Westenberg.
Field Notes on Now.
$ cat ./posts/latest
The case for gatekeeping, or: why medieval guilds had it figured out
Every open source maintainer I've talked to in the last six months has the same complaint: the absolute flood of mass-produced, AI-generated, mass-submitted slop requests have turned their repositories into a slush pile. The contributions look like contributions, they have commit messages, they reference issues and they follow
$ ls ./posts/
The empire always falls
A citizen of Rome in 117 AD, under Emperor Trajan, would've found it difficult to imagine the empire not existing. The roads, the aqueducts, the legal system, the
AI twitter's favourite lie: everyone wants to be a developer
Twitter's latest consensus on inevitability: now that large language models can write code, everyone will become a software developer. People, you see, have problems, and software solves problems,
Members only: "Won't Fix" self help
Every major self-help framework of the last two decades falls into one of two camps. * Camp one is Stoic Acceptance: your problems are features, not bugs, and the path to
Communities are not fungible
There's a default assumption baked into how Silicon Valley builds products, and it tracks against how urban planners redesign neighbourhoods: that communities are interchangeable, and if you "
The pitch deck is dead. Write a pitch.md instead.
Every week, thousands of founders open Canva or Google Slides or, God help them, PowerPoint, and begin the ritual. They agonize over fonts, nudge logos three pixels to the left
How to stop being boring
The most interesting people I know aren't trying to be interesting. Thank God. They're saying what they actually think and wearing what they actually like, pursuing
The Coherence Premium
I don't necessarily believe in second brains. The notion (pun-intended) that you can offload your thinking to a perfectly organized system of notes and links has always struck
Your Life is the Sum Total of 2,000 Mondays
We plan our lives like we're editing a movie trailer. The trip to Portugal, or the product launch, or the transformation photo at the gym. The big moment
Why Intelligence Is a Terrible Proxy for Wisdom
Isaac Newton, one of the greatest scientific minds in human history, lost a fortune in the South Sea Bubble of 1720. After initially making money and selling his shares, he
Claude Code Won't Fix Your Life
Claude Code can now read and write to local file systems. You can point it at your Obsidian vault and suddenly you have an AI that “knows” everything you’ve
The Discourse is a Distributed Denial-of-Service Attack
In September 2016, the security journalist Brian Krebs had his website knocked offline by a botnet called Mirai. Hundreds of thousands of compromised devices, mostly cheap webcams and DVRs manufactured