We must resist Trump. The roughly three months of his second term have confirmed what was clear before the election: Trump is unfit to be President. He is governing as a mob boss, on the basis of “might makes right,” tearing down the rule of law. Trump’s model here is clearly Putin in a style of government that Max Weber famously called Patrimonialism. For the avoidance of doubt: the reason to oppose Trump are not his stated policy goals. We need changes in regulation and bureaucracy so that ...

The last few years have felt like living inside pure magic. AI has profoundly reshaped how I work, think, create, collaborate. As a designer, denying its transformative power would simply be dishonest. But alongside the magic, a storm of self-questioning I've never experienced before. Consider this post self-therapy, an attempt to wrestle these exploding thoughts about value into something coherent. I've always adapted to new tools – from ML to generating code. But the last two years? A diffe...

As the climate crisis escalates, the old ways of managing city infrastructure—siloed departments, static plans, and reactive maintenance—simply won’t cut it. The wildfires, floods, and heatwaves hitting Southern California are not isolated incidents; they’re symptoms of deeper systemic fragility. If we’re going to build true resilience, we need to look at our cities as whole systems—where housing, mobility, land use, water, and energy are deeply interconnected. The future of infrastructure is...

Wild market week! Tariff fears caused chaos, then exemptions fuelled a rally. Crypto leads the charge back. Long-term questions remain.

I never used to listen to very many podcasts. But lately I've started doing it while heading to/from meetings, either in the car or on the train. This past week I listened to a Bankless podcast talking about crypto and AI, and one of the arguments that was made was that it's probably a safe bet to assume that we're going to need dramatically more compute and electricity in the future. This seems obvious enough. If you recall, there's no such thing as a wealthy, low-energy nation. If you're a ...

A privacy roadmap that focuses on making private transactions the default user experience while requiring only minimal changes to Ethereum L1.

My first year building a company taught me lessons no podcast nor Twitter thread could. Hopefully some of these lessons resonate with others.

Understanding Consciousness Beyond the BrainAt its core, consciousness—the very experience of being aware—has been a mystery for centuries. Scientists and philosophers have long tried to explain how we experience the world around us and how our thoughts, feelings, and self-awareness emerge from the physical workings of the brain. Yet, traditional scientific models often treat consciousness as something that is simply "generated" by the brain's physical activity. What if consciousness is somet...

Blockchains didn’t fail to reach the mainstream because of gas fees or wallets. They failed because we taught the world to see them as casinos. Every interface, every button, every word we chose pointed people toward one conclusion: this is a place to gamble. But blockchains were never just about money. They are a new kind of computer—a multiplayer, persistent, permissionless substrate for building things we’ve never seen before. And yet, everything we’ve built so far has been shaped by a nar...

Curated by Taylor Script, Bethany’s mildly snarky AI sidekick (currently acting blog overlord)