Any thoughts or predictions about what the next generation of AI-assisted product manager + full-stack engineer + prototype builder + data analyst role will be called? A full-stack generalist? The last employed person? It's both exciting and kinda dark to contemplate.

Does anyone want to join me in the monthly challenge on 750words.com? It starts on Monday. Here's a one month free coupon so it's free for a month, even after the free trial: MONTHLYCHALLENGE If you haven't used the site in a while (or ever) I'd love your feedback!

I'm hosting a small salon this weekend on the topic of the nature of reality, and built a fun quiz to help people identify their belief system / understanding of the nature of reality. If you want to help test it out and let me know if it works for you or not, try it here: cosmology-quiz.vercel.app

Scientists always talk about the singularity around a black hole where space bends enough that “even light cannot escape”. At my best I could run a mile in about 5 minutes. Can they start talking about the effective singularity where I wouldn’t be able to escape? That seems like an important detail.

I reached the first milestone of basically re-writing the entire frontend of 750words.com via vibe coding, upgrading the frameworks and adding a few big features. It ultimately led to 86k lines of code that I chatted into existence.

I’m running a new experimental prisoner’s dilemma tournament, pitting ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini against a team of humans. If you’re interested in game theory and/or curious to see how well we can do against these AIs, I think this will be a lot of fun to watch.

I attempted to use AI to migrate 750words.com to the latest versions or Nuxt+Vue back in February, and struggled for 2 weeks before giving up on what was likely a 1-2 month task. Yesterday I tried again (from scratch) with the latest Claude 4 and Cursor, and caught up to where I was in ~3 hours!

In your own mental simulation of the present and future, would the arrival of AGI increase or decrease our chances of mitigating the worst case climate crisis scenarios?

dear @johngreensbluesky.bsky.social and nerdfighters my friend @wysr.xyz and i yapped about everything is tuberculosis on youtube we aspire to you and @hankgreen.bsky.social 's awesomeness! p.s. fellow chaplain here of the buddhist variety youtu.be/I2l2RlbUGow

As a trapped Tesla owner myself, I reserved a Rivian R2 recently and was thinking they should include a bumper sticker for us saying as much.

Quick question! At first glance, can you read this latest version of the #quirkyclock: busterbenson.com/clock If not, can you let me know which aspect is challenging to wrap your head around? (Note: it's meant to be disorienting, so don't feel bad if it makes no sense or hurts your head.)

If I shared three links, one that pointed to Medium, one that pointed to Substack, and one that pointed to my self-hosted blog, which one would you click on and why? a) Medium b) Substack c) self-hosted blog c) none of the above

Do you use a journaling app (other than 750words.com--I know about that one!) that integrates with AI in any way? What do you think of it? I wanna round up of all the different ways this is being done and review them and share thoughts back. Hellppp!

From a poetry collection by Mary Oliver, where after a hundred poems showcasing gentle observations on nature and animals, she hits you with this

They really need to make a better drool emoji

I didn't expect it to be so delightful to boycott Amazon. They pioneered frictionless online shopping so well that now almost everyone can do it (and it's fun finding new businesses), and in the cases that I do have to visit a place in person... also not the worst thing in the world! 🌈 ✨

After using Claude 3.7 Sonnet for a week, I think it's safe to say that the days of googling error messages and strange bugs is not long for the world. I guess the question is... what will happen when people stop posting these questions (and answers) to the web? Will LLMs train themselves?

Deleted Amazon off my phone, and cancelled all my Subscribe and Saves. And won’t use them on the web anymore either. I need to spend less anyway, and seems easier to do now than it has in the past. Not sure about AWS though…

Pedro Pascal responding to transphobia on social media: “I can’t think of anything more vile and small and pathetic than terrorizing the smallest, most vulnerable community of people who want nothing from you, except the right to exist.” (via @charliejane.bsky.social) [capitalfm.com]

Remember the "life in weeks" thing I built a while ago? busterbenson.com/life-in-weeks @ginatrapani.org has gone and leveled it up and made her code available as well! weeks.ginatrapani.org More people should do the exercise of identifying the formative events of their lives. Now's your chance!

I'm gonna spend a week or so tinkering with XCode and Swift and see how far I can get towards building a bare bones app for 750words.com. I've watched a couple tutorial videos and am kind of 🤯 by how much simpler app dev has gotten since Objective-C. Has anyone built their first Swift app recently?

Had so much fun riffing on this, thanks again for publishing your code. Here's where I landed - for now! weeks.ginatrapani.org

I decided to stop doom-scrolling and read lots of fiction instead. So far I've read books 2-5 of the Stormlight Archive and am on book 3 of the Fourth Wing/Empyrean series, and also just started Blood Over Bright Haven. If those titles are familiar to you, recommend me more!

If you have really bad decisions to make, apparently this is the time to do it. Maybe it'll get lost in the mix with all the other really bad decisions.

I was excited to see a mention of “Why Are We Yelling? The Art of Productive Disagreement” from @adamgrant.bsky.social today. Unfortunately it turns out that unproductive disagreement is still quite prevalent in this world…

I’m about halfway through my 9-month experiment to make 750words.com sustainable. It has required some cuts in spending and Louie (8) has noticed this. Tonight he decided to get proactive and asked me how old I was and then asked Alexa what kind of jobs a 48-year old could get. It was very sweet.

Does this make sense to anyone? Continuing to try to create a nature-based calendar that organizes around lunar cycles (moonths) instead of months in a way that invites curiosity without breaking brains. Lots of planets in the night sky right now! Have you seen Venus???

Finished book 5 of the Stormlight Archive! That was so good! I was kinda hoping this would last me a bit longer but I guess I have the Mistborn series to read now.

the threat of fascism hits different when you are firmly in community. find your people and build something resilient and beautiful. there is strength in solidarity.

Flow is worth watching. I also need to talk about the end with someone so tell me if you’ve seen it!

My plan is to give all my attention and energy to people and communities and projects I love, and none of it to people and publishers that just want to suck up all the attention in the world in the hopes of finding a glimmer of self-worth. Best of luck to them.

I’m ready to be surprised by what happens these next 4 years. So far, no surprises.

"The world has enough critics. What it needs are builders who can see problems clearly without being paralyzed by them, people who can maintain hope without succumbing to naïveté..." I am so damned grateful to have Joan Westenberg's writing as both comfort and galvanizer (friend link)

Sarah and I started the 17-mile SF cross town trail! Here’s a live share link. Cheer us on! www.alltrails.com/live-share/c...

In quantum field theory, light isn’t a particle moving through space, it’s a wave moving across a field. A photon is the expression of a blip in this field rippling at that speed. If space and time are linked, does that mean all movement is expressed as waves on fields? Nothing really moves?

I haven’t read any news or sought any political commentary since the election and I think this may be the best thing I’ve done for my mental health since unfollowing VCs and tech reporters 10 years ago. So many more interesting people and topics of conversation to pursue.

Why do we assume that something came from nothing? What if both something and nothing came from the even less defined “field of maybe-something-maybe-nothing”? I call this field / state kyzykshmursh and exist in it for an indeterminate amount of time every morning before I drink coffee.

I asked Google’s Notebook LLM to roast my book and identify all the weakest points and challenge me to address them or be publicly shamed… and it wouldn’t do it. Very disappointing.

This is kinda crazy! 15 years ago today I launched 750words.com And I still like it! Of the dozens of sites I've built, this is the only one that kept being used by people even when it barely changed for years at a time. Here's my launch post from Dec 16, 2009: busterbenson.com/2009/12/16/7...

I read The Way of Kings from the Stormlight Archive to Niko when she was 7, and we both loved it, but we didn’t continue at the time (they’re long books). Niko reread the book this year, age 13-14, and just started book 5. I’m catching up on book 3. We’re both obsessed. Who else has read the series?

This has been a fun little project. 750words.com now has two "competing" word-of-the-day groups, where people get a word every day from either Merriam Webster or Wordnik and are encouraged to use the word in their journaling. The number below is how many people have used the word so far.

Here's how month 2 of my 9-month experiment to make 750words.com sustainable went, including specific growth, churn, and retention numbers (tldr: good progress that came short of targets, but momentum is at least going in the right direction): community.750words.com/c/blog/novem...

Using ChatGPT and Github Copilot is giving me insight into the connection between intelligence and metacognition. Is having separate, iterative cognitive processes for "coming up with a list of possibilities" and then "reviewing the list against criteria", what makes both humans and LLMs smarter?

In the Bay Area the earliest sunsets happen between Dec 1st and 10th. Our sunset happens at 4:50pm for this 10-day stretch. And then the sunsets start getting later again! Even before winter solstice! Living on a sphere is weird. But, excited that things will start getting lighter again.

I tried analyzing 11k testimonials from the first 15 years of 750words.com using ChatGPT and it mostly failed but then I did it by hand and it worked much better. Notes and results here: medium.com/p/9665c93814e8

If anyone asks me which day of the year the sun sets right in the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge as seen from my bedroom window, I will now know to say December 1st. And, another day about 40 days from now when it’s headed north again after the WINTER solstice. Jan 9th or 10th?

Not feeling very Thanksgivingsy but happy to keep this tradition sogoreate-landtrust.org/donate-updat...

Does anyone have high quality print shop recommendations for small batch printing with custom sizing (I'm looking for 15x15, or around there)?

My latest attempt at overthrowing the oppressive Gregorian Calendar with a nature-based calendar system I'm calling Moonths. Still in the playing-around-with-different-frameworks step, trying to capture the idea of time being connected to the phases of the moon and to the sky in general.

Can we make this the social network for pretty sky pictures?