A Website for the Things I Haven't Finished Thinking About

Perpetually between states

Most days, my attention feels like a working superposition.

Not in the literal quantum-mechanical sense. I’m borrowing the image.

Several possibilities tend to remain active at once: a product question, a circuit, a class assignment, a book, a CAD model, or an idea I haven’t found words for yet. If you were to catch me at any given moment, you would probably see only one of them, whatever task happens to be in front of me. That observation is only a snapshot, not a description of the entire complex system.

To be honest, I usually wake up thinking about the product. Those thoughts compound throughout the day, occasionally reaching critical mass around dinner. My family has learned that conversing with me can accidentally trigger a twenty-minute product monologue.

My morning ablutions are where the spark plugs in my brain start to apply voltage. I brush my teeth in the shower. Yes, I brush in the shower. I usually zone out long enough for some half-life problem to become slightly less half-formed.

From there, I sit down in front of three monitors, allowing the possibilities to collapse into whatever needs doing. Depending on the day, it might mean working through thirty credits over the summer. It might mean setting up yet another harness, preparing something for a client, or calling Ben to ramble through an idea. Occasionally, it means breaking a piece of hardware and reordering it from Temu.

If you skimmed the sentences above, the TL;DR is simple: my work doesn’t fit neatly into a single title.

It’s not that I have ADHD, although I know plenty of brilliant inventors who do. My curiosity simply refuses to stay in one category.

The graph, not the feed

I have little interest in compressing all of that into a polished professional identity. Short-form media seems to have scaffolded itself around compression, and compression usually removes uncertainty first. By the time ideas reach a professional feed, the mistakes, reversals, and confused middle sections mysteriously disappear.

LinkedIn’s particularly good at this. Someone you bumped into at Safeway three days ago is suddenly revolutionizing the nuclear-powered Honda Civic. Sh*t, maybe they are, but more often than not, it’s noise pollution.

X gets a partial pass. At least some of its machinery is visible now that it is open source. I appreciate getting value and still being allowed to look under the hood.

I think the real point here is that I prefer long-form writing. If you made it this far, maybe it was worth the read. I would rather preserve some evidence of the thinking while it is still occurring.

This site is an honest attempt to graph the way I think instead of flattening my life into a feed.

This blog is the /src folder of my mind. It is structured like a series of interconnected knowledge graphs. The nodes are my projects, essays, reading notes, experiments, and unfinished ideas. The edges are the connections I discover between them, sometimes immediately and sometimes years later.

Don’t blame me if some of it reads like total sh*t. I’m iterating. A lot of this simply marks where my thinking was at a particular moment in time. Ideas may remain unresolved.

A commitment to writing

The more pragmatic use for this site is simply becoming a better writer.

I believe curiosity is fragmented. Writing is, in some ways, an attempt to tidy those fragments. It forces me to examine them, not just ponder how they connect. Physically, it turns something in my head into an object that can be questioned, corrected, remembered, and shared.

Some of the inspiration for this website came from two books in my reading log: Guns, Germs, and Steel and Sapiens.

In Chapter 12 of Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond describes writing as infrastructure for recordkeeping and for transmitting knowledge across time and distance. As he puts it, writing made transmission “easier, more detailed, more accurate, and more persuasive.”

In Chapter 7 of Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari approaches the same development through the limits of human memory. As societies became larger and more complicated, information could no longer live exclusively inside individual brains. Writing gave that information somewhere else to exist.

In both accounts, writing does more than preserve thought. It changes the scale at which thought can be accumulated, organized, and transmitted.

My purpose here is much smaller, and perhaps more selfish, but I think it is related.

Writing allows an idea to survive beyond the moment in which it was conceived. This site is where I publish what I think I know. It is also where I preserve what I am still testing, leaving a record of the discrepancy between the two.

Hopefully, over time, it will help both of us understand how my brain actually works.