Ways of Looking #17 (January '26)
In this issue: electrolytes, a very personal app, Traditional Chinese Medicine, fixing myopia, quantum factoring, and unprocessed photos.
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
Everything Is As It Should Be — my favorite phrase and most-loved way of looking. On equanimity and the futility of resisting reality as it is, even if you seek to play a role in creating the future.
Someone, please make clean electrolytes (recipes included) — we make our own super-clean (and tasty) electrolytes at home. I want someone to start a company doing this. Use our recipes!
Congruence: a very personal app — I made a “home-cooked” app that guides me through my day and helps with all sorts of little utilities. I love it. Here’s a series of very short posts about the features: intro, streaks & MEQ, notes & AI, meditation, call list, vibe checks & 2 things, and barcodes & freedom phone. Maybe part of the future is indeed personalized software?
AI Captain’s Log — usual updates on my usage of AI, including thoughts on big and small models.
What I’m enjoying
App: Helium Browser. I recently switched to Helium as my primary desktop browser. Chrome was just getting way too slow, and I’ve never loved Brave. Helium is great so far — snappy, Chromium-based (so my extensions still work), privacy and ad blocking by default, clean.
The two bits people complain about are 1) no DRM, so things like Netflix won’t work and 2) no mobile browser / tab sync. I’m fine without these but your mileage may vary!
Experiment: tinkering club. Since I got this rolling a couple months ago, we’ve spun up several groups of 3-4 awesome people. It has been a lot of fun. If you’re building or creating anything (as your main job, on the side, whatever), check it out! Would love to get a couple more groups going.
Book: The Web That Has No Weaver by Ted J. Kaptchuk. An amazing introduction to Traditional Chinese Medicine. There are so many misconceptions about TCM (including that, e.g., words like “liver” or “heart” do not actually refer to the same organs that those words mean in Western anatomy). TCM has treated literally billions of patients over several millennia… feels worth knowing about!
You can probably skip the middle ~50% of the book if you’re just looking for an overview (it pretty exhaustively goes through details of various conditions), but the beginning and end chapters provide a great introduction with lot of eye-opening health philosophy.
Article: lots of good reading this last month. A smattering:
The Dilbert Afterlife by Scott Alexander. Quite a psychoanalysis of Scott Adams, who recently passed. Worth the read.
How Will the Miracle Happen Today? by Kevin Kelly. A beautiful way of looking.
What an unprocessed photo looks like by Maurycy. Very cool visual breakdown, and provokes some questions about whether something “unedited” can exist (as well as about the nature of perception!).
An introduction to Susan Pockett: An electromagnetic theory of consciousness by smoothbrains. Compelling!
There are only a few suttas where the Buddha directly discusses technique, the Saṅkhitta Dhamma Sutta is one of them by RomeoStevens. Title says it all!
Why haven’t quantum computers factored 21 yet? by Craig Gidney. They’ve had no problem factoring 15; but 21 turns out to be much harder.
And a series of posts on vision: Polarizer Glasses for Outdoor Computing by Michael Sloan (very cool!), Reversing Lens-Induced Myopia by Andrew Backhouse, Vision in the Digital Age by Sohil Sathe.
For a compilation of all past recommendations, see the Recommendations page on my site.
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