Check out my more regular writing and reply to this email anytime. Thanks for reading.

What I wrote last month

Winnie-the-Pooh, customized for my daughter — a very fun little project! I fully customized and printed a physical copy of Winnie-the-Pooh for my daughter from scratch.

You can solve problems ambiently — a post that made me feel much better about an uncommonly effective way of problem solving.

AI Captain’s Log — regular thoughts, this month on too much intelligence.

What I’m enjoying

• Book: Buddhism: A Journey through History by Donald Lopez. A series of very-readable (albeit occasionally repetitive) short essays by one of America’s leading Buddhist scholars that, in sum, bust many myths and reveal many idiosyncrasies about the true history of Buddhism. If you’re at all curious about the subject matter, I recommend this one.

• Articles:

  • A Concise Overview of Wolfram’s Research by Geoff Anders. The most approachable explanation of Stephen Wolfram’s research I have found — a great primer. For my favorite Wolfram idea, see The Concept of the Ruliad by the man himself (although I’d start with Anders’ overview if you aren’t already familiar with the work).

  • Why Japanese companies do so many different things by David Oks. An interesting thesis on why companies like Toto (known for their bidets, but also in the business of memory chips and photocatalytic building coatings) and Kyocera (smartphones, ballpoint pens, tooth replacements, and more) exist in Japan but not the US.

  • Aluminum foil by Kragen Javier Sitaker. Everything you’ve ever wanted to know about the stuff. I would love to see more blog posts like this on the internet, about anything and everything.

  • Dynomight regularly writes great posts where they simply do the math or analyze the evidence for (or against) something. Two recents: Does creatine make you smarter? and So you want to use plants to reduce indoor CO₂

  • Inside the Coke-Fueled Rise and Fall of VICE by Mitchell Jackson. Remember VICE? A very entertaining read.

  • A short post from Jack Gallagher with an under-appreciated insight about AI: “a lot of work is intelligence x schlep gated and as you improve on those axes just about everything eventually falls. maybe you still miss some grand creative spark but nanotech doesn’t require a creative spark from here it requires relentless grinding on miniaturization.” — this is also why increased inference speed can directly translate to better results / “more intelligence,” because AI speed isn’t just about speed itself; it’s about increased bandwidth for schlepping and thinking.

• Experiment: cost-per-use. I’ve started doing some tracking of cost-per-wear or cost-per-use for items I own, and it is often eye-opening. Things that feel expensive on an absolute basis can end up feeling cheap on a per-use basis (“yes this cost $x but I’ve worn it three hundred times…”), or vice versa (“if I knew I would only use this twice ever, how would I feel about the price?”). I built a little app for this I may write about soon, but in the meantime here’s a post from Steph Ango about the topic.

• Product: combi-steam ovens. We just moved into a new place that happened to come with one of these and it is my new favorite way to easily cook or heat up food. So much better than normal convection ovens — and in hindsight, obvious that there would have been some technological innovation in the last 80 years since those hit the market.
  

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, investing at Amity, Lightwork, Eco, tinkering with interface0 and other products, supporting FreeWorld, and advising great companies and founders.

Thanks for reading. I’ll see you next time.

— Andy

Check out my more regular writing and reply to this email anytime. Thanks for reading.

What I wrote last month

A month of mostly-technical writing… but I’ve got some very fun projects in near-final stages that I look forward to writing about more accessibly in the coming months!

Developing on iOS is underrated: CloudKit and more — recently I’ve really enjoyed building iOS apps for the first time in my life — here’s why.

Copapers: the tricky bits — a technical writeup on some of the nuances of building Copapers.

AI Captain’s Log — regular thoughts, this month on connectors, the physical world, and open source.

What I’m enjoying

• Book: Hard Landing: The Epic Contest for Power and Profits That Plunged the Airlines into Chaos by Thomas Petzinger Jr. — unexpectedly almost couldn’t put this history of the airline industry down. It’s a page-turner written with all the drama and plot twists of great fiction but… it’s real. Great read, and I now understand the weird edges of the air travel industry much more clearly.

• Product: Screen Studio. Every time I publish a nice-looking screen recording with zooming and transitions, people ask me how I made it and how long it took me to edit. The answers are 1) Screen Studio and 2) roughly 3 minutes. It’s a little pricey and there are competitors, but I’ve found it to be reliable and easy, and so have stuck with it…

• Articles:

  • 50 Hours to Draw Some Lines by Doug MacDowell. Such cool craftsmanship.

    

  • Curious cases of financial engineering in biotech by Abhishaike Mahajan. Biotech stocks and markets have never made much sense to me, and this helped explain the frameworks and intuition behind them.

  • Against Maximum Stimulation- Egg freezing, IVF, and the case for gentler fertility medicine by Riva Melissa-Tez. The American Way of IVF is almost certainly not optimal, and this piece does a great job explaining the issues.

• Experiment: Biomat before bed. If I’m wired before bed — which I try not to be, but is sometimes unavoidable — I find that 5-10 minutes on a biomat / PEMF mat absolutely knocks me out. I go from fully-energized to staggering-to-bed-90%-asleep. The most effective setting for me seems to be 3Hz with the heat on, but anything 2-6Hz does the trick, with heat optional. I use a Healthy Wave Mat but there are many out there.

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, investing at Amity, Lightwork, Eco, tinkering with interface0 and other products, supporting FreeWorld, and advising great companies and founders.

Thanks for reading. I’ll see you next time.

— Andy

Check out my more regular writing and reply to this email anytime. Thanks for reading.

What I wrote last month

My grandfather’s papers: some family computing history — I loosely knew my grandfather was a mathematician, but recently discovered that he was around in the early days of commercial computing and made some cool contributions to the field.

Copapers: multiplayer docs for humans & agents — I got sick of there being no good product that combines Google Docs-like collaborative editing with allowing AI agents edit/suggest as well, so I built one: Copapers. Fun to build and has already been quite useful.

365 days of commits — proudly just hit a year of committing code every single day. Turns out doing a thing daily makes you better at the thing.

On Seasonality — a reflection on how good it feels to have seasonal routines.

AI Captain’s Log — regular thoughts, this month on Google maybe finally getting some things right.

What I’m enjoying

• Articles:

  • Character of the Happy Warrior by William Wordsworth. An absolute 1806 banger from the great WW. (And, yes, a poem, not an article.)

  • IT’S DEATH by Jesse Duffield. Wonderful & weird & brief. His other short stories are too.

  • There Is No ‘Hard Problem Of Consciousness’ by Carlo Rovelli. I always find Rovelli’s thinking interesting (and am especially partial to his relational theory of quantum mechanics). I’m not sure exactly where I rigorously come out on this particular piece’s thesis, but it does line up with my intuition that the “consciousness debate” often gets bogged down in semantics thanks to dualistic assumptions in the frame of the discussion. Worth considering, at least.

  • Complexity in Ilya’s Model by Anand Majmudar. Allegedly, Ilya Sutskever gave John Carmack 27 or so papers he should read to understand the state of AI. Two of them discuss the mathematical idea of complexity. This post explores why it may be so relevant.

• Product: using Atkinson Hyperlegible (Google Fonts) as my default font across prose-writing apps (Obsidian, Google Docs, Copapers). Does it make me feel old to use a font designed for vision-impaired people, created by the Braille Institute and named after its founder, and carrying the tagline “Making Reading Easier for Everyone?” Yes. But has it indeed made reading and writing easier and lower-strain? Also yes.

  • Bonuses, while you’re customizing your workspace: JetBrains Mono (Google Fonts) is the best code font (the version with ligatures, not the “NL” one). And gruvbox-material-light-hard is the best editor color scheme.

• Experiment: did you know that if you have a baby with you, you can bring a large, full glass bottle of water through airport security with the explanation that it is for making formula?

• Book: The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom by James Burnham. An analysis of Machiavelli and several modern (as of its 1943 publication date) thinkers who followed in his footsteps. Burnham discusses the practice of political theory and political science — in the strict sense of the word “science” — and looks critically at the United States through the lens of these thinkers’ views on the elite, power, democracy, and self-interest.

  • I read this book maybe a decade ago and thought it was good; upon re-reading I think it is excellent. Probably mostly due to broader perspective on my part, although perhaps also contributed to by the ever-evolving times in which we live.

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, investing at Amity, Lightwork, Eco, tinkering with interface0 and other products, supporting FreeWorld, and advising great companies and founders.

Thanks for reading. I’ll see you next time.

— Andy

Check out my more regular writing and reply to this email anytime. Thanks for reading.

What I wrote last month

COHERENCE: a short story — a piece of fiction about belief, miracles, and messaging — and how much words might matter.

I wanted to explore this concept and thought a story would be the best way. I’ve ~never written fiction before (and am not sure I’ll do much more), but would love to hear any sharp criticism or feedback.

Using AI for fiction — an accompanying piece on where AI was and wasn’t useful in writing that piece (spoiler: editing and high volume idea generation = great; writing = terrible).

Congruence updates: Baby photos and Custom widgets. You may remember earlier posts in this series about the features of my “personal app” Congruence. It continues to be my most-used phone app every day, in part thanks to these new adds.

AI Captain’s Log — regular reflections, this month on putting in the effort required for long-running prompting.

What I’m enjoying

• Book: They Flew: A History of the Impossible by Carlos Eire, professor of history & religion at Yale. An impeccably-researched and beautifully-written academic history of the accounts and testimonies of miracles (levitation, bilocation, and the like). It is not, as one might assume, so much a history of the miracles themselves as it is a history of the observations and testimonies of said miracles — and that nuance is why this book is so interesting.

  • I also note that it served as the source for the first epigraph in my piece COHERENCE mentioned above (Hume: “No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish.”) and spurred some of the ideas in the story.

• Products:

  • For the engineers reading, Superset is my new favorite agentic coding interface. For me, it’s the Goldilocks balance of “close enough to just a plain Ghostty terminal” but with some really nice quality-of-life features. I don’t like the interfaces that layer too much on the Claude Code / Codex harnesses or use the SDKs instead of the official CLIs, but I also want seamless worktree support, good visual organization, diffs, and the like.

  • Three clothing recs:

    • New favorite barefoot (zero-drop, wide toebox) shoes: Ohne Project. Best-looking ones I have found out there. They almost look normal! I continue to strongly prefer barefoot shoes over typical ones.

    • Industry of All Nations. I may have mentioned this brand before. But now, it’s mostly what I (and my wife, and our baby) wear every day. Just great products across the board.

    • Unimatic titanium tool watches. I’ve had (and enjoyed) a Unimatic watch for awhile, and just recently got their new titanium GMT (UT-4-U-TI-GMT). Very light / easy to wear, and I really like the style.

• Articles:

  • Endemic Pathogens Are Making You Crazy And Then Killing You: Toxoplasmosis Spotlight by Riva-Melissa Tez. An excellent post from a few years ago I just revisited. If the title makes you roll your eyes, you should probably read it.

  • Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself and bloom by Henrik Karlsson. Excellent writing (as is typical of the author) on attention and experience.

    

  • Where Geniuses Hide Today by Tomas Pueyo. People often wonder where all the great works and discoveries have gone — why aren’t there modern Einsteins or Michaelangelos or Mozarts? This post posits some arguments.

  • How to Eat an Elephant, One Atomic Concept at a Time by Kevin Kwok. A five-year old business strategy essay with Figma & Canva as its primary case study that continues to age extremely well.

• Experiment: this bullet typically covers some health or productivity technique I’m trying out. But my dominant experiment for the last six weeks or so has been experiencing life with a newborn. It has been absolutely 10/10 delightful and wonderful and I would recommend it to most everyone :)

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, investing at Amity, Lightwork, Eco, tinkering with interface0 and other products, supporting FreeWorld, and advising great companies and founders.

Thanks for reading. I’ll see you next time.

— Andy

Check out my more regular writing and reply to this email anytime. Thanks for reading.

What I wrote last month

How to pick the best air purifier, objectively — the internet is cluttered with people’s opinions on the best air purifiers. So we at Lightwork put together a quantitative approach to selecting the most effective units (and it’s free, no signup required, no affiliate links or bias).

Theory of Constraints: the (Claude) Skill — I love the theory of constraints, and now I can have Jonah from The Goal in Claude Code helping me solve my (perceived) problems. (And you can, too!)

AI Captain’s Log — regular reflections, this month touching on skills & subagents.

What I’m enjoying

• Experiment: putting blue-blocking photography gels over our refrigerator & freezer’s interior lights. I got a few of these sheets, cut them up, and taped them over the lights in my fridge. Yes, everything is now orange-tinted. But when we open the fridge in the evening, we no longer get blasted with intense blue light. We use very little lighting in the evening (just a couple amber incandescents), and so opening the fridge was always a shock. No more! Highly recommended, although it takes a week to get used to the orange hue.

• Book: Anathem by Neal Stephenson. Now in competition with The Baroque Cycle for my favorite Stephenson book (with Snow Crash, Diamond Age, and Cryptonomicon all trailing close behind). Epic alternate-world plot. As you get into it, know that you are meant to not understand everything right away, and that it will unfold beautifully. I also suspect I don’t understand everything Stephenson does in this novel, and may need to re-read it — especially the end — to really grok the depth. I look forward to that.

• Product: Craighill money clip. Despite many tries, I had never found an aesthetic, durable, tight money clip until stumbling on this one. It’s great for cash & cards.

• Articles:

  • Byrnes on Trance by Scott Alexander and the original source material, Intuitive Self-Models by Steven Byrnes (especially post #8, Rooting Out Free Will Intuitions). Provocative exposition of a heterodox view on perception and self-models. This line from Alexander summarizes the thrust well: “Byrnes argues that ‘homunculus’ vs. ‘trance’ are two alternative bistable models for analyzing internal mental experience” — and if you read Alexander’s piece, you’ll understand what that means and Byrnes’ proposed implications of the same.

  • Argentina On Two Steaks A Day by Maciej Cegłowski. Never been to Argentina but this makes me want to. Great travel writing.

  • Let’s talk space toilets! also by Maciej Cegłowski. Everything you’ve ever wanted to know — and more — about how toilets work in space and the engineering problems they have faced.

  • Is the frequency domain a real place? by lcamtuf. Really interesting, if you’re into this sort of math-y stuff.

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

Check out my more regular writing and reply to this email anytime. Thanks for reading.

What I wrote last month

Collaborative Folders: multiplayer notes for Obsidian — I made a plugin that turns Obsidian into a collaborative, Google Docs-like experience. It’s been great.

Busy month! Not much writing time.

What I’m enjoying

• Book: American Gods by Neil Gaiman. An outstanding, genre-spanning read (awarded the Hugo & Nebula for sci-fi, the Locus for fantasy, and the Bram-Stoker for horror). Endlessly imaginative Americana odyssey. I couldn’t put it down. Make sure to get the tenth anniversary edition, which is expanded to Gaiman’s preferred version of the text vs. the edited-down original.

  • Bonus book rec to keep clearing out the backlog: The Secret of Life by Georges Lakhovsky. If you liked The Body Electric, you’ll probably enjoy this 1939 quick read about electromagnetism and the human body. Does everything in it still hold? No, but it stands up pretty well for being nearly 100 years old, and the lindy-ness of those ideas is worth something.

• Articles:

  • How will OpenAI compete? by Benedict Evans. A great analysis with some big questions. Big doesn’t always mean durable. OpenAI has some work to do!

  • My dive into the world of telepathy by Tyler Alterman. A thoughtful inspection of a “weird” topic.

  • Introduction to Critical Fallibilism by Elliot Temple. Elliot is one of my favorite contemporary philosophers, and CF is one of his core ideas. It integrates concepts from Ayn Rand & Objectivism, Eli Goldratt & Theory of Constraints (a favorite Way of Looking), and Karl Popper & Critical Rationalism. For Temple’s overall intellectual heritage, see this image from his site:

    

  • The Visual World of ‘Samurai Jack’ by Animation Obsessive. Never watched this show but the article makes me want to.

  • The King of X by Tom Foster. Classic easy-read New Journalism about the top Texas ecstasy dealer in the 80s and 90s.

• Product: Force of Nature Grass-Fed Ancestral Blend Classic Meatballs. A rare, unreasonably tasty & simple prepared food product. Grass-fed/finished muscle & organ meats + organic brown rice flour + organic spices, and quick to make. We’ve been having these a lot when we want something easy for dinner.

  • While we’re on the topic, Lineage Provisions has been shipping some great products recently. The protein bar (I prefer the berry one but chocolate is good too) is the only protein bar I’ve found that I’m willing to eat, and the AB Complete protein powder is also excellent.

• App: Shortcat. Allows you to navigate around your entire computer with just your keyboard, clicking links and buttons without touching the mouse. Bit of a learning curve but then it’s great if you’re a power user.

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

Check out my more regular writing and reply to this email anytime. Thanks for reading.

What I wrote last month

I don’t write code anymore — well, it happened. Sooner than I thought!

Stanford Lecture on Theory of Constraints for AI — slides from a lecture I gave to a Stanford AI engineering class on applying Theory of Constraints — which I have written about before here, here, and elsewhere. ToC is one of my favorite ways of looking in general.

AI Captain’s Log — usual updates on my usage of AI, including thoughts on whether Something Big is Happening.

AI-heavy this month… we should be back to at least a little bit more of a mix next month!

What I’m enjoying

• Book: Quantum Mechanics and Experience by David Albert. Really, really great and thought-provoking. Albert walks through several thought experiments that helped me understand quantum concepts I had never quite grokked before. You’ll need to tolerate some math, but it is manageable and frankly you can probably just skim over it and still get 90% of the benefit of the book.

  • My recently-read book recommendation backlog is building up, so I’ll toss a second one in here: Neverness by David Zindell. Space opera sci-fi with outstanding worldbuilding and prose. While I wouldn’t put it on the same level as Dune, fellow fans of Herbert are likely to really enjoy this one.

• App: Xnapper or Clean Shot X. I’ve recently realized that not everyone already uses a tool like these. It makes screenshot experience 10x better — trivially letting you add annotations, padding, backgrounds, and more, and drag the result wherever you want to put it. I slightly prefer Xnapper — less fully-featured but faster to do the core padding/balancing/etc. I typically want — but Clean Shot X is cool too, especially if you want to redact things or have more control over annotations.

  

• Article: another good month of articles…

  • My journey to the microwave alternate timeline by Malmesbury. Just delightful. Worth the easy read.

  • How to live without your phone by Sam Kriss. Kriss is reliably incisive and this is no exception.

  • Antique Beef by “a literal banana.” A breakdown of what actually probably happened around the time of the Salem witch trials, from primary sources. I had no idea!

  • How to Make a Living as an Artist by fnnch. The creator of those “honey bear” paintings you have almost certainly seen has clearly given this question some thought. Always rare and wonderful to see someone who has succeeded in something against all odds give a considered, analytical breakdown of the same.

  • Going Founder Mode On Cancer by Elliot Hershberg. This has been circulating widely, but I feel like I have to do my part to surface to anyone who hasn’t seen it. What does it look like when you get to the end of the medical standard-of-care but refuse to accept it (and have the resources to go further)?

  • Radios, how do they work? by lcamtuf. Self-describing.

• Experiment: flossing. I regret to inform you that flossing extremely consistently does, in fact, seem to make a massive difference in how your mouth feels and — presumably, given the mouth and teeth’s connections to the rest of the body — your overall health. It took me a few decades of being pestered by family members and dentists to really commit to the bit on this one, but I don’t think I’m going back. If you’ve similarly been inconsistent… just commit to three months.

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

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

Check out my more regular writing and reply to this email anytime. Thanks for reading.

What I wrote last month

“Just call me” — I wrote about this in WoL #11, but it deserved a dedicated / shareable post. My life is much more enjoyable with very few scheduled calls, and this explains why (and how to do it)! Try it out!

An experimental, private, autonomous todo list — I built a funky experimental AI product that I’ve been using for research tasks. Hard to describe cleanly but quite useful.

Are EMFs bad? — assessing the evidence, Part I: RF-EMF — if you ever wanted to read 25,000 words reviewing the scientific literature on whether cell phone use is carcinogenic… now’s your chance. (… crickets… )

My newsletter recommendations archive — there’s now a filterable page on my site with everything I’ve recommended in the “What I’m enjoying” sections (below) in these newsletters.

AI Captain’s Log — usual updates on my usage of AI, including thoughts on task duration and working memory.

What I’m enjoying

• App: Macrofactor. Every couple years I track all my food consumption for a month or so to recalibrate intuitions for what I’m eating, find any gaps, build more awareness etc. Macrofactor is by far the best product I’ve used for this.

• Experiment: buccal massage. Back in WoL #3 I mentioned rolfing. Buccal massage is like rolfing for your jaw specifically. I’ve found this category of fascial work to be super impactful. At my wife’s recommendation, I went to Vetiver in Austin for my first session and felt like they disassembled and reconstructed my jaw. It dissipated a huge amount of tension I didn’t know was there (and incidentally changed the shape of my face noticeably).

• X thread: The Scam is that your opinion matters by Romeo Stevens. Worth considering — and perhaps even giving “I don’t think I have an opinion on that” a shot… (be prepared for shockingly negative reactions!)

• Book: Embassytown by China Miéville. Compelling sci-fi exploring language and how deeply interlinked it is with how we think. Good plot, good world-building, and quite thought-provoking.

• Article: Why Is Moscow So Weird? by Tomas Pueyo. Outstanding, logical, rigorous walkthrough of why Moscow is where it is, why it’s the capital of Russia, and the story behind other of its superficially-odd characteristics.

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

Check out my more regular writing and reply to this email anytime. Thanks for reading.

What I wrote last month

I was all over the map writing-wise last month…

Your problems are your fault in two different ways — a way of looking at the world that allows you to choose which problems you have (including the maybe-radical proposal that Real Problems don’t exist in the absolute).

Visualizing electromagnetic fields from sparse measurements — using geostatistical techniques to make pretty visualizations of electromagnetic fields for Lightwork assessment reports.

Consciousness as a field theory — is consciousness a physical field that can interact with matter? How might ideas of universal consciousness fit into such a theory?

Lessons learned making safe wooden kids toys — the guide to woods and finishes I wish existed three weeks ago when I started making some toys.

Beware of Trying — the next piece in the Useful Ways of Looking series, on how identifying with “Trying to achieve something” can be counterproductive.

I beat Google to making AI suggestions in Docs — a new interface0 feature that I can’t believe Google / Gemini doesn’t yet have…

Tinkering Club: call for applications — if you’re working on a project, you should join a Tinkering Club!

AI Captain’s Log — usual updates on my usage of AI, including thoughts on “fingertip feel.”

What I’m enjoying

• Book: Systemantics by John Gall. A very readable — and humorous — “bible” of systems theory. It’s far less textbook-ish than most systems theory books, but I’d argue has much higher density of insights. If you’re curious about why “Systems in general work poorly or not at all,” or “The System itself does not do what it says it is doing,” (two of Gall’s axioms) then you should pick this up.

• Product: LocalSend.org. For moving files like Airdrop, but between any devices at all. Particularly useful when using a shared device (like a library or workspace computer) that you aren’t logged into any accounts on. It Just Works. And is free!

• Articles: four for you this month…

  • Theravada reinvents meditation by David Chapman. How old is the way people practice Vipassana meditation today, really? The answer might surprise you. (This essay is part of an online book about Vajrayana Buddism — many of the chapters are great).

  • How to sequence your DNA for <$2k by Max Langenkamp. Two things I love and wish we could see more of: 1) citizen science and 2) people writing up failed experiments, not just successful ones.

  • levered beta is all you need by Ethan Ding. An interesting take on which strategies are being used effectively by AI startups, and why they’re different than what came before.

  • The ear does not do a Fourier transform by Galen. Cool breakdown of some intuition around how the ear “hears” sounds.

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

Check out my more regular writing and reply to this email anytime. Thanks for reading.

What I wrote last month

Lightwork Home Health: functional health for modern homes — on the launch of Lightwork, and why homes have gotten so much more toxic in the last few decades. Check it out if you’re interested in home health & environmental toxins!

AI Captain’s Log — usual updates on my usage of AI, including an impressive performance on arguing a legal bill.

The trick to changing router bits on a Laguna Shaper — extremely low-TAM blog post targeted towards people cluelessly searching for the same thing I was a month ago.

What I’m enjoying

• Book: Vimalakirti Sutra. Vimalakirti is one of the somewhat-uncommon “lay bodhisattvas” in Mahayana Buddhist literature. He’s a wealthy businessperson / homeowner / father, as opposed to the more common “monastic bodhisattvas.” The sutra is a quick read and entertaining and pretty irreverent. And it makes much of the question of living the dharma while being a layperson doing “normal” things successfully in the world and not following the path of renunciation.

  • Was reminded of this text by Johnathan Bi’s excellent interview of Francis Pedraza. Well worth the watch!

• Product / Experiment: Barefoot shoes. I’m five months in to almost entirely wearing barefoot shoes (90%+ of the time), and loving it. It feels so much more natural, and I have less tightness after very long walks. It took probably 4-6 weeks to get used to, and was completely worth it. I’ve been mostly wearing Soludos espadrilles, Vivo Barefoot Primus Lite Knit running shoes, and Aviary Footwear sneakers. I also hear good things about Birchbury sneakers and Bahé hiking boots, both of which I am going to try.

  • Barefoot shoes, as I understand it, are characterized by having “zero drop” (no height difference between the heel and the toes), and a wide toebox, and minimal stack height (very thin sole). I hear some people see big benefits from just switching to zero drop shoes, even with a more normal stack height (more sole padding). But I’ve been loving barefoot.

• Article: Four Types of Disagreement by silentbob (?). An instructive post suggesting that disagreements can be about one of four things — facts, strategy, values, or labels — and that often, the friction in resolving the disagreement is that the parties don’t have the same view of which one it is. Adjacent to the oft-cited “Facts vs. Stories” approach to conflict, but with greater depth.

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

Check out my more regular writing and reply to this email anytime. Thanks for reading.

What I wrote last month

On the application of high effort — on how putting an unusual amount of effort into ordinary situations can yield unreasonably good results, why most people don’t, and how you can fix that.

DATs are misunderstood: why they (sometimes) make sense — publicly-listed Digital Asset Treasury companies are all the rage right now. Most people don’t understand the concept (and reasonably so!). Here’s how I think about them.

Upcoming trend predictions (September 2025 edition) — a scattered assortment of trends I think may be coming over the next few years, from fragrance-free to “sila,” pets rights, and citizen science.

Free site and layout planner mini-app — I wanted a very simple visual editor to lay out a room and a piece of land on grids. I couldn’t find a good one, so I built it. Try it out!

Doors and keys — the latest addition to the Useful Ways of Looking series, on how journeys of change involve a you-specific sequence of lessons, and ways to deal with that.

Costeading: Don’t scroll Zillow alone — I built a social layer on top of Zillow so you can save and categorize homes with your friends & family and discuss them. Zillow should have this!

Theory of Constraints for AI — a mental model for how to increase the quality of your AI interactions by recognizing your potential bottlenecks (tools, context, prompting).

AI Captain’s Log — usual not-quite-weekly updates on my usage of AI, including my cranky views on AI-generated collateral.

Also: I’m now just over 1 year into consistently writing essays (and this newsletter!). I’ve written quite a few posts, so on my blog homepage, I added categories you can filter by (including “Best-of”). Check it out!

What I’m enjoying

• Articles:

  • Fell in a hole, got out. by Tony Stubblebine. Gory-(financial)-details-included recap by Medium’s CEO of how they dug themselves out of a deep ditch. Rare to get this much visibility.

  • God created the real numbers by Ethan Heilman. Compelling meditation on man-made vs. divine concepts, and the perhaps-counterintuitive nature of how “weird” each may seem.

  • Why Are There So Many Rationalist Cults? by Ozy Brennan. It’s a good question!

  • You can try to like stuff by Dynomight. A worthwhile experiment.

• Book: Life: A User’s Manual by Georges Perec. Sounds like a self-help book; is actually an incredible work of puzzling fiction. Perec was a member of the French Oulipo, a group of authors and mathematicians who wrote under varied self-imposed constraints. Perec himself famously wrote The Void, which is an entire book that seems normal other than the fact that it doesn’t include the letter “e” once. But I like Life: A User’s Manual much more — its constraints are in the story-telling itself. I won’t spoil it :)

• Product / Experiment: Lanto Sinus Probiotic powder. n=1, but I’m pretty sure using this powder once or twice every couple weeks has reduced my sinus inflammation sensitivity by 80%. I’ve had a bunch of sinus issues and this is the most effective intervention so far I can point to! Your mileage may vary.

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

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

Check out my more regular writing and reply to this email anytime. Thanks for reading.

What I wrote last month

Introductory field guide to Context Engineering for LLM users — it’s not just “prompts” that matter for good AI results — context is king. LLM interfaces inject a lot of context themselves, and you can augment it. If you do this well, you’ll get better answers!

Useful Ways of Looking — I started writing a series on concepts / mental models / “ways of looking” I find myself referencing frequently. When I’m facing a challenge (or helping a friend work through one), these are the explanatory tools I commonly reach for. The first five:

• OODA loops — Loop through Observing, Orienting, Deciding, and Acting — with a special emphasis on Orientation, and on cycling back to it as quickly as possible; it works for fighter pilots and can work for you, too.

• Theory of Constraints — To solve any problem: 1) properly define your goal, 2) clearly outline the system that will dictate the achievement of that goal, 3) determine the bottleneck of that system, and 4) address the bottleneck — and only the bottleneck.

• Parkinson's Law, generalized — Work expands to the time allotted for its completion, and elsewhere constraints generally predict outcomes as well; the intelligent definition of constraints is often more important than the energy put into execution.

• Ways of Looking — 'The most fundamental fact about any experience is that it depends on the way of looking' (Rob Burbea); by leveraging this, we can make any 'problem' we're facing trivially soluble.

• Useful vs. Correct — The usefulness of any idea is not necessarily correlated with how correct it is; it is only within a specified context that attributes like usefulness and correctness of the idea can be evaluated.

A pretty gradient generator — exactly what it says on the tin. Configurable gradient generator I used to create the interface0 “pulse.”

interface0: early July update — more features! (And then many more since I published this…)

AI Captain's Log — usual not-quite-weekly updates on my usage of AI.

Jekyll category filtering with no JS — low-TAM blog post. If the title doesn’t make sense, it’s probably not for you…

What I’m enjoying

• Article: "Smile" vs. "Poop!" by Guy/Rivalvoices. On why “Trying” to achieve a direct outcome (“smile!” “get healthy!” “be happy!” “make more money!”) often fails — because the thing you are acting out is the “Trying” rather than the “Doing” — and thus why indirect paths are often more effective. The piece is really, really good. May need a couple read-throughs (and is deserving of such!).

• Experiment: Just Call My Cell Anytime. For 95%+ of inbound scheduling requests I want to take, I now just give the other person my cell number and tell them to call me anytime. It is great. Calls now last the appropriate amount of time (often 3-10 minutes) instead of a default 30- or 60-minute block. And perhaps 50% of people end up never calling (even better!). I usually pick up, but if I can’t, I rip through the backlog of missed calls while I’m out for a walk. This has been a huge quality-of-life improvement.

  • A friend sent me this video from Jason Fried which exactly represents my attitude toward the whole thing. Thanks Alex.

• Product: I’ve finally abandoned non-natural materials in my workout gear and am loving Ryker and Wayve cotton/wool shorts. For shirts, I’m doing merino wool from Quince.

  • Yes, most “100%” merino wool is actually “superwashed” with a chemical treatment and then coated with a polymer layer, but I don’t want to pay $100+ for an untreated/plasma- or enzyme-treated shirt I’m going to destroy with sweat in a month. If you have any other ideas, please let me know!

• Book: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard. Pulitzer-winning narrative nonfiction in the vein of Walden. I didn’t find the philosophical thread particularly compelling, but the writing and depth of observation is stunning. Worth picking it up and reading a chapter or two whenever you want a dose of inspiration on those fronts.

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

Check out my more regular writing and reply to this email anytime. Thanks for reading.

What I wrote last month

interface0: the LLM interface I've been waiting for — I built an upgraded version of the ChatGPT/Claude frontends, with all sorts of power-user features (all providers in one place, memory across them, configurable system prompts and contexts, etc.). It’s called interface0. And it’s advanced quite a bit since I published that post three weeks ago!

How the Yom Kippur War led to America's moldy homes — Sounds wacky, but is true. You can draw a line from the 1973 invasion of Israel to elevated mold issues in modern-day America…

I'm not sure how I feel about this — when fed sufficient context, Gemini did a shockingly good job writing a blog post “like Andy.” It even came up with the idea!

AI Captain’s Log — A few more updates to my weekly-ish notes on my usage of AI. Models, tools, and capabilities continue to move fast…

What I’m enjoying

• Articles: three for you this month —

  • An end to all this prostate trouble? A breakdown of one very interesting proposal on how widespread prostate issues might be trivially solved. It’s interesting to read such a mechanical piece on biology / medicine.

    

  • Possibly a serious possibility by Adam Kucharski. On what such phrases as “probably” or “improbable” or “highly likely” mean in practice.

  • The Frame-Dependent Mind: On Reality's Stubborn Refusal To Be One Thing by Emmett Shear and Sonnet 3.7. “The question isn’t whether your frame is The Truth, but whether it serves the purposes for which you’ve adopted it.” Adjacent to my recent piece about Ways of Looking (the namesake of this newsletter!).

• Product: Intake Nasal Strips. If you use Breathe Right strips or anything similar to dilate your nostrils, I highly recommend trying the Intake ones. I like them so much more, and they’re less damaging to my skin.

• Experiment: Seasonality. I’ve always had a bias towards routines: eating the same thing every day, going through the same morning and evening flows, doing the same workouts. But I often find that after a long stretch of that, it starts fraying at the edges and I feel the need to make changes. Recently, I’ve been leaning into this “seasonality” and proactively shifting my routines as the seasons change.

  • My sense is that our bodies have some sort of intuition for seasonal behavior change, and we might as well lean into that. Most ancient medical and wellness traditions have some concept of this — Ayurveda, TCM, Japanese “shun,” and more.

• Book: The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch. I’m revisiting this one while diving deeper in quantum physics (see this post from last month), and it’s so much richer with a better understanding of that field. Gotta read it slowly, sentence-by-sentence, though…

About me: I’m a three-time founder (Eco, CoinList, Sidewire) based in Austin, TX. I’m currently spending time on: Eco, exploring the home health & environmental toxins space, supporting FreeWorld, hacking on a few products, and investing in and advising great companies and founders.

Thanks for reading. I’ll see you next time.

— Andy

Check out my more regular writing and reply to this email anytime. Thanks for reading.

What I wrote last month

Quantum intuition for everyone, or: why Einstein thinks reality isn't reasonable — Understanding quantum mechanics (even just a bit) can fundamentally shift your worldview. This is an explanation of one mind-bending component, written for laypeople. I’d love feedback on this post (or any others!) — is it clear?

AI Captain’s Log — I’ve started logging brief weekly notes on my usage of AI (what’s surprising me, what’s interesting, which models and tools I’m using…). Things are moving so fast that I think it’ll be interesting to look back on this years from now.

What I’m enjoying

• Articles: four very different ones this month — 

  • Task estimation: Conquering Hofstadter's Law by Jacob Bayless. “Engineers never estimate projects correctly,” everyone claims — but what if that’s because their estimates are (unknowingly) lognormally distributed? Fascinating.

  

  • On Really Trying by Gwern. It turns out that 20% of the time I go to write a post, Gwern has already published a version of the same idea (in this case, my draft “On the Application of High Effort”). Many of the stories in Gwern’s piece here are outstanding.

  • Lost in the Meritocracy by Walter Kirn (archive link). Excellent writing on one man’s experience transferring into Ivy League “meritocracy” in the ‘80s.

  • How to quickly charge your smartphone: fast charging technologies in detail by Eugen Barilyuk. I love the genre of “person gets obsessed with understanding something weird in plain sight.” In this case: “why do some charging blocks and cords charge my phone fast, and others don’t?” (The answer isn’t simple.)

• Product: Heal All Oil. My wife always has an array of tinctures and serums and elixirs around the house, but this one is particularly magical. Anytime there’s something cracked, dry, cut, blemished, etc. on my face, I put it on and am healed overnight.

  • e.g., a couple weeks ago the corners of my lips cracked open during travel while I wasn’t with her, and it was painful for five days. Then we reunited, I applied Heal All Oil, and the next morning it was as if nothing had happened.

  • It’s just high-quality 100% Tamanu oil, which I had never heard of before. I’m increasingly intrigued by certain oils that have special properties, perhaps based on their fatty acid ratios. Castor oil is another that seems to have unusual effects.

• Book: How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand. This book changed my mind on the “right” way to build a building, and gave me a much deeper appreciation for the craft of building construction and management. Recommended!

• App / Experiment: How We Feel. A free app that prompts you multiple times a day to quickly (5 seconds) log how you feel between four quadrants: high or low energy, and pleasant or unpleasant (i.e.: high energy & unpleasant, or high energy & pleasant, etc.). You can then add additional detail if you want. I’ve been using this for a long time, and find it really interesting for two use cases:

  • The 4x daily “check in” makes me stop and think, and I often quickly realize “oh when I do [x] it is energizing” (or the opposite).

  • It has a nice visual view for looking back at the past, and you can easily see “oh that week was not good” — and then think about why that was and make a change.

About me: I’m a three-time founder (Eco, CoinList, Sidewire) based in Austin, TX. I’m currently spending time on: Eco, exploring the home health & environmental toxins space, supporting FreeWorld, hacking on a few products, and investing in and advising great companies and founders.

Thanks for reading. I’ll see you next time.

— Andy

Check out my more regular writing and reply to this email anytime. Thanks for reading.

What I wrote last month

Ways of Looking: a brief guide to ending suffering — on the difference between pain and suffering, and a path towards eliminating all of the latter. (And now you know where this newsletter’s name comes from!)

Speedrunning a home-cooked DocSend replacement — I (well, AI) built a personal replacement for DocSend in 2.5 hours.

Assorted excerpts on the malleability of "reality" — eye-opening posts and quotes I’ve collected over the years about how much agency you have over “reality.”

The illuminated blog — medieval monks created custom illustrations in their hand-scribed books; more modern bloggers should write custom code for their posts.

What I’m enjoying

• Book: Egypt: A Short History by Robert Tignor. I walked away from this book with a much deeper understanding of one of the oldest continuing civilizations on the planet. Highly readable and well-paced. I only wish there were an updated version for 2011 through present…

• Article(s): A quantum mechanics puzzle (and parts deux and drei), by Ron Garret. If you’re into such things, it’s a great read. I also recommend the comments section on part three, which has some thought-provoking argumentation about the whole concept. I’m working on a more layman-targeted post about the wonders of quantum mechanics, so keep an eye on this space…

• Product: Dodecahedron Timer Ball (well, they call it a dodecagon. But it’s actually a dodecahedron). I love the pomodoro technique and will write about it another time. This is my favorite way to track pomodoros — no screen (you don’t know how long is left), physical object (feels more substantial than a digital timer), pleasant buzzing interaction.

• Experiment: 100 sketches. Every night, I’m doing a 5-10 minute sketch on paper of the room I’m in. I do not consider myself artistic, and probably haven’t drawn like this since elementary school art classes. But I’m ~20 sketches in right now and it is shocking how quickly I’ve improved with just a few short reps. Can’t wait to see what #100 looks like.

  • Here’s a good X thread on the concept of practice reps, and a related single post.

About me: I’m a three-time founder (Eco, CoinList, Sidewire) based in Austin, TX. I’m currently spending time on: Eco, exploring the home health & environmental toxins space, supporting FreeWorld, hacking on a few products, and investing in and advising great companies and founders.

Thanks for reading. I’ll see you next time.

— Andy

Check out my more regular writing and reply to this email anytime. Thanks for reading.

What I wrote last month

All light is not created equal — ever wondered why some lighting “feels” good and other lighting doesn’t? Or why blue light is bad for sleep and the reason it’s present in nearly every modern bulb? Then this article is for you.

The flawed assumption at the heart of US RFR regulation — radiofrequency radiation (i.e. emissions from cell service, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, etc.) is regulated in the US, but there’s a huge flaw. I walk through how we ended up with this broken regime.

I²C + AI = crazy fast simple hardware prototyping — a 30 minute hardware project to build an “office environmental sensor” covering air and light quality. Hardware hacking is getting easier and easier.

Jizo, Instax, and Impermanence — a brief philosophical detour through an experience that put me face-to-face with some Buddhist ideas.

What I’m enjoying

• Product: Respiray, a wearable air filter. Yes, it looks ridiculous. But it is truly great for flights and other places where you’re getting assaulted by someone’s cologne/perfume. Highly recommend. (And most people just assume you have a VR headset or weird glasses case around your neck).

• Book: The Invisible Rainbow, by Arthur Firstenberg. A compelling history of electricity (from the 1700s through today), arguing that the rollout of electrical technologies may be affecting our health. The stories of electricity in the 1700s and 1800s — and how magical and scary it seemed — are fascinating.

• Experiment: the honey diet, created by anabology. I’ve been trying different variants of this diet over the last few months and feel great. My core version: only fruit (whatever is in season) and honey until ~2pm. Then nothing until dinner (~6pm). And for dinner, a big meal, usually ground beef + rice + steamed veggies. I feel much “lighter” during the day and have more energy than when I was having protein for breakfast/lunch.

• Article: Power Lies Trembling, by Richard Ngo. “A three-book review on the game theory of political power” — starting with one on coup d'état, primarily in Ghana, which experienced 10 attempted coups in a 17 year stretch. The article has an interesting point of view on how perception shapes reality in politics.

About me: I’m a three-time founder (Eco, CoinList, Sidewire) based in Austin, TX. I’m currently spending time on: Eco, exploring the home health & environmental toxins space, supporting FreeWorld, hacking on a few products, and investing in and advising great companies and founders.

Thanks for reading. I’ll see you next time.

— Andy

Check out my more regular writing and reply to this email anytime. Thanks for reading.

What I wrote last month

Deus Deceptor: Descartes as a Chrome extension — a Chrome extension that changes the internet in front of your very eyes (without telling you). It was fun to build, and led to some philosophical explorations.

Mentat Mail: Email as an interface for AI — I made a tool that lets you to correspond with AI models from your email inbox. I’ve been loving it — far preferable to the standalone sites for most of my AI use cases.

Here it is in action — I just email [preferred model]@agent.andybromberg.com and it replies to me (right now it won’t work for you unless you deploy it yourself):

Building intuition for electromagnetism's symmetric origins — a long, self-indulgent piece walking through the math that gives rise to the symbolic representation of electromagnetism. Plus some thoughts on maps vs. territories, existence, and symmetry.

A design pattern I hope Yelp copies — a quick writeup of a useful feature on Clean Travel Club: treating chains of restaurants as a singular unit.

What I’m enjoying

• Experiment: Nattokinase for cholesterol reduction. This is not medical advice, but I saw some research suggesting natto / nattokinase supplementation could reduce cholesterol levels (along with other positive effects including potential neuroprotective ones). It seemed low-downside, so I tried five months at 8000 FU daily of this well-tested brand. Lo and behold, my LDL cholesterol is down >15% (!) over that stretch, with few other interventions that seem likely to be related. Of course, this is n=1 and poorly-controlled, but I’m happy with the results and would be interested to see more experimentation with this compound.

• Book: The Enneagram: A Christian Perspective, by Richard Rohr and Andreas Ebert. I had assumed the Enneagram was “just another modern personality assessment,” but it turns out to have hundreds or thousands of years of background in Christian thought and Sufism. This skimmable book gave me a much deeper appreciation for it.

  • Worth noting: the canonical advice in the Enneagram community is that “Enneagram tests” don’t really work, and instead what you want to do is get a book like this one. At some point in the book, you’ll be reading about one of the types and it will feel painfully resonant — and that’s what you are. This was my experience. (Any guesses what I am?)

• Product: Urban AIP is by far the best meal delivery service we’ve found. Tasty and healthy.

• Article: A Case Against the Placebo Effect by “a literal banana” (this seems to be how the author identifies themselves…). A very long and very thorough argument against the existence of the placebo effect, at least as popularly understood. I wish there were more articles like this on the internet. Also enlightened me to the historical distinction between “dummy” and “placebo.”

About me: I’m a three-time founder (Eco, CoinList, Sidewire) based in Austin, TX. I’m currently spending time on: Eco, exploring the home health & environmental toxins space, supporting FreeWorld, hacking on a few products, and investing in and advising great companies and founders.

Thanks for reading. I’ll see you next time.

— Andy

Check out my more regular writing and reply to this email anytime. Thanks for reading.

What I wrote last month

The death of Nor Eply: a Stanford security story — a fun recounting of the decade when I owned an-apparently-very-important Stanford email address (and why I don’t anymore).

So, you're going on TV? Here's your media training — friends being interviewed on TV for the first time often ask for advice. Here it is — hopefully it can save you from hiring a PR firm for “media training.”

What I’m enjoying

• Article: The Silicon Valley Canon: On the Paideía of the American Tech Elite by Tanner Greer. Especially in this moment when Silicon Valley is bursting into Washington, it’s worth revisiting this treatment of those two regions’ elites’ reading preferences. The nut graf:

• Site/App: Perhaps I need a new category here: “model.” I bit the bullet and got o1 pro from OpenAI. I was underwhelmed at first, but then I read this article: o1 isn’t a chat model (and that’s the point) from Ben Hylak and Latent Space. And after that changed how I was prompting it, I have been blown away. I still prefer Claude 3.6 for most daily things, but correctly-prompted o1 pro on its appropriate subset of of tasks is on another level.

• Product: US Global Mail. I never thought I’d have rave reviews for a virtual mailbox service, but these guys are really great. If you’re looking for more privacy or are moving around a bunch, try it out. Super smooth experience, great customer support, and just a great service overall. Referral code: ANDY-LZSYAGTG.7WS

• Book: Unsong, by Scott Alexander. I read it off-and-on as a web series, but it’s better in book form. Imagine an alternate history from the 1970s onward involving a lot of Kabbalah & theology, a bunch of characters that will sound familiar to San Francisco-based readers, and plenty of absurdist humor. (Thanks Kevin for nudging me to pick this back up.)

About me: I’m a three-time founder (Eco, CoinList, Sidewire) based in Austin, TX. I’m currently spending time on: Eco, exploring the home health & environmental toxins space, supporting FreeWorld, hacking on a few products, and investing in and advising great companies and founders.

Thanks for reading. I’ll see you next time.

— Andy