in|retrospect
Posts on page 6
AI's Bland Writing
Starting around high school, people began asking me to help proofread their writings. Occasionally it'd be a college essay or a publication, but I also helped with simple things like emails or blog posts or real estate listings.…
A Retreat from Game Subscriptions
Remember the persistent idea of an evergreen gaming service, a "Netflix for games," that gamers had been clamoring for since…well, since Netflix became a household name? We did enjoy a brief era of subscription gaming, but just…
Review: On Writing Well
I was thinking of The Elements of Style. I asked ChatGPT for suggestions to get deeper into the craft of writing. To its credit, none of its recommendations were hallucinated—I double-checked—but instead of that quintessential instructional manual,…
Executing Organizational Cartography
A few years back, during my early days at Affirm, a couple of us engineering leaders[1] were trying and struggling to orchestrate a reorg across our teams. There were a number of strong personalities to manage and key communications…
Year in Review — 2025
This was a quick year. Perhaps it’s an effect from aging time acceleration—when the subjective experience of the passage of time speeds up as I get older. Maybe it’s the result of throwing myself more into work…
Law of Conservation of Vehicular Modularity
Most in the startup world have heard of the idea of disruption; many have peddled it for their own benefits. This is, after all, the theory that gives hope for David to topple Goliath. But the original term is a…
