Westenberg.
Field Notes on Now.
$ cat ./posts/latest
The optimized self and the life that got away
This newsletter is free to read, and it’ll stay that way. But if you want more - extra posts each month, access to the community, and a direct line to ask me things - paid subscriptions are $2.50/month. A lot of people have told me it’s
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Everything's Casino
On the evening of February 28, 2026, American B-2 bombers lifted off from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri. By the time they reached Iranian airspace, Tomahawk missiles were already
Members Only: We desperately need a Reality Literacy
The Noble Path
It is a truth universally acknowledged that an indie hacker in possession of a widget must be in want of a business model... Every tool is a startup now. Every
A soft-landing manual for the second gilded age
By the summer of 1945, West Berlin had been reduced to rubble. Allied bombing, the Soviet ground assault and Hitler's insistence on Götterdämmerung had destroyed roughly a third
Members Only: Your anonymity set has collapsed and you don't know it yet
Everything is awesome (why I'm an optimist)
February is the month the internet decided we're all going to die. In the span of about two weeks, Matt Shumer's Something Big is Happening racked
Agentic swarms are an org-chart delusion
The "agentic swarm" vision of productivity is comfortingly familiar. Which should be an immediate red flag... You take the existing corporate hierarchy, you replace the bottom layers with
Thoughts on Farcaster
For the past few weeks I've been asking myself why I'm still on Farcaster, whether I'll stay, whether I even want to. I'
Everyone in AI is building the wrong thing for the same reason
Every AI founder I talk to is on an accelerating treadmill, burdened by a nagging suspicion that the entire industry is moving too fast in a direction that doesn'
The unbearable weight of cruft
The case for gatekeeping, or: why medieval guilds had it figured out
Every open source maintainer I've talked to in the last six months has the same complaint: the absolute flood of mass-produced, AI-generated, mass-submitted slop requests have turned their