Joy & Curiosity #26

Interesting & joyful things from the previous week

Another quick dispatch. I need to go to the airport soon. Flying home after a week — a tremendous week — in San Francisco.

The tremendous week produced some very big thoughts. They’re in need of more thinking before I can share them, though. Instead, a collection of small thoughts:

• Forgot a lot about office culture in my six years of remote work. Scooched over to people that had their headphones in. Oof.

• It’s nice when a place is what it’s said to be. You come to San Francisco and there’s people in Patagonia vests, people carrying yoga mats, billboards telling you to hire an AI SDR, hills to walk up and down, logos of companies you know everywhere — on shirts, on backpacks, on buildings. Pleasant exception: I didn’t get stabbed.

• I wish that when people in California say “I miss the seasons” a hole would appear beneath them and swallow them up.

• Waymo! I rode in a Waymo last week and… Waymo! Waymo! Waymo! What else can you even say?

• A graph with a huge, towering spike on its right. Flatness to its left; years and years of flatness. That’s my Diet Coke consumption after this week.

• There’s a beautiful thing about jetlag: it makes you throw out all the rules and just go with it. Wake up at 4am? That’s the jetlag, it is what it is, let’s go with it. Tired at 8pm? It is what it is. Let’s go to bed. Awake from 2am to 4am? Just another day with the jetlag, let’s roll. It is what it is.

• Breakfast burritos!

• Water everywhere. You sit down and someone hands you a water. You check in to your hotel and they give you water bottles. You order beer and potato chips and they hand you beer and potato chips and water. You turn around and there’s a water station to fill up your glasses and bottles and mouths and bellies. Water in every hand. Makes you wonder whether Stay Hydrated isn’t a psy-ops campaign by Big Sewers.

Now, a small bag of links.

• antirez: we are destroying software.

• Read this at 4:30am in the morning, the phone’s moon shining in my face, it is what it is, thinking: yes, yes, yes. Yes: “If we wanted Amazon to be a place where builders can build, we needed to eliminate communication, not encourage it.” Yes: “Jeff had one simple rule: ‘It has to be perfect.’ He'd remind his team that one bad customer experience would undo the goodwill of hundreds of perfect ones.” Yes: “Leaders have relentlessly high standards—many people may think these standards are unreasonably high.”

• Tim O’Reilly on the end of programming as we know it. “What is programming, after all, but the way that humans get computers to do our bidding?”

• Richard and Roc are switching to Zig, from Rust. “Did I mention compile times? I'll reiterate: compile times are a huge deal.”

• Wonderful Craig Mod on his rules for running his membership program: “Books are one of the greatest bulwarks against kleptocracy and authoritarianism because they hone focus, attention, and can imbue a mind with calmness required to take clear action: Qualities required by a society to ‘win.’ To be reductive (and somewhat alarmist): The feed, the doomscroll, the hyperventilation, is the heartbeat of political and social death. It is not life. It is a false heartbeat.”

• Reminder of how venture capital works. The article talks to founders. I think engineers must know too. An analogy I often use: music labels in the 70s, 80s, 90s. Labels gave a lot of bands the money to record their first album. It didn’t really matter if that album became a hit or not. What matterered is that of all the albums that were recorded, one was Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction.

• Robert Caro on why he doesn’t use a computer for writing: “stop thinking with your fingers.”

• Pinboard on AI & whales & seafaring: “I think the public is unaware to what extent AI developers accidentally harpooned a whale and are now just water-skiing behind it, making confident predictions.”

Special insert this week: a conversation I had yesterday with a friend.

(If you have extraordinary ability and want to work with me to build the best possible developer tooling to navigate latent space: let me know.)