Lately I’ve been learning math with ChatGPT (Astra) as my tutor, using this document scanning camera and a vibecoded tool that pastes the captured image right into the chat. This way, I just work problems on paper and ChatGPT gives feedback. It’s really nice.

I love listening to new grads (22-24yos) talk about “kids these days” and everything wrong current college students. On one hand, the irony is simply entertaining. On the other hand, new grads have the clearest picture of what current college students are actually like.

I have no idea how true this is, but the combination of short-form video social media making everyone crazy *and* having an opiate-like effect that stops them doing anything crazy is an under-discussed combination IMO

Teaching your child to code in 2026 is considered by many to be child abuse. Like sending them to work at the factory, forcing them to memorize Latin poetry, or spanking them, it is now considered the outdated practice of a bygone era.

The thing I learned this year is that when engineers say they like working on “hard problems”, they actually don't. What they like is puzzle solving, and having a repertoire of patterns that they can pattern match onto traditionally hard problems, usually involving databases or something with scale, etc. And they know that the industry used to pay you a lot for how deep and broad this repertoire was. Unfortunately, in 2026, well, you have a cheat code machine that has infinite breadth and depth for pattern matching. So the question is, do you actually like hard problems? Because there are now hard problems that are a complection of engineering, product, society, culture, politics, and they are fairly intractable, probably unsolvable! Because if you do want to work on those actually hard problems, there is so much money that people will pay you for it. But you’ll have to face that truth about yourself first.

I had Astra write a philosophy essay for that AI Philosophy competition and the example it came up with is the most Astra thing possible. Okay Astra, I get that this is very relatable to you but checks and verifications are not particularly salient human interactions

I feel like the people trying to express how crazy a continually decreasing fertility world will be could benefit from a piece like this on housing that makes clear which parts of the current world can't be built again with few young people.

My apparently-hot take is that we don’t need bots that sound and look like humans. I want Alexa/Siri et al to be intelligent, but stilted robot speech is fine. I want to know when I’m talking to an AI.