Bits

Thom Yorke — "Live at Sydney Opera House". My favorite concert venue. Incredible performance of Let Down. Can't wait to watch the whole thing properly over the weekend.

Found this while organizing files — a letter I wrote to my eldest somewhere over the Atlantic, LAX to CDG. I've been writing letters like this to both of my kids for years. One day I'll put them all in a book.

A dozen photo books and counting. This one's from last summer in Maui — shot entirely on my custom photography app. Flipping through it still makes me smile.

Three filters, in order: great people, hard problems, new things to learn. Exceptional people have already cleared the easy problems, and proximity to them selects for harder work. Hard problems can't be solved with what you already know, so learning stops being optional. Compounding knowledge is how you get back into rooms with better people.

Marketing is about values. This is a very complicated world. This is a very noisy world. And we're not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. And so we have to be really clear what we want them to know about us.

— Steve Jobs

Jobs said this in 1997 to a room of skeptical developers. The world he described as "very noisy" would look monastic by today's standards.

There are two kinds of readers: those trying to understand the world, and those trying to understand themselves.

Every now and then, I still catch myself typing in reader.google.com. Old habits.

When I'm struggling to understand something, I break it down. Not once — recursively. Large abstractions first, then the layer beneath, then the one beneath that, until I hit the primal forms. You don't get to understand the thing until you can put it back together.

Software commoditization was the first wave. Hardware is next.

3D printing, CNC automation, and robotic assembly are compressing the cost of physical production the same way cloud and open source compressed software a decade ago. Close that loop with generative models and you get systems that can design, simulate, and iterate on physical goods at something approaching software velocity. The cost floor drops. The barrier to replication drops with it.

Physics doesn't care that atoms are involved.

Secret enemy hideout.

March was a blur — AppWorld, GTC, RSA, and Arm. Four keynotes, a panel, dozens of customer meetings, and tons of high-fives and fist-bumps. The highlight was getting to interview Steve Wozniak. Looking forward to a few days of recharging with hikes and photography in the PNW.

The path I'm on was paved by people who didn't have to help me, but did anyway. That's not lost on me.

I lose myself in the work to find myself in the creation.

Some weeks I'm training a transformer on my iMessage corpus. Others I'm deep in a PNW forest with a camera, or chasing a chord progression late at night. I come to all of it as a beginner. That's not a hobby posture, it's the only way I know how to stay honest with myself.

And this sinks so calcified
Those calluses begin
The last remaining light
Is stretched across your skin

Love this live performance of the recent record. "The Sound of Changing Place" is probably my favorite — the vocal harmonies are beautiful.

Recorded a version of Cold Like Winter on the OP-XY tonight. I wrote the song more than a decade ago. Something fun about bringing it into the current moment with modern gear. Almost like covering myself.

Estás tan dentro de mí
Te sigo pensando
Te sigo esperando
Y estás, oh
Tan lejos de mí, oh
Te sigo pensando
Me canso llorando

The lyrics are from the Spanish outro in this version of the song.

I oscillate between who I am, and who I want to be.

And hate runs through my blood
Well my tongue was in love
But my heart was left above
I've got to be leaving now
I thought I'd never be shot down
But girl I'm black and blue
So beaten down for you
Well I'm beaten down in bloom

I genuinely wonder how someone makes a song like this.

I got into this band last year, especially during M&A diligence — they were on constant rotation. For this show, the band played the entire record front to back and the cinematography is incredible. This was a standout performance for me.

On the back of all the things you gave
If only I was zooming on the moon
I've been in Los Angeles too long I think
Singing songs I never thought I would
Singing in a style I didn't think I'd ever understand
Take it like a California breeze
Grew up on the car horns and city noise
Didn't know the quiet oh oh

I remember walking around my neighborhood and listening to this setlist for months during the pandemic. There's something about these lyrics that hit differently knowing what came next. The LA references, the sense of being somewhere too long, singing in ways you didn't expect — it all feels like the end of an era captured in real time.