Writing
Essays & experiments.
Long-form pieces from the seam of games, physics, code and story. Some come with a playable companion in the Lab.
I Asked a Shopping Agent for Costco Gold Bars
An office procurement agent, a 1 oz gold bar, and the Washington State sales tax that quietly saved everyone from a very expensive joke.
- humor
- ai
- agents
- essays
Can You Un-Smoke an Almond Mix?
My daughter asked what contamination means, and my wife accidentally arranged a demonstration. Can a spoon rescue the plain almonds from a smoky mix? A small physics-of-snacks investigation.
- science
- humor
- physics
- simulation
Peanut Butter vs. Nut Effect
I keep two kinds of M&Ms in one container and I want every handful to be fair. So: how many flips does it take? A kitchen scale, a lot of shaking, and a simulation with 900 candies.
- science
- humor
- physics
- simulation
A More Perfect Pamphlet
Washington mails every voter a pamphlet, and it's imperfect in useful ways. Why I'm building CivicGuide to help people see what's on the ballot — and what it means for someone like them.
- civics
- washington
- building
- privacy
▶ InteractiveShooting the Moon
Pinochle is a small, honest model of information theory in a market — what to share, when to share it, and the all-or-nothing prize that good signaling buys you.
- games
- information
- negotiation
- strategy
AI Shouldn't Pick Your Candidate. It Should Check Their Story.
After my favorite candidate turned out to be fake, I wanted to ground the interview against the paper trail. Every tool I had was either useless at it — or legally radioactive. Here's the line that actually matters.
- hiring
- ai
- compliance
- verification
▶ InteractiveI Loved That Candidate. He Wasn't Real.
What hiring across operations, product, and AI taught me about a screening system that quietly stopped working — and the slightly crazy experiment I ran to fix it.
- hiring
- interviewing
- ai
- fairness
- ▶ Interactive
The Capacity to Read
Code review assumes a human can read what ships. That assumption runs out of room — one engineer, then a team, then the code nobody wrote.
- engineering
- code-review
- software-quality
- essays
▶ InteractiveTime Travel, From a Zelda Speedrun
A deterministic minigame, a fixed seed, and the cheapest version of the past the universe will actually sell you.
- physics
- games
- information
- essays