Portfolio

A hedge fund trader taught me how to love. I had no idea what a wretched thing I was, until I met him.

His mind was a perfect terror, a Turing machine that drew derivatives from mere memory.

Or maybe Orpheus wanted to look. He wanted the memory over the living reality, and made the poet’s choice, not the lover’s.

Our love was also a three-body problem. Our histories, our creations, and our distance. Lover, beloved, and the distance between us.

The past is Newtonian. Deterministic, linear, bound by rules—like memory’s fixation, like old love that keeps repeating in your mind.

The future is quantum. Probability, uncertainty, entanglement—the unknowable state until observed, until you choose the path.

The present is relativity. Time dilates, mass shifts, meaning warps—relativity introduces perspective, a frame of reference.

The market is a Lovecraftian horror that punishes and rewards with unfeeling caprice. I’m just a fly caught in its web. But daily he walks willingly into its maw.

So I flung him back out into the stars, into the dark forest. Watched him touch escape velocity, where I cannot reach him.

After him, I know that writing is the truest form of love. Writing is the ice in my hand that never melts.

It is the only place where holding on and letting go weave the same thread, the one planet whose three suns spin in a stable orbit, the closest thing I have to a theory of everything.

I daresay Charlie Kirk, dead, is even riper for the picking than Charlie Kirk, alive.

The algorithm is the greatest propagandist of all, a mechanical black priest with a singular virtue: attention.

Charlie, with a whole wife and two kids and a sprawling conservative empire. Charlie, eternally 31.

I can almost see Him touch her hand, closing that excruciating, infinite gap to forgiveness. Forgiveness!

Could the perfect form of propaganda … look like forgiveness?

Maybe it’s just impossible to mourn a living wound. It feels so much easier to try and love Charlie, to forgive the fantasy of a dead man for his abstract harms against me.

And so I end with a twist on an old prayer: Charlie Kirk, rest in future.

The software engineer is their own bottleneck now. AI is a coordination problem; the work (code) is a mere byproduct of coordination.

Claude today, the worst that it will ever be, already can deliver.

So which one is AI, substitute or complement?

Back to wrangling atoms, since not even AI can bend the speed of light.

As products are commoditized, the value moves up to the coordination layer above.

The middle is the substitute being wiped out. Standard software engineering like webapps, what most people think of when they hear “tech”—that’s dying.

What’s happening to software engineering right now will happen to almost every white-collar corporate job over the next few years.

As quartz solved the problem of accuracy, AI is solving the problem of work.

Those skills at the top layer? Vision, taste, knowing what’s worth building….those are the humanities.

If you care about beauty, the process, the craft, whatever makes you come alive, that there will always be space for you.

Where efficiency lives, responsibility dies.

But modernity, which has profaned and desacralized the natural world and God, has elevated technique to the sacred instead.

Everyone responds to their task, and no one is responsible for the whole.

Technology is empowering and enslaving; propaganda is necessary and destructive; violence is natural and unacceptable.

I worry that I am spreading propaganda, as I did in the past.