Ways of Looking #12 (August '25)
In this issue: decibels finally make sense, the FoodCycler, kettlebells, AI AI AI, plastic differentiation, and excellence in a blog post.
Welcome to Ways of Looking. Roughly every month, I send my friends links and summaries for anything I’ve written recently, plus a few things I’m enjoying.
Check out my more regular writing and reply to this email anytime. Thanks for reading.
What I wrote last month
We're all the editors now — on how using AI effectively means becoming more like an editor, and why managers might be more used to that already.
AI Captain's Log — usual not-quite-weekly updates on my usage of AI, including three “wows” from this last week.
Omarchy on a 2018-2020 Mac — low-TAM blog post on a new, awesome niche development environment. (But seems like other people had the same issue — surprising amount of search traffic to this post immediately!)
What I’m enjoying
Articles: I couldn’t narrow it down to one this month. Sorry!
Not a single article, but I just discovered lcamtuf’s Substack and it is full of incredible work. I’m steadily working my way through it. The electronics series is excellent and pragmatic. Also Decibels are ridiculous helped me finally understand that my confusion about decibels is not really my fault.
Building a web search engine from scratch in two months with 3 billion neural embeddings by Wilson Lin. Unbelievably cool. If you’re semi-technical (and perhaps also if you’re not), I recommend reading this start-to-finish, even if you understand only a fraction of it. I believe that reading the “process” for someone exceptional like this can help build your own capabilities and meta-learning ability, even if the details whiz by — and we don’t often get the chance to do so.
The characters of plastics by anonymous Usenet poster. Plastics are a large category and most of us don’t know the differences!
Two oldies-but-goodies I revisited this week while writing a memo on something related: In The Balance by Scott Alexander and The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority by Nassim Taleb. Both very useful ways of looking!
Product: FoodCycler. I almost can’t believe I’m posting this given how much I teased my wife when she was ordering it, but… it’s great. We toss all our food waste in it, run it once every day or so, and out comes odorless dirt. I eat a ton of fruit (see: “honey diet” from Ways of Looking #7) and the cores and scraps in the trash or compost kept attracting fruit flies — plus sometimes food waste just starts to stink. But now the issue is gone.
Book: Prescriptions for a Healthy House by Paula Baker-Laporte and John Banta. A practical textbook for building, renovating, or tweaking a home to be healthy. So much information.
Experiments: kettlebells. For the last few months I’ve subbed kettlebells in for my typical weightlifting and have been loving it. With a pair of 35lbs and a pair of 60lbs, I can get a great, varied workout every day in the garage. Feels really good and dynamic, and the change of pace is nice. Will see how long I keep it as my primary workout, but I’m already about five months in…
About me: I’m a multi-time founder (Eco, Lightwork Home Health, CoinList, Sidewire). I’m currently spending time on: Eco, Lightwork, building interface0, investing at Amity, supporting FreeWorld, hacking on a few other products, and advising great companies and founders.
Thanks for reading. I’ll see you next time.
— Andy