Friends
This page is a map of my creative influences. Most of the people here are creative explorers,
or for lack of a better term, public intellectuals:
hackers, researchers, engineers, entrepreneurs, writers, and educators.
They differ in what they build, but they share a habit of making their work visible
by publishing their ideas, experiments, and discoveries. By observing how they think,
build, and explain, I've borrowed countless frames, mental models, and fragments of expertise.
Together, they've shaped how I approach problems and continue to influence the way I learn.
This page is inspired by
SlashFriends. It is not a list of
people I know personally, but of people whose work I keep coming back to.
Think of it as a public set of intellectual bookmarks.
Why this page?
The internet is full of recommendations—"Top 10 books," "People to
follow," "Must-read blogs." This page is something different. It's a
personal map of the people and communities that have shaped how I think.
I hope you'll discover someone whose work resonates with you, just as
I've benefited from discovering theirs.
Creative Explorers
George Hotz
He won the 2014 SECUINSIDE CTF (Capture the Flag) competition by himself. How could he outperform teams as a single person?
"One of the big ways was this tool.
If you're running the binary 10 times less than everybody else, it's quite helpful."
Everyone else was trying to debug better with GDB while he was questioning the process of debugging.
That is when he built QIRA, a tool that reduces the cost of exploration giving him a significant time advantage,
and questioning the assumption that debugging is temporal.
Mental moves I learned
- Current workflow
- What assumption is everyone making?
- Can I remove this assumption?
- Steal an abstraction from another field.
- Design a tool around the new abstraction.
Topics:
tinygrad deep learning framework, hacking, cybersecurity, systems thinking,
self-driving cars
Website →
Bret Victor
I'm inspired by his vision of creating a medium and culture in which all people deeply understand the real world, and each other.
Mental moves I learned
- Representations shape thought.
- Make ideas visible.
- Design for understanding instead of memorization.
Topics:
Dynamicland,
explorable explanations,
learnable programming
Website →
Ethan Chlebowski
Ethan taught me to think about cooking in terms of frameworks rather than
recipes. Instead of memorizing individual dishes, he breaks cooking down
into transferable principles that make it easier to improvise and adapt
meals to whatever ingredients you have available.
Mental moves I learned
- Learn frameworks instead of recipes.
- Think in terms of interchangeable ingredients.
- Design meals around constraints and goals.
Topics:
framework cooking, meal prep, nutrition, experimentation
Website →
Elijah Fox
Elijah Fox changed how I think about improvisation. Rather than hearing
music as a stream of individual notes, I learned to listen for anchors:
the harmonic centers, rhythmic landmarks, and phrase boundaries that give
the music its structure.
Mental moves I learned
- Listen for anchors before filling in the details.
- Treat phrases as coherent ideas rather than sequences of notes.
- Improvise by exploring a harmonic space, not by choosing isolated notes.
Topics:
jazz piano, improvisation, harmonic language, transcription
Website →