I just watched Whiplash last night (writing this in October 2026). I enjoyed it. The moral is one I've pondered a few times: we collectively celebrate greatness, but prefer to avert our eyes from the process of becoming great.

A short economic fable, in the style of Aesop, about a grasshopper who discovers that the value of his work depends on countless hands he never sees.

The question I’m pondering is: can we truly get to a better world by all of us tending to our tiny corner of it? Or would a truly better world require all those micro actions to be complemented by some grand-scale work?

3D chess is a tired metaphor that will lead you in the wrong direction. Instead, you want to play fractal chess: increase the layers of game that you're playing, not simply the complexity.

It just struck me the other day: our main units of time are a hodgepodge of those determined by an external reality and those that are completely arbitrary. And since time is such a central concept to how we organise our lives in the modern world, it makes me wonder how life would be different if we changed the units…