Latest posts
- Communities are not fungibleFeb 11, 2026JA Westenberg
There's a default assumption baked into how Silicon Valley builds products, and it tracks against how urban planners redesign neighbourhoods: that communities are interchangeable, and if you "lose" one, you can manufacture a replacement; that the value of a group of people who share space and
- The pitch deck is dead. Write a pitch.md instead.Feb 09, 2026JA Westenberg
Every week, thousands of founders open Canva or Google Slides or, God help them, PowerPoint, and begin the ritual. They agonize over fonts, nudge logos three pixels to the left and workshop whether the TAM slide should come before or after the team slide, as though the ordering of these
- How to stop being boringFeb 05, 2026JA Westenberg
The most interesting people I know aren't trying to be interesting. Thank God. They're saying what they actually think and wearing what they actually like, pursuing hobbies that genuinely fascinate them, regardless of whether those hobbies are cool. The most mind-numbingly boring people I know are
- The Coherence PremiumFeb 02, 2026JA Westenberg
I don't necessarily believe in second brains. The notion (pun-intended) that you can offload your thinking to a perfectly organized system of notes and links has always struck me as a fantasy. The people I know who've built elaborate Notion databases or Obsidian vaults mostly end
- Your Life is the Sum Total of 2,000 MondaysJan 31, 2026JA Westenberg
We plan our lives like we're editing a movie trailer. The trip to Portugal, or the product launch, or the transformation photo at the gym. The big moment where everything crystallizes into meaning. We accumulate these peaks in our imagination, and then arrange them into a montage that
- Why Intelligence Is a Terrible Proxy for WisdomJan 27, 2026JA Westenberg
Isaac Newton, one of the greatest scientific minds in human history, lost a fortune in the South Sea Bubble of 1720. After initially making money and selling his shares, he bought back in at the peak, watching helplessly as the stock collapsed. His reported loss was around £20,000,
- Claude Code Won't Fix Your LifeJan 20, 2026JA Westenberg
Claude Code can now read and write to local file systems. You can point it at your Obsidian vault and suddenly you have an AI that “knows” everything you’ve ever written. Noah Brier runs it on a home server and connects via VPN from his phone.
- The Discourse is a Distributed Denial-of-Service AttackJan 17, 2026JA Westenberg
In September 2016, the security journalist Brian Krebs had his website knocked offline by a botnet called Mirai. Hundreds of thousands of compromised devices, mostly cheap webcams and DVRs manufactured with default passwords that nobody ever changed, all simultaneously requesting his homepage. No single request was malicious. Each packet was
- How to Debug Your LifeJan 15, 2026JA Westenberg
I. In 1947, Grace Hopper and her team at Harvard were working on the Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator. The machine was massive, a deafening clatter of electromechanical relays, and it had stopped working. They opened the casing to find the problem. It was a moth. An actual, literal moth,
- Failure vs. Success is the Wrong Frame.Jan 13, 2026JA Westenberg
How many novels exist only as "I'm still outlining"? How many startups live permanently in "stealth mode"? How many paintings never get painted because the painter is waiting until they're good enough to not mess it up? The obvious response is to
- A Metabolic WorkspaceJan 05, 2026JA Westenberg
In 1895, a Belgian lawyer, bibliographer and information scientist named Paul Otlet started building what he would call the Mundaneum: a vast repository in Brussels containing over 12 million index cards cross-referenced by subject, designed to hold the entirety of human knowledge. Otlet had already predicted hyperlinks, search engines, and
- Barbarossa: How Hitler Lost the War - By Jonathan DimblebyJan 04, 2026JA Westenberg
💡 Grim but essential // corrective to the Western-centric view of WWII. Dimbleby argues persuasively that the war was won and lost on the Eastern Front in 1941, not on the beaches of Normandy in 1944. It is a catalogue of two competing barbarisms, dispelling the myth of the "clean&
- 1929 - By Andrew Ross SorkinJan 03, 2026JA Westenberg
💡 A terrifying // granular look at the hubris that melted the global economy. Sorkin doesn't paint the bankers as cartoon villains, so much as delusional optimists who got high on their own supply of cheap credit. Read this to understand why "this time is different" is
- The Case for Blogging in the RuinsJan 01, 2026JA Westenberg
In 1751, Denis Diderot began publishing his Encyclopédie, a project that would eventually span 28 volumes and take more than two decades to complete. The French government banned it twice. The Catholic Church condemned it, Diderot's collaborators abandoned him, his publisher secretly censored entries behind
- The Rime of the Ancient MaintainerDec 26, 2025JA Westenberg
Every culture produces heroes that reflect its deepest anxieties. The Greeks, terrified of both mortality and immortality, gave us Achilles. The Victorians, haunted by social mobility, gave us the self-made industrialist. And Silicon Valley, drunk on exponential curves and both terrified and entranced by endless funding rounds, has given us