It's that time again for my weekly update, which includes a short collection of noteworthy finds, posts that inspire, as well as a few reflections from the past week or two. I'll aim to land these in your inbox by the weekend, in time to pair with your morning coffee (or your preferred cup of inspiration).

The Latest Drippings ☕️

  • I Discovered a Sound That Leaks Your Exact Location (and It's Everywhere). Well, this is both wonderfully geeky and terrifying. This video describes a technique that uses 'faint airplane sounds in videos to figure out where they were recorded.' I don't understand a bunch of the methodology here around Doppler effects, but it's kinda wild: 'By cross-referencing audio data with public ADS-B flight records, which track every plane's altitude, speed, and position across the United States, and even when audio is compressed through phone calls or hidden behind background noise, these faint patterns often remain detectable to sophisticated signal processing tools.' Privacy is often an illusion, unfortunately.
  • Why Nothing's Charlie Smith Is Doubling Down on "Joy and Wonder". 'Think about the Apple 1984 ad, or the Guinness Surfers, or the Levi's Flat Eric one. They were all supremely entertaining pieces of film. Somewhere along the way, when we got access to loads of data, we lost sight of the fact that the best way of getting people's attention is to entertain them. I think that's where Nike has really fallen off, and you can see it in the share price. They focused on performance, and efficiency, and data, and they lost the brand magic. Creativity is an art, not a science.' Can you remember when technology was fun? There's a certain level of joy that comes with doubling down on being 'punk' and leveraging being anti-establishment, building with other punks, and being funny on purpose. Perhaps this is the new 'pirate's code' as we approach 2027. Guy Kawasaki embodied this back in 1984: you don't sell the Mac, you make people want to join it. Heading into 2027, I need to lean back into what I was saying last year: remember that fun isn't the opposite of serious; it's how we survive it.
  • What Are The Rules For Jeep Ducking?. Two years ago, after running into town to pick up dinner, I came out to find a small rubber duck left on my Jeep's door handle. I was amused, put it on the dash (figured it was as good a spot as any), and went on my way. A few weeks later, another duck showed up after I ran into the grocery store, and I mentioned it to a work colleague on a call later that day. "Oh, that's a thing - you should go look online about ducking," she commented. And apparently it is - I had been indoctrinated into Jeep Ducking. 'The main goal is to share friendship and fun. Jeep ducking is not about competition or showing off. Instead, it’s about kindness and building a sense of community. There are no official organizations or strict rules, but certain guidelines help keep the tradition friendly and respectful.'
  • The Encyclopedia for Local People. This week I ran across Ed Jefferson's Local Wikipedia, a site which shows only the geotagged articles within a half-hour walk of you. It's styled like Wikipedia's front page, and even better - your location never leaves the browser. A great find if you are interested in everyday micro-adventures (or if you're traveling to discover local favorites).
  • The October Inflection Point for Vibe Game Development. It's been an interesting month, outside of the cyber crazy with AI, around leveraging AI to build video games. A project was released that allowed Nintendo Switch games to run natively on macOS (without an emulator). I appreciated Simon's approach, though; instead of trying to clone games, he's been pushing models with a simple prompt of 'This game isn't fun enough yet. Make it a LOT more fun.' ... and apparently it did. Looking back at where I've been drawing a lot of my hacker spirit and curiosity, these AI things are allowing amateurs and explorers to build things that were out of reach or that time didn't allow for. Side note: Anthropic has also quietly added a rule (and later confirmed it) to steer Claude away.
  • How Reverse Game Theory Could Keep AI Agents in Check. An area of study that I seem to keep revisiting and trying to learn as much as possible about is game theory. It's described as 'a brand of applied mathematics that provides tools for analyzing situations in which parties, called players, make decisions that are interdependent. This interdependence causes each player to consider the other player's possible decisions, or strategies, in formulating strategy.' This study, however, tries to flip that on its head by applying mechanism design (aka reverse game theory), as an approach to better control AI agents. 'Where game theory tries to predict how rational actors will behave when given a particular set of rules, reverse game theory attempts to design rules that will elicit the kinds of behavior we want to encourage.'
  • Kurt Vonnegut on the Shapes of Stories. Kurt Vonnegut (so it goes) has long been one of my favorite authors due to his dark, satirical nature, but I've also admired the way in which he describes how any story can be visually drawn on an axis. 'Now let me give you a marketing tip. The people who can afford to buy books and magazines and go to the movies don’t like to hear about people who are poor or sick, so start your story up here [indicates top of the G-I axis]. You will see this story over and over again. People love it, and it is not copyrighted. The story is 'Man in Hole,' but the story needn’t be about a man or a hole. It's: somebody gets into trouble, gets out of it again [draws line A]. It is not accidental that the line ends up higher than where it began. This is encouraging to readers.' Spend a few minutes watching the wonderful "The Shapes of Stories."
  • The Comfort Paradox. While I think having slightly crooked shelves would make my wife insane, I appreciated this post, which focuses on psychological richness. 'A good life isn't just about feeling happy, but also about having interesting, varied, and perspective-changing experiences. And these experiences aren’t always pleasant. Sometimes they involve uncertainty, frustration, or struggle.'
  • Hunger Beats Tenure: Advice for Junior Engineers. By personal design, I spend a lot of time working with our intern program at the day job. It's one of the most valuable things I can do as a leader of an organization, and frankly, I learn a ton from it on how to think different. 'Fresh eyes, even naive ones, have long been considered powerful. When I joined Stripe, founder Patrick Collison implored us newcomers to pay close attention to things that seem odd to us. His bet was that newcomers would spot friction and opportunities that old-timers had long stopped noticing.' I have a theory that large organizations have often hyper-normalized friction, and leaning into the newcomers has been a great way to rethink the 'why' of a system many overlook.
  • To Scale, You Need Systems. And Systems Need Vision. Simon Sinek has a short but important message that was posted this week: pragmatism without vision goes nowhere; vision without pragmatism ships nothing. 'You want the visionary to be able to break things now and then and you want the operator to be able to maintain some sort of semblance of stability and predictability and those things should live in tension.'
  • Thirty Thousand Books, and Time for None. The anti-library is how I've described my own digital nightstand: it's full of books that I have yet to read. This article was a good reminder, echoing Umberto Eco, that 'a wall of unread books is not a monument to failure. It is a map of the surrounding dark, drawn to scale and updated with every purchase.' It also introduced me to the Japanese term tsundoku (積ん読) that describes the phenomenon of acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in a home without reading them.
  • Attention Is All You Have. 'The Tetris effect is one of psychology's most easy to reproduce experiments. Simply spend a bit of time playing the eponymous game every day for a few weeks. After a little while, you'll start recognizing familiar Tetromino shapes in clouds, buildings, and everyday objects. You might even see them appear before your eyes when you start falling asleep.' The lesson here is that 'whatever you focus on long enough, will end up shaping your thoughts,' and that it's incredibly important to focus less on what the algorithm machine is feeding you daily, and to be intentional about what you consume. No empty calories.
  • Make the Internet Feel Small. 'In an age of AI gobbledygook, I've come to really cherish those folks bringing humanity to this world wide web. The internet is a very big place. Loud. Urgent. All-consuming and never ending. Big. This newsletter, on the other hand, has been wind in my sails. The supportive community of readers, subscribers paid and free, and steady conversations about what lights us up ... making things... noticing things... finding reasons to be excited about being alive in this wonderfully weird world ...' Just like in the real world, being part of something smaller that is more community driven is mentally refreshing. Make the internet feel small: focus more on humans, creativity, connection, (and I'll add) curiosity.

Amor Fati ✌🏻