Eitan Burcat

I have too many inboxes. Personal email, work email, Slack, WhatsApp, Jira, my to-do list, my calendar, and various other systems that keep asking for my attention. Some are even inboxes within inboxes. A task that looked manageable yesterday can accumulate three new things to do by tomorrow. David Allen’s Getting Things Done introduced me to the powerful idea of getting your inbox to zero. And zero feels wonderful. There’s something deeply satisfying about having nothing waiting for you. Nothing…

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About twenty years ago, I opened a DreamHost account (thanks, Eran Lahav for the inspiration). It started with 42tags.com. Then came my personal website, a few sites for friends, Anobi, and smaller experiments like RigidIngrid. Things got bigger when I started hosting LickNRiff for Assaf. And for the last decade or so, Assaf, Shira, and I have been splitting the bill. A couple of years ago, it occurred to me that pretty much everything I was hosting had become static….

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I learned about Gall’s Law just this morning, but it feels like a truth I’ve been following throughout my professional career. A complex system that works invariably evolved from a simple system that worked. I’ve never really managed to design a big system from scratch. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever sat through a formal design forum that eventually turned into something useful. My different development experiences have always followed a similar pattern: start with something simple that works,…

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Just got free 90 days of the Waking Up app from Sam Harris. Lovely app, I paid for it a few times First 3 minutes I listened to it – was a short listen about just beginning again, whenever we catch ourselves not doing / being our best It’s a great advice So I’m beginning to write here again, and I encourage you too, to begin doing your best again – starting now

While we were going through COVID and the October 7th war, the idea of living through historical times, and how current events would be remembered in the future, kept popping up in the back of my mind and in conversations around me. History books, history classes at school, documentaries, history podcasts, and conversations with loved ones and acquaintances kept coming to mind. Because that’s how I learned about history. And yet, with the AI revolution we’re going through, our understanding…

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Saw a reel today of a “Digital Creator” filming himself dealing with police harassment. In two other reels, he mentioned how important it is to always be filming and experimenting with the medium. It reminded me that I’m just beginning my journey here on this blog (this is so 2004 🙂 ). Still experimenting. Wish me luck!

Listening to “Hidden Brain” now. I’m a new listener, and they mention how old experiences shape our lives in the present. It reminded me of one of my near-death experiences. There were several. I was coming back by myself from lunch in Tel Aviv, on Habarzel Street. There was heavy construction going on. I think it was the Assuta hospital being built. Two huge trucks were parked one behind the other, blocking the sidewalk. I looked carefully to make sure…

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Two major security incidents in Israel over the past two weeks. Very different stories, but both seem to share one thing: responsibility falling through the cracks. The Flydubai near-disaster. The Shin Bet stepped away from securing foreign flights to Israel, while the Ministry of Transportation apparently failed to fully assume that responsibility. Nearly 180 passengers were put at risk because of this gap in ownership. Yonatan Urich’s WhatsApp leak. A close adviser to the Prime Minister, but not formally a…

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I’ve scheduled a weekly LifeOps review with ChatGPT, every Saturday at 20:00, after the kids go to bed. We go over different areas of life at a high level and try to plan the week ahead: health, household, kids, building committee, etc. I used to do this several years ago, just after completing a Stephen Covey seminar. It worked great, but took a lot of effort, as I was doing everything manually with pen and paper. Today was my 10th…

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We’ve been exploring the possibility of AI sentience for a while now. My prediction? We’ll eventually circle back to what Zen has been teaching us for centuries: there is no “I”. The consciousness we take for granted may itself be an illusion. After failing to make machines sentient, we may discover that we’re much more like thinking machines than we’d like to admit.