Credibility Debt
The gap between the credibility you borrow (raises, accelerator logos, LOIs, prestige) and what your actual work can support, and why it eventually comes due.
a graduation for dropouts
Notes from the ZFellows dropout graduation: speaker highlights, recurring themes, and where I think swarm intelligence and personal AI are headed.
Onism
Chopin's Ballade No. 4, a stranger named Patrick, the last standby seat at a Boston concert, and finding my way back to the piano.
Philmont — A Journey of Hiking Through Mountains (2019)
Twelve days, 65 miles, 40+ pound packs and 11k feet of elevation change: a day-by-day journal of the Philmont trek that turned a little boy into a grown man.
CES 2026 NVIDIA Keynote
NVIDIA's CES 2026 keynote framed AI as the next computing platform: open models, agentic architectures, physical AI, and co-designed hardware reinventing the stack.
The biggest unsolved question
Elite colleges, YC, and Davos work because they compress exceptional people into one place. Can we create exceptional environments for everyone?
Dinner Notes from a brain that refuses to shut up
A dinner conversation about who gets credit, eighty-year historical cycles, power, and desperation as jet fuel.
2025 Recap
2025 on 2x speed: work vs love, the fast food decision that never ended, a generalist brain in a specialist world, and what I am carrying into 2026.
Slime, Deadlines, And Trying Not To Explode
On being curious about everything: why generalists get stuck, and how containers, deadlines, and constraints let the slime harden.
Dream journal 11/19/25
A dream about my dad's spirit, the Reaper, and three attempts to escape, written down before it could fade.
Acquaintances, Friends, and Close Friends
A framework for sorting people into acquaintances, friends, and close friends, four common social builds, and the configuration I want.
Fuck Structure. Let's Talk About Being Spontaneous.
My 50th blog post about why being spontaneous matters more than planning, featuring stories of biking to Facebook as a ninth grader, flying to San Diego in under an hour, and crawling through unmapped caves.
The AI Projects No One's Building (But Should Be)
A dialogue between two builders exploring the overlooked frontiers of artificial intelligence: emotionally intelligent productivity software, personalized music creation tools, and memory-aware games.
Dream journal 11/07/25
A strange dream with two parts that somehow connected: starting in the world of Hollow Knight and ending in Japan, exploring themes of transition and borders.
Improving Browser Autonomous Agents with Deep Reinforcement Learning and Memory
Exploring how deep reinforcement learning and memory systems can make browser automation agents faster and more accurate, with insights on Composite and other web agent frameworks.
Hierarchical Memory and Adaptive State Management for an AI Agent
A comprehensive exploration of how to build powerful AI assistants through memory partitioning, goal-driven state transitions, graph-based retrieval, and multi-step prompting strategies.
200 second cat dream
A dream about adopting a cat from Instagram, the practical challenges of responsibility, and the weight of decisions made without thinking them through.
A Kid From Phoenix and the Question That Stopped Me
I met him on ome.tv: a fourteen-year-old kid from Phoenix who wanted to sell drugs. Then he asked me if I was content with who I am. This is that conversation.
The World Map of Higher Ed: Dragon Hoards, Prestige Bubbles, and Why Some Small Countries Win
Universities behave like nations, with endowments as dragon hoards and prestige as currency; smaller institutions can still outperform by focusing on what they do best.
Vending Machine Dreams: Sparks, Trains, Shields
A series of vivid dreams becomes a personal operating manual: step in earlier, choose nourishment over sparks and model the pause you want others to take.
Building for Decades
How to future‑proof a company: hire for compounders, aim for orders of magnitude improvements and let product brilliance be the marketing.
Thoughts on Hiring and the Future
Four traits for day‑one hires, and a twenty‑year lens on where leverage concentrates in AI and beyond.
On Free Will vs Determinism
A pragmatic synthesis: why Laplace's demon doesn't matter, how unpredictability arises from limited information and how meaningful choice emerges from framing and endorsement.
A Letter From the Future
Future Jack writes to present Jack about seven lifetimes of projects, emotion‑capable robots, quantum moral algorithms and the importance of purpose.
9 Lives I Want to Live Today (Part 1)
Exploring nine archetypal lives — creator, voyager, AI architect, world‑builder, servant and more — and challenging myself to inhabit them instead of dreaming about them.
Why do people like quirky cultures?
A look at why unconventional communities like hacker houses and East Campus feel like home, the psychology behind self‑selection and the risks of staying too long.
20 Ideas from Y Combinator
Twenty concise lessons drawn from YC's startup wisdom: team over idea, embrace pivots, recruit well, and focus on shipping, customers and culture.
1.001
A candid reflection on transferring from a complacent university to MIT: the grind, the shock of success, the hidden hardships and the path to acceptance.
Thoughts on life in 21st century
Gratitude-filled reflections on humanity's slow arc of progress and what modern abundance unlocks.
WeWork
An unfinished prologue introducing Jack and teeing up a deeper dive on learning outside college.
How to get a MIT education, outside of MIT?
Mindset shifts and tactical habits for building an MIT-caliber education without the admissions letter.
A selection of space, time, and philosophy
A sweeping thought experiment on space, dimensions, time, existence, and the questions they raise.
18 things I learned at 18
Eighteen bite-sized lessons on relationships, focus, urgency, and owning your growth.