About Me
I am just some guy with a cool wife and funny kids who likes making things that probably don’t need to exist, like this website, a bunch of albums, and all these words.
I made Resolution and I just finished an acoustic album.
About Me
I am just some guy with a cool wife and funny kids who likes making things that probably don’t need to exist, like this website, a bunch of albums, and all these words.
Here’s some of my work.
I’m also the lunatic behind a what-if scenario planning & goal setting application called Resolution. You can use it for free here, or check out our fairly large set of examples.
Look at This Hat
I recently finished an acoustic album, and it came out pretty good! If you like stripped down, half-earnest half-winking-at-the-camera punk rock songs recorded by some Dad in his living room, you should listen to it.
Listen Now:
Intentionally Spread Thin
OpenAI is shoving more stuff out the door that seems very early, very ambitious, and very janky.
OpenAI is releasing a “research preview” of an AI agent called Operator that can “go to the web to perform tasks for you,” according to a blog post. “Using its own browser, it can look at a webpage and interact with it by typing, clicking, and scrolling,” OpenAI says. It’s launching first in the US for subscribers of OpenAI’s $200 per month ChatGPT Pro tier.
Operator relies a “Computer-Using Agent” model that combines GPT-4o’s vision capabilities with “advanced reasoning through reinforcement learning” to be able to interact with GUIs, OpenAI says. “Operator can ‘see’ (through screenshots) and ‘interact’ (using all the actions a mouse and keyboard allow) with a browser, enabling it to take action on the web without requiring custom API integrations,” according to OpenAI.
One thing I learned working in all these tech startups is that the easiest way to solve extremely difficult “last mile” problems is to get distracted by something else and work on that instead.
The Employees You Want
Max Read has a secondary potential motivation (other than sucking up to an incoming Presidential administration) for Mark Zuckerberg suddenly reinventing himself as the least intimidating, least plausible right-wing tough-guy reactionary ever conceived:
“News on Friday that Meta is ending its D.E.I. program should be seen in this context–as not just another way to cozy up to the Trump administration, but as another sally in a war against a workforce that tech management has come to see as dangerously left-wing. I’ve argued before that the hard-right turn of investors like Marc Andreessen should be seen in part as a kind of marketing strategy, an attempt to find founders and workers whose politics make them less likely to jeopardize profits with workplace action.2I suspect that Zuck’s makeover functions at least in part in the same way. I don’t think Republican electeds much care if Zuck is cageside at M.M.A. matches or using right-wing slang like “legacy media” and “virtue-signaling”–but I think the kinds of employees he might like to attract probably do (As do, from the other direction, the kinds of employees he would like to attrite).”
Honestly, I have no real reason not believe this. It’s not a stupid theory — it’s a fairly compelling theory proposing that someone weird (and maybe, in their own way, stupid) is doing something stupid.
It’s stupid for a couple reasons. It’s stupid because you can already get whatever kind of workforce you want, and Facebook has been hiring what it wants for twenty years now. It wants “100x engineers”, best in class, A-player, blah blah blah. That’s what it’s been hiring for better or worse. Never in Facebook’s notoriously money and power hungry history has it said “we want this place staffed by a bunch of bleeding heart liberals”. That was always the price of getting the people they wanted, and it was a price they paid happily to print money for, again, two decades.
This bring us to the second reason this is stupid. This is America — as much as corporations (especially tech companies, for whatever reason) seem to love coming up with elaborate, too-cute-by-a-half justifications for dumping workers, it’s not really necessary. Americans have very few labor protections, and it’s not hard to get rid of tens of thousands of workers. Traditionally, that sort of thing has hurt the stock price of public companies, but who knows if that would even happen now. So if you don’t want most of your employees to be Facebook employees anymore (and the posturing of the last two years sure makes it look like he doesn’t), just do your job and get rid of them. You don’t even have to pay severance! I’m sure most of these people, like me, are at-will employees.
But… there is one little problem. These are still the kinds of workers you want — you just don’t want them to be annoying or have principles or make you consider things you don’t like. You want truly talented engineers and smart, technical business people who just love money and winning and crushing it, but… also people who thrive working inside a massive organization with huge egos, interdepartmental conflict, and often incoherent or incompetent upper management.
See where this is going? The first set of problems is very real, I get it. I once watched an intern launch into a rant at an all-hands meeting about how our executive team’s answer on diversity “was frankly not good enough”, and she was only there for the summer and didn’t even do any work. But that’s an extreme outlier. I’ve been working at tech companies for almost as long as Facebook has existed, and the best, most innovative, most effective employees I worked with (other than the occasional ruthless salesperson or actively hostile DevOps guy) were all basically kind, thoughtful, intelligent people. There’s a type, man, and it’s not AI-crypto-libertarian edgelord. Some of those people really are very intelligent and potentially very productive, but they generally don’t scale well, they hate the bureaucracy and rules inherent in running a billion dollar business, and honestly, they’re just a different kind of a pain-in-the-ass, and one you tend to run into a lot quicker. In other words, they’d all love to work with Mark Zuckerberg, as long as they can have his job where they can say and do whatever they want, change their mind on a whim, and never be held accountable for anything. As my uncle reportedly said when they reinstated the draft — “sure, I’ll go to Vietnam. Just make me a general.”
That’s not who Zuckerberg and the rest of the “I’m a libertarian because I’m winning” crew actually want as mid-level product managers and data scientists. It’d be chaos, and far more insufferable than the occasionally eye-rolling left-wing status quo. Instead, these guys are just delusionally pining for their manic pixie dream girl — in their case, a brilliant, kind, innovative, competent professional who puts customers first, is willing to disagree and commit, and who also has absolutely no problem watching terrible, amoral shit go down on their watch as long as their boss says it’s fine.
A few of these magical employees might exist, but there aren’t nearly enough of them to staff Silicon Valley, which is why the only fantasy more appealing to these guys than a tech company staffed by obedient, professional, submissive right wing sociopaths is one staffed by large language mod– sorry, I mean “AI Agents”.
Three Pointers & The Angry Mob
John Hollinger is the first big, respected basketball name I’ve seen take a counterpunch at the puzzling (and omnipresent) narrative that the NBA is in some kind of death spiral.
Declining TV ratings. Endless fourth quarters thanks to timeouts, replays and clock stoppages. One-sided blowouts. A new December tournament format struggling to compete with the NFL colossus.
I’m talking, of course, about college football. Back in my day, there was real variety — Oklahoma won a national title running the wishbone! — but now everyone plays the same way. It’s all about passing, and whoever throws it better wins. No wonder ratings are down.
(*Sound of record scratching*)
I’ve been a pretty avid NBA fan for a long time, now. That includes some stretches where the basketball was… not very good. The immediate post-Jordan years, watching my 2002-era Celtics grind out brutal 81-78 playoff victories against the likes of the Al Harrington Pacers and the Jason Kidd Nets, the non-beautiful version of the Spurs (the Bruce Bowen era), and so forth. For the life of me, I just can’t understand how any quasi-serious fan of the game could take this three point panic seriously, given the various ups and downs the league has been through over the years.
As with a lot of things, a big part of the problem is just a failure to accurately assess the situation. There are a lot more three pointers being taken now than even just a few years ago. That’s an objective fact. But I definitely get the sense from people who are concerned about this trend that they either assume or believe from limited amount of game footage and YouTube clips that “three pointer” means basically pulling it up and chucking from far away, as some sort of alternative to traditional offense where you try to find an open shot.
If that were actually the case, I’d agree that there really was a problem. In fact, that really is my least favorite kind of basketball, but it’s not limited to three pointers. It’s iso-ball, a style best (and most efficiently) represented by peak-James Harden and recent-vintage Luka Doncic dribbling around with four guys spread around the court and looking to make something happen (and often succeeding). There are a lot of threes in that style, especially of the step-back variety. Just as importantly, there are a lot of foul shots, which are way more boring than threes. Worst of all, there’s a tremendous amount of everyone else standing around.
But that’s not the only way to shoot threes, and it’s not powering the increase in threes we’re seeing today. Instead, as Hollinger points out, a bunch of high usage players have started shooting 24 foot threes instead of 20 foot twos, with similar success rates but a lot more points. Hollinger also notes that spreads the floor for other things, to wit:
This is an important distinction when people talk about “too many 3s”: Shots at the basket are the same, and dunks — the most exciting play in the game — are the same 4.7 per team per game that they’ve been for the past two seasons. That may seem counterintuitive, but more 3s equal more spacing, which in turn equals more runway for dunks.
Look at the Celtics. When they lean on “dribble dribble shoot”, it occasionally works, but most of the time the offense grows stagnant and they’re beatable. But when they play basketball — as they usually do — their ability to hit threes turns into something almost indescribable.
You can see the way the aggressive use of three pointers befuddles even hardworking, hustling defenses, but it certainly isn’t somebody scared of contact resorting to “dribble dribble shoot”.
And while there are definitely loud, “too many threes” critics who are also pretty sophisticated basketball fans, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t notice a correlation between much of the “too many threes” crew and the equally angry “the league is too soft” crew. But Hollinger addresses this as well — after an initial gasp at the sudden physicality added to the game in the middle of the season last year, everyone seems to have forgotten about that and simply moved on to complaining about threes again.
I feel like I’ve seen my fair share of awesome games this season, both in-person and on TV, and that’s pretty much been the case ever since the league decided at last season’s All-Star break that it was going to chill on calling so many fouls when players drive to the basket. The result has been some of the most watchable, entertaining and stoppage-free basketball of the last quarter century.
That, to me, is the story: that the league enacted a fairly sudden change to make its product massively better. An underwhelming postseason likely prevented many people from noticing, especially the generalists who parachute into the NBA in April.
I actually think there’s a relationship here, but it’s not what the overlapping part of the too-soft/too-many-threes Venn diagram wants to hear. I think the two trends are actually related — the more physicality you allow near the basket, the more it makes sense to shoot threes. Allowing defenders to grab and pull underneath the basket makes driving to the basket or playing in the post more difficult, and less efficient. It might hurt three point shooting a little bit, by simply allowing defenses to focus more on threes, knowing they are more likely to get away with simply clobbering anyone who gets by them, but it impedes the things people claim to want to see even more. At some point, I’m not sure what some of these casual fans even want, or if they’d recognize it if they got it. If you want to see Shaq post up and run people over, I mean… we’ve got Giannis, right? He’s a different player than Shaq, but he’s incredibly well-known, one of the leading scorers in the league, and he absolutely lives in the paint!
(I know this clip is old, but nothing’s changed here — if anything he’s even better at this now.)
Would it somehow be better if somebody like Nikola Jokic couldn’t shoot threes? Wouldn’t not being a threat from all around the court just make him a less interesting passer (Arvydas Sabonis was amazing, for instance, but Jokic is just a better, more broadly effective offensive player)? And can you seriously make the case that modern guards and wings are somehow less broadly skilled than prior generations, or unable to do anything besides cower behind the line and heave up prayers?
This just seems like yet another one of these “I know it when I see it” complaints about the NBA that the league seems inherently susceptible to. I’m not interested in hockey, and I tend to get bored when I watch it, but I don’t have some laundry list of things I think the NHL is doing wrong, nor do I think the NHL has “lost their way” and needs to return to some glorious prior age. I have lots of thoughts on pass interference and offensive holding occurring on every play, but until ex-players actually started killing themselves and leaving behind suicide notes begging their families to have their brains examined for traumatic damage, I didn’t think the NFL was in some existential crisis.
But everyone has a hot take on basketball. It’s hard for me to believe that for many people, there isn’t some unspoken, subconscious connection between how undeniably minority powered the league is (the biggest stars and best players are generally black americans, europeans, or increasingly, black europeans) and how endlessly critical and pearl-clutching we always seem to be about the direction the game is going, no matter what that direction is. For years, grumpy old white Dads would complain that no one could shoot. Today, those same grumpy Dads see the proliferation of exceptional long-distance shot making not as a return to graceful, skill-driven basketball, but as something that needs to be stopped by any means necessary.
Year in Review (sort of)
This isn’t quite an end-of-year post, but technically, we are approaching the end of the year, so why not. At present, there are some things I’m high on (ideas, not substances), and some things I’m a lot lower on. In an attempt to stay positive, I’m going to counter each of my lows with a high. I know, I know — but this is how hard I have to try sometimes to keep my grumbling at bay, or at the very least somewhat moderated.
Low: Generative AI
I mean, do we even need to go here? I tried. God, I really, really tried. But this thing reeked of disingenuousness and hand-waving almost from the day it hit the zeitgeist, and now we’re here. The whole thing hasn’t collapsed yet, but the general mood has soured dramatically even in just the last couple of months. We’re certainly getting the downside — spam, shitposting at scale, customer service chatbots, people repeating made up nonsense from ChatGPT on national news broadcasts, plus massive (and needless!) energy and water use. But the upside continues to be utter vaporware, breathlessly described by a bunch of grown up Ready Player One dorks again, and again, and again, but never actually turning into anything people can use. Even in the enterprise, white-dollar knobs like me are subjected to endless prompts to use “AI assistants” in already awful, user-hostile business applications that (1) do not work, (2) do not know whether they worked or not, (3) constantly promise they will get better, (4) never get better.
This is going to take forever to wind down, because so much of this is motivated by ego and funded by entrenched companies that print money doing something completely unrelated, so there’s no forcing mechanism to make any of them give up the ghost. We could be here for a while.
High: Not-Generative AI
The Photos app on my TV is really pretty amazing. I spent a couple hours in my late 20s teaching my (long since discarded) iMac what a bunch of my friends and family looked like, and then eventually added my kids. That’s all it took, apparently, for THE MACHINE to provide me with a lifetime of whimsical albums, slideshows, and movies about so many awesome times in my life. Sometimes it’s hard to even go to bed, with so many good memories available to enjoy (and after around 2012, to enjoy in pretty consistently high quality).
Low: Most Software
The web is a disaster — search is useless, everything is computer generated chum, and social networking is dead for anything other than pissing matches and engagement bait. Despite that, web browsers are where we spend all of our desktop computing time, using crappy apps built with generic, high level frameworks that are slow, battery-soggy, and easy to turn into even crappier desktop apps. DO NOT GIVE ME A DESKTOP APP WITH A “RELOAD” BUTTON IN IT.
We’re really stuck with this now, aren’t we? We have no good HTML to view in our HTML viewer, and yet somehow that’s the application we use all day, every day. Two menu bars for everything. I still can’t believe it.
High: Some Software
God bless you, indie developers. Rogue Amoeba, I just bought your entire $200 bundle thing. Do I need it? Probably not — I needed Loopback, but everything you make is just so beautiful, and thoughtful, and functional, and faaaaast, I couldn’t say no. There are also some gems in SetApp (along with some weird stuff, but whatever) like CleanShot, the venerable MarsEdit, OneSwitch, Permute, and a few others. And of course, Logic and Final Cut continue to grind along like the champs they are despite coming from a massive corporation, and the general eyebrow-raising quality issues that have snuck into a lot of Apple’s software over the last few years. Here’s to hoping they don’t ruin Pixelmator.
Low: The News
It’s rough. Plus, I canceled my Washington Post subscription after nearly ten years thanks to Jeff Bezos’ truly groveling decision to block the paper’s presidential endorsement at the last minute. I’m not saying it mattered, but I’m not subsidizing that guy’s vehicle for sucking up to Donald Trump.
High: Other… news?
Hey, somebody has to do journalism, which means I need to pay for it. I’m currently subscribing to The Village Green (my extremely local newspaper) and The Verge, which just rolled out subscriptions and has slowly evolved from a run of the mill tech dork website to a legitimately thought-provoking and investigative entity. Good job, guys.
Low: The New England Patriots
Drake Maye = pretty good! Everyone else = pretty bad! No one should (or will!) feel bad for us, but those twenty years of regional dominance were pretty fun if you were from the region, as I am.
High: The Boston Celtics
WHAT THEY GONNA SAY NOW? WHAT THEY GONNA SAY NOW????
Low: I’m Not in a Band
This is quite the drought for me, but I did put out the first of two short acoustic albums, and that was fun. The second one’s basically done, but I need to sit down and mix everything, because AI isn’t real and can’t do it for me despite it being a common, theoretically low-skill grunt task that is basically a bunch of math.
RESOLUTION LIVES FOREVER
Did I have to get a job again because I’m a coward, and built the most conservative version of my passion project possible, largely driven by a fear of failure that almost certainly played a role in my project largely… failing? Probably. AND YET! This coward’s conservatively constructed application is still 100% live and accepting payments, friends! I use it all the time, even for my real job that actually makes money, and the monthly costs to run it are laughably low. No state of the art GPUs required. Even for Brian?
Yep, even for Brian.
Never Good Enough
For some reason, WordPress has decided to incinerate itself. It’s true, but not really true, because WordPress is a million different things. It’s an open source CMS. It’s a hosting provider of said CMS. It’s the flagship product, of sorts, of an extremely successful and (on the surface, at least?) cool looking tech company. It’s also an ecosystem of service providers and product companies that aren’t affiliated with that tech company, and that’s where it’s all decided to come apart.
Basically, the people (person, really) who control WordPress have a problem with how much WPEngine, the very profitable company that hosts this website, contributes back to the open-source WordPress project. After that, everyone’s opinion sort of goes into a black box and there’s copyright infringement accusations and plugin seizing and all kinds of nonsense, but it all sort of stems from the feeling Automattic (and more specifically, Matt Mullenweg) have that WPEngine is free-riding off an open source project that Automattic effectively leads development of.
Are they right?
Not even a little! I really, really, truly do not care about the financial specifics of the slowly advancing WordPress project, or who makes money from it. That’s the beauty of it being open-source! If I felt like things were moving too slowly, I could go work on it, or give someone money to work on it, or whatever, but that would be entirely up to me. As it happens, I feel (or felt) fine about WordPress until this entire thing blew up, so like Deputy Marshall Sam Gerard, I do not care.
Unfortunately, now I have to care for several reasons.
- This site is hosted by WPEngine, an entirely unsexy and uninteresting IT provider that has generally served me well over the years here and elsewhere. Whether they like it or not, they are now in a protracted legal and PR war with Matt Mullengweg, and thus WordPress.org, which does not appear to have any sort of governance outside of doing whatever Mullenweg says.
- I left WordPress once, but came back years ago and was planning on never switching again. If for some reason this place starts to fall apart for reasons beyond my control, I might have to rebuild all of this on another CMS. Please… don’t make me figure out Ghost or something, I’m old now, everything takes longer.
Annoying logistics aside, the real bummer is Mullenweg, the heart and soul of a company that represents so many cool things on the internet, either (a) going completely insane, or (b) taking off his “I love the internet mask” to reveal the same egomaniacal tech bro persona ruining everything else in tech. I guess I’m rooting for the second one just because I have a hard time rooting for the existence of mental health problems in a person, but man, that’s a depressing outcome. Do they not have enough money over there? Can you not just continue to be profitable and make cool things? Automattic runs the journal I keep track of my kids childhood with, for God’s sake. Somebody take the wheel over there, and fast.
Visionaries
I was ranting to my wife the other night about how frustrating it is that so much energy is going into absurd nerd fantasy when there’s just SO MUCH to improve about the actual technology real people use every day.
At some point, I blurted out something about how maybe getting two completely insane platforms — the internet, and the iPhone — in less than fifty years was enough. Maybe we needed to get better at those before deciding we were moving onto… whatever this is.
“The computer should be alive. I should be able to wear the computer.”
WHOA, WHOA, SETTLE DOWN. There’s work to be done here, folks. The singularity ain’t coming in our lifetimes, so this is going to be a grind.
Or… well, I guess if you’re a billionaire you can play pretend for a few years.
The Theoretical Beauty of the Legislative Branch
I’ve been reading John Roberts rulings since I was a pre-law undergraduate student, and simply put… the guy lives in a fantasy world.
The Supreme Court on Friday curtailed the power of federal government agencies to regulate vast parts of American life, overturning a 40-year-old legal precedent long targeted by conservatives who say the government gives unaccountable bureaucrats too much authority.
For decades, the court’s decision in Chevron U.S.A. v. Natural Resources Defense Council directed judges to defer to the reasonable interpretations of federal agency officials in cases that involve how to administer ambiguous federal laws. That power will now revert to judges, a move experts said could lead to a spate of challenges of federal guidelines and make regulation more unpredictable as different courts assess agency decisions in different ways.
Writing for the majority in the 6-3 ruling in a pair of cases, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said the Chevron framework has proved “unworkable” and allowed federal agencies to change course even without direction from Congress.
“Chevron was a judicial invention that required judges to disregard their statutory duties,” Roberts wrote.
You don’t have to be especially cynical to realize that the United States Congress has had a lot of trouble producing thorough, detailed legislation at a rate sufficient to meet the challenges of the 21st century. That’s why so many things go to the courts! But Roberts is nothing if not consistent — from his judicial philosophy to his decisions and opinions on the regulatory state, this dude has always believed that the legislative branch should clearly articulate what is and isn’t permitted, and that courts can make this happen by simply rejecting regulatory actions that don’t have express legislative authority.
Cool, cool. But I have to like, live here, man, and the thing you are describing almost never happens. We hate long, detailed legislation! We’ve been told to hate it since the Reagan administration, by legislators waving around giant stacks of papers and lamenting “this 9000 page bill!”, as if the number of pages in a law is a measure for the “amount of government” or something. So which is it? Simple bills, or detailed bills?
I actually believe that Roberts would like detailed bills. He would probably shoot a lot of them down from his position on Mount Olympus, but he would enjoy the back and forth, and I don’t think he’d undercut the few things he actually allowed to pass. It’s not an intellectually incoherent approach to government at all — it’s just a completely impractical civic fantasy that people should be debating in dorm rooms late at night, not suddenly deciding to implement in a country that is already paralyzed and ready to tear itself apart.
Again — “the Chevron framework has proved ‘unworkable’”, says… some freaking guy we don’t even vote for. I mean, look, I’m not begging for my life to be micromanaged by a bunch of dorks at the Department of Agriculture or anything, but at least I can vote for one of two extremely old men who can appoint some political hack to get in or out of their way a little bit. John Roberts, on the other hand — I mean, the guy literally has zero accountability. Zero! So don’t start poking at shit, man!
I just can’t take seriously anybody who thinks today’s Congress — we didn’t even have a SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE for weeks for absolutely no discernible reason — is even remotely up to the task of providing the kind of detail Roberts and his coalition have suddenly decided is necessary. This pre-WWII vision of American government guys like Roberts continue to wave around a hundred years after it had any relevance at all is just childishly unworkable, and now my kids are probably going to have to do their own private-sector mercury testing or whatever while the guy puts up William McKinley posters in his bedroom. I’ve been super patient with this dude for 25 years but I think I’m done with him.
“complimentary chiropractic adjustment”
This is funny, informed, profane, and generally delightful.
Most organizations cannot ship the most basic applications imaginable with any consistency, and you’re out here saying that the best way to remain competitive is to roll out experimental technology that is an order of magnitude more sophisticated than anything else your I.T department runs, which you have no experience hiring for, when the organization has never used a GPU for anything other than junior engineers playing video games with their camera off during standup, and even if you do that all right there is a chance that the problem is simply unsolvable due to the characteristics of your data and business? This isn’t a recipe for disaster, it’s a cookbook for someone looking to prepare a twelve course fucking catastrophe.
I have no notes. There is going to be some absolutely incredible goalpost-moving over the next five years — unlike crypto, the vague, amorphous “AI” space will be able to declare victory in any number of ways even if the most visible applications never become practical or production-viable. “But Nate, AI is everywhere now!” is a thing you will definitely be able to say without lying in 2026, but also a thing you could have said in 2016 before the market discovered thirsty chatbots and mass-laundering of intellectual property.