Joy & Curiosity #27

Interesting & joyful things from the previous week

Keeping it short here, because I’m busy — in the good sense. It feels more like spring even though it’s the middle of February.

• Since I linked to a related piece up there, I also need to link to another Austin Kleon post: I’m not languishing, I’m dormant. It made me stop feeling bad about going through different “creative seasons” and I’ll probably never forget about Michelangelo, “who lost four years of work to a lawsuit.”

• A reader shared Richard P. Gabriel’s Rise of Worse Is Better with me. I read it many years ago and thanks to the reminder, read it again. “The New Jersey guy said that the Unix solution was right because the design philosophy of Unix was simplicity and that the right thing was too complex. Besides, programmers could easily insert this extra test and loop. The MIT guy pointed out that the implementation was simple but the interface to the functionality was complex. The New Jersey guy said that the right tradeoff has been selected in Unix -- namely, implementation simplicity was more important than interface simplicity.” Imagine rewriting the piece for today, but using programming languages instead of operating systems.

• Max created a catalog of ways to generate SSA. Very helpful if you’re new to SSA. Wish I had had that years ago while working on my compiler.

• Last week, in the Sourcegraph office in San Francisco, I noticed that Erika, our Head of Enginering, had an ereader in her hand and asked whether that’s the new Kindle. “It’s a BOOX Go Color”, she said, and that’s when I learned that there are ereaders that can run a Kindle app (required) and a Readwise Reader app, which I think might solve all of the read-it-later problems I ever had and now I’m seriously, seriously wondering what to with this new knowledge.

• Ghostty now comes with alternative icons and, man, it does feel anachronistic, this level of care and whimsy, does it not? We need more of that.

• Dwarkesh Patel wrote a post about lessons from The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro last year. I only read it last week and it’s very good. “The reason why Robert Caro is able to write so compellingly about these qualities of Lyndon Johnson - his resourcefulness and ruthlessness, his inexhaustible energy, his need to win, his inability to take no for an answer - is that the biographer shares many of the attributes of the subject.” I still haven’t reached 20% of The Power Broker, but I’ll make it, even if it takes me the whole year.

• I’m usually very anti-”kids these days” sentiments and very much a “fucking hell, wow, kids these days, let’s go” person, but… But. But… this week my wife shared with me that a friend’s friend’s daughter has a hobby called hobby horsing and she then showed me a photo and I have to admit that I struggled very much.

• Remember how I wondered whether we won’t see CONTEXT.md files in repositories? Well, you can now replace the github in every github.com repository URL with gitingest and you end up with something like that. Example: gitingest.com/mrnugget/code-judger

• Just on the verge of falling into the hype: AI or Die. “Winning in this new world requires a full ‘re-founding’ of your company. This is neither simple nor safe. […] But as my wife and I tell our sons…we don’t always get to choose what happens. But we do get to choose how we respond.” (I love that there is a .php in the URL — you don’t see that anymore, do you?)

• This post saying “You are using Cursor AI incorrectly...” turned out to be completely different from what I expected. The emerging patterns around AI tooling — I think that’s actually the most interesting thing happening today, not the changes in foundational models.

• Since Friday was Valentine’s Day and a lot of my readers are from the US, I have a treat for you: Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond? It’s one of “the best magazine articles ever” and after reading it I couldn’t shut up about diamonds for a few weeks.

• I’m a sucker for stories like this one: "When Enron filed for bankruptcy, I chartered a Gulfstream jet, put 16 people on it to Houston, and all we did was interview people at Enron for several days to understand what worked, what didn't work, how they made money, how they ran the business, what the competitive advantages were. I hired the entire leadership of the quantitative research effort at Enron. UBS bought the business except for the research team. We've made $30 billion in commodities since then. UBS shut the business down."

• Rob Pike presentation On Bloat. “It has become infeasible to understand how our software is constructed, and how to maintain it safely. This is a consequence of how code is built today.”

• The Resilience of Alien Chess seems like a very good idea to keep in your mental pockets. The whole post is good, but this line stood out to me as probably the most crucial one: “We must recognize when the board has changed; if you miss it, it will cost you.”

• Wild paper: “In our work, we reveal this relatedness—akin to the overlap between training data and evaluation sets in traditional data contamination—would introduce a systematic bias of judge LLMs towards their related student models (i.e., the model distilled by the data generator which is related to the judge).” LLMs-as-judges favor relatives?

• Pretty much by chance, I ended up reading Nabokov’s short (actually short!) story Symbols And Signs this Wednesday evening. I’m not sure I fully understood it, or if it’s meant to be fully understood, but it’s very good writing: “She thought of […] beautiful weeds that cannot hide from the farmer.” If you don’t have a New Yorker subscription, you can find it by searching, but mind you, apparently how this story was published, mattered a lot: “The New Yorker wanted to make many changes. Nabokov objected strongly […] However, the New Yorker version still contained four editorial changes that Nabokov eliminated in later publications. One was that the title was reversed as mentioned above. The second was that instead of numbers for the three sections, the sections were separated by ellipses. The third was that two paragraphs were joined into one.” Go and read it, then read the Wikipedia article. That’s 45 minutes spent well.

• “Joel Spolsky had a nice analogy for this; Mr Coffee. Enterprise software is not about making a coffee machine, it is about putting a coffee machine in every room for 1000s of hotels and maintaining them.”

• James Somers, one of my favorite writers, sent around an email telling people about Bracket City, a word game a friend of his built, and that he’s now writing about a word of the day, every day, under the /words endpoint. That seems like a wonderful idea and I now need to crack a puzzle so I can get the word of the day every day via email. More importantly, though, James also reminded me of his 2014 post called “You’re probably using the wrong dictionary”. If you haven’t read that, do it!

• Very much enjoyed Patrick’s last two posts: Five coding hats and Make it happen. “While I was booking that flight, I had a thought: Alan Kay lives in LA. […] So I sent him an email.”

• Sam Altman’s Three Observations. The most important one to me, someone who’s paid to do “software engineering”, seems to be this one: “the cost to use a given level of AI falls about 10x every 12 months, and lower prices lead to much more use.”

• I’ve been really enjoying the Bg2 podcast with investors Bill Gurley and Brad Gerstner. I won’t even pretend that I understand everything they’re saying (or what Gerstner is saying when he goes wild with numbers and predictions), but listening to them think through second-order effects is illuminating. Also: listen to the episode that came out right before DeepSeek released R1 — prescient, I think is the word.

• This book, Bootstrapping Computing, looks so beautiful and I want to have it but I also know that I’ll never read through a hardcover book like this. Is it okay to have books only because they’re nice to flip through, because their presence inspires?

• Zach Holman on Nontraditional Red Teams, containg at least “someone to look for dicks”, “someone with an ad blocker”, and “someone with a password manager.”