Archive

jay

The Harness, Not the Agent

Lance Eaton wrote a careful piece on agentic AI in education. He names a real tension. Agentic tools cut friction. Learning needs friction. He’s right to worry. He’s also looking at the wrong layer. The interesting thing isn’t Claude Code itself (although it’s a fun…

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Five Favorite Bike Rides in Rockbridge County

Rockbridge County is quietly exceptional for cycling. You get real climbs, real valleys, and roads that still feel agricultural rather than optimized for speed. Over time, a handful of routes have become my go-tos—not because they’re the hardest or longest, but because each one has…

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Weekly Notes — November 17, 2025

A quieter week on the surface, but the kind where the ideas pile up in unexpected corners like code windows, student conversations, half-built hardware, grant documents, and browser prototypes that refuse to behave neatly. Building Strange Things on Jetstream2 I spent time exploring Indiana University’s…

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Weekly Notes — 2025-11-10

There’s a line I read this week that’s pretty compelling: encryption, Doctorow says, makes it possible to scramble a photo so thoroughly that even if every hydrogen atom in the universe were made into a computer, we still wouldn’t have enough universe to brute-force the…

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ourss – An Opinionated RSS Reader

I spent nine days building ourss, an opinionated RSS reader that leans into the weird web. It runs in human-scale instances, lets friends trade links inside their node, and generates a daily digest that summarizes what you actually read while recommending what to read next….

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OmniFocus Google Chrome Plugin

I’ve been using OmniFocus for my personal task management for almost a decade now, and one of its most useful features are the integrations into my email, web browsing, etc. So when the Chrome plugin went belly up a while back I was kind of…

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AI Meets Atoms – A Hardware Reality Check

Emerging signal: I’m seeing more and more hands-on pros—engineers, surgeons in the OR, mechanics—push back on the notion that AI is about to swallow the physical world whole. After almost two decades working in hardware, I get it. Bits travel at the speed of a…

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design, entrepreneurship, figma

The Power of Figma in Entrepreneurship Education

In the realm of entrepreneurship (eship) education, where ideas are the currency and innovation is the goal, having a versatile tool that can shepherd an idea from its nascent stages to a tangible prototype is invaluable. Enter Figma—a design tool that has become a cornerstone…

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TSW* Podcast ep. with Ellen Schmidt-Devlin

Really excited for this one! Check it out. TSW* welcomes Ellen Schmidt-Devlin, co-founder and Executive Director of the Sports Product Management Program at the University of Oregon. Ellen’s illustrious career spans 27 years at Nike, where she worked closely with legendary coach Bill Bowerman and…

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