Nullius in verba
"Take no one's word for it"
People grow best where they continuously experience an ingenious blend of support and challenge; the rest is commentary.
– Robert Kegan, In Over Our Heads
Hi, I’m Tom and I write about design, software, introspection, and rationality.
Contact (please send comments, questions, or feedback): tom@tmewett.com · leave an anonymous message
Favourite blogs: Sasha Chapin · Neurotic Gradient Descent · Numb at the Lodge · Sympathetic Opposition
Favourite tech blogs: Dan Luu · Ted Kaminski
Other websites: X/Twitter · GitHub · Bluesky
Referrals and recommendations: WorkFlowy
Latest
'Burnout is a particularly modern affliction, feeling simultaneously overwhelmed and paralyzed. I’ve found it’s best to think of burnout not as a disease but as a symptom, with many different etiologies. The big three: permanent on-call, broken steering, and mission doubt.' ·
26 October 2025
10 July 2025
Best
I used to believe self-discipline was unquestionably good and that more = better, but not any more. Here's why... ·
26 September 2023
On benches, houses, and community managers ·
21 November 2023
Software »
16 December 2024
18 November 2022
This is a series about a research rabbit hole I've been going down over the last year or so, about a kind of incremental programming approach for games, UIs, and more [...] ·
30 September 2024
From Mars »
As a younger man, I never felt very well-connected with my gender. Being male seemed somewhat arbitrary to me, like a random coincidence, and sometimes it was a category I was uncomfortable with [...] ·
29 August 2024
Pretty much all of the emotional suppression I've absorbed hasn't come from traditional masculinity or patriarchy at all ·
11 June 2023
Self
'Burnout is a particularly modern affliction, feeling simultaneously overwhelmed and paralyzed. I’ve found it’s best to think of burnout not as a disease but as a symptom, with many different etiologies. The big three: permanent on-call, broken steering, and mission doubt.' ·
26 October 2025
I've been thinking recently about authenticity, in the sense of being authentic to oneself. I've always heard authenticity talked about as if it meant "a lack of influence from others", but this never... ·
12 April 2025
3 May 2024
- Give up: a meditation technique - by Sasha Chapin
- On emotions and attention - by Alexander Vezhnevets
- Introduction to Internal Family Systems: a Groundbreaking Psychotherapy, Self-Therapy, Communication Method and World-View - by Maija Haavisto
- How to do hard things - David R. MacIver a.k.a. the “The Fully General System For Learning To Do Hard Things”
- Post-conceptual meta-goodness and changing in the deepest of ways - meditationstuff
- Hank Green’s description of his 80% rule for completing projects. Also: ivysly.com - on scope creep
- ‘Askers’ vs. ‘Guessers’ - The Atlantic
- Goodhart’s Law Isn’t as Useful as You Might Think - Commoncog - better titled as “how to solve Goodhart’s Law”; describes the practice of the Weekly Business Review
- How to Be an Expert Fear-Driven Person - by Sasha Chapin
- Articles - Shinzen Young: Shinzen’s various teaching materials about meditation; he’s put a lot of effort into teaching effectively, and has ended up with an interesting and somewhat unconventional approach
- The Buddha’s Teachings: An Introduction, by Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu: free e-book; very direct and clear description of Buddhism’s core teachings
- How to Be Happy - by Andrew Shade Blevins: an introduction to “the Option Method”, a kind of existential inquiry which seems interesting
Misc
Worm is a web serial about superheroes. It was written piece-by-piece between 2011-2013, with a chapter being uploaded twice a week, like clockwork, to a blog at... ·
5 February 2025
- DreymaR’s Big Bag of Kbd Tricks - THE BIG BAG THEORY
- houmain/keymapper: A cross-platform context-aware key remapper: an easy-to-use and wildly underrated keymapping tool
- If You’re So Smart, Why Can’t You Die? - Desystemize: on AI, spiky intelligence, and adversarial agents
Older stuff
Mathematics
The strange nature of the real numbers ·
11 January 2022
2 April 2019
15 April 2019
Self, introspection, & rationality
If there was ever one thing worth understanding deeply, it would be happiness. [...] Should I be so surprised when I'm unhappy, if I unconsciously believe it's impossible, or boring, or unfair to be happy? ·
13 April 2024
Somewhere in the last 2 years I discovered Internal Family Systems, and it's been one of the most impactful things I've learned. [...] Parts work is path to seeing the mind as more than a dumb machine of suffering [...] ·
21 December 2023
[...] The problem is I subconsciously don't recognise the incomplete thought as valid, so I don't hold onto it. [...] ·
17 January 2024
Dreams, butterflies, and finding true worlds ·
5 March 2022
6 September 2022
You've probably been told that it will relax and de-stress you. It's more about awareness collapse ·
12 November 2022
An overview of how knowledge is created, and its limits ·
22 October 2021
Software
Raymarching signed distance fields for creative coding·Running code at an average rate with a 'stretchy sleep'·Managing software installs on Linux·CRUD is fake; or, what should a data mapper look like?·What's the sign of C's remainder operator "%"?Miscellaneous
30 January 2024
Any child who has to spend a lot of effort learning how to fit in eventually learns that it's an endless game of losing. [...] ·
29 August 2023
I guess I'm afraid of everything falling apart. I'm afraid of needless pain and suffering. War that starts on nothing more than a misunderstanding. [...] ·
3 March 2024
19 September 2020
7 November 2020