A batch with range, philosophy, productivity, tools, craft, and a personal project that took ten years.
George Mack’s High Agency In 30 Minutes is a long-form essay on what separates people who make things happen from people who wait for permission. The jail cell thought experiment, who would you call if you were stuck in a third-world jail with one phone call?, frames it perfectly. High agency is a tricycle: clear thinking, bias to action, and disagreeability. Remove any wheel and it stops working. The sections on low-agency traps (the vague trap, the midwit trap, the attachment trap, the rumination trap, the overwhelm trap) are individually more useful than the framing, each comes with a practical escape route. The Wilbur Wright story, where a bedridden teenager becomes the first person to fly, is the best illustration of the whole thing. I keep coming back to this one.
Viktor Löfgren’s AI Makes You Boring is the most honest thing I’ve read about what happens when you outsource thinking to an LLM. The argument isn’t that AI tools are bad, it’s that original ideas emerge from prolonged immersion in a problem, and that immersion is exactly what you skip when you hand the thinking to a model. “Prompting an AI model is not articulating an idea. You get the output, but in terms of ideation the output is discardable. It’s the work that matters.” Short, uncomfortable, and correct.
Steph Ango’s How I Use Obsidian is the most useful PKM (personal knowledge management) walkthrough I’ve found. He shares his vault structure, his personal rules (always pluralize tags, no nested folders, ISO dates everywhere, avoid non-standard Markdown), his fractal journaling approach, and the tools he uses (Obsidian Web Clipper, Sync, Bases). The philosophy matters as much as the implementation: notes are files you own in formats that are easy to read, not data locked inside a platform. The template is downloadable if you want to start from his structure.
David Gomes’ Phabricator Code Review is a sharp retrospective on what made Phabricator’s code review experience better than GitHub’s, seven points, from the four-color diff display (moves shown in yellow, not just green/red) to draft-first comments as the default, to genuine single-page layout that didn’t force tab switching between the PR description and the diff. He’s now on Graphite and finds it the closest modern equivalent. The broader point is that code review tooling makes a real difference and GitHub still has room to improve. Worth reading if you care about the craft of code review.
Joel Hawksley’s How I Built Timeframe is a beautiful personal engineering story, a decade of building the ideal family home dashboard using e-paper displays. He started with a Magic Mirror LCD that glowed at night, moved to jailbroken Kindles, then found Visionect displays, then rebuilt everything on a 25″ Boox Mira Pro after his house burned down in the 2021 Marshall Fire. The current system pulls from Home Assistant, shows calendar, weather, and contextual home status (doors open/unlocked, laundry done), and updates in real time. The design principle, a blank status panel means everything is healthy, is genuinely elegant.