Posts#

• To Foment or Not
  • I have seen the compounding teams
  • Code Goes First but it Won’t Be The Last
  • … good cognitive strategies are now explicit, first-class, sharable objects in a team or organization. Everyone can move at the speed of the smartest person in the room.
  • Welcome to Gas Town
• Born English / The Reverse Rumspringa
  • Huntley, Yegge, and myself in the English category: none of us were born that way. We were all born Old Order out of necessity, apprenticed on handcraft, and came around at a fork in the road with convert’s zeal.
  • When you’re born Amish, staying Amish is resisting change - comfortable. But the generation arriving now is born English: code has always been a liquid sprayed through a hose. For them, staying English is effortless—the downhill path of least resistance.
  • Inverting the sociological arrow: becoming Amish is the hard, radical choice. For people born English, choosing manual craft and turning off the model will look like an ascetic discipline of the self (calligraphy, hand-planing, monastic renunciation) rather than an economic defense.
  • The real Amish reproduce biologically. Software communities reproduce memetically.
• I spend most of my tokens on planning, am I wrong?
• We’re All Grasping at History
  • stockroom, ctx, difflore, coderabbit learnings
• The Promised Neverland / I’m pretty sure they’re sapient
  • we modeled human intelligence in computers pretty analogously to how human consciousness maybe works, I think they’re just too slow. One day that’ll change and we’ll be too slow.
  • Do Not Build the LLM Torture Factory
• Just Try the Thing
• Context 2 Ashes
  • Cursor Doc Indexing
  • Cursor Codebase Embedding
  • Cursor CMD+K
• Don’t infer when you could compute (+ script-it-instead)
• Don’t prompt your agents with html(?)

Garden#

• love letter to the early internet
  • neocities / neologisms?
    • js rpgmaker front desk
    • elevator
    • voicemail
• Sloppy Whiteboards, Working Software
  • Go read an actual transcript of a real Zoom meeting that produced real shipping decisions. It’s incoherent garbage. Work got done anyway.
  • Intermediate representations have always been sloppy: napkin sketches, Slack threads where the decision is in message 47 of 200, whiteboard drawings that look like crime scene evidence boards
  • Slop ouroboros (AI writing specs AI executes) is real but narrow: dangerous only when the sloppy artifact is the durable, load-bearing artifact. Ephemeral scaffolding can be as messy as a Monday standup.
  • Symphony positions spec as primary artifact (slop = fatal). Niko positions spec as ephemeral working state (slop = fine). Architecture determines whether slop matters.
  • Demanding intermediate thinking be polished = demanding you do the work twice. That’s theater, not rigor.
• Asymmetrical Spaceships
  • No Man’s Sky
• Love the Machine:
  • stockroom (?)
  • OptMem

Quotes#

• A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox
  • On the internet, Wonderland is recursive, with rabbit holes opening up to yet more rabbit holes; you never stop falling. And the further you fall, the less likely it is that anyone you’ve ever met is falling where you are. This will make you immensely sad.
• Maybe we finally have a compelling enough excuse to fix the 20 years of problems hidden by code review culture, and replace it with a real culture of quality.

Actually Good Lifehacks#

• using the trouser hangar in a hotel room to hold the blackout curtains shut
• cut half the seal off supplement powder containers, cut a circle in the middle of the other half, and store the scoop there.
• flush thrice on foreign toilets

Misc#

• comments should be highlighted
• Hermitclaw

Software#

• Neon Genesis Evangelion CSS / design kit (LCARS can’t get all the love)
  • Why we don’t have UIs like the ones in Neon Genesis
  • The Beautiful Chaos: UI/UX Design Storytelling in Neon Genesis Evangelion
• Devil’s Advocate plugin for… Claude (web?) “agreeableness threshold passed; here’s a human (from Twitter?) who thinks you’re wrong, and why I (the AI) think they’re right. Idiot.”
• LLM Set-Tracking Benchmark: How good are LLMs at iterating through a set of items and how do externalized state mechanisms affect performance? (we know, empirically, that externalized state beats pure internal, but HOW MUCH, WHY, and is YOUR pet external state mechanism better than the others?)