MicCheck (Testing 1 2 1 2)

I wanted a quick system-wide menu item that would show my microphone’s current muted state and I wanted an easy way to change the state globally from this very same menu item. Sure, I can do this from a specific app (Zoom, Teams, Meet, …) but I didn’t want to go hunting from app-to-app looking for the mute button.

So: MicCheck. It is a tiny macOS menu bar app with one job: keep your microphone muted until you decide otherwise. It sits up in the menu bar showing ON AIR or OFF AIR. When something tries to unmute your mic without permission — a browser, a background app, whatever — MicCheck catches it at the system (CoreAudio) level and reverts it within milliseconds.

I built it with one feature that I couldn’t find elsewhere: a whitelist for allowed apps. For example, I use Superwhisper constantly for voice-to-text. The problem with a hard mute enforcer is that it would block Superwhisper too. So MicCheck has an allowed apps list — you add Superwhisper (or any other app you trust), and MicCheck steps aside when that app needs the mic. The moment your whitelisted app finishes recording and releases the input device, MicCheck re-mutes automatically. No button press. No forgetting to mute again. It just goes back to where it was.

The whitelist works at the audio session level, not just the mute property level. Most apps don’t touch the system mute flag — they open an audio stream and expect audio to flow. MicCheck watches for that too, so whitelisted apps get real audio while everything else gets silence.

It’s built with SwiftUI and CoreAudio, targets macOS 13+, and lives entirely in the menu bar — no Dock icon, no windows unless you open Preferences. Global hotkey (⌥⇧M by default, fully remappable), optional sounds and notifications, launch at login.

The source is on GitHub. Build it yourself or just grab the app download.

What I’m reading (AI reads)

On Higher Powers

Imagine describing AI to an ancient human –– “a superintelligent invisible being designed by the body of all of humanity’s recorded expression that helps us be productive, less lonely, and guides us through work and personal life.” –– almost any person in almost any civilization in the world would shrug and say “spirits, angels, devas, dybbuks, gods. Sure, no big deal.” We have, in fact, 100,000 years of robust and time-tested systems of organizing our society based on the belief that there are higher powers than ours. These higher powers move among us, determine how we all should act, and with whom we should be in communication — this is older than just about any principle we have together.

The Handoff

I think it is no coincidence that at the historical moment that humans progress themselves to the point of not breeding because it is inconvenient, that they invent a million virtual beings, a billion artificial minds, trillions of robots and a zillion working agents. Think of this as a handoff – a shift from one regime based on the biologically born to another based on the manufactured made. We are in transition from the world of the Born handing off to the world of the Made.
…
The purpose of handing the economy off to the synths is so that we can do the kinds of tasks that every human would wake up in the morning eager to do. There should not be any human doing a task they find a waste of their talent. If it is a job where productivity matters, a human should not be doing it. Productivity is for robots. Humans should be doing the jobs where inefficiency reigns – art, exploration, invention, innovation, small talk, adventure, companionship. All the productive chores should be handled by the billions of AIs we make.

The Big Take with Nadella

The DeepSeek episode highlights another, arguably more revealing part of Nadella’s thinking: AI is rapidly commoditizing, and this is a good thing for Microsoft. While everyone in Davos was focused on AI consumption, Nadella was contemplating the history of coal production. One of his favorite economic theories is the Jevons paradox, which posits that as a resource becomes more accessible and its usage more efficient, consumption increases. This happened with coal during the 18th and 19th centuries and more recently with plane travel, when plummeting operational costs and airfares helped create frequent flyers, new flight destinations and booming sales for airlines. Nadella believes a similar phenomenon will play out with AI.

America Isn’t Ready For What AI Will Do to Jobs

Taken together, these statements are extraordinary: the owners of capital warning workers that the ice beneath them is about to crack—while continuing to stomp on it.

It’s as if we’re watching two versions of the same scene. In one, the ice holds, because it always has. In the other, a lot of people go under. The difference becomes clear only when the surface finally gives way—at which point the range of available options will have considerably narrowed.

The Bitter Lesson

One thing that should be learned from the bitter lesson is the great power of general purpose methods, of methods that continue to scale with increased computation even as the available computation becomes very great. The two methods that seem to scale arbitrarily in this way are search and learning. 

The second general point to be learned from the bitter lesson is that the actual contents of minds are tremendously, irredeemably complex; we should stop trying to find simple ways to think about the contents of minds, such as simple ways to think about space, objects, multiple agents, or symmetries. All these are part of the arbitrary, intrinsically-complex, outside world. They are not what should be built in, as their complexity is endless; instead we should build in only the meta-methods that can find and capture this arbitrary complexity. Essential to these methods is that they can find good approximations, but the search for them should be by our methods, not by us. We want AI agents that can discover like we can, not which contain what we have discovered. Building in our discoveries only makes it harder to see how the discovering process can be done.

Blasting through X (Twitter) bookmarks

After years of accumulating tweets, I decided to tackle the monstrous backlog of 1,237 bookmarks on Twitter. (I’m almost kicking myself for not waiting just a few more days to hit the 1,337 marker.)

However, the web and mobile interfaces are painful for loads of content: slow to load, can’t group and categorize after the fact, can’t quickly open them in new tabs (“_blank”) and, worst of all, you can’t access these via API.

So, I used a simple Chrome extension to export the raw list of tweets. Then, with a little help from Claude, I wrote a Python script to do the heavy lifting: export the data, automatically sort and group each into distinct categories, and put them into a more readable format. The goal was to create a single-serving, local page that would let me finally blast through my reading list in a weekend.

My categories and counts reveal a lot about what captured my attention over the years, and honestly, the distribution probably still holds true today:

Investing & Finance (387), AI & Machine Learning (264), Other (103), Startups & Entrepreneurship (82), Productivity & Tools (77), Long Reads & Essays (70), Career & Professional Growth (56), Media & Entertainment (55), Design & Creativity (54), Tech Industry & News (44), Society & Culture (21), Health & Longevity (13), Images & Visual Content (8), Humor & Fun (3)

Reviewing six or seven years of bookmarks was a fascinating trip down memory lane. It was interesting to see which posts and articles have genuinely stood the test of time. And, which haven’t: oddly, a lot of crypto content. I bookmarked many crypto tweets during the intense 2020–2022 period because it was all moving so quickly that it was impossible to keep up. In a way, the current flow of AI (Code! Cowork! OpenClaw! Tunnel straight into your Mac mini at home!) updates feels similar. A constant stream of new information you probably want to save-for-later. Except this time, I’m not: I’m reading them because it’s so much fun to be building using these tools.

If you’re ready to tackle your own archive, here are the two tools you’ll need:

  1. Use the X Bookmarks Exporter Chrome extension to export a CSV of all your bookmarks.
  2. Feed the output to the x-bookmarks-viewer python script to process the data and design a single-serving page locally. You can fork it, drop in your own CSV export, run 'python process_bookmarks.py`, and have your own organized bookmarks viewer.

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

From 1967:

I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

– Richard Brautigan

Cool tools

A few new tools I’ve been loving recently. A bit heavy on the Chrome extensions, but they seem to work well together without issue.

  • Raycast – I went hunting for a faster replacement to Spotlight (besides being sluggish, it never seems to match the search term to the thing I want). I found this via @mikekarnj‘s newsletter and I am loving it so far. Extensible via scripts and extensions, and super fast too. I can’t believe it’s free (before I found this one, I went looking for open-source versions).
  • Rectangle – A free, open-source window manager to replace my old one.
  • Tweaks for Twitter – A Chrome extension that gives you a cleaner Twitter web view.
  • Simplify – A Chrome extension (worth paying for, if you ask me) that gives you a cleaner, faster Gmail. Designed by @leggett who worked on Google Inbox.
  • Vimium – A Chrome extension that bring vim keybindings to the browser so you can do things like search and jump to links without your hands leaving the keyboard.

See previous cool tools from 2019 and 2018, some of which I’ve since replaced with better versions (e.g., Rectangle remembers your placements on multiple displays and also has backward-support for Spectacle, which I was using previously).

Books 2020-2023

In honor of Matt’s 40th birthday, and per his request, I’m giving him a blog post as a gift.––And I’m blogging again for the first time in a while! I liked his idea a few weeks ago to publish all his favorite books from the past few years. I, too, neglected to publish yearly book lists these last four years so, here goes. (Absolute favorites have an asterisk * next to them).

2020 & 2021 (I can’t remember now which ones were which years)

  1. The Road* – Cormac McCarthy – how funny I started January 2020 with this book first
  2. The White Darkness* – David Grann
  3. A Man for All Markets – Edward Thorp
  4. Killers of the Flower Moon* – David Grann
  5. The Ride of a Lifetime – Robert Iger
  6. The Uninhabitable Earth – David Wallace-Wells
  7. Bitter Brew – William Knoedelseder
  8. Measure What Matters – John Doerr
  9. The Coddling of the American Mind* – Jonathan Haidt
  10. Hackers – Steven Levy
  11. The Brain Fog Fix – Mike Dow
  12. The Great Influenza* – John M. Barry
  13. Chaos Monkeys – Antonio García Martínez
  14. Smarter Faster Better – Charles Duhigg
  15. Brunelleschi’s Dome* – Ross King
  16. The Innocent Man* – John Grisham
  17. The First Tycoon* – T.J. Stiles
  18. The Square and the Tower – Niall Ferguson
  19. The Revenge of Analog – David Sax
  20. The Year Without Pants – Scott Berkun
  21. The Overstory* – Richard Powers
  22. How We Got to Now – Steven Johnson
  23. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running* – Haruki Murakami
  24. The (Mis)Behavior of Markets – Benoit B. Mandelbrot
  25. Make Your Bed – William H. McRaven
  26. The Plaza* – Julie Satow
  27. The Idea Factory* – Jon Gertner
  28. The Inevitable – Kevin Kelly
  29. Empire of Pain* – Patrick Radden Keefe
  30. Valley of Genius* – Adam Fischer – loved the first-hand storytelling feel
  31. Red Notice – Bill Browder
  32. Billion Dollar Whale – Tom Wright
  33. Radical Candor – Kim Malone Scott
  34. Black Edge – Sheelah Kolhatkar
  35. On Writing* – Stephen King
  36. The Space Barons – Christian Davenport
  37. Outline – Rachel Cusk
  38. Calypso – David Sedaris
  39. Travels with Charley* – John Steinbeck – one of the two reasons why our camper van is called “Rocinante”
  40. A Random Walk Down Wall Street – Burton G. Malkiel
  41. It Starts with the Egg – Rebecca Fett
  42. Thinking in Bets – Annie Duke
  43. The Library Book – Susan Orlean
  44. The Devil in the White City* – Erik Larson
  45. Cribsheet – Emily Oster
  46. Circe* – Madeline Miller – just an excellent retelling; I always recommend this one
  47. Born Standing Up – Steve Martin
  48. Say Nothing* – Patrick Radden Keefe – like a Grann or Remnick, I think I would pick up and read any of his works
  49. The Fire Next Time* – James Baldwin
  50. The Fragile Earth* – David Remnick
  51. No One Is Talking About This – Patricia Lockwood
  52. How to Avoid a Climate Disaster – Bill Gates
  53. Working in Public – Nadia Eghbal
  54. Blood and Oil – Bradley Hope
  55. No Rules Rules – Reed Hastings
  56. Is This Anything? – Jerry Seinfeld
  57. The Psychology of Money – Morgan Housel
  58. The Snowball* – Alice Schroeder
  59. Great Society* – Amity Shlaes
  60. No-Drama Discipline – Daniel Siegel
  61. The Year of Magical Thinking* – Joan Didion
  62. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas* – Hunter S. Thompson
  63. Driven – Alex Davies
  64. Empire* – Donald L. Bartlett
  65. Skunk Works* – Ben R. Rich
  66. In the Garden of Beasts – Erik Larson
  67. Leonardo da Vinci – Walter Isaacson

2022

  1. The Doors of Perception* – Aldous Huxley
  2. Nausea* – Jean-Paul Sartre
  3. The Spy and the Traitor* – Ben Macintyre
  4. Born to Run – Christopher McDougall
  5. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – Robert M. Pirsig
  6. Men Explain Things to Me* – Rebecca Solnit
  7. What If? – Randall Monroe
  8. 1776 – David McCullough
  9. Snow Crash* – Neal Stephenson
  10. Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World – Jack Weatherford
  11. Greenlights – Matthew McConaughey
  12. Catch and Kill – Ronan Farrow
  13. Ender’s Game – Orson Scott Card
  14. Between the World and Me* – Ta-Nehisi Coates
  15. The Code Breaker – Walter Isaacson
  16. Norse Mythology* – Neil Gaiman
  17. Waiting for Godot* – Samuel Beckett
  18. Why We Sleep* – Matthew Walker
  19. How To Talk So Little Kids Will Listen – Joanna Faber

2023

  1. The Second Mountain – David Brooks
  2. Eat the Buddha* – Barbara Demick
  3. Rise and Kill First* – Ronen Bergman
  4. Other Minds* – Peter Godfrey Smith
  5. Cannery Row* – John Steinbeck
  6. Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life* – William Finnegan
  7. American Prometheus* – Kai Bird
  8. Season of the Witch* – David Talbot
  9. Burn Rate – Andy Dunn
  10. Orange Sunshine* – Nicholas Schou
  11. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test* – Tom Wolfe
  12. Hell’s Angels* – Hunter S. Thompson
  13. The Billionaire Raj* – James Crabtree
  14. SPQR – Mary Bears
  15. Don Quixote* – Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
  16. Going Infinite – Michael Lewis
  17. The Bond King – Mary Childs
  18. The Wager* – David Grann
  19. Like a Rolling Stone – Jann Wenner
  20. Cult Classic* – Sloane Crosley
  21. The Guest – Emma Cline
  22. Normal Family* – Chrysta Bilton
  23. Your Table Is Ready – Michael Cecchi-Azzolina
  24. Electrify – Saul Griffith
  25. The Ministry for the Future* – Kim Stanley Robinson
  26. Outlive* – Peter Attia
  27. Slouching Towards Bethlehem* – Joan Didion
  28. Let Me Tell You What I Mean* – Joan Didion
  29. Nothing to Envy – Barbara Demick
  30. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow – Gabrielle Zevin

Until next year!

Thirty-nine

Today, I turned thirty-nine.

I celebrated the day with my most favorite people in the world: my wife, my son, and my dog – my “quaranteam” with whom I’ve spent nearly every moment of the past year.

This year was unique not only because of the pandemic, but also because it was a year that I took off from work. It just so happened that my wife did the same. Our decisions to do so were made pre-pandemic and exclusive of each other’s, but the timing was extremely fortuitous for us both.

We’ve lived a lifetime in this past year – time moves differently in lockdown, yeah, but we’ve also been lucky to cram in so much as a family: we “closed up shop” in New York, we quarantined in the Catskills, we drove across the country for the first time (albeit in record time with as few touch points as possible), and we posted up in Southern California. The time away from work allowed us to be present with one another and with our son. I think Miles (our dog) would agree that our bond is stronger than ever.

I don’t know what this next year has in store – none of us do anymore. But, in the meantime, I’m going to continue to pack in as much as I can before my thirties are up.

A New New Thing

It was an early December morning and I had just dropped my wife and son off at JFK. As I watched them pass through the security line, I had a small sense of freedom for the first time in the year since Crosby was born. I decided I would visit the new TWA Hotel and sat alone for breakfast at the bar while finishing the last few pages of Michael Lewis’ The New New Thing. I then decided I wanted a new new thing.

The name of the book itself is enough to inspire one to seek something new, but it was the story of Jim Clark’s lifelong pursuit of innovation that helped light a new fire. His obsessive nature of creating, tweaking, tinkering, both on personal and professional projects is something I’ve always seen in myself – a restless desire to innovate, create, push new ideas forward.

So, I am branching out on my own to start something new.

It’s a hard decision to leave the perfect role in a great company at Expa. When Garrett and I met up six years ago, we sought to create a different kind of startup studio, one that would be the best place for entrepreneurs to bring ideas to life. Now with our six Partners, I’m proud to say that we have accomplished that. We’ve had the honor to work with almost forty teams so far, and nearly 300 colleagues across all of our businesses. I have been more directly involved in helping to build a few of these including Current, Kit, Drip, Reserve, and Input.

Being a Partner at Expa has allowed me to live in all worlds of our industry: to be a founder, CEO, investor, board member, advisor, designer, coder, and educator. I am interested in and take great joy in this breadth of roles. I’ve always sought to be a kind of Renaissance man, a polymath, as one used to be called. But I am an engineer at heart and by training, and the role of the entrepreneur is always where I’ve felt most at home.

Though I am leaving Expa as a Partner, I will continue to be a part of the Expa network, helping our various teams and remaining on the board of Current. Thank you to my partners Garrett, Roberto, Vitor, Hooman, Milun and the rest of the Expa crew for an amazing six years and for supporting my next steps.

But now on to my new new thing. Though it is yet undefined, I would like to eventually start another great company, and will be tweaking and tinkering on personal and professional projects until I get there. While I explore new ideas, I’ll be hanging out at various friends’ offices in the city. And, to honor my wife’s long-term desire to return to LA, I’ll be spending a little time out West to see what might come up.

If you’d like to follow along, sign up for my newsletter here: https://naveen.blog/subscribe/

Thirty-eight

Every year that goes by seems to be not only moving faster than the one before it, but packed with larger and larger milestones: meeting Diana, adopting our pup Miles, marriage, house moves, career wins, career losses, sometimes a couple of those things thrown into the same year. (And, in the case of marriage, we threw three weddings in the same year, because why not celebrate ourselves a little?)

This past year, keeping with the accelerating slope, has been the most action-packed yet. It was the one where I learned to become a dad. Me, teaching him all the things I know about the world. Him, showing me what it’s like to learn about life for the first time––a beginner’s mind in its purest form. Me, learning to up my dad joke game. (Truly, having a child is the sign of a groan man.) Him, testing his boundaries and exploring what he’s capable of, and oftentimes, making us laugh out loud in the process.

At last year’s birthday, I was too caught up in the thick of taking care of a newborn to think about what it means to be a dad. At this time last year, I spent most days with Crosby napping on my chest, dreaming of all the activities that I would do with him. This year, I’m doing a lot of those same things dreamt because he’s older, walking, and eager to discover the world around him.

With my wife having more free time away from work for the first time in a long time, and Crosby beginning to really interact with his surroundings, I think this year will mean more time exploring New York and seeing the world around us anew. One cold winter morning, as we were strolling the west side of Manhattan with newly-arrived Baby, my wife (who, let it be known, has long been seeking warmer climes than our brutal New York Januarys) said: “This will mean we’ll get to explore New York all over again.” So, knowing we will move at some point to who-knows-where as our family grows, let’s start with what’s there now in front of us: let’s explore New York all over again.

This past year has been spent trying to figure out how to stop chasing things endlessly – in work, in accolades, in likes, in what others have that I also want but that maybe I can’t quite explain why I want. To be confident in knowing that whatever comes, will come. Some of it was spent thinking “Well, now that we have all this family and kid stuff to work out, we won’t have time for anything else”. Now that we’re chasing Baby, how will we have time to chase anything else? And why, when all Baby wants and needs is us, do we want, or need to chase anything else? But in the past year I’ve learned to view all that time away from the “other chase” as a superpower of sorts. After Baby, I feel I know more now about life and other things I wouldn’t otherwise have. There’s some feeling like I’ve always known these things, but now I know these things. I seek closer, fewer, more meaningful friendships. I seek out books and places that I didn’t before, that give me experience and meaning without wasting time that I could otherwise be spending with family. I’m more mature now. I think of ideas and life differently now. I’d like to think I’ve always treated everyone as I would like to be treated, but I think I’m even nicer to everyone now, especially when I see other parents. A silent “Baby on Board” network no matter where we go.

This past year, I chose to spend most of my time with Crosby and Diana. You won’t get this time back. Time only goes one way.

At thirty-eight, I’m not just thinking of what I’ve done (or not done) in thirty-eight years, but what life will be like when Crosby is thirty-eight. And that, like my own life and my own thirty-eight years, it will all move just too fast. We won’t get this time back. It only goes one way.

This coming year, instead of just measuring age and accolades, I plan to use a different sort of measurement for my life. One that encompasses family, happiness, health, and success alike. I’m reminded of Clayton Christensen’s, How will you measure your life?

In pondering that question, I realized that my success lies not in just what I will achieve in my lifetime, but what my son will achieve in his.