These are my thoughts on product, tech and design.

I’m taking up blogging again because the alternative was sending my friends extra-long text messages. They’re too nice to complain, but if I dump my thoughts into a blog instead I can simply send them a link they can give a thumbs up reaction. It’s a win-win.

For most of the twentieth century, you couldn’t buy a Coca-Cola in the Soviet Union. It was one of the most American things in existence, and like Levi’s and Michael Jackson, the Iron Curtain kept it out.

Today is Apple’s 50th birthday. Tim Cook shared a letter about “50 Years of Thinking Different.” There are animated homepages, Paul McCartney concerts at Apple Park, commemorative t-shirts, David Pogue just published Apple: The First 50 Years and there’s a lot of well-earned celebration for a company that really has put a dent in the universe.

But I’ve been thinking different about a lost side of Apple’s legacy. The side that hides yaks in software.

On the Macintosh episode of Version History, David Pierce and Nilay Patel had a lot of fun riffing about Mr. Macintosh, Steve Jobs’s obscure concept for a digital cryptid who lives in your computer.

About 15 years later, Apple actually shipped something very similar, except instead of a mysterious little man it was a yak named Bruce.

If you interacted with my last LinkedIn post, I owe you an apology. It was 100% AI slop.

This post isn’t, but here’s why I did it.

In December 2025, Anthropic invited Claude users to sit down with an AI interviewer and share how they use AI, what they hope it could become and what concerns them about where it’s headed. Over 80,000 people across 159 countries participated, and Anthropic recently published their findings.

The findings are about what you’d expect. People want AI to do their boring work and they’re worried it’ll take their interesting work. The things they love most about it are the same things that scare them. Anthropic’s term for this is “light and shade,” which is a polite way of saying nobody knows if this is going to be good or bad.

This more or less describes how I feel too, and that’s pretty relevant because I was one of the 80,508 people interviewed in this study.

For a few years now, I’ve been chipping away at a historical research project about Will Rogers, the early 20th century humorist and one of the most widely read newspaper columnists in America. I find his story and his role in American cultural history fascinating, and as a fellow Oklahoman I feel somewhat obliged to help tell it. He died 91 years ago in 1935, so the vast majority of his life’s work has already rolled into the public domain, and the rest will soon. My project’s bottleneck has never been a lack of material, but getting access to it in the digital vaults where it is imprisoned. There are many paid-only, private databases that hold incredible, sprawling troves of public domain content but are barely indexed and have interfaces that seem almost designed to punish efficiency. Using them feels like the company is daring you to reverse engineer a better option.

I used to judge people for their overflowing inboxes. You know those screenshots where someone’s mail app shows a gargantuan unread count? I’d cringe wondering why they wouldn’t just deal with it. How hard is it to stay on top of your email?

Turns out: very hard.

I’m in year two of working for a startup, which has meant a lot of late nights and weekends with less time for small but important tasks like working out, laundry, and deleting D2C email pollution. In less than a year I went from inbox zero to inbox disaster. I’d try to clean up here and there, but the Gmail app on my phone is barely equipped for it, and even the desktop web made deep cleaning surprisingly painful. The power was there, it just took six or seven clicks and queries to reach it. It was so much harder than I expected that I built my own app to help (more on that another time). I’ve finally got it down from 14,500+ emails to 14 and I can breathe again, but I have a lot of thoughts about how I got here in the first place.

I often need sane estimates I can say out loud without cringing later. To solve this, I’ve made the Point-O-Matic to “price” project friction.