2025-05-07 06:13:00
Too many bangers to pull out of this one. Well worth a full read. But here are a couple juicy pull quotes to whet your pallette:
Programming lures us into believing we can control the outside events. That is where the suffering begins. There is something deeper happening here. This is not just about software.
I believe sometimes building things is how we self-soothe. We write a new tool or a script because we are in a desperate need for a small victory. We write a new tool because we are overwhelmed. Refactor it, not because the code is messy, but your life is. We chase the perfect system because it gives us something to hold onto when everything else is spinning.
I’m trying to let things stay a little broken. Because I’ve realized I don’t want to fix everything. I just want to feel OK in a world that often isn’t. I can fix something, but not everything.
You learn how to program. You learn how to fix things. But the hardest thing you’ll ever learn is when to leave them broken.
And maybe that’s the most human skill of all.
2025-05-06 11:01:03
One thing you’re not supposed to admit to: not enjoying basic activities of hygiene maintenance. I get that it’s suspect. I swear to you I do shower enough, but the whole process (the hair removal! the exfoliation, body and facial! the shampoo-rinse-shampoo-rinse-conditioner-rinsing!) is to me tedious at its core, and I know few enough of you all in real life to be able to admit it here.
So: I bought a Bluetooth speaker that claims enough waterproofness for my own plausible deniability to use it in the shower.
This then opens up an important soundtracking opportunity. What is the right music to propel one through the emotional deadness of a shower1?
Maya goes on to recommend froge.mp3 by piri & Tommy Villiers. Listening to it now, I can totally see myself shaving and washing with this album in the background.
It makes me wonder: what albums do y’all recommend for random every day tasks? Like, what are you bumping when you’re folding socks? Or pulling weeds?
2025-05-05 23:04:57
We should stop worshipping numerical comfort. Twenty partial views don’t make a whole picture. They make noise. They make an echo. They create professionalized, sanitized, panel-approved blindness.
If you're lucky enough to know someone with twenty years of scar tissue in a domain, listen. Don't just ask what they know. Ask what they've unlearned. Ask what they stopped saying because nobody understood. That's where the signal lives.
“Worshipping numerical comfort” is a fantastic phrase that I’ll be pondering here for the next few days.
2025-05-01 07:29:00
How did we get here? What can we do? Maybe it starts by trying to just... be normal about technology.
There's an orthodoxy in tech tycoon circles that's increasingly referred to, ironically, as "tech optimism". I say "ironically", because there's nothing optimistic about it. The culture is one of deep insecurity, reacting defensively, or even lashing out aggressively, when faced with any critical conversation about new technology. That tendency is paired with a desperate and facile cheerleading of startups, ignoring the often equally interesting technologies stories that come from academia, or from mature industries, or from noncommercial and open source communities that don't get tons of media coverage, but quietly push forward innovating without the fame and fortune. By contrast, those of us who actually are optimistic about technology (usually because we either create it, or are in communities with those who do) are just happily moving forward, not worrying when people point out the bugs that we all ought to be fixing together.
We don't actually have to follow along with the narratives that tech tycoons make up for each other. We choose the tools that we use, based on the utility that they have for us. It's strange to have to say it, but... there are people picking up and adopting AI tools on their own, because they find them useful.
Is there a “law” that says the amount someone actually knows about a given technology is inversely proportional to the amount that they hype it?
ChatGPT says it’s called “Clarke’s Law of Hype” but I don’t see that anywhere in a Google response.
Looking things up on the internet in 2025 sucks.
2025-04-22 21:31:54
I wish I could say I was past this part. That I’ve grown thicker skin by now. But the truth is, I still care. Not about applause. I care about people’s time. I care about making things that are worth showing up for. And that pressure? It can be paralyzing.
Still, something in me wants to try. Slowly. Gently. Maybe I’m not going back to who I was. Maybe I’m heading toward something new, something more honest.
This post was extremely timely because I literally talked with my therapist about this yesterday.
Time to get posting!
2025-04-21 23:08:48
I’m writing about this today because it’s been one of my “can LLMs do this reliably yet?” questions for over two years now. I think they’ve just crossed the line into being useful as research assistants, without feeling the need to check everything they say with a fine-tooth comb.
I still don’t trust them not to make mistakes, but I think I might trust them enough that I’ll skip my own fact-checking for lower-stakes tasks.
This also means that a bunch of the potential dark futures we’ve been predicting for the last couple of years are a whole lot more likely to become true. Why visit websites if you can get your answers directly from the chatbot instead?
The lawsuits over this started flying back when the LLMs were still mostly rubbish. The stakes are a lot higher now that they’re actually good at it!
I can feel my usage of Google search taking a nosedive already. I expect a bumpy ride as a new economic model for the Web lurches into view.
I keep thinking of the quote that “information wants to be free”.
As the capabilities of open-source LLMs continue to increase, I keep finding myself wanting a locally-running model at arms length any time I’m near a computer.
How many more cool things can I accomplish with computers if I can always have a “good enough” answer at my disposal for virtually any question for free?