As I discussed in my last blog post , I recently joined Pursuit.org as their Director AI Product Engineering. And now I have a request: If you have the capacity to mentor a student at Pursuit for just one hour per week over 15 weeks (virtually or in NYC), please reach out to me about volunteering. ( Email , Bluesky , Mastodon , or find me somewhere on the internet.) Reach out and let me know even

tldr; Want to skip straight to the news and find out about my new job? On December 15, 2014 I went to dinner with Jukay Hsu . I was 25 years old and not too proud to say yes to a free meal, and my friend Josh said I really should meet him. I was none the wiser, so I agreed, not realizing that dinner would become one of the more consequential nights of my life. Our dinner turned out to be a job int

Around my birthday (which is today 🥳) I always feel a lot of love. I'm incredibly lucky to have so much love in my life. From the love of my life, to the love of my cat, to the love of my friends, to the love for my fellow person — there is so much love in my world. But I find that reading other people's love stories always makes me feel even more love. A few years ago I read 100 Small Acts of Lov

I won't bury the lede, I'm looking to go back to work full-time. I'm thankful to not be under financial strain, so I'm not rushing into anything. Instead I'm coming at this from a place of genuine interest in finding the right opportunity for me. Recently I've had some great conversations with interesting companies, and it helped me realize that there are some things I miss about not being an indi

I'm riding on the bullet train from Tokyo to Kyoto and wanted to jot down my thoughts from the 48 hours I spent in Tokyo. I'll be back in a few days, but if I had to describe my initial impression it would be titled: Everything, Everywhere, All At Once . For the first time in my life I feel overwhelmed and overstimulated by a city. As a born and raised New Yorker no place has ever felt big to me,

Yesterday I posted this on Mastodon and Bluesky to share how much I've been enjoying blogging as a creative outlet. Post by @[email protected] View on Mastodon And Kyle Bashour had a funny, pithy reply. Post by @[email protected] View on Mastodon And he was right! So here you go Kyle, a blog post.

Consider this a PSA. I went to the doctor in September to get some blood tests done for my never-ending health crusade and was shocked to find out that I have shockingly low vitamin D levels. I was surprised by this because I walk at least 30 minutes every day, and many days that's upwards of 60-90 minutes. That's a lot of time in the sun, so I expected my vitamin D levels to be good — or regular

I've always felt very conflicted about the idea of donating my organs when I die. On the one hand, it's entirely in accordance with my values. I strive to help anyone I can in any way I can, whenever possible — even in death. On the other hand, despite having lapsed in my Judaism — I think a lot about Pascal's Wager . 1 Pascal contends that a rational person should adopt a lifestyle consistent wit

I. I once knew a wonderful man . He was kind, gentle, and beloved by many. He was so wise that when he graduated from college, Mahatma Gandhi himself handed him his diploma. He was a scholar and a gentleman, blessed with the unique gift of deeply knowing Sanskrit and Hindi. He spent much of his life translating scrolls filled with the wisdom of the ancients into modern language — in pursuit of pre

Colleen and I were binge-watching Gossip Girl last winter, and there are a few scenes where a stressed and irate Blair Waldorf wanders over to Central Park to feed the ducks. I told Colleen, "that sounds soothing — we should do that when the weather gets better". And then, as I’m wont to do, I promptly forgot. But Colleen takes note of moments like that, and a few months later she reminded me: we

This blog post is documentation for a very specific problem I run into about once a year. That’s rare enough to forget how I solved it, but frequent enough to waste 15 minutes rediscovering the answer. And let’s be honest: it’s not the big problems that drive you mad — it’s the little ones that feel like their own Sisyphean hell. The Problem Some websites 1 require you to log in using a magic link

The iPhone 15 Pro launched with a marquee feature, the Action Button. The Action Button set out to replace the mute switch, which had existed since the first iPhone was released back in 2007. The Action Button is a software-powered button, replacing what previously was a hardware switch that would toggle your phone’s silent mode on or off. The appeal of the Action Button was that now you could dec

The post below was written by me, originally featured on the Plinky blog . To celebrate the launch of Plinky you can get 50% off of a yearly subscription by redeeming this offer: plinky.app/offer/REDPANDA There are few words I've ever said more excitedly than these: I want to tell you about my latest app, Plinky . Plinky makes it incredibly easy to do something we do every day, save links for late

The Turing test is dead, and we killed it. The Turing test is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. From the 1940s 1 to the 2010s people programmed computers, and computers could only do what they were programmed to do in a rules-based deterministic manner. Sometimes a person would program the computer and it would

When I wrote The Future Will Be Signed almost six years ago the latest in AI advancements was Google Duplex. If you're like me and have never used Google Duplex, it's a feature of Google Assistant that could make calls on behalf of a person and automatically perform a task, such as booking restaurant tables. While you may have never heard of Google Duplex there's a good chance you've used a genera

Sometimes I think about all of the societal issues I cared about 10 years ago: privacy, government overreach, and platform accountability. More and more as I look at the technological landscape it feels like none of that care seems to have mattered. When I worked on the Societal Health team at Twitter I had a voice and direct impact on these matters. If the feedback I received and still hear from

To set expectations for you my dear reader, this blog post was written for me, not for you. It's very long (quite long), but I'm still proud of it enough to post for the world to read. The frigid days of December are often unbearable in New York City, but those same freezing temperatures combined with the slow down of work, life, and everyone's collective desire to rest up after a long year afford

Is coding a science or an art? — Matthew Garlington (@dejadu13) May 21, 2022 I've seen many versions of this question posed over the years, and to Matthew's credit it's a very good question. As you can see in the replies people translate their lived experience writing code and answer art or science based on however they conceptualize and practice programming. A few years ago MIT conducted a study

Hard to believe it's over. My time at Twitter wasn’t perfect but it was incredibly special and there's little I would change about it (though less crypto would be cool). I was able to provide constant feedback about products across the entire platform and the entire organization, work on some of the most pressing digital societal health issues of our time, including the 2020 US presidential electi

Crafting a great interview process is difficult 1 , especially for software development where a company is often trying to assess years of specialized knowledge and potential in only a few hours. The best interviews are said to feel like a discussion amongst peers, where each side is providing the other with signal about what it will be like to work together. Candidates share signals about their e