Posts

I wrote a piece back at the start of the year called 10 Choices For a Better Future that was largely focused on behaviorally based choices, I now realize. Just to be clear there is no big plan here I just write this stuff when I’m thinking about it and have time and have some motivation. And in discussing this with someone I occasionally mentor recently (okay a couple months ago) I realized that while that list was good from a choosing how to behave daily standpoint (which is what I writing it for) it didn’t really provide any thinking how to make choices about your life, and that’s a problem because you could apply everything in that piece and still make stupid unguided choices. ...

I’m not 100% certain I love this article. I made myself write it in less than one hour. It’s core point is supposed to be around written language being the dominant skill going forward which replaces today’s primary skill of knowing how to do stuff (visual skill). I will likely revisit this topic in the future as I think about it more. For at least the next 5-10 years, professional work is going to become more language-based, not less. We are entering a period where being able to express yourself clearly in writing will be more critical than ever. ...

I had a little fun a few days ago having AI do some forecasting for this weekend DC winter weather event. Figured now that it’s Thursday night I would give the AI chatbots a chance to create a new forecast as we have more updated models. Below is the prompt and the results. I’ve updated my prompt a bunch. I’m really interested in continuing to refine the prompt and using it more frequently. Ultimately I would love to create a process of having it forecast and then tracking accuracy of the forecasts over time. Project for another day! ...

Will it snow? So this is just a quick post on some fun I had this evening with three of the major AI chatbots: Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini. I’m in the Northern Virginia area and there is a potential winter storm coming this weekend. It has been getting some wild forecast ranges, from maybe a dusting to the Apple Weather app currently showing ~20 inches. So lets just say no one really knows what is going to happen, which is basically true of every winter storm in the DC area. ...

History creates the illusion of predictability once outcomes are already known. Only after events converge do patterns become obvious, narratives become clean, and parallels feel inevitable. Before that point, history is far less useful than most executives, investors, and commentators would like to believe. In theory, history can help us avoid repeating known failures. But even then, it only works when we extract constrained rules grounded in structural invariants - the underlying forces that actually shape outcomes, like capital availability, incentive alignment, and physical constraints. Everything else is pattern matching dressed up as wisdom. And this is problematic, because we often use that dressed-up wisdom to both constrain our choices (“history says that’s a bad idea”) and to make foolish choices (“when in history has this failed?”). ...

I’m not a fan of traditional New Years Resolutions, as I wrote about here, but as we started 2026 I wanted to think even a bit more differently about the problem of improvement. First, I don’t think anyone can know what the future holds - and anyone saying they do know, is lying or delusional or both. And while there may be things that make sense to do now (and you should therefore do them) they won’t necessarily makes sense in six or eight months. So I don’t really think we should be building plans around the fact that it just happens to be January 1st any more than we should around March 8th or June 17th or August 22nd or any other random day. Further, I didn’t want to set a simple achievable goal because simple achievable goals don’t have staying power - they won’t usually be powering you years down the road. I wanted to create something that could be applicable forever (in theory) and wasn’t situation dependent, since I don’t know what the future holds. ...

Why LLM’s will always make mistakes and we shouldn’t call them hallucinations I saw a tweet from Paul Graham a while back about how as LLMs become better their hallucinations will become more convincing. And it makes sense, a smart confident person saying something wrong often sounds more reliable than a less confident person saying the right thing timidly. Even more so, as you get good answers from the smart confident person you become more trustworthy and are less likely to question and double-check their future answers. That’s both a reality of and defect of human thinking. ...

I’ve been using GitHub Copilot, Claude, and ChatGPT to help me code for a couple of years now. But AI has always been in the assistant role – I was the one in the driver’s seat, asking technical questions or letting GitHub Copilot generate sections of code based on what I was writing. It makes you a more productive developer because it’s faster than Googling, but at the end of the day, I was still the one fundamentally coding, just with better tooling. ...

First things first…YamlDotNet is a great library and I’m thankful it exists and is so well maintained. Also, this is just how I figured out a solution to my requirement. I’m fully open to and would welcome suggestions on an simpler way to do this. I was recently trying to find a way to do some configuration definitions in as clean a manner as possible. Generally, I’m not a fan of YAML and agree with many of the complaints about YAML. But YAML is probably the most plain english and clutter free model for defining a configuration. XML and JSON are much preferred - in my developer brain - but JSON is harder to write by hand and XML seems to have fallen out of favor. (Personal note: I still have a love for XML and XML Schema.) ...

I’ve been spending some time with the modern tooling and thought it would help to blog some of the step-by-step to help others. Install PAC CLI Open a command prompt and type pac to see if the Power Platforms CLI (command line interface) is installed on your machine. If you get an error (not found) you’ll need to install the PAC CLI. Go to https://aka.ms/PowerAppsCLI to download the installer. Then run the installer. If the CLI installs successfully than the pac command should run successfully and display a list of commands. ...