FIGBERT

From the desk of Benji Welner in Dallas, TX.

John Gruber, yesterday: The best writing I see come out of these models is worse than anything I would choose to read for pleasure.

From the desk of Benji Welner in Mexico City.

From the desk of Benji Welner in Austin, TX.

From the desk of Benji Welner in the sky between Austin and the Hamptons.

From the desk of Benji Welner in Austin, TX.

I mostly don’t use the Google Suite—but when I stumbled on these through Sheets, I genuinely thought there was a rendering error in Safari

Like Dreamers by Yossi Klein Halevi.

In ME103 you build a “high-fidelity product or object… with the PRL’s manufacturing resources.”

It took me two decades to learn that coconut water does not taste like sweat.

Welcome back to our regularly scheduled programming!

Sweetness and Blood by Michael Scott Moore.

Began: 30 Jun 2025 Concluded: 19 Sep 2025 Many people say the job market is a mess.

Many years ago, my family discovered a secret about the Grand Wailea: amongst all their wonderful amenities, none managed to surpass the quality of their in-room body wash.

Flinging an object a distance is perhaps humanity’s oldest challenge—and it’s one I faced with my teammates for the final project of ME102: Foundations of Product Realization.

The Making of Prince of Persia by Jordan Mechner.

Steve Klabnik, as found on Lobsters: some of my friends have started a new company, ERSC, which is going to be building a new platform for developer collaboration on top of jj.

For the second project of ME102: Foundations of Product Realization, you are assigned a mechanism and instructed to build something with it.

I burnt vastly too much time on this today, after having already figured this out a week ago, so here it goes in writing.

There is an ancient Jewish story told about a wise man who used to walk around with two pieces of paper, one in each of his pockets.

The Counterlife by Philip Roth.

An Odyssey by Daniel Mendelsohn.

In the vast apparatus of the internet, I have my own little hideaway: an Alpine Linux box hosted on Hetzner.

When Apple announced that visionOS 26 was bringing wall-mounted widgets to their face-mounted headset, I was very excited.

The de-facto standard for event invitations at Stanford is Partiful.

I enjoy many things.

Night by Elie Wiesel.

How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell.

Blind Date A Book is part ecommerce website and part art project.

There is a feeling coursing through the populace.

Robin Rendle, himself responding to another post on “digital gardening”: How many bangers on this here website are lost to the feed of new stuff and are only hard to find because of the chronological list I’ve slapped together?

Last year my friends would often pointedly remind me that I was a freshman.

I continue to set new records in how long-overdue something can be.

Om, on his blog: Unlike search engines, AI platforms are built on precision and summaries.

Israel Alone by Bernard-Henri Lévy.

Roll Call is a jury-rigged receipt printer that sits on my desk and dictates my morning routine.

Rocket by Marc Tarpenning.

One Hundred Saturdays by Michael Frank.

The above image was created as my final project for CS148, under the auspices of renown bodybuilder and occasional professor Ron Fedkiw.

Waking Lions by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen.

I was very fortunate to have the opportunity to hear Marc Tarpenning, cofounder of Tesla, speak at the beginning of this quarter.

A funky list of two for my own use mostly.

The Illusion of Return by Samir El-Youssef.

I was walking around the other day, listening to the sounds of the night, when I had a thought about AirPods.

Mitchell Hashimoto, announcing the release of his new terminal emulator: …I am nostalgic for the days when software was released when it was ready.

Reading yesterday’s Register Spill post I got hooked on this sentence: Is [the success of frequent and significant rewrites by the founders of Zed] because they have been working on text editors for over a decade and know the domain well and how things sh…

UNSONG by Scott Alexander.

The Great Gatsby by F.

Began: 17 Jun 2024 Concluded: 06 Sep 2024 YCombinator’s job board has high signal to noise for interesting work, but it’s not every day that their internship tab has as compelling a phrase as “SwiftUI Engineer.”

Began: 05 Jun 2023 Concluded: 01 Sep 2023 As the summer of 2023 rolled around, I found myself opening up a bunch of tabs in Safari to check if any cool companies I had heard of on the orange site were hiring.