Joy & Curiosity #52
Interesting & joyful things from the previous week
Fifty two! Fifty two issues of Joy & Curiosity! Taking the small breaks into account, that’s more than a year of me writing this weekly newsletter and you reading it — thank you. The lines are still hand-drawn, by the way. Look at these beauties. That’s how you know that it’s an original J&C. It makes you go “wait, how does he draw them? With his mouse or what? Sometimes they look weirder is that when he uses the touchpad or something?” And the real beauty is that these question will never be answered.
By far, my favorite thing I read this week: James Somers on The McPhee method. I love James Somers and all his writing (start with this one and then read the rest) and I have a tremendous respect for John McPhee, even though, so far, I haven’t made it through one of his books and… well, this is Somers on McPhee and how McPhee influenced Somers. I love it.
Lovely: David Klein’s Magnificent TWA Posters. I didn’t know about Trans World Airliens (TWA) nor David Klein, so maybe I missed some cultural significance that comes from having heard about these posters before and now seeing them all together, but all I could think was: wow, this is… different, interesting, different from what I expected. You start to look at one poster and go “ah, retro”, and then, “no, wait a second… this is… different.”
Also lovely: Wil wrote about 6 surprising things about life in SF. Nice to read this after having spent two weeks in SF.
My teammate Oskar wrote about building a fuzzer for a central piece in the Amp codebase: Finding Bugs in a Coding Agent with Lightweight DST.
Ben Thompson, in Stratechery, on the U.S. goverment taking an equity stake in Intel: U.S. Intel. The technology, the time horizons, the geopolitics, and the politics involved here are impressive: “That, by extension, is why the stakes today are so high. The problem facing the U.S. is not simply the short-term: the real problems will arise in the 2030s and beyond. Semiconductor manufacturing decision-making does not require nimbleness; it requires gravity and the knowledge that abandoning the leading edge entails never regaining it.”
Kovid Goyal, the developer behind Calibre and Kitty, published the multiple cursors protocol for terminal emulators. So much fun stuff happening in terminals in the last five years and I’m excited to see where this one will go — multiple cursors everywhere or nowhere?
I’m not really a security person, nor am I a privacy person (I told you last time, in a public newsletter, that for 37 years I couldn’t ride my bike without my hands, so…), but I do have one fantasy: a burner phone. Every 17 weeks or so I try to figure out where I could get one without it being traceable back to me. I never acted on it, I’m far too lazy, but I have brought it up as a discussion topic at parties. Would I have a use for a burner phone? 100% not. But… imagine! A burner phone! You could walk through a public square, receive a call on your burner phone, and just say “the eagle has landed” before you throw it in the trash. Imagine! Anyway, I thought this was interesting: “this Burner Phone 101 workshop introduced participants to phone-related risk modeling, privacy-protective smartphone practices, the full spectrum of burner phone options, and when to leave phones behind entirely”
This was interesting: Why German Strings are Everywhere. I had no idea that German Strings (“each string is represented by a single 128-bit struct”) are a thing. Neat!
“Air conditioning was a most important invention for us, perhaps one of the signal inventions of history. […] Without air conditioning you can work only in the cool early-morning hours or at dusk. The first thing I did upon becoming prime minister was to install air conditioners in buildings where the civil service worked.”
Excellent: Nine Ways to Improve an Ad. At first I wasn’t sure: wait, are they serious? But then… Well. You’ll see. “There you have it. No clever, precious, self-conscious waste of space like the ad we started with; but an honest hard-hitting, two-fisted ad like this that really sells. I said ‘sells.’“
The index mindset: “The index mindset has pervaded startups, too. Employee tenure is short and shortening, with many employees opting to collect a portfolio of equity across several companies, hedging their downside along the way.” But the stickiest part is the section about indexing in culture.
Look, I don’t know how to start this one, so let’s use the classic chronological intro: a year or so ago I discovered Bird Buddy, a “Smart Bird Feeder”, that takes a picture and sends it to your phone whenever a bird is eating something in your garden. I’m not a bird watching guy, I’m not a bird guy, I’m not even a “smart” guy, but I have to admit that in four years of having a garden, I said “look! It’s a green woodpecker!” probably five times and there’s a hard to explain joy in having birds pick up the seed that you put in those stupid tiny houses. Naturally, when I first heard about Bird Buddy I thought: that’s dumb. And yet, mysteriously, I put it in the shopping cart. And then my finger hovered over the Pay button for a long time. And I nearly did it. And then… well, I think you call it “follow-up campaign”: Bird Buddy would occasionally send me emails about their product and every time, every god damn time, I was tempted to buy this smart bird feeder, because their emails are so good. But then this week they sent me an email that starts with the following Maya Angelou quote: “A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.” How can I resist? They just sent me an email that Birdbuddy 2 is out.
Discovered SteerMouse and its claim that you can use “24 Functions per Button & Chording Operations” and am now restless, confused, wondering: what could my life be if I would assign 24 functions to each mouse button?
Google released Gemini 2.5 Flash Image and called it Nano Banana. That’s a very good name.
“You can't stop at checking the boxes on paper. You have to sit with it, use it, live with it. You have to feel it.”
This — the metaphor and the fact he used it — has been stuck in my head: “There's two different ways you could describe what's happening in the model business right now. So, let's say in 2023, you train a model that costs $100 million, and then you deploy it in 2024, and it makes $200 million of revenue. Meanwhile, because of the scaling laws, in 2024, you also train a model that costs $1 billion. And then in 2025, you get $2 billion of revenue from that $1 billion, and you've spent $10 billion to train the model. So, if you look in a conventional way at the profit and loss of the company, you've lost $100 million the first year, you've lost $800 million the second year, and you've lost $8 billion in the third year, so it looks like it's getting worse and worse. If you consider each model to be a company, the model that was trained in 2023 was profitable. You paid $100 million, and then it made $200 million of revenue. There's some cost to inference with the model, but let's just assume, in this cartoonish cartoon example, that even if you add those two up, you're kind of in a good state. So, if every model was a company, the model, in this example, is actually profitable. What's going on is that at the same time as you're reaping the benefits from one company, you're founding another company that's much more expensive and requires much more upfront R&D investment. And so the way that it's going to shake out is this will keep going up until the numbers go very large and the models can't get larger, and then it'll be a large, very profitable business, or, at some point, the models will stop getting better, right?”
“Don’t be sad. You are in the business of heavy tails. New Yorker cartoonists, great physicists, famous poets and degen gamblers are your brethren. Not dentists and line order cooks.”
Pretty sure I’ve linked to it before, but in case I haven’t, you need to read this: Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades. This could be chiseled in stone, because every word is perfect. It’s sublime. If someone knows how to get in touch with Alec Baldwin, so I can get him to do a one-man performance of this piece, let me know. Alec, if you’re reading this, please reply to this email.
