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
What are we teaching them to be? — a parable with some reflections on AI risk and the weirdness inherent at the intersection of how models are trained and how we talk about them in public.
daegent: pro-grade, multi-model Claude Cowork — a tool I built, which I now use for almost all of my non-code AI interactions. Also published a shorter post about daegent’s integration into my personal app Congruence.
A love letter to exe.dev — my new favorite cloud platform. If you’re building software projects, you should probably at least check it out.
AI Captain’s Log — regular thoughts, this month on becoming (more) coding-pilled.
What I’m enjoying
Product: Steelmade griddles. US-made, well-engineered steel griddle that sits on top of your range. Really happy with this and use it for almost everything that would otherwise go in a pan. If seasoned well (either by them or yourself), it’s pretty much entirely nonstick.
Book: A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman. An unbelievably well-researched narrative retelling of the arc of 14th-century Europe, which was… quite a time. Eye-opening to learn about in this format. The book long and dense and detailed, but every time I thought about putting it down for something else, the next page pulled me back in.
Experiment: caffeine cycling. Well — painfully — it’s that time of the year again. Roughly once annually I cold-turkey caffeine down to zero, suffer for a week or so, and then maintain at zero until I feel like I “need” it again — usually during travel or a particularly busy work time. It hurts during the reset, but it’s so much better then permanently anchoring my baseline to “caffeinated” and needing coffee just to feel normal. I’ve done this pattern for many years and have no plans to stop.
Articles:
The Mystery in the Medicine Cabinet by Dynomight. I started to wonder about the conventional advice on ibuprofen (Advil/Motrin) vs. acetaminophen (Tylenol), and lo and behold, one of my favorite internet writers had recently published an excellent debunking of the layperson consensus perspective. (tl;dr: you probably, mostly, will be better off with Tylenol from a health perspective.)
How to Rack 30 Petabytes of Storage by the Standard Intelligence Team. Yet another exhibit in the “people doing cool technical things and writing well about it” archive.
Ultra-Pure Quantum Crystals from an Abandoned Mine in the Atacama Desert by Aaron Breidenbach. Pretty self-explanatory and remarkable. They found higher purity quantum crystals in the desert than they have managed to synthesize in a highly-controlled lab!
Some Contemporary Heresies by Kevin Kelly. Nice to read a list of heresies every now and then.
Riding the Leopard by Packy McCormick. Great speech/essay with a compelling perspective on meaning and why you should do things, drawing on many traditions.
What is a Smith Chart? by Christopher Bryant. A very nice visual breakdown of an important concept in radiofrequency engineering.
Lindy check
Now that this newsletter has been around for a couple years, each issue will come with a “Lindy check” where I review at my recommendations from two years prior and see if they still stand. From Ways of Looking #1 (September ‘24):
Fanlecy back stretcher: A++, still in near-daily use.
The Caesars Palace Coup: Still recommended as a good business read, but not pounding the table for it.
Donating blood if you have high SHBG: Still happily doing it!
Lab-grown diamonds article: Vaguely remember this being good but the details didn’t stick with me.
Claude’s Projects and Artifacts features: Nope — don’t ever use these anymore, except for rare artifacts usage via Claude Code.
I’ll give that a 3/5 Lindy score total.
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: a stealthy AI company, Amity venture investing, Lightwork, Eco, lots of tinkering and building projects, supporting FreeWorld, and advising great companies and founders.
Thanks for reading. I’ll see you next time.
— Andy