Essays#

• 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
• I spend most of my tokens on planning, am I wrong?

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.

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.

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?)