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Michael Lopp
Bluesky
If you’re falling in love with your robot, I don’t think you understand the best parts of being human. Hint: we’re a mess.
hint mess robot
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17 September
Hosts the Lex Fridman Podcast — long, unhurried conversations with scientists, engineers and public figures. Several of the interviews quoted elsewhere on this site are episodes of it.
Their words
Humans are amazing. In part, because our minds are such a damn complicated mess.
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@lexfridman on X x.com
15 September
Founder of Farnam Street (fs.blog) and host of The Knowledge Project podcast. Writes and curates on decision-making, mental models and rational thinking.
Lazy work used to mean too little output. Now, with AI, it often means too much and more work for everyone else. @tobi call it "slop grenades." A "Slop Grenade" is when you let AI produce the work and pass it on without adding any value (including checking it). Someone else has to wade through it, catch the mistakes, and clean up the mess. You save time and look productive but someone else pays for it. Quoting @shaneparrish My third conversation with Shopify co-founder and CEO @tobi. 0:00 How Shopify Uses AI 7:18 River: Shopify's Internal AI 8:55 How to Encourage Osmosis Learning 10:52 AI Dreaming and Self-Reflection 11:53 How to Use AI for Strategic Decision Making 14:11 The One Thing AI Cannot Do 16:04 What AI is Ma… Related
8 September
Writer and programmer; co-founder of the software studio Postlight and author of the Bloomberg Businessweek essay What Is Code?
I vibed up a weird music screensaver a month ago, but I kept thinking, “What if it was an imaginary failed 90s arranger keyboard called the Stellate that generated music in 500 genres?” So this is an imaginary web port of that. It's a mess, but I keep laughing at it. Exports to Ableton. stellate.app Related
3 September
Programmer, teacher and speaker; long-time Microsoft developer-community figure, host of the Hanselminutes podcast and author of the hanselman.com blog.
The first time Dave Barry wrote about tech, Miami Herald, 1985: "To better understand why you need a personal computer, let's take a look at the pathetic mess that you call your life." Forty years later he doesn't think computers made us dumber. Related
21 August
Writer on habits and decision-making; author of Atomic Habits and the 3-2-1 newsletter, and publisher of long-running book recommendation lists.
I split problems into two groups: muddy puddles and leaky ceilings. Some problems are like muddy puddles. The way to clear a muddy puddle is to leave it alone. The more you mess with it, the muddier it becomes. Many of the problems I dream up when I'm overthinking or worrying or ruminating fall into this category. Is life really falling apart or am I just in a sour mood? Is this as hard as I'm making it or do I just need to go work out? Drink some water. Go for a walk. Get some sleep. Go do something else and give the puddle time to turn clear. Other problems are like a leaky ceiling. Ignore… Related
18 August
Writer, editor and executive coach; co-founder and editor of A Book Apart and a former contributing editor at A List Apart.
Bluesky One of my most often given (and possibly most annoying) bits of counsel is: *talk with your mouth.* But really I don’t think there’s any other way out of this mess we’re in, so I am not going to stop. everythingchanges.us
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Mastodon One of my most often given (and possibly most annoying) bits of counsel is: *talk with your mouth.* But really I don’t think there’s any other way out of this mess we’re in, so I am not going to stop. everythingchanges.us
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17 August
Writes jvns.ca, turning "hard and scary" topics — networking, debugging, Linux internals — into plain explanations and hand-drawn comics. Publishes Wizard Zines, illustrated programming zines. Software developer based in Montreal.
14 August
Graphic designer and type designer, who created the original Macintosh icons and typefaces at Apple from 1982 and has since designed interface graphics for NeXT, Microsoft, Facebook and Pinterest.
Their words
and I would probably preach the same thing like don't mess around with the logo and put it in a different color and put it on a crazy background until people know it so well that you can play with it
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youtube.com
3 August
Engineering manager who has worked at Apple, Netscape, Slack and Palantir; writes as Rands at randsinrepose.com and wrote Managing Humans.
If you’re falling in love with your robot, I don’t think you understand the best parts of being human. Hint: we’re a mess. Related
21 July
Founding member of OpenAI and former director of AI at Tesla; creator of nanoGPT and the term "vibe coding".
One pattern I find useful for working with LLMs is a nice long ramble session. Sometimes the LLM needs more bits to understand what you're trying to achieve, but you're too lazy to type them. In these cases I like to lean back, switch to /voice and just ramble for like 10 minutes, total mess, anything goes, full stream of consciousness. Sometimes I declare it up top, something like "switching to speech recognition sorry for any typos...". Sometimes I turn it into a small interview of a few turns. But I find that the LLMs are somehow very good at reconstructing long incoherent rambles and ofte… LLMs Related
15 July
Writer and teacher on productivity and personal knowledge management. Author of Building a Second Brain and founder of Forte Labs, which runs the course of the same name.
Their words
The whole purpose of childhood is to mess up, to skin your knees, to run up against the limits of reality and feel reality push back.
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fortelabs.com
1 July
Programmer; wrote Extreme Programming Explained and Test-Driven Development, signed the Agile Manifesto, and writes Tidy First?.
Their words
You look under the underneath though at the code and it was just a horrible unmaintainable mess. But the fact that people could program the programs that they wanted was a a significant step forward as opposed to I'm going to write a thousandpage requirements document and then wait 8 years and not get what I want which was the alternative that we were offering at the at the time.
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youtube.com
25 June
Writer on happiness, habits and human nature. Author of The Happiness Project, Better Than Before and The Four Tendencies, and host of the Happier with Gretchen Rubin podcast.
11 March
Programmer and essayist who has worked at Amazon, Google, Grab and Sourcegraph. Best known for the long-form essays collected as Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants and Stevey's Blog Rants.
7 January
Executive coach for product leaders. Previously a partner at GV (Google Ventures) and a product manager at Google. Writes at Bring the Donuts, including a standing essential-reading list for product managers.
Their words
Jazz is messy, and musicians seem to court disaster night after night. What can product leaders learn from how these artists approach their art? Barrett’s entertaining book formed the backbone for
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bringthedonuts.com
1 January
Founder and CEO of SaaStr, the B2B software community and events business, and a SaaS investor who previously co-founded EchoSign and sold it to Adobe.
Their words
The contact mess that we see, we have no need for them today. They should be extinct next year.
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youtube.com
1 November 2025
Novelist and writer, author of Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore and Sourdough; previously worked at Twitter and Current TV.
Their words
Dandelion Chocolate Dandelion Chocolate Don’t mess around.
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robinsloan.com
8 October 2025
Independent game developer, creator of the colony simulation RimWorld and author of Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences. Previously worked on BioShock Infinite.
Lots of games can be made by just starting to mess around and seeing what works. You get a guy on screen, have him jump on stuff, or shoot stuff. Or you put a city on screen, click on squares to build houses. And so on. Such games are easy to find because they don't require a theory of what's going to work. You just try random simple things and see what feels good and chase that. It's not easy to do well, but it's a shallow process. But as time goes on, such low-theory games are more and more oversaturated. The basic "objects bumping into each other" and "map painting" and "number goes up" de… Related
21 March 2025
Writer and former McKinsey/BCG strategy consultant; author of The Pathless Path and Good Work, about leaving the default career track. Publishes the Boundless newsletter and podcast.
Their words
A powerful personal story from a friend Ravi, who reinvented his life through the lens of activism, entrepreneurship, and life exploration.
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pathlesspath.com
20 January 2025
Writer and developer. He runs the Latent Space newsletter and podcast about AI engineering, and writes essays on software and careers at swyx.io.
22 April 2024
Theoretical physicist and philosopher, Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins and fractal faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. Writes the Preposterous Universe blog and hosts the Mindscape podcast.
Their words
If you think about how we teach quantum mechanics to our students, the Copenhagen interpretation, it’s a God-awful mess. No one’s going to accuse that of being very beautiful. I’m a fan of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and that is very beautiful in the sense that fewer ingredients, just one equation, and it could cover everything in the world.
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youtube.com
25 November 2021
Software engineer; co-founder and former CTO of Tailscale, previously on the Go team at Google.
Software I’m thankful for 2021-11-25 A few of the things that come to mind, this thanksgiving. open/read/write/close Most Unix-ish APIs, from files to sockets are a bit of a mess today. Endless poorly documented sockopts, unexpected changes in w…
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28 October 2020
Founder and CEO of Get Lighthouse, a management-coaching software company, and previously a product lead at KISSmetrics. Writes about leadership, management and product at jasonevanish.com.
Their words
The original usability book by Steve Krug is the best starter for anyone looking to learn the basics of the subject. Nothing I've read helps crystallize as well the idea of your complicated user flow actually being a mess.
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jasonevanish.com
29 September 2020
Software developer and entrepreneur; co-founder of Heroku, author of The Twelve-Factor App, and a researcher at Ink & Switch.
how we identify ourselves We identify ourselves to computers hundreds of times a day, but it’s a mess. I want digital identity that is easy to use, private, and secure.
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