DUMBO at Dusk
The Manhattan Bridge doesn't care about your timeline. It's been here longer than whatever you're worried about.
Archive
The Engineer's Marketing Problem
Technical founders write copy that's precise about mechanism and silent about consequence. Here's why that's backwards — and how to fix it.
What You Can't Copy from Snowflake
The Snowflake Native App Framework looks like a compute pattern. It's actually a distribution moat — and understanding why reveals something important about where platform value really lives.
The IRA That Outlived the Rules
Putting startup equity in a self-directed IRA is straightforward. Getting it out when the company gets acquired is not — and the institutions involved don't have a playbook for it.
Lookalike Modeling Is Just Conditional Probability. SQL Can Do Conditional Probability.
The ML stack for lookalike modeling implies something sophisticated is happening. Under the hood, it's a log-likelihood ratio. Here's how to build a statistically principled audience scorer in pure SQL — and why the complexity is often borrowed, not earned.
Still Works
A cracked mirror on a Brooklyn sidewalk, still doing exactly what a mirror does. We conflate broken with useless constantly — and there is a cost to that.
The Constraint Engine: Why Every Strategy Game Is Just Civilization in a Different Costume
Building a Civilization knockoff seems like a scope problem. It's actually a design insight waiting to happen — one that starts by asking what makes Civ interesting in the first place.
AI Is Not a Feature. It Is a Dimension.
Most companies bolt AI onto what already exists. The better architecture treats it as a set of independent, composable dimensions — and builds accordingly.
Blue Hour Under the Bridge
There's a twenty-minute window after sunset when the city lights and the sky reach equilibrium. This is what it looks like from DUMBO.
AI Is a Primitive, Not a Solution
Complexity theory doesn't bend for large language models. The real question isn't whether AI can solve hard problems — it's whether you're asking the right question.