A library I keep coming back to.

The essay everyone references and almost no one has actually read. Scott Alexander on multipolar traps and why systems get worse despite everyone in them trying to make them better. The piece I most often hand to people who are trying to explain why their org is the way it is.

Tim Urban's exhaustive walkthrough of how to choose a career on purpose instead of by drift. Long, illustrated, worth every minute. The 'Yearning Octopus' section alone has rearranged how I think about ambition.

The career-research arm of Effective Altruism. The career guide is the more rigorous companion to the Wait But Why piece above. The Rob Wiblin podcast is the more underrated artifact on the site: long-form interviews with people working on the problems that might actually matter, taken seriously.

As resources get cheaper to consume per unit, total consumption tends to go up, not down. Coal in 1865. AI tokens in 2025. The cleanest frame I know for predicting what happens to demand when a price collapses by an order of magnitude.

Peter Turchin's idea: societies that produce more credentialed elite-aspirants than they have elite slots get unstable. A useful lens on the last decade of political turbulence and on what is about to happen as AI compresses entry-level knowledge work.

A wall of charts showing how a bunch of US economic indicators broke trend right around 1971, the year Nixon closed the gold window. Don't take any individual chart too seriously. The cumulative effect is the point.

Practical advice on listening that almost no one actually applies. The version of 'be a better listener' that came from people who think carefully about thinking.

Robin Hanson's model for why we don't see aliens: civilizations that expand fast leave visible boundaries, civilizations that don't, don't. If we're one of the rare grabby ones, we should be near the start of an expansion era. Cosmology-flavored, but the underlying selection logic transfers to competitive dynamics in general.

Declassified WWII guide from the Office of Strategic Services on how regular citizens could sabotage Axis operations through workplace dysfunction. Hauntingly indistinguishable from how a lot of large companies actually run today. Read it once and you start seeing it everywhere.

Gregor Hohpe's catalogue of messaging patterns for distributed systems, from 2003. The vocabulary the whole industry uses whether or not it realizes. If you're designing anything that has to talk to anything else, this is where to start.

A huge curated list of free and open-source replacements for almost every piece of commercial software you might currently be paying for. Useful for the recurring moment when you realize you're about to subscribe to the third tool this month.

The other half of Moloch, by the same author. If competition grinds everything toward short-term fitness, slack is the absence of that pressure, the room a system needs to make a move that's worse now and better later. Read it right after Moloch above and the pair does more work than either does alone.

Why every project balloons the moment you actually start it: the closer you look at anything, the more detail resolves out of what looked smooth from a distance. The essay I hand to anyone who keeps being surprised that the simple task took all week. You stop being surprised.

Moloch pointed at your favorite app. Companies optimize for the marginal user, the next not-yet-acquired one, and that quietly makes the product worse for everyone already using it. The cleanest explanation I know for why software you love keeps getting dumber.

Why a string quartet costs more to stage than it did a century ago even though they play the same notes: wages rise economy-wide on the back of productivity gains the quartet never got. The load-bearing piece of the WTF-1971 puzzle. Once you see it you can't unsee it in healthcare and education.

When a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure. Four-fifths of the systems-thinking on this page compresses into that one line. Tape it above every dashboard you've ever been asked to move.

The most-quoted two pages in modern AI, and for once the quoting is deserved. Seventy years of research keep teaching the same thing: methods that just scale with compute beat methods that encode human cleverness, every time, eventually. Jevons paradox pointed at GPUs.

The accessible on-ramp to the book half this list quietly references. Why grand schemes to make the world legible from above, planned cities, scientific forestry, keep failing the people they're imposed on. Read this before you tackle the book itself.

A 1983 Usenet post about a programmer who optimized machine code so tight it exploited the drum memory's rotation to land each instruction exactly where the read head would be. Half love letter, half warning. The folklore companion to the null garbage collector below: both are about what 'good code' means once you actually know your machine.

Grant Sanderson's visual explanations of how neural networks actually work. The single best on-ramp to the math, full stop. If you've ever waved your hands about backpropagation, watch the four-part series and never have to wave again.

Karpathy's talk on how software keeps redefining what 'programming' means. Software 1.0 was code, 2.0 was learned weights, 3.0 is prompts. The half-hour version of the framing every serious AI engineer should be able to riff on without notes.

Karpathy builds a working GPT in a couple of hours, live, from an empty file. The hands-on sequel to the 3Blue1Brown playlist above: once the math clicks, watch someone type the thing into existence. Nothing demystifies a transformer like watching every line of it get typed.

The Dictator's Handbook compressed into eighteen animated minutes. Power isn't about the ruler's character, it's about who controls the keys the ruler needs to stay in power, and that one shift explains a startling amount of politics. Moloch wearing a crown.

The 2012 talk that quietly seeded a decade of tools, live-coding, reactive notebooks, hot reload, all of it. Victor's argument is that creators deserve an immediate connection to what they make, and then he just shows you. The direct ancestor of Strudel down in Everything else.

Blow's bear case for technology: progress isn't guaranteed, knowledge gets lost between generations, and our towering abstraction stacks may be quietly eating the ability to rebuild them. You don't have to buy the whole thesis to find it uncomfortable in the right way. Pair it with the simple-sabotage manual.

A mock history lecture delivered from the year 2035 about how JavaScript ate the world and then dissolved into a universal compilation target. Comedy that turned out to be roughly half-prophecy, asm.js and WASM showed up more or less on schedule. The funniest serious talk about where compute is going.

A clean, no-nonsense FIRE calculator. Drop in your numbers, get an honest read on whether you can actually walk away from a job when you say you can.

Reverse phone number lookup. The thing you reach for when an unknown number rings and you want to triage in three seconds instead of three minutes.

The honest, slightly morbid companion to ficalc above. Instead of a single success probability it folds in mortality, so each year of retirement is colored rich, broke, or simply dead. Sobering in exactly the way a retirement plan should be.

Backtest any portfolio against a century of real market history, complete with leverage, glide paths, and fees. Where you go to check whether the allocation you're so confident about would actually have survived 1966 or 2000. The reality check for the FIRE numbers two entries up.

Type your email, find out which breaches already have it. The thing I point people to the moment they ask 'should I change that password,' because the answer is usually yes and this tells you exactly why. Same three-second-triage energy as the reverse lookup above.

A search engine that deliberately ranks the small, old, text-heavy, non-commercial web above everything SEO has bloated to the top. The engine the Fourmilab blurb below is secretly asking for. Search anything obscure here and remember what the web was before it was optimized.

Browser-based live coding for music, JavaScript port of TidalCycles. Type a pattern, hear it loop, modify it in place. The most fun you can have with a code editor in twenty seconds.

GeoGuessr, but the panoramas are AI-generated scenes from history and you have to pin down both where you are and what year it is. A small, weird, surprisingly compelling thing to lose ten minutes to. Also a nice early example of what AI image gen unlocks for casual-game design.

John Walker, co-founder of Autodesk, measuring the gravitational pull between ordinary masses with an apparatus he rigged up in his basement, then writing the whole thing up in obsessive detail. A monument to old-internet engineer rigor and humor, and a reminder that the most interesting personal sites still belong to people who started building them in the '90s and never stopped.

A missile-software team that decided not to fix their memory leaks: they measured how much memory would leak over the flight time, doubled it, and added that much RAM. The missile hits the target before it runs out. The cleanest reminder I know that 'correct' is relative to the problem you're actually solving.

Neal Agarwal's playground of one-idea interactives, the Size of Space, Asteroid Launcher, Spend Bill Gates' Money. The spiritual heir to Fourmilab's whole 'put something gloriously pointless on the web and let people poke at it' ethos, minus thirty years. Open one, lose an afternoon.

A spinnable globe dotted with every live radio station on Earth. Drag from a late-night talk show in São Paulo to a village station in Mongolia in one motion. The most quietly astonishing ten minutes the modern web still offers for free.

A search engine that indexes only old-school personal websites, the handmade, single-author, 1996-energy corner of the web. The literal answer to the nostalgia in the Fourmilab blurb above: there's a whole search engine for sites like that, and this is it. Hit 'surprise me' and wander.

A website run entirely off a solar panel on the author's balcony, which means it goes offline when the weather's bad and the page literally dims as the battery drains. Engineer ethos and old-web ethos welded into a single artifact you can watch run low on power. Proof that a website can be an argument.

Asimov's own favorite of his stories, and a tidy nine pages. Across billions of years humanity keeps asking a computer how to reverse entropy, and the answer waits until exactly the right moment to arrive. The short-story cousin of Grabby Aliens up top: cosmic timescales, one perfect last line.