The Seven Rules of Trust, by Jimmy Wales
Hyped by entrepreneurs looking to match the enormous success and reach of Wikipedia in their own companies, I found Wales' lessons from Wikipedia to be broadly applicable to daily life as a human. The most striking takeaway: Start every relationship with trust as a foundation. Beginning with inherent distrust presents a sometimes insurmountable uphill battle before anything else has been established. My trust today is never earned, only lost. What a positive impact that has made!
inviting everyone you know over for dinner, twice a month
This Binary Universe, by BT
BT is a pioneer in the field of electronic music. Released in 2006, this album redefined for me what music could be. Each song defies genre. The original release included full-length music videos by guest artists on DVD for each of the seven, nearly 10-minute songs, which were composed with a veritable orchestra of synths, hacked toys, and custom-programmed instruments with Csound. "Good Morning Kaia" hits hardest -- a love letter from BT to his daughter, written not as lyrics but presented as words superimposed in-time over home videos. BT remastered this album in late 2025, but I recommend the original. The tweaks he made didn't add much and at times felt jarring, at least for a fan of the 2006 album.
Kagi
Google used to be good. Kagi is better. Some scoff at the thought of paying for a search engine. But for users who value deep dives through the internet and don't want their experience cluttered with ads and AI slop, giving up $10/month is well worth it. A longtime favorite feature is domain filtering, which allows you to rank up, down, or outright block domains from your results. Pinterest (infamous for useless landing pages), TikTok, and Facebook are among the most blocked by Kagi's users, among some other usual suspects: https://kagi.com/stats?stat=insights Kagi also runs projects like Small Web, a Stumbleupon-style index of small websites with Web 2.0 vibes. (I hope to build my own site back like these!) Their search product also has a user-report-driven anti-AI system to help flag Ai-generated webpages in results, though that initiative has seen mixed results.
