A solitary middle-aged man sitting alone on a dimly lit metro platform

June 22, 2026 3 min read

Everyday Heroes

Working notes for a column.

Latest

A small steaming kettle sitting incongruously inside a large bubbling jacuzzi.

Essays Jun 15, 2026 1 min

The Jacuzzi Fallacy

"It was worth it because of this nice thing that fell out of it" is not an argument. It's the receipt for a purchase you never compared.

Fallacies Thinking

A green iguana sitting with regal composure on a velvet cushion beside a small golden crown, under a single spotlight

Essays Jun 11, 2026 12 min

On the Last Human Sports: The Rules of Trolling

There is a leaderboard for everything now. Two games take no machine entry — and one of them has iguanas in it.

LLMs Trolling

A lone robed figure climbs the long central stair of a vast stepped stone temple toward a fire at its summit, at cold ashen dawn

Essays Jun 8, 2026 22 min

You'll Understand When You're Older

the catastrophe you never look up

Modernity Moloch

An open antique naturalist's field guide on a dark wooden desk in lamplight: a hand-drawn engraving of a horned creature on the right page, dense handwritten annotations on the left, a dip pen in the gutter

Essays Jun 3, 2026 18 min

A Monster Manual

a field guide to your own catastrophes

Craft Self Knowledge

A wooden Trojan horse on wheels in a city avenue at dawn, watched from a high window

Essays May 28, 2026 7 min

Call me Cassandra

Three years holding this back. Done holding.

Authenticity LLMs

Lab May 15, 2026 17 min

Turning a face into a chibi: a tour of LAM, Gaussian Splatting, and what happens when you push on the mesh underneath

A few weeks ago the only thing we wanted from a "talking-head avatar" was for it to look like the person in the input photo and to blink at roughly the right moments. By this week we wanted to grab th

Faces Gaussian Splatting