The working title of this piece was “I Chose Too Small a Niche.” I’m leaving it here, because it captures the starting point well — but it doesn’t capture the conclusions. A Project There’s No One to Talk To About I’m finishing another project. It’s polished, coherent, with an internal logic that delights me every…
For decades, we knew how to measure a person’s value at work. AI is changing those rules — and no one yet knows what to replace them with. Something I Was Very Good at Is Now Free and Abundant In early 2026, Aditya Agarwal — one of Facebook’s earliest engineers, later CTO of Dropbox, the…
The past month has been a time of focusing on other projects and recharging. I’ll be back soon with new topics.
Short answer: yes. Long answer — below. Introduction The Moon has no atmosphere to slow down a landing vehicle. No airport to receive it. Every kilogram landing on its surface has to brake using engines alone — burning fuel that itself had to be flown there. It’s a closed loop. Expensive, single-use, energy-intensive. And yet…
The AI Era, the LLM Era, and the Problem of Naming Our Own Times Imagine you’re talking to a language model and you want to say something simple: that you mean the time from when all of this started. The time when a conversation with something non-human suddenly became possible in a way that had…
You’re reading an article. The topic pulls you in. But after the conclusion, a question appears that the article didn’t ask — or asked, but not in the direction that interests you. You can close the tab. You can look for another article that might not exist. Or you can ask a language model —…
Launch, orbit, the Moon. But somewhere between the broadcast and reality, there’s a layer worth seeing. April 1, 2026, 22:35 UTC. SLS lifted Orion from Launch Pad 39B at Kennedy Space Center. On board: Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen — four people heading toward the Moon for the first time in…
Earth erases its traces. The Moon does not. Nothing on Earth lasts forever in its original form. Rain, wind, tectonics, water — they work together to keep every surface in constant motion. A meteor crater vanishes within millions of years. A human footprint — within minutes. The planet is alive, and because of that it…
Summary: I describe a research project that attempts to estimate a relative height map of the Moon’s surface from a single orbital photograph. No stereoscopy, no machine learning — just classical shadow analysis, brightness gradients, and georeferenced data. The Problem: 3D from 2D Every photograph of the Moon’s surface is a projection of 3D onto…
Conventional thinking about lunar survival focuses on the poles. The nights are shorter there, conditions more forgiving, energy available almost continuously. This mission is somewhere else. We’re sending a team of miniature construction machines to the Moon. The goal: locate a suitable boulder arrangement, build a habitat measuring 2×2×1 meters, cover it with regolith —…
