Joy & Curiosity #37

Interesting & joyful things from the previous week

A friend and I were talking about our computer setups at home. The big question was what data lives where, specifically what data we keep on our personal machines and what we keep on the NAS.

My philosphy? I like to think that Robert De Niro’s character in the diner scene in Heat was talking about keeping data on his NAS, not on his laptop, which is exactly how I think about it:

A guy told me one time, "Don't let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner."

Anyway, here’s some links.

• The most thought-generating thing I read this week: AI Horseless Carriages. Not only is it one of the best introductions to, well, the whole concept of a prompt that I came across, and not only is it interactive, but it asks some foundation-touching questions about what software even is in the age of AI. “My core contention in this essay is this: when an LLM agent is acting on my behalf I should be allowed to teach it how to do that by editing the System Prompt.”

• Atuin Desktop is out. Looks lovely. If this can run terminal commands on a remote host, it could replace the five Markdown files that contain everything I know about how to do anything on my Raspberry Pis. (If you haven’t tried Atuin to manage your shell history, give it a shot!)

• This is great: “In short, I thought my job was to be right. I thought that was how I proved my worth to the company. But that was all wrong. My job was to get things done and doing anything meaningful past a certain point requires more than one person. If you are right but nobody wants to work with you, then how valuable are you really?”

• “Just as a chef might use a food processor for tedious prep work but would never dream of automating the creative aspects of recipe development and flavor balancing, we should use AI for what it’s good at while preserving the parts of coding that bring us joy and growth.”

• Phil Eaton on “the path to promotion and a successful and interesting career”: “Burn your title. Burn your job description. I mean, keep your boss happy for sure. Keep your teammates happy by supporting them and building them up and communicating well. But don't wait to be officially made a lead or given a new title to do what otherwise fits into that intersection above.” (Reminded me of So Good They Can’t Ignore You which I’ve recommended to more people than I can remember.)

• Here’s a hypothesis of mine: whenever you find a piece of software that makes you think “this wouldn’t exist if all were right in the world” there’s a good chance that PDFs are involved. I mean: “a proof-of-concept project, showing that it's possible to run an entire Large Language Model in nothing but a PDF file”.

• Reading about arbitrary code execution in PDFs reminded me of this NSO zero-click iMessage exploit. It’s mind-bending. They sent a “fake gif” via iMessage, iMessage ended up using the CoreGraphics PDF parser to analyze the “gif” and, from stage left, JBIG2 enters. JBIG2 is an old image compression standard and that sounds boring, but, well: “JBIG2 doesn't have scripting capabilities, but when combined with a vulnerability, it does have the ability to emulate circuits of arbitrary logic gates operating on arbitrary memory. So why not just use that to build your own computer architecture and script that!? That's exactly what this exploit does. Using over 70,000 segment commands defining logical bit operations, they define a small computer architecture […]” Go read the whole post and get goosebumps whenever someone mentions PDFs.

• This ain’t a job board, but this is a sentence I want to write: you should hire the topless, muscled programmer.

• I’m not a big sports guy. I don’t watch any sport regularly, I can’t remember any of the important games that I have watched, I’ve never seen a full NBA game. But I do love hearing and reading about professional athletes. I like sport documentaries. I’ve watched The Last Dance four times and watch Moneyball at least once a year. All of that is to say that I really enjoyed this one: The Genius of Jokic.

• Good questions in here: “when you miss deadlines: do you tell everyone about it ahead of time or do people sometimes tell you? when you think of important things for the company to do: do you do get them done or do you suggest that they get done?”

• Came across and read the first thing Anthony Bourdain published in The New Yorker, before his book Kitchen Confidential came out: Don’t Eat Before Reading This. It’s very good. “I love the sheer weirdness of the kitchen life: the dreamers, the crackpots, the refugees, and the sociopaths with whom I continue to work; the ever-present smells of roasting bones, searing fish, and simmering liquids; the noise and clatter, the hiss and spray, the flames, the smoke, and the steam.” Imagine how it was received in 1999.

• Dan Shipper had Kevin Kelly on his podcast and it was lovely conversation. Unique but I can’t explain why. I listened to it yesterday in the car and frequently switched to ChatGPT’s voice mode to dictate some notes that listening to these two made me want to take down.

• There’s a lot of prompting gold in here: GPT-4.1 Prompting Guide. The most fascinating bit to me is the apply-patch tool at the end. It’s wild to me that they trained the model on that format, this human/machine-readable hybrid format.

• In the first few minutes of the podcast episode, which I had listened to earlier this week, Shipper and Kelly talk about Annie Dillard and how much they adore her writing. Years ago I read Dillard’s Total Eclipse. Some of the images it evoked in my mind have been stuck there ever since and I strongly recommend you read it. But that’s all I had read of her work, so, prompted by Shipper and Kelly, I sought out more and the first thing I read was this essay: Write Till You Drop. And… Well. You need to read it. It’s possibly one of the best things I’ve ever read about writing, about art, about, I guess, doing things, creating things. I highlighted at least ten sentences and paragraphs and even though I really want to I can’t quote them all here, so instead here’s only one: “Why are we reading, if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage and the hope of meaningfulness, and press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power?” And, god damn, what a title for an essay.

• With “god damn, what a title” still echoing in my mind, I read the next thing I found, an excerpt from Dillard’s book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and, god damn, it’s good. “This is it, I think, this is it, right now; the present, this empty gas station, here, this western wind, this tang of coffee on the tongue …”

• Russ Cox with a very neat debugging trick: Differential Coverage for Debugging.

• This is so funny to me and I don’t know why.