This is a growing collection of things I’ve personally found to be life-changing and some of my thoughts on them. They are arranged mostly in the order of wow factor, not importance or usefulness.
ChatGPT
Generative AI has completely changed the way I operate. I don’t even think twice about asking it for a second opinion, a simple question, or a quick sanity check anymore. It’s nothing short of amazing.
A recent example: we went on a hike with Zuki, our dog, and two mornings later, he started peeing what looked like blood. Needless to say, we panicked and took him to the ER. Long story short, he was diagnosed with primary IMHA, or immune-mediated hemolytic anemia. Before we knew it, we were talking to doctors who were throwing around words like hemolysis, PCV, hematocrit, and so on. It was overwhelming fast. And when the ER gets busy, and it does sometimes, you feel bad for hammering the doctors with questions.
When you need to get up to speed on a field you know almost nothing about, ChatGPT is a godsend. Within minutes, I had enough of the basics to understand what was going on and come up with better questions to ask. Hemolysis is the breakdown of red blood cells. PCV and HCT are measures related to how much of the blood is made up of red blood cells. Bilirubin is a waste product associated with that breakdown. These are just tiny examples, and we went much deeper than this, but hopefully they give you a sense of how useful this is. Going from completely lost to meaningfully informed in minutes is incredible.
Claude Code
I love building things. The problem is that I don’t code fast enough to build all the things I want to build. Claude Code has basically obliterated the time and effort between having an idea and having a working prototype.
I was already doing this style of building before people started calling it vibe coding, and way before agents became a thing. I still remember when Augment in VSCode was giving me better results than Cursor with the latest Claude models, and even that already felt like magic. Today, as of April 2026, Claude Code feels like cheating. It’s hard to imagine what this will look like five years from now. Actually, scratch that, two years from now.
Tesla FSD
This is real living-in-the-future stuff. Honestly, this might be the most mind-blowing item on this list.
I love driving, and I don’t just mean I like cars. I mean I genuinely enjoy the act of driving. I also consider myself a good driver, and to me that means safety first, speed when appropriate. For context, I’ve done same-day Bay Area to Yosemite and back trips solo, which is about six hours of driving. I’ve also done a Bay Area to Vegas road trip where I averaged at least eight hours of driving a day for four straight days, on top of the hikes, because we spontaneously decided to visit the Grand Canyon after already booking our Vegas hotel. Driving has always felt like second nature to me.
That’s what makes Tesla FSD so impressive. Since version 14.3 especially, it has completely changed how I drive. I basically don’t do normal driving anymore. I delegate at least 90% of my normal driving to FSD, and it handles it shockingly well. What’s left for me is the part I actually enjoy: spirited driving, when I want it. I’m going to write a separate post just about FSD 14.3, because I have a lot more to say about why that update hit so differently, and what I think is good and bad about it. But for now I’ll just say this: even as someone who genuinely loves driving, this feels life-changing.
drTung’s Smart Floss
Expandable floss is already one of those things that feels weirdly life-changing once you discover it. drTung’s Smart Floss is the best version we’ve tried, and it’s not even close.
It pulls out so much more than regular floss that normal floss just doesn’t do it for me anymore. This stuff ruined any other floss for me. You have to try it.
Apple Silicon Macs
I’ve been a Mac user my whole life. I don’t see that changing anytime soon. Macs are unusually good at both ends of the spectrum: basic things are simple and intuitive, yet it’s still hackable and tunable underneath. Everything just feels natural on a Mac in a way Windows PCs never quite have for me. I mean, the trackpad, oh boy, is still in a league of its own. Give me an Apple trackpad and I might give PCs a try.
What made Apple Silicon Macs special was that Apple finally matched that software experience with hardware that felt properly sorted out. The Intel years got rough. The chips ran hot, the obsession with thinness made the thermals worse, and too many of those laptops felt compromised. Remember those butterfly keyboards that broke if a speck of dust got in? Then the M1 arrived and the whole thing snapped into place: fast, cool, quiet, and absurdly efficient. These days I don’t replace my laptop because it no longer meets my needs. I replace it because I just want even more speed. Apple Silicon feels like endgame laptop computing.
Roborock
Back in the early 2010s, my parents bought one of those early robot vacuums from LG. It was expensive, but it didn’t clean well. We used it maybe once or twice and gave up. That pretty much wrote off the entire category for me.
Fast forward to today, and Roborock is a completely different story. I’m sort of a clean freak, and these things are shockingly good. The game changer isn’t just that they mop. It’s that they mop well. That distinction matters. Vacuuming is nice. A robot that actually leaves the floor feeling properly clean is a different level. It’s one of those products that quietly removes a huge amount of life friction.
Fiberglass Reinforced Tape
Not enough people know about fiberglass reinforced tape. I’m serious. If you’ve ever moved or packed heavy boxes, you know regular packing tape is terrible. The 3M or Scotch stuff is not even decent. Layering doesn’t help because if the bottom layer doesn’t stick well, the whole thing starts coming loose anyway.
Fiberglass reinforced tape is a whole different beast. I can wrap it around a 50- or 70-pound box once and literally lift the whole thing by the tape. That sounds absurd until you try it. I just don’t see anyone going back to regular packing tape after this.
