I’ve been reading Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments — this year marks the 250th anniversary of its publication, which felt like reason enough to finally pick it up.
It is a genuinely great book. But reading it has its own particular rhythm: a paragraph of Smith, then a pause, then a Google search.
Scipio and Camillus. Timoleon and Aristides. Smith drops these names the way a modern writer might cite a headline — as shared cultural reference points, things any educated reader would simply know.
I recently spent time with two different deep dives into the mind of Stewart Brand, an iconoclast who has spent decades shaping how we think about systems, technology, and the future. He’s currently out discussing his latest book, The Maintenance of Everything, and the timing couldn’t be better.
I listened to two distinct conversations back-to-back:
EconTalk with Russ Roberts The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie Two Different Vibes While both covered the core themes of the book, the experiences were quite different.
The rise of LLMs and the recent insights from Anthropic regarding systems like Mythos and Glasswing suggest we are entering a new phase of technical operations. It’s no longer just about automation; it’s about the massive expansion of the attack surface and the complexity of “vibe-coded” enterprise applications.
While there is plenty of talk about AI replacing roles, the reality on the ground feels different. As AI-driven system hacking becomes more sophisticated, the demand for high-level Incident Command and Cybersecurity Response is likely to spike.
Recently, I’ve been using AntennaPod on my Samsung S24 to keep up with my podcast feed during the workday. For the most part, it’s a solid, open-source experience, but I’ve run into a peculiar little glitch lately.
Every once in a while, the audio skips backward and replays the previous 10 seconds. The transition is surprisingly smooth—so smooth, in fact, that the last two times it happened, I didn’t even realize it until that “deja vu” feeling kicked in.
I recently watched the following video from the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE):
Who Controls Your Money?
The video is ultimately about fiat money and central banking, but it opens by asking a fundamental question: Is money discovered or created?
The video’s narrator posits that money was discovered [00:23], using the emergent economy of a WWII prisoner-of-war camp as a primary example. In that camp, cigarettes spontaneously became the medium of exchange to solve the “double coincidence of wants” [01:24].
Living in Georgia, I’ve become accustomed to the “pay-to-play” nature of our express lanes. But lately, GDOT has introduced a bit of a data-opacity problem that feels like total shenanigans.
The Old System (The Logical Way): In the not-so-distant past, the overhead signs were transparent. They would break out the travel times for both the local lanes and the express lanes. The next sign would give you the current surge price.
I’ve been spending some time on the Nostalgia 4-1-1 YouTube channel lately, and as a proud GenXer, it is a trip.
Watching their breakdowns of 80s and 90s cartoons—from the heavy hitters like Ninja Turtles to the “what happened to that?” flops like TigerSharks—is fascinating. It brings a whole new perspective to my Saturday morning memories.
Back then, I was just a kid watching cartoons. Now, looking at it through a developer’s lens of systems and integrations, I see the massive machinery behind it all.
It’s been a week of digital “new beginnings.” In addition to settling into the MacBook Neo, I’ve started experimenting with Obsidian to build out a personal knowledge graph.
For years, my notes have been scattered across different apps and local files. Now, I’m trying to consolidate everything into a single “vault” of linked ideas. There’s something deeply satisfying about seeing a visual graph of how my interests—from n8n automation and Python to Dostoevsky and brisket recipes—actually intersect.