A few days ago, the Day One journal app gave me a prompt: what is the one word that would describe you. That made me think hard. I was thrown for a loop.

I have always struggled to describe myself. Not sure how others see me versus how I see myself. This is not the first time I have had to confront this question. As a child and as a young man, I dealt with this same challenge.

I have been thinking about this for a few days. It is hard to use one word to describe a whole person. It is a strange way to think of yourself. I came up with many descriptors, but they are not the whole thing. I knew that already. Still, I wondered why they were the fragments that I chose to put down on paper.

When I offered my fragments to Claude, it pointed out that the underlying theme to them all, the one that ties it all together, makes me a “seeker.” And almost instantly I realized that’s the word that describes me best, more than anything else.

I have always believed that you need others to see you better than you see yourself. Just as I am able to see, learn, and appreciate others better. In this specific case, Claude found an underlying correlation.

Over the years I have amassed many fragments of self. The phrases I ended up using to describe myself.

Curious. Interesting. Sarcastic. Optimistic. Cool. Forever young. Worry wart. Uptight. Indecisive waffler. Taste maker. Curator. Never finish. Early adopter. Careless.

Curator and Taste are real. But they are outputs. Descriptive of what I produce. Seeker is the reason I am. The AI pointed out that most seekers are better at outward motion than the inward one. Or maybe the AI was just doing what it is trained to do: be a sycophant, aimed to please, saying what you think you need to hear.

But, I do trust my own view of things. And of me. More than AI, or more than any other person. I just lack the vocabulary to describe myself for myself. Words are very important, but when it comes to the self and labeling myself, they have failed me.

Because words are your salvation, your reason to be, as a writer you feel your verbal shortcomings more acutely.

“We know more than we can tell.”

Michael Polanyi.

And while Polanyi was writing about science, it applies here too. Charles Taylor, in Sources of the Self, points out that articulation isn’t just description. It changes how you see what you know. The gap between awareness and articulation is something we don’t think about enough.

But we should.

As I came closer to my own fragments, I realized that the glue that holds them together is a fundamental quality I don’t even think about. Caring.

Curiosity means I care enough to dig deeper. My sarcasm is a mask for caring enough to be disappointed. I worry because I care too much to let go. An indecisive waffler? Maybe I don’t want to get it wrong. You get the point. The fragments point to just one thing. And I didn’t even realize it. It took a long few days of introspection to even come to this realization.

Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, had it right: language chops up something that was never meant to be fragmented. I suppose that’s where it all started. Where my fragments of self managed to hide the one word that describes it all.

Maybe because you are too close to yourself. Too clouded to see clearly. And that’s why you have to go outside to get a better perspective. Or maybe that’s the journalist in me. A larger perspective, a bigger context, a lens that’s not so close.

Weirdly, this translates in my photography as well. I find beauty in a landscape through its contours and its outlines, not in its details. And even when I get close, I always seek the essential.

So maybe “Seeker” is the best descriptor. What fuels the seeking is that you care. I care about a lot of things. Not sure why. But I do. Maybe I will never know. Maybe that’s the point.

Ancient philosophers across all traditions, Western, Zen, or Vedic, point out that seeking is noble. But the seeker has to make peace with the idea of never arriving.

I think I am okay with that.

March 28, 2026. San Francisco

The news cycle has been moving at hyperspeed and sometimes it is really hard to keep up with so much information, most of it not much more than a drop in the bucket. So, I did what I usually do. Take a step back from it all, and decided to just slow down the cycle around my own interests. As a result, most of my writing this week is a bit more personal.

Whether it was celebrating my 23 years in San Francisco or simply using AI to identify the right phrase to describe myself, it was quite fun, and an exercise in some philosophical meandering. I also took the time to write about broadband, and yes, I got all worked up about Google flipping my favorite internet service provider to a PE-owned company. Now I am going to be looking for a new service.

Nonetheless, I took the time to enjoy reading what others are writing, especially the longer, less covered articles.

Here are seven stories I recommend.

• American Diner Gothic. Robert Mariani writes that economic stagnation, the death of regional culture, and the internet have converged to produce a new American type he calls the “dinergoth.” The pierced-up, anime-watching, gender-fluid Amazon warehouse worker who streams on Twitch and dreams of voice acting. I don’t normally even think about this. Now I do. [The New Atlantis]
• When ChatGPT Broke an Entire Field: An Oral History. Quanta Magazine interviewed 19 current and former natural language processing researchers to tell the story of what happened to their field when the transformer arrived. This is a fantastic read. Read it, and then read it again. [Quanta Magazine]
• How Oregon’s Data Center Boom Is Supercharging a Water Crisis. Rolling Stone and FERN investigate what happens when Amazon builds data centers on top of an aquifer already poisoned by decades of agricultural runoff. The water used to cool the servers evaporates, but the nitrates don’t. The wastewater gets sprayed back onto farmland. It seeps into the same wells people drink from. It leads to miscarriages and others losing a kidney. This is ugly. [Rolling Stone]
• Despite Doubts, Feds Approved Microsoft Cloud Service. Oops. Microsoft has a history of overpromising and underdelivering. Microsoft cloud is no different, as federal reviewers found out after five years and 480 hours. They wanted to verify how Microsoft protects sensitive government data in its cloud. They couldn’t. One reviewer called the documentation “a pile of shit.” They approved it anyway. [ProPublica]
• The $165 Billion Annoyance Economy. The “annoyance economy,” the cost of being on hold, fighting cancellation flows, disputing junk fees, navigating health insurance bureaucracy, costs American families $165 billion a year. This is capitalism gone wrong, and it rankles me no end. [Business Insider]
• How AI-Assisted ABS Will Impact MLB. It was Opening Day 2026. And it was also the introduction of robot umpires. Cornell researchers studied what happens when you replace human umpires with an automated ball-strike system. A nice reminder that “more accurate” and “better” are not always the same thing. [Cornell]
• Operation Red Wings: The True Story Behind Lone Survivor. Reality is not a movie. Politico Magazine revisits one of the most mythologized events in recent military history and finds a story far more complicated than the book or the movie. Read it slowly. [Politico]

What I wrote this week, ICYMI:

• Jargon Sucks — A short rant on why we hide behind words that mean nothing.
• Seeker — I used AI to find the right word to describe myself. The answer surprised me.
• 23 Years — A short photo-filled love letter to San Francisco on the anniversary of making it home.
• We Are Now an Upload (Broadband) Nation — Upstream usage is surging 21.7% year over year. It is the biggest challenge of infrastructure.
• Meta’s May Day — Meta has lost two cases in court. The problem is the way it lost them. Will it force them to rethink their entire operation?
• More Magic Math from OpenAI — The numbers still don’t add up.
• ‘Astound’ed. Google Flips Its Fiber to PE — Google sold GFiber to a PE-owned company called Astound. I am taking it personally.

March 29, 2026. San Francisco