One mental muscle I've noticed atrophying through AI use is the muscle for generating options. Intellectually, I know it's rare for AI to give you out-of-band options. In the moment, it's easy to be mentally lazy in this regard.

I currently don't see a bigger unlock than a designer who can get mainstream internet users to get used to owning and managing cryptographic keys.

When making stuff for others, you have to wear two hats: someone behind the interface, and someone in front of the interface. It's hard but necessary to remember to be the latter. x.com/unconed/sta... I'll echo the sentiment for DC metro's ticket machines.

Surprised there aren't more "chain-mail" type of poast for engagement farming, where people propose you ask GPT to tell you something magazine quiz-like, based on everything it knows about you. Like:"Based on everything you know about me, what do you think my porn name would be?"

I've started blocking accounts that consistently post obviously dumb opinions who aren't young people. If I find I have the urge to correct the tweet not from a place of sharing, but from a place of anger, it's probably engagement bait. Don't feed the trolls.

A new Sarah Paine episode arrived! Dr. Sarah Paine, more than any one else, was my gateway drug into the topic of geopolitics. Can't say I really cared about the topic before, but her lectures are riveting. I recommend them over random short-form videos. www.youtube.com/watch?v=RH_...

Would this be considered the enshittification of ginseng? The economic shape for cultivation doesn't allow ginseng to fully express its wild self. The taste we commonly get is an expression of the unit economics, not the ecology. www.perplexity.ai/search/what...

I hate that it's the prevailing narrative, as it's a betrayal of craft. But this is the market dynamics when making new market categories. Only in mature markets that become infra does the downstream effects of code quality seem to matter to customers. x.com/lennysan/st...

It's a missed opportunity by Anthropic where if you click the button, you can't continue the existing conversation someone shared. You might have other questions. Instead of comments on web pages, this might be more helpful.

I suspect why devs have wildly different reports on the viability and experience in vibe coding, is because some of us do wildly different things from the mainstream. The more some specific details matter the less AI can help us out without a lot of scaffolding.

tag functions are nice. I didn't even know this was a thing in javascript. Well applied to writing raw SQL. I think this can do more. bsky.app/profile/int...

Vibe coding is for experts. I think the Surgeon analogy is apt. Especially if you think software should be written only if you can't get it off-the-shelf.

It's high time Local-first Software saved Zoomers. x.com/Disaffected...

patchedDependencies is such a nice feature. Even better that Claude found the bug and made the patch. This is the rare time when I feel like vibe coding saved me a lot of headache.

"I was using local-first software in the 80's!" quips a greybeard on HN. No you were not. A common misconception about local-first software is that it's just software that doesn't use the network. Local-first is inherently multi-device and collaborative with other users.

i mean… jay literally tried to redefine it to mean something broader. still one of my favorite articles even though it didn’t catch on

incidentally, this is how I learned everything in 3D I had an image I wanted to make, and no idea how to get from A to Z, but you just start stumbling through stuff and learn a bit of B or C, or a bit of LMNOP and then back to E or F, and suddenly it starts resolving, solidifying out of the fog

this is the way to learn with ai. you can start anywhere and backfill. you have to remain curious and careful and not just passively eat up plausible explanations. but if you put in the effort and the model is good, it’s powerful

New post: Most people think you need foundations before attempting hard things. Prerequisites as requirements. But that's just an artifact of industrial-scale curriculum design. Prerequisites are activation energy, not gatekeepers. 🧵

Learned a new word: "chiaroscuro" Good for image prompting, I guess. I have yet to find a use for "erinaceous".

It's the same debate going on when I was in school. I agree then as I do now: it's better for the students to learn the theory in school. Glad my school didn't bow to the pressure to teach Java in the classes. x.com/GuptaAnkitV...

We are a dynamic economy that uses capitalism to allocate resources. There were other more enticing industries with better margins and growth. This is both good and bad. We captured more of the future, but let our foundations rot. x.com/Robotbeat/s...

Globally unique identifier rundown: DNS: Centralized coordination (ICANN) but fast ENS: Decentralized consensus (blockchain) but slow Local-first: No coordination (UUIDs) but ugly

This is relatable, is from using vim and emacs, once I got into the habit of searching to navigate. However, that was only within the same document. Search across files was still painful without a plugin. One huge stream sounds like it's something easier to get used to. x.com/alexobenaue...

The juxtaposition of the fantastic with the mundane has always fascinated us. This sort of effect is even more pronounced in VR. x.com/XRarchitect...

I used to like ORMs, since they were language native, and familiar--back in my Rails days. But since then, I find them constraining. They never offer the full power of the SQL of the DB you're doing. And I've never moved between DBs for a project.

AI is an exceptional astrology and magazine personality quiz, if you're not careful. Here's what it says about my writing style:

Surprised at how cute the early sketches of Pokemon are in their design docs.

I imagine it's a similar graph for what VCs and Founders talk about on social media vs what actually moves the needle or the causes of startup death. The driver is that we, the audience, pay attention to the exceptional, and any medium is driven to capture the audience attention

Doing more customer interviews won't make you better at them. Conversations give you noise disguised as signal: customers lie out of politeness, leading questions get enthusiastic agreement, and you collect expensive fiction thinking it's insight.

There are those that love AI because it sharpens their thinking. There are those that love AI because it can offload your thinking. Order of magnitude divergence in ability will be come commonplace, and people won't believe it exists.

The worst recruiting email I ever got wasn't even targeted right. It was for a plumbing job. I thought maybe, plumbing as a euphemism for a data pipeline or data engineering job. But no, it was for an actual plumbing job. x.com/thorstenbal...

I feel my webby friends would like this. Might be a fun excuse to dabble in random things and show some fun possibilities with your skills! Thinking of the recent convo with @amyhoy.bsky.social on Javascript.

Man, I still really like a lot of the ideas behind @cuelang.org. (But I need to find a good excuse to use it properly to see how it fares in practice.)

Shower thought: If there's no taxation without representation, then that implies people wouldn't demand democracies without taxes.

The only real thing stopping me from using the web app version of smartphone apps is just that they log me out randomly. Otherwise, they're usually quite functional.

We didn't need AI for slop. We are the slop. Rage Slop on Twitter. Praise Slop on Linkedin.

I kinda like it, actually. I see it a new kind of camera, where you can point it in the space of concepts. The hope is that it'll expand the horizon of imagination. The despair is that it'll be used to stoke preconceptions. x.com/alexandr_wa...

"You don’t `learn` from a chatbot. You consume...They’re spewing slop and people are gobbling it up." - random 🦋 account No. You’re holding it wrong. You can definitely learn from LLMs, though it has to be with critical thinking. Three ways I learn with AI: 👇

I think this was my ah-ha moment. UI = f(state) doesn't allow for temporarily illicit states. Without intents as first-class data, you resort to state fiddling, diffing, and inference of previous state. x.com/iamwil/stat...

Nuance is a well that goes deep. x.com/s8mb/status...

Been a little while since the last lab note. Work has noticeably shifted from a applied research to a product direction. I'll write more about what I found, but it feels different this time around. Lab note #074

Up for discussion on HN. If you have corrections or addendums, let me know. news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4533...

I've said it many times but I will say it again: the drive to AI is a drive to constant, regular interactivity. There is enjoyment in spending an hour being interacted with -- that is the actual primary driver of so much of this behavior. The product of the interaction is secondary at best.

It's interesting to see the influence of your influences. I had no idea that Moebius underlies what we accept as the visual language of scifi epics and anime. Akira, Naussica, Dune, Blade Runner, Star Wars, just to name a few. But I think we need a new vision of the future.

I wrote about Claude Code, which to my absolute astonishment is quite good at theorem proving. For people who don't know theorem proving, this is like spending your whole life building F1 engines and getting lapped by a Tesco's shopping trolley www.galois.com/articles/cla...

What's Algebraic about Algebraic Effects? Most descriptions explain them as "resumable exceptions", but never really tackle the "algebraic" part. After looking into this for a couple weeks last spring, my own answer is: composition with structure 👇

OpenAI with chartjunk again. The first bar adds up to 5.9%, not 6%, and the x-axis categories adds up to 100.1%. The widths are suppose to adjust for the % in each category, to make the areas indicative of overall fraction, but well-known that areas are hard to eye-ball compare x.com/omooretweet...

I have a tendency to think Enshittification is the result of Seeing like a State. If Clay Christensen's framework of Disruptive/Sustaining/Efficiency innovation aligns with reality, we have too many people doing Efficiency Innovation. www.cubbyathome.com/boxed-cake-...

I finally updated the "about" page on my blog. I can now say this is the scope of the stuff that I'll write about. I too, want my blog to be "a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to my inbox" What I write about: 👇