Hi, I'm Kifah

Now / About

I create tools for thoughttools for thought (objects that let you think thoughts you couldn’t hold in your head alone) to model and intervene in complex systemscomplex systems (anything made of many parts that all affect each other — a body, a city, an economy, an ecosystem; the parts are so tangled together that the whole takes on a behavior you can’t predict from any single piece, and pushing on it in one place makes surprising things happen somewhere else). I built the first complete data model of San Francisco's government and a way to navigate an entire Twitter archive as a map. I also did design engineering at Roam Research (see their white paper).

I keep track of problems, possibilities, and developments worth returning to, and the people, companies, and projects working on them.

Work like this only happens in a scenius. The people I most want to find are relentless entrepreneurs (Edison, Branson), and strategic marshals (Napoleon, Bezos, LKY). They’re better than me (and better motivated than me) at rallying people, making fast decisions, moving money and talent, and pushing a thing into the world until it wins. They will ignore standard playbooks, because they can look at a strange map of a system, spot the exact bottleneck, and break through it. If that's you, email me.

If you work inside an agency, lab, reef program, or another system that is hard to understand from outside, please reach out. I want to learn which constraints matter in practice and where a better model could change a real decision.

Work

CivLab

We cannot govern systems we don't understand.

Yutome

Search any YouTube video. Get the transcript. Ask your AI about it.

Tweetscope

Every tweet tells a story. See the whole picture.

Roam Research

Design engineer at a tools-for-thought startup.

Studento

A student assistant app I built in high school. 100k+ downloads, 4.8 rating. Later acquired.

Google Code-in

First winner from Mauritius. Completed 22 open-source tasks for Drupal — programming, design, documentation, and QA.

Writing

Start here →

My Answer to the Hamming Question

We have become powerful enough to reshape the world without becoming equally capable of governing ourselves or the systems through which that power acts.

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Favorites

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