Random thoughts of me

Every day as a Jew, three times a day, we say a lot of words. In the morning we say a whole lot of words, and call it Shacris. In the afternoon we say less words, and call it Mincha. In the evening we say more words than in the afternoon, but not nearly as many as we do in the morning, and we call it Arvis. Saying a lot of words, the same words, every day, can become tiresome. Understanding what we’re saying makes this daily practice more interesting. The traditional liturgy is in Hebrew, so understanding begins at the most basic, literal level. Past that, there are myriad sefarim which give insight into the words we say every day, covering the full spread of Jewish thought and tradition, from the classical commentators to modern anthologies, from the simplest explanation to the more sophisticated, to the insights of Kabbalah and Chassidus. ...

I put together a 19-page beginner guitar booklet — 36 reading exercises in twelve units, plus a chord-and-rhythm companion that runs alongside them. There’s now a second volume too: Volume 1 is a reading primer with a songbook attached, and Volume 2 is a songbook with a reading curriculum hidden inside it. Both are embedded below; nothing to download, just scroll. If the embed doesn’t load for you, open the primer in a new tab. ...

I go out through the window. Glass and grey daylight and the drop, and then I’m on my feet in the yard with people already closing from three sides, close enough that going back in isn’t a thing I get to consider. So I run. There’s a dirt track leading away between the fences and I take it because it’s the only thing that isn’t a person. The track narrows. Barbed wire strung post to post on both sides, sagging, and the light is going, and I can almost see my own shadow laid across it — caught there, surprised, staying. Ahead of me there’s nothing. No voices, no work, no sound at all, which I keep mistaking for good news. Then one of them sees me and they all come at once, out of the dark on both sides of the trail. It’s manageable here. The trail is narrow enough that they arrive more or less one at a time, and I shoot and I move. That’s the last part I understand. ...

A prosecutor in Los Angeles wants to convict someone who killed an attacker in self-defense. The attacker had a criminal record stretching to the moon. The prosecutor’s move: you couldn’t have known about that record when you killed him, so it’s irrelevant. The argument bugged me for weeks before I could name why. It’s not stupid. It’s the opposite of stupid — it takes a certain amount of cleverness to build. And that turns out to be the whole problem. ...

When you translate Classical Hebrew texts into English, you hit a wall that has nothing to do with vocabulary or concepts. The wall is structural. The two languages think differently — not in some vague Sapir-Whorf way, but in a concrete, mechanical way that shapes how a reader processes every sentence. Hebrew Lets You Forget Hebrew builds long sentences by chaining clauses with ו (vav — “and”). Each clause arrives with its grammatical roles already stamped into the words themselves. Prefixed prepositions, the construct state, suffixed pronouns, the binyan system — all of it bakes the grammar directly into the morphology. So each clause resolves immediately. The reader absorbs it, lets it go, and the ו pushes them forward to the next one. ...

There’s a book I’ve wanted to share with the world for years. Sha’ar HaYichud (שַׁעַר הַיִּחוּד — “The Gate of Unity”), written by the Mitteler Rebbe, Rabbi DovBer Schneuri, is a foundational Chassidic text of remarkable depth. Years ago I went through the entire book and divided it into labeled sections and subsections — a structural layer I felt would make it significantly more accessible to readers. That work sat in my notes, half-forgotten, until a few weeks ago when something clicked and I decided to finally publish it. ...

A Street Interview A college student with a phone camera spots a Jewish man on the sidewalk and approaches him. Anthony: Hey man, you got a minute? I’m doing street interviews for my YouTube channel. I’m just gonna be straight with you — I’ve met a few Jewish people who have this vibe like they think they’re better than everyone else. There’s this whole “chosen people” thing, and some of them have been pretty condescending about it. Is that actually a Jewish belief, or am I just running into jerks who happen to be Jewish? ...

The Illusion of Security: America’s Institutional Decline and the Demographic Trap Part 1: Managed Decline This is Part 1 of a three-part essay series examining civilizational decline and potential alternatives. The math on Social Security is simple enough that a programmer with a spreadsheet can work it out in fifteen minutes. A worker earning $150,000 annually pays $9,300 per year in Social Security taxes.1 Invested in a basic Vanguard index fund at historical market returns of 8-10% over thirty years, that same amount would grow to between $1.1 million and $1.5 million.2 Meanwhile, Social Security promises monthly benefits of roughly $3,500-4,000 at retirement age, which annualized over a typical retirement comes to perhaps $840,000-960,000 total.3 ...

AI Parallelism: The New Forcing Function for Clean Architecture For decades, clean architecture has been a hard sell. Not because developers don’t understand its value—they do. The problem is incentive structure. Good architecture is a deferred investment. You pay the cost now (more files, more interfaces, more ceremony) for benefits that materialize later: maintainability, testability, onboarding speed. But “later” is abstract. The immediate reward for stuffing logic into one class was real—less context switching, faster to write, everything in view. ...

In what is found the greatness of man? In his understanding? That would leave the difference between man and beast to be a matter of degree. In fact, that would leave beast as our superior; his intellect is perfectly suited to his needs. The path to obtain them - or the cruel reality of his inability - is always clear. Unique to man is not-understanding - the ability to recognize a vastness which is not understood, and to be inspired by that awareness. The beast lives in his world, which consists entirely of what he perceives. Only man loses himself in the stars. ...