The Lab

Everything on the workbench

Essays, notes, and quick links — all mixed together. Filter by topic, maturity stage, or type.

We Need to Write More

Why is our thinking clearer when we write about something than when we just think about it? A short tour through working memory, the motor cortex, and the bottleneck that makes writing magic.

Distilled· 19 days ago

Distilled· 3 min

The Critique, The Creator and the Editor Went to a Bar

The three voices you need to make anything — and why letting them work at the same time means nothing gets made. On sequencing creation, critique, and editing instead of letting them clash.

Distilled· 3 min

Daal Chawal Happiness

All happiness is small. On cooking my mom's daal chawal, the fleeting nature of every joy — from new sneakers to dream cars — and why the mind keeps fooling us into ranking them.

Distilled· 4 min

Numbers Don't Bleed. Stories Do.

Statistics fade from memory, but stories preserve the human emotions behind historical tragedies. Why we must collect, live, and pass down narratives that capture what numbers cannot—the grief, courage, and moral choices that define our shared humanity.

Distilled· 12 min

When Intelligence Becomes Rentable

As AI makes thinking effortless, what happens to judgment, taste, and human creativity? A reflective essay on resisting cognitive outsourcing in the age of LLMs.

The Bitter Lesson

Rich Sutton · incompleteideas.net

Sutton on why general methods that leverage computation tend to win.

How to Do Great Work

Paul Graham · paulgraham.com

Long but worth it. The section on curiosity is the one I keep re-reading.

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics

Eugene Wigner · dartmouth.edu

1960 essay — the question hasn't been answered, only deferred.

You and Your Research

Richard Hamming · virginia.edu

A talk about why most researchers don't do important work. Brutal, honest.