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 'yearnings tree' 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.

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.

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.

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 photos are AI-generated scenes of historical events and you have to guess the era. 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's gravitation calculator that lets you compute orbital mechanics in the comedic Furlong-Firkin-Fortnight unit system. A monument to old-internet engineer humor, and a reminder that the most interesting personal sites still belong to people who built them in 1996 and never stopped.