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
Google used to be my first go-to whenever I came across something I didn’t know and wanted to learn more about. Now it’s ChatGPT.
It’s become a sort of personalized Wikipedia. If I want a one-sentence TL;DR, I can have it. If I want a 500-word explanation, I can have that too. I can even ask for an interactive webpage that walks me through a tricky concept.
Google has Gemini, of course, but in my experience, it gets too much wrong. ChatGPT hallucinates too, and I can live with the occasional mistake. But when a tool repeatedly misinforms me or sends me down the wrong path, it becomes a trust problem.
Claude Code
I’m a builder at heart. The problem is that I have way more ideas than I have the time or energy to execute. I also don’t know enough people who could or would build them for me, or have the money to hire or invest in them.
Coding agents in general have made prototyping ridiculously cheap. A budget of 400 a month can go a long way turning ideas into working prototypes. More of those ideas now feel worth trying rather than just dreaming about.
Tesla FSD
This is real living-in-the-future stuff. Honestly, it might be the most mind-blowing thing on this list.
I love driving, and I love cars. Of course, a 296 or a 911 GT3 would be more fun on a track or an open road. But for just trying to get from point A to point B, nothing beats a Tesla with FSD. I’m talking about Hardware 4 or newer.
Maybe another carmaker will eventually change my mind by having their own version of FSD. I’m not holding my breath.
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 I’ve tried, and it’s not even close. This stuff has ruined regular floss for me. You have to try it.
Apple Silicon Macs
I’ve been a Mac user my whole life. Apple gets so many things right, from the hardware to the software. Even after all these years, the trackpad alone is still in a league of its own.
Overheating had long been my gripe with Macs. The Intel years got rough: the chips ran hot, and Apple’s obsession with thinness made the thermals worse. Then there were the butterfly keyboard years, when a little dust could leave a key stuck or repeating.
With the M1 Macs, it finally felt like everything came together: fast, cool, quiet, efficient, and highly functional machines.
Roborock
Back in the early 2010s, my parents bought one of those early robot vacuums from LG. It was expensive, but it barely cleaned anything. We used it once or twice and gave up. I pretty much wrote off the entire category after that.
Roborock changed my mind. The vacuuming is nice, but the mopping is what makes the difference. These things don’t just mop. They mop really well. A robot that actually leaves the floor feeling properly clean is a different level.
Fiberglass Reinforced Tape
Not enough people know about fiberglass-reinforced tape. I’m serious. If you’ve ever moved or packed heavy boxes yourself, you know how terrible regular packing tape can be. The 3M or Scotch stuff isn’t any better. Adding more layers doesn’t help when the bottom layer won’t stay stuck to the box.
Fiberglass-reinforced tape is a whole different beast. I can wrap it once around a 50- or 70-pound box and literally lift the whole thing by the tape. That sounds absurd, but it’s that strong. I can’t imagine going back to regular packing tape.
One pro tip: even this stuff doesn’t stick especially well to rough cardboard boxes. But it sticks like a mofo to smooth surfaces, including itself. Wrap it all the way around the box, then overlap it a little bit, and you’ve got something seriously secure.
