Bizarre questions and powerful leverage I live in a new area, and I'm frequently meeting new people. This means that I have to spend a not-insignificant amount of time explaining my professional interests to random strangers. Some people are curious. Some are dismissive. But one of the strangest comments I've gotten happened last week, and was clearly on the dismissive end of the spectrum. "What are you, some kind of futurist?" (For context, this was said in a Violet Beauregard voice that...
27 days ago • 3 min read
Easy things to do On these hot and humid days where they're trying to get us to skip the air conditioning to save energy, nobody has the energy to undertake Big Things. So here are some incredibly lazy ways to live more sustainably this summer with minimal effort or physical discomfort. Don't multitask. I think we've all had those evenings where we had a streaming movie playing on the TV in the background while sending emails on our computer and texting friends by phone. We don't need to be...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Shifting responsibility to the individual Update: During the summer (and maybe longer?) this newsletter will be going to an every-other-week schedule. Last week, much of the United States experienced a massive heatwave, complete with intensely high humidity. Record high temperatures were broken in places as far apart as Louisiana (the U.S. deep South), and Wisconsin (northern Midwest near the Great Lakes). On top of that, the strained power grid led to extended blackouts in Philadelphia from...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Everything is topsy-turvy I feel like there's a bit of repetition in the newsletter of late. That's because I keep getting emails and DMs asking me about what I'm doing and how to navigate everything given... well, everything. Now, did I write an entire newsletter just to use the phrase "topsy-turvy?" Maybe. It feels a lot more playful than the onslaught of emails that have flooding my inbox talking about climate disasters, underfunding of government agencies, economic uncertainty, health...
2 months ago • 4 min read
A model of restraint Is this the fourth time I've rewritten this just this week? Yep. Everything is moving fast and breaking my newsletter But I'm hoping that this will be an evergreen analogy. Recently, lots of people have been talking about how micro LLMs are the answer to anyone's concerns about LLM/genAI resource overconsumption. Because they're still cool toys like the big models, but they use less of everything. So isn't that a good thing? Maybe? I'm going to use excerpts from my side...
2 months ago • 3 min read
What do we see? I'm sitting here with my eyes dilated and blurry from an eye exam, so I'll keep this brief. This is a good tie-in for something I've been thinking about all week: perspective. Last week, I won an eBay auction for a circa 1970 film camera that is full of Wes Anderson vibes. It looks like the sort of thing one of his characters would carry, and it was a bargain at $53! (Original MSRP would have been about $93, or inflation-adjusted $769 in 2025 dollars.) I haven't seen any of...
3 months ago • 2 min read
What do you do with it? At the Green IO conference in New York City, there was a lot of talk about AI. (I know you're shocked.) Within the hallway discussions outside the broader apidays conference, there was a lot of talk about how AI is "just a tool," and what matters is how you use it. I think that's an oversimplification. A hammer is a tool. I can use it to gently tap a nail into the wall so I can hang a family photo, or I can use it to smash a windshield. An ice pick is a tool, but it...
3 months ago • 2 min read
Calculating water consumption I'm writing this early because I'm speaking at the Green IO conference this week. I'm a sucker for a sustainability conference, doubly so for one in New York City. I'll keep this brief, as there's a lot going on with life, travel, and... you know... everything else. Last week, I was introduced to the work of Masheika Allgood. She's developed a calculator to identify how much water is being consumed by hyperscale data centers. The existence of this calculator left...
3 months ago • 2 min read
Proactive framing I didn't publish last week because I was struggling with resilience. Resilience is a funny thing. Merriam-Webster says it's "an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change." But in that definition, there are two ways of looking at it. When we talk about personal resilience, it's usually in the context of misfortune: how did a person bounce back from trauma, illness, or disaster? How did they rebuild? It's about looking backwards. This kind of resilience,...
3 months ago • 2 min read