Joy & Curiosity #17

Interesting & joyful things from the previous week

• Last weekend I first read this article on the network model in Quake 3 and then this blog post it links to — it’s beautiful. It made me want to build a networked game via UDP. It made me think: if you have a good design, things just seem to fall into place in a way that makes you think “they couldn’t have fallen anywhere else.”

• New James Somers piece in New Yorker. Wonderful. Recommended weekend read.

• There’s a new Benedict Evans presentation out and I not only recommend reading through that but also want to add that I’ve been a paid subscriber of his newsletter for over a year now and I think it’s by far the best investment I’ve made into any subscription.

• In the mood for an astonished-eyebrows-raised face? Read through “Vladimir Nabokov's opinions on various writers”. Here’s a taste, Nabokov on Dostoevsky: “Dislike him. A cheap sensationalist, clumsy and vulgar.” On Satre: “Even more awful than Camus” On Plato: “Not particularly fond of him.” On Joyce: “A genius.” I guess an American would say: the balls on this guy, huh.

• Being a consultant: “No matter how much you try, you can’t stop people from sticking beans up their nose.”

• Very, very interesting and thought-provoking: Erik Meijer asking why search for code when you can ask an LLM to write it for you?

• Not a lot of new things in this for me, but the recommendation to “treat AI just like an infinitely patient new coworker who forgets everything you tell them each new conversation” made me consider that I still underestimate the “patient” part. Give me 5 examples? How about 500?

• On the power of the RUNK and other ways to change the world: “Notice they both use the word ‘maintain’—not ‘invent,’ not ‘lead,’ but maintain. The power of a RUNK is that it works consistently. It was there counting numbers before it was cool, and it keeps counting numbers no matter how cool it gets.”

• Somehow came across Zach Klein’s personal San Francisco Travel Guide. Love the idea of personal travel guides presented like this. I have a text file somewhere deep in my computer with Berlin coffee shop and Pizza recommendations that Robin once gave me and I’ve copy&pasted that file into at least 4 conversations about Berlin trips.

• Simon Willison on storing time for human events. You have to love the RUNK-like work that goes into the tz database. I mean, come on: “Goodmorning. I’m writing here to propose a new time zone for an all-year open Antarctic base. The base is a French–Italian research facility that was built 3,233 m (10,607 ft) above sea level at a location called Dome C on the Antarctic Plateau, Antarctica.”

• In case you haven’t, try the OpenAI realtime API in the web browser, mixing voice and text. It’s nuts, man. It’s nuts.

• Came across antirez’ aspark, a C version of Zach Holman’s spark. aspark is, by own admission, “completely useless in 2011”, the year it was written in. Look at that README, though. Look at the code. This is the programming.

• Don’t know what to think of it yet, but this presentation on how “organizations are like slime molds” hits the spot for me — I do love me some organizational & company culture theory. (Shared by Vicki Boykis in response to wonderment about Big Tech software.)

• “… and you can find that magic part. And for all you real electric guitar players out there: when you’re in the meat, point it right towards your amp and you’ll feel where the bullseye is — and it’s small — and you’ll feel where the bullseye is. Move your hand up and down. Don’t be afraid to repick it and find it again. Point right towards the cone. And you’ll be like: there’s the bullseye. And if you just lean into it, that badboy will feed back and if you know whatcha doin’, that’s the top of the wave.” That’s the top of the wave — what a phrase. There’s life behind it.