus removable batteries to comply with EU regulation.

Hey—more Kindle hardware is good news. Yet, the reading experience on Kindles has felt stagnant for years, and after they discontinued the Voyage/Oasis line of e-readers, I moved off of their ecosystem entirely and started playing around with other e-reading devices.

It turned out harder than I initially appreciated to rebuild the same ecosystem. The flip side to a seemingly static product line is that it's also quite mature; the biannual hardware refreshes and OS updates have been incremental for years, but the foundation still does its core job of presenting a seamless reading experience. Outside of Kindles, I've been stitching together comparable functionality from independent services, open-source initiatives, and hobbyist projects.

Fortunately, while there are fewer and fewer people reading books, those who keep the habit are a passionate bunch.

So here are the areas where I took Kindles for granted, and their indie alternatives in 2026.

Form Factor Experimentation

The original Kindle Paperwhite perfected the e-reader form factor: black-and-white, 6" across, 300 dpi, touchscreen, light plastic casing with minimal bezel thickness. Subsequent Paperwhite refreshes, along with other major e-readers, converge onto this form factor.

Previously, I've played around with the Kobo Sage, a flagship 8" e-reader with hardware page-turn buttons that felt like the spiritual successor to the Kindle Oasis, and the Boox Palma, the innovator in using the phone form factor as an e-reader. I've even tried to make the reMarkable tablets and a Kindle Scribe into reading devices, but the 10"+ screens are unwieldy and are only useful when rendering college textbooks.

Instead, I've bought into the small, phone-sized form factor. Portability wins for actual usage, and taking an e-reader out of a side pocket feels much less daunting than fishing out a tablet from a backpack. The diminutive screen size translates to fewer sentences/paragraphs per page, but that has the positive effect of less effort to finish a page, and less text to scan when picking up my reading mid-passage. These advantages accumulate to less friction and lower activation energy to start reading.

My current e-reader is the ViWoods AiPaper Reader. Despite the name, I have no use for any of its AI features, and on its stock Android installation I load the minimalist homescreen/launcher app Before Launcher to keep it a single-use device^[1].

All the Documents

E-ink Kindles run on a fork of Linux, which keeps its software simple and efficient. Their reader app is functional, though it's felt stuck in maintenance mode for a decade now.

For all other e-readers, the reading experience starts with KOReader.

KOReader is a fast document viewer designed explicitly to work well with e-ink devices; it's compatible with most document formats and handles most things you could throw at it. There are edge cases—large PDFs, oversized embedded images, font size changes that cause layout reflows—that I've seen crash other devices and their native apps, cases that KOReader easily handles. The app also runs on most e-readers, either as an Android app in the Google Play Store, or cleverly sideloaded onto Kindles and Remarkables and Kobos.

Functionally, running KOReader enables a pile of features not found in default reader apps. Hardware volume buttons can be remapped (e.g., to turn pages), swipe gestures can be defined (e.g., to control backlight intensity), and there is a library of plugins that target specific manufacturers and devices for further customization. Meanwhile, for people like me who enjoy adjusting the minutiae of font weights and paragraph spacing and applying the right set of progress bars, the rendered page is infinitely tweakable via extensive options and menus.

Yet, for all the bells and whistles in viewing documents, KOReader is barebones when it comes to managing books on-device. Plugins fill the gap to a degree, but slow e-ink screens and underpowered components make for a clunky experience. E-readers are amazing client devices, but wrangling a digital library is much easier on regular computers and servers.

Centralized Libraries

Of course, this was how ebook libraries have always been managed since the original Kindle. Amazon runs its own backend servers to sync purchased books, and provides another half a dozen ways to import content—all of which are seamless to users. The indie equivalents require a bit more effort.

Calibre is the OG library management app. It was originally written to transfer files to the Sony PRS-500, released back in 2006, and has added compatibility with pretty much every single commercial e-reader throughout these past two decades. It's the open-source Swiss Army Knife for digital libraries: it organizes folders, cleans up messy metadata, and converts between the handful of common ebook formats. Between the main app and its hundreds of plugins, everything that you'd want to do with an ebook is covered.

That said, the app does show its age. The UI is sprawling and messy, with options tacked on through generations of active development. In particular, Calibre was designed as a desktop app, running on top of a local filesystem and database—a quaint setup, in a networked world of APIs and multiple clients and integrated services. For a while, I ran Calibre-Web, a modern web front-end designed to work in conjunction with the Calibre library database, for a nicer interface, but the integration was always finicky, particularly across multiple Docker containers, a last-generation Synology server with a slow CPU, and both apps reading and writing to the same database.

When I finally decided to try something else, I was pleasantly surprised to see the breadth of open-source digital library management systems in active development. There were projects designed for simplicity; apps targeting digital comic books and manga; a few services with heavy social elements; and generalist apps that take the most commonly used functions of Calibre and implement them on top of modern frameworks. Of the latter, I found two good candidates in Grimmory^[2] and BookOrbit.

I went with BookOrbit. The interface and functionality echo what I saw with Grimmory, but BO runs significantly faster on common import tasks and day-to-day use. I was also encouraged by the speed of development; they bumped a minor version in the six weeks I was testing Calibre successors, and that release included a dozen new features and twice as many bug fixes^[3].

Everything in Sync

Where BookOrbit shines is its API and integrations into the rest of the ebook ecosystem. For fetching and downloading books, the app supports the Open Publication Distribution System (OPDS), a feed that lists book collections with accompanying metadata and download links. It does an even better job syncing with Kobo devices, by emulating Kobo's sync backend and replacing it with your self-managed library^[4].

Once the books are copied to the device, BO offers a native KOReader plugin to keep progress, notes, and annotations synced across all instances. This is a non-trivial task; book formats aren't standardized and metadata is often messy, so systems fuzzy match titles and authors and ISBNs to correlate media across devices and servers. From my own use, it mostly does work and I get to see fine-grained reading stats as I page through my latest sci-fi short-story collection.

I took this one step further, and asked Claude to find a way to integrate my typing practice into BO. I've been using Entertrained to "read" books by typing them out, paragraph by paragraph, chapter by chapter—exercising my fingers on real-world passages as opposed to asdf typing tests.

And dammit, I wanted credit for all that typing. So through some API sniffing and localStorage splunking, I wrote a UserScript that sends immediate progress back to the library for tracking, marking percentage progress with every paragraph typed. The only downside is that this integration tracks me as a very slow reader.

The Social Element

Amazon acquired Goodreads in 2013. It's a loose social network for readers, featuring user reviews and recommendations, plus surveys, polls, and discussions centered around books. Its social data fits perfectly with the Kindle ecosystem, but, since it's the biggest community attached to the biggest bookstore, the platform has not changed much since the 2000s, and its seeming neglect remains a sore point for its users.

As with everything else we've talked about so far, there are alternative services, though most of the ones I found offer free and paid subscriptions. Here, I checked out three generalist sites: The StoryGraph, Fable, and Hardcover. They all track reading stats (which I already have, in finer detail, with BookOrbit), and aid in the discovery of new books via social recommendations and sometimes personalized AI. Their reviews are periodically useful, though quantities are limited compared to Goodreads since Amazon's site has an order of magnitude more users than its competitors.

I'm sticking with Hardcover for the time being. Of the top social reading networks, it has the most nerd cred by offering free and easy GraphQL access for querying user and book data. Those APIs make it possible for the rest of the stack—BookOrbit, KOReader, other reading apps like Readest on my iPad—to pass data back and forth in the background and keep the apps tightly integrated. Admittedly, though, these are external sites and this part of the e-reader stack is most likely to break from incompatibilities and updates.

Latent Complexity

Whew! That's a lot of components to replicate the functionality that Amazon Kindles enjoy out of the box.

Honestly, this is not worth the effort for most people. There are a bunch of moving pieces, and stitching services together still requires some coding and debugging. And there are other areas—audiobooks, for instance—where this entire complex setup still falls short of Kindle's multifaceted ecosystem. For me, though, the breadth of different hardware choices has genuinely enabled new ways to read, and it's been a ton of fun to tinker with these open-source alternatives. Now, it'd just feel claustrophobic to go back to the closed reading garden.

Back in 2017, the sci-fi author Ted Chiang wrote a prescient article surfacing the fears of AI. This was before the technology had reached its current, supercharged LLM form, before even GPT-1 was trained.

He was reflecting on the problem of misaligned AI, the same concern that would eventually weave into the founding stories of both OpenAI and Anthropic. The idea is farcically explained by the famous paperclip problem: what if an advanced AI, acting purely on instructions to maximize paperclip production, consumes all available resources to achieve its given goal^[1]?

Chiang's punchline was that we didn't have to wait for Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) to experience the dystopia of incentives run amok; unfettered, no-holds-barred capitalism does a great job of optimizing for a singular outcome, regardless of negative externalities.

Well, nine years later, we're seeing how the economics of AI is playing out in real time. But instead of seizing resources by hacking into systems or human social engineering or whatever gets dreamed up by science fiction, we're achieving "optimal resource allocation" by much less exotic means.

The capital markets are already misaligned; it has taken the last 12–18 months for the takeover of AI to become fully apparent.

In tech circles, we've already been experiencing the squeeze in computing hardware. Initially, GPUs that were crunching hashes for crypto mining were unceremoniously repurposed for AI training and inference, causing prices to spike and Nvidia's stock price to jump tenfold. In 2026, the same economic forces came for memory and storage; component costs skyrocketed, killing cheap smartphones and raising the prices of consumer electronics across the board.

For those who aren't as attuned to the industry, sentiment towards AI turned negative very quickly and remains terribly unpopular, at least in the United States. Regular people hear about the loss of jobs, the consumption of power and water, and noisy data centers as the costs borne by the citizenry. Yet, on the other end, only a handful of techies capture all the value.

The tendrils of AI now weave into all parts of the global economy, with venture capital, private equity, debt, and the public markets all focused on the AI trade. Collectively, these sources of capital are pouring billions—now trillions—of dollars into all parts of the AI stack, from semiconductors to research to models to hyperscalers to applications.

The effect is most dramatic with the public markets, partly because of structural transparency, but also because the numbers are so unfathomably huge. The SpaceX IPO, valued at $1.75 trillion, pivoted its narrative from Mars to space data centers. Memory chips are now so constrained that two Korean companies alone (Samsung and SK Hynix) made up three-quarters of the entire country's market trading volume earlier this summer^[2]. An analyst report speculating on hypothetical AI disruption to established business models erased $100 billion in public market cap.

So is this all that different from what Chiang posited, or from the original paperclip maximization thought experiment?

The fear was an abstract system, given a misguided objective, pulling out all the stops to reach that goal. It turns out that AI just needs the mechanism of capital allocation to do its bidding.

Etched in my core memory, from my teenage gaming years, is The Offspring's All I Want:

It's the intro loop from the arcade game Crazy Taxi. The core game and its sequels haven't seen any updates since the 2000s^[1], but they epitomized the arcade games of that era: flashy, stupid fun, but maddeningly punishing and designed to eat quarters.

Recently, I wanted to replay the game for nostalgia's sake, only to find it delisted from Steam in 2024 for unspecified reasons. Had I bought it two years ago, I could just boot it on my Steam Deck; now, I'll need to find a DVD drive, rip the ISO off of my Dreamcast copy of the game, and look for an emulator to see whether it can still run.

Now, discs are often cited as a durable format that survives meddling by publishers, but that's a reflection of the era more so than the medium. When Sony announced their plans to end support for physical discs in 18 months, the reflexive resistance feels like pining for an earlier era.

For instance, due to licensing limitations, Crazy Taxi's iconic music was replaced in later PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of the game. They even had to replace real-world brands like KFC with generic alternatives.

Meanwhile, modern games that are shipped on discs often receive large, immediate Day One patches. Gamers sometimes complain that this is a sign of degrading quality in game development, but it takes weeks, sometimes months, to certify a game and press physical discs. Before online patches were commonplace, all development had to finalize with the gold master certification disc, including any missed or deprioritized bugs. Nowadays even single-player games are supported up through launch day and for months afterward.

Publishers have strong incentives to move to digital, beyond the usual accusations of blocking second-hand sales. They have to not only maintain the physical factories that press the discs or produce the cartridges, but also handle the logistics of shipping these boxes worldwide to coordinate launches across multiple territories. Unsanctioned early sales and leaks become real problems; it's likely one of the reasons why GTA6 is shipping physical boxes that only contain download codes to retailers^[2].

There are real hardware constraints as well. Games get bigger every year, and some of the biggest games are outgrowing disc capacity. Blu-ray discs hold up to 100GB, and games have gotten so large that they no longer fit; none of the top 25 largest games (by storage size) could ship on a Blu-ray disc. Internal drives are now many times faster than disc drives; in practice, every PS5 and Xbox Series X disc is first copied onto the local solid-state drive, and nothing is really streamed off of the disc anymore.

And of course, almost every other form of media has made the same transition. Movies, shows, and music are streamed. PC games have abandoned physical boxes since the early 2010s, when Steam plus a handful of much smaller online stores took over distribution completely. Sony and Nintendo are not so much the pioneers in moving to digital, as they are the last remaining holdouts.

In fact, the revealed preference of PlayStation gamers is overwhelmingly digital, with less than 15% of games sold on discs.

All that said, there is still real functional loss in ditching physical media. They can be borrowed or sold, and the used games market still exists even with all the above caveats. Preservation is a real concern, and shipping physical discs still lets some games run without online access. My local library started building a collection of Switch games, made available for kids to check out a few weeks at a time: the portable Nintendo console may be the only piece of hardware left that embodies the simplicity of plug-and-play games of a bygone era.

What are the rules to the game?

What game are we even playing?

A couple years ago, we caught the Super Bowl on TV, with the 49ers playing in the biggest sporting event of the year. As my son was asking why things were happening, I found myself having to explain, more and more, the strategic aspects of American football: timeout and clock management, probabilities of field goals versus touchdowns, point spreads, etc. It's genuinely impressive how much game theory is accessible to casual fans.

But that intricacy was lost on my third grade kid; he just enjoyed seeing dudes smash into each other. When he discovered Retro Bowl on his iPad a few years later, his only goal was to score as many points as possible, as fast as possible. Thus, much like many games of Madden NFL, the only plays that mattered were either QB sacks or Hail Mary pass plays^[1].

In sports, this cliché is often referred to as the "game within a game." The phrase refers to in-the-moment subgoals that can contribute to winning the game, but come with their own set of operating principles. Or, they may not contribute; winning games may hamper that season's goals^[2], or not be in the best interests of the sports franchise. Each layer of "game" can institute its own rules of engagement and definition of success, and it's not necessary for all layers to be pointed in the same direction.

In this, sports can become a microcosm for life. Many of us don't recognize that we're playing the games fostered onto us by our environments, our cultures, or our upbringings. We end up following an implicit set of rules and constraints, shaping our behaviors to conform to an opaque rulebook, often without a scoreboard. If we can become conscientious of our participation, we can actively decide to keep playing—or opt into another game entirely.

A Game of Wealth

I have always been interested in personal finance. But beyond the numbers and accounting, there is a very individual, inherently subjective, yet completely fundamental question: what is the goal of building wealth?

Now, there are definitely bad answers—even though few will admit to their intrinsic motivations. Some chase money for clout, which is particularly acute in this era of social media. Some live for competition, where wealth becomes the way they keep score and "win" against their peer groups. Some believe money buys them happiness^[3], not just in the sense of being content, but that it'd drastically turn around a dissatisfactory situation—I've known distant relatives who strongly espoused that belief, who became devastated when their low-probability windfall never materialized.

As you can imagine, these unhealthy pursuits pull people to the extremes: they turn to crimes, sacrifice health and family, or go into unsustainable modes of saving and thrift to "make their number."

A better game to play—though still not perfect—is to accumulate a nest egg for an early retirement and the freedom for personal pursuits, i.e., joining the Financial Independence, Retire Early (FIRE) movement. Although FIRE is not without its faults, its adherents focus more on buying back time and insulating their families from economic turbulence. The community celebrates people reaching their thresholds, rather than compare each other's brokerage accounts. In fact, the toughest transition that potential early retirees make is letting go of the "one more year [of work]" trap—making a choice to play a different game.

A Game of Work

In the context of work, the idea of shifting behaviors typically segues into discussions about role progression, promotions, and inevitably, career goals. As a manager, this conundrum comes up frequently during performance reviews.

Sometimes people don't want to admit that they're playing the job title game, or that they're locked into a contest comparing their salary with acquaintances within our industry. Some people lean into prestige, whether it's a brand-name company they're a part of, a team that's lauded by executives, or even trending technologies getting all the attention. Occasionally, by chatting through motivations and rationales, folks realize they had trapped themselves into games they didn't enjoy.

Identifying which game you want to play also clarifies its rules. With promotions, the typical advice focuses on climbing the corporate ladder. But context matters. If, for instance, your company's career ladder mandates that staff-level engineers build complex systems, yet all of your team's staff engineers are hands-on firefighting all the time—the written best practice is overruled by cultural convention. There are the expressed rules, then there are the shadow rules to the game.

What the company values, what the HR team says they value, and the actual values demonstrated by your team and manager—would ideally be the same, but usually differ in subtle and nuanced ways. Navigating success in the workplace means understanding these implicit norms, and deciphering the rules that govern the game you're willing to play.

A Game of Life

My immigrant background provides me a wide range of attitudes, when sampling friends and family, on what matters. Many of the family members with my same background prioritize setting the foundation for future generations. Some of my relatives who grew up here emphasize stability and self-improvement, to fulfill the expectations of their immigrant ancestry. Colleagues who moved here to Silicon Valley are driven by participating in the technological frontier and making a lot of money along the way; friends who grew up in the Bay Area are more mellow, caring more about longevity and social status.

These are, of course, broad generalizations, but the through-threads of family background and cultural expectations do shape each group of people. This is why a luxury hotel for some would be considered just another place for others, or admission to an Ivy League college could be unremarkable, versus a profound source of pride. When folks aren't even playing the same game, it takes a mental adjustment or two to engage at the right level, to situate myself in each environment and its implicit set of rules.

Subconscious Scorekeeping

Whether it's money, career, or life, the most important aspect for each domain is to recognize the game and its rules—and then change them if they are not serving us. The trouble is that figuring out the game itself can be intimidating.

Sometimes I see this not with the big, broad ideas, but in the small things. It's a well-off relative always angling to get a good deal, and feeling aggrieved for the rest of the day if they overpaid by $2. It's a coworker who spends all of their spare time studying to add course certifications to their résumé. It's a friend who will drop a backhanded compliment while subtly boasting about their own kids' accomplishments. There's a flavor of "game within a game" at play that I notice, and on some level appreciate.

But I also suspect that a lot of the mental accounting and scorekeeping is subconscious. I wish people were more self-aware of the rules they're following, and more importantly, why they're adhering to these rules. Because if they can stop and think about the consequences and second and third-order effects of their behavior, maybe they can tweak the rules that don't serve them well, or opt out of that game altogether. The first step is honest self-assessment.

It's a huge mental shift, and I can attest that it's really hard to do consistently. What helped me was reading about the philosophy of stoicism and trying to live by it, governing my thinking and emotions with reasoning and self-control. In particular, its core tenet, the Dichotomy of Control, has been instrumental in regulating my reactions—most of the time. The goal is to be intentional with the games I play. When I'm successful, I get to craft a set of rules that serve me well in wealth, work, and life.