Ai-Generated

The childhood friendship — the neighbor, the walkie-talkies, the bamboo — cost me nothing Jewish. The wrong lesson to draw is “non-Jewish friendships are fine.” The right one is narrower: that particular kind of friendship was fine. “Non-Jewish friend” is not one thing. It names several structurally different situations that get lumped under a single phrase, and the lumping is exactly where the bad thinking happens. A parent who has decided the question in the abstract — for it or against it — has already made the mistake. The situations differ enough that they deserve different answers. ...

In the first post I argued that responsibility in AI-assisted development isn’t line-level review — it’s strategic oversight at the right altitude. This post is about what that means in practice. Specifically: how to recognize when the right move is to stop pushing at the current level and step up a layer. This is the single most useful pattern I’ve found, and it shows up at every scale. The Pattern Whenever something isn’t working — a bug AI keeps failing to fix, a feature it keeps implementing wrongly, a plan that keeps generating awkward code — the wrong response is to push harder at the same level. The right response is almost always to go up one. ...

When I was a kid I had a friend who lived nearby. He wasn’t Jewish. He was, by any measure, a good kid — kind, easy to be around, more mature than his age. We played the way children have always played. Hide-and-seek with walkie-talkies and some elaborate set of rules I no longer remember. Pretend games. Pulling bamboo out of the strip behind his backyard, which for some reason felt like the best thing in the world to do on a given afternoon. ...

Before You Drop $500 on a Switch 2, Read This The Nintendo Switch 2 is a great machine. But is it $500-better than a $45 handheld that plays the entire NES (Nintendo Entertainment System), SNES (Super Nintendo), Game Boy, Genesis, and PlayStation 1 libraries — or a $249 one that handles PS2 and GameCube? A Little Story A few weeks ago I went looking for something my kids could play classic games on — something I wouldn’t mourn if it got dropped, lost, or used as a frisbee. ...

A few months ago I wrote a post arguing that AI parallelism would force developers to take clean architecture seriously, because coupling now has an immediate cost in blocked parallel work. I still think that’s true. But I want to start this series with a confession: the elaborate workflow I built on top of that insight is mostly not what I actually do anymore. This isn’t a retraction. The economic argument holds. What I got wrong was the workflow that I thought followed from it. ...

The Sky Arena: Why Air Shows Are a Moral Anachronism We’ve Somehow Normalized We banned gladiatorial combat. We reformed NASCAR until the deaths stopped. Air shows cannot be reformed — they can only be banned. There is a particular kind of moral blindness that only becomes visible in retrospect. Future generations look back and ask: how did they not see it? How did they sit in those stands, eat their funnel cake, and watch without flinching? ...

The AI PC Kickstarter Gold Rush: A Buyer’s Guide for the Discerning Paranoid Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Just Buy a Framework Desktop The year is 2026. Every company with access to a Shenzhen ODM catalog and a Canva account has discovered that if you put the words “local AI,” “agentic,” and “private” in a Kickstarter headline, people will throw money at a render of an aluminum cube. We are in the middle of the AI PC gold rush, and somebody has to sort the nuggets from the gravel. ...

A Close Reading of the Dearborn Heights Mayor’s Statement on the Temple Israel Attack On March 12, 2026, Ayman Mohamad Ghazali — a 41-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen from Lebanon and resident of Dearborn Heights, Michigan — drove a truck loaded with explosives into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield Township, the largest Reform synagogue in the United States. He exited with a rifle and opened fire. Approximately 140 students and staff were inside, including young children in an early childhood center. Security guards engaged and killed him. The FBI is investigating it as “a targeted act of violence against the Jewish community.” ...

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. ...