Family Photo: Memory Lawrence's beveled mirror reflection. Friend of the Newsletter Aaron sent me a very nerdy article about ways to use AI. The main point was that the AI models will continue to improve, but they are most useful because of our specific interactions with them. The article proposed a method to capture these AI model interactions so that you could port the interaction context across other models to avoid getting locked in—Anthropic's Fable and ChatGPT's Sol would be conditioned...
16 days ago • 5 min read
Family Photo: Generational Wealth Our lives are built atop unfathomable piles of generational wealth. Generations of innovators took us from hunter-gathering, to subsistence farming, to the industrial revolution to...whatever this is. Each generation improves our understanding of science and our use of technology a little bit. Part of what makes a city so valuable is its compounding infrastructure investments across generations. I read that 250 years ago about half of children died before age...
29 days ago • 3 min read
Family Photo: The Last Time You'll Do Something If you define it specifically enough, every day contains something you'll do for the last time: The last time you cut up junk mail, while kneeling on the bare floor, wearing a train museum hat with a purple shirt. The last time your eldest child loose his top right baby tooth. The last time you eating ice cream with your five year-old in the month of May, knowing next year he'll be six. Sometimes you know it's the last time as it happens....
about 1 month ago • 6 min read
Family Photo: Infinity Calvin came home with a book he wrote at school. He calls it The Book of 6-7. Longtime readers (and parents across America) will recognize the 6-7 phenomena. The book's cover has a big 67, surrounded by little people saying "67". In my mind, each speech bubble 67 has its own little people, with their own tiny "67" speech bubbles...and then little-er people encircle those tiny 67s with their own tinier speech bubbles...on and on in infinite fractal complexity. I call it:...
about 2 months ago • 7 min read
Family Photo: Autonomous Car While visiting Las Vegas last week, my dad and I rode in a Zoox. A Zoox is an autonomous robotaxi, purpose-built for automomous riders. The vehicle has no steering wheel: inside is just two benches allowing passengers to face each other during the ride. Two sets of folding doors allowing entry/exit from both sides. The symmetrical design, completely wrapped in cameras and sensors, means no functional difference between front and rear. It is not clear if the...
2 months ago • 4 min read
Family Photo: No Place Like Home I attended DynamicsCon 2026 last week. This year's event was in Las Vegas, which apparently piqued my dad's interest in Microsoft's enterprise SaaS offerings...so we drove out and attended the event together. One evening, after learning the latest about inventory costing, demand planning, and Power BI administration, we headed off property to watch The Wizard of Oz at The Sphere. Outside The Sphere. The Sphere is a monument to immersive entertainment. Its dome...
2 months ago • 6 min read
Family Photo: Commit Calvin started futsal this season. It's our first foray into team sports. The new activity comes with new calendar commitments: practices every Monday, games on Wednesdays or Fridays depending on the whims of whoever's in charge of those decisions. Calvin's the youngest kid on his 1st/2nd grade team. He's enjoying it, and his indoor soccer skills are improving. It helps that all his teammates are nice. I don't know if that's a statistical anomaly. Maybe kids are just...
3 months ago • 6 min read
Family Photo: Forts What's stronger: the urge to build a fort, or dig a tunnel? It feels like Calvin and Lawrence are building forts everywhere these days. Building materials range from couch cushions and blankets and pillows to cardboard bricks and cardboard boxes and storage containers. This weekend they built a fort out of the neighbor's mulch pile. Last month, we built a snow fort together up in Truckee. When the cousins visited a couple weeks ago, they all built a mixed-media fort that...
3 months ago • 3 min read
Family Photo: Easter Puzzle For Easter, Luana wanted to give each kid a big Easter present instead of the usual collection of chocolate eggs, fun-size candy bars, and Chuck E. Cheese prize-counter-schlock stuffed into plastic eggs. We came up with the idea of a puzzle: I coaxed ChatGPT into creating an Easter puzzle picture, we sliced it into a grid, fit the pieces into Easter eggs, and hid the eggs around the yard. We wrote a message on the back of the puzzle. After Calvin and Lawrence found...
3 months ago • 5 min read