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AI Reveals Why BI Still Matters(opens in new tab)

Ask a BI engineer what they actually spend their time on: it’s not building dashboards. More often: fixing the join that broke in the overnight pipeline, untangling the metric definition that means three different things to three different teams, or ...

GOOSE IT UP(opens in new tab)

I’m in school1 again. I’m going back to school because my work, my entire career, for my entire adult life, has been writing things for the Internet. That’s going away,...

Build yourself flowers(opens in new tab)

This is an edited transcript of the keynote I gave at the Applied Machine Learning Conference in Charlottesville, VA in April 2026. I first wrote a draft of this talk by hand. This part took 2 months. I then recorded ...

Weak vs. Strong AI Rollouts(opens in new tab)

Weak vs Strong AI Rollouts diagram/images/weak-vs-strong-ai-rollouts.webp/images/weak-vs-strong-ai-rollouts.webp I get to see and help with a lot of Anterprise AI rollouts. Some are brilliant, but most even in 2026 are surprisingly bad. I've been thinking about and trying to summarize what I ...

Hook It Up to the Machine(opens in new tab)

In the early 2000’s, my parents took us on a road trip to Glacier National Park in Montana. We made the journey in our new (used) family van: a green Dodge Caravan whose reputation was soon to become “a lemon”. ...

(opens in new tab)

Just have such strong nostalgia for this song. Still slaps. Close second from MC Chris. Curious, this record isn’t streaming anywhere, and he just makes the album available as downloadable MP3’s in a Google Drive.

Jensen vs. Dwarkesh on China Chips(opens in new tab)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hrbq66XqtCo Dwarkesh Patel talked to Jensen Huang in this videohttps://youtu.be/Hrbq66XqtCo, and I wanted to make a couple of points about it. I take Jensen's point about not wanting to give up a tech stack to a competing country — wanting ...

Mythos is Just the New Normal(opens in new tab)

Mythos is Just the New Normal/images/mythos-is-new-normal.webp/images/mythos-is-new-normal.webp This whole Mythos thing continues to surprise me. Not the model, but the reaction to it. Guys, it's not even a cyber model. It's just the next thing. It's just a model designed to ...

Good and Bad Harness Engineering(opens in new tab)

Good and Bad Harness Engineering/images/blog/bitter-lesson-engineering/bitter-lesson-engineering-header.webp/images/blog/bitter-lesson-engineering/bitter-lesson-engineering-header.webp There are lots of ways to do Harness Engineering well and poorly, but the most important one comes down to whether...

Design and Engineering, As One(opens in new tab)

In the winter of 1898, a mechanical engineer named Frederick Winslow Taylor arrived at the Bethlehem Steel Company in Pennsylvania with a stopwatch and a conviction. Taylor had been thinking for years about why industrial work was so inefficient, and ...

It's Time for Full Activation(opens in new tab)

It's Time for Full Activation/images/blog/its-time-for-full-activation/header.webp/images/blog/its-time-for-full-activation/header.webp I've been experiencing a feeling lately that's massive and hard to pin down. But here goes. If you remember my piece on Constraints on Creativity/blog/our-constr...

✉️ Content Hiatus(opens in new tab)

I've decided to go on a content hiatus. This will be my last dispatch for a while. I don't know how long I'll be gone. Why? Because I've been posting to an anonymous audience on the Internet almost every day ...

Mechanical sympathy(opens in new tab)

Weaver, seen from the Front, Vincent van Gogh, 1884 Something that’s been floating around in my head lately is the idea that I don’t know any truly good engineers who are also not good at at product design. Product design ...

AI Only Has to Beat 3/10(opens in new tab)

AI Only Has to Beat 3/10/images/ai-only-has-to-beat-3-out-of-10.webp/images/ai-only-has-to-beat-3-out-of-10.webp I think there's a misconception about how AI will break and change things. The Mythos hype has convinced people that AI is about to be so advanced that it can overcome our great cyber...