joanwestenberg.eth

If the doomers are right, I'm about to waste the last good years making things I enjoyed. If they’re wrong, I have a three-year head start. I can honestly live with either outcome.

I've been working on this for a little bit. It's a detailed, free-to-read history of optimism. How the world has gotten reliably better, and why you should feel hope for the future and what we build next. I hope you like it.

English is a terrible programming language because it compiles everything and validates nothing. Forget a semicolon in C, and the compiler slaps you in the face. Feed a vague, sloppy sentence to an LLM, and it complies with three paragraphs of clean, confident, polished garbage...

Until now, I’ve been lobbing individual essays into your inbox as soon as I finish them. Starting this week, we’re doing things differently. You’ll get one email from me each week. In it, I’ll share what I’m obsessing over, the best links I’ve stumbled across, what I’m reading and writing, and anything // everything I’m building behind the scenes. Why the change? Why indeed:

You're about to get an army of AI agents that will do whatever you ask. Which is a problem, because you've spent thirty years learning to wait for someone to ask you.

The Railway incident is exactly why I'm taking my 15 years of experience in tech comms/tech journalism and launching Dedicated crisis comms for AI and tech companies: instant access, immediate turnaround, always-on advisory. So many companies don't have a plan for this and don't have anyone on call to get it right when they get it wrong...so I'm keen to push this right now.