Joy & Curiosity #61

Interesting & joyful things from the previous week

Here’s a puzzle I’m wrestling with this week: I do my best work when it doesn’t feel like work, when, instead, it feels like play. And yet my mind tells me, strains to tell me, that I must do work that feels like work in order to be productive. How do you solve a puzzle when you have all the pieces in your hand but you won’t let yourself put them together?

• This is the best thing I read this week: The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce, by Tom Wolfe. It’s from 1983, published in Esquire; it’s about, you guessed it, a guy named Robert Noyce, who was part of the Traitorous Eight, who co-invented the integrated circuit, who co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel (the other founder is Gordon Moore), who quite literally put the silicon into Silicon Valley, who came from the midwest and became richer than a small god; it’s about Silicon Valley and the West and the Midwest and how the West isn’t the East. If you work in tech, if you work in a startup, or if you’re even remotely interested in this industry we’re in, you should read it. And in order to convince you to read it, let me tell you about a roommate I once had. He and I had been, separately, with a different cadence, watching Battlestar Galactica, the 2004 TV show. The premise of the show can be condensed as follows: humans create androids called Cylons, humans and Cylons go to war, Cylons launch surprise attack on humans with the help of a human traitor called Gaius Baltar, surprise attack kills most humans and makes human colonies inhabitable, surviving humans flee on battleship Galactica, in search of a new Earth. Now, all of that — the background explanation on the war, the attack, the battles following the attack, the reveal of the traitor, the escape of all remaining humans on a single ship — is shown in the first two episodes of the show. But these two very crucial first episodes aren’t part of the first season. They are, technically, a separate miniseries that was aired before the first season. They’re not S01, but S00. Which is exactly why my roommate, who watched the show in the order the files appeared on disk, watched all 53 episodes of Battlestar Galactica without having watched the miniseries first, without knowing why they’re even on the god damn battleship. Yes, he was very surprised when he got to “the end” and figured out who the traitor is. Now, here’s my point: The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce — that’s the two episodes I hadn’t watched. And now that I have read it, all of it — Silicon Valley, startups, tech, everything I have ever read about it — makes a lot more sense.

• Mary Rose Cook: “Dozens of new tests and four new techniques to carry into the future. Or, rather, to carry until they’re superseded next week.”

• From the always fantastic James Somers, in The New Yorker: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking. Marvelous writing and it’s all in here: the stochastic parrot argument, Hofstadter, Ted Chiang, Geoffrey Hinton, neuroscientists. I highly recommend you read it. (I actually listened to it, which is rare for me, and I was surprised by how good the production quality is and thought that the setting in which I listened — a dark, very cold, November evening walk through an empty-seeming town — was great for this.)

• On the surface, this is about a homelab and infrastructure and, if we stretch it, it’s about developer tools too, but I’d argue there’s even more: a prison of my own making. I actually read this a few hours after I had woken up and found out that my UniFi controller no longer works and that I can’t access my network’s admin area anymore.

• So while researching UniFi stuff, I came across this: UniFi Network Comparison Charts. Not particularly interesting, if you’re not into UniFi gear, but doesn’t this feel like a page out of a different era of the Internet? I think it’s great.

• “Terminal emulators face a fundamental challenge: mapping the vast breadth of Unicode scripts into a fixed-width grid while maintaining legibility. A terminal must predict whether each character occupies one cell or two, whether combining marks overlay previous characters, and how emoji sequences collapse into single glyphs. These predictions fail routinely.” This is from State of Terminal Emulators in 2025, which is very interesting, especially the section on performance. If you want to get a glimpse and have never thought about width of Unicode characters, look through the author’s wcwidth. And if you want to understand what’s going on there, this is a good intro.

• Thomas Ptacek: You Should Write An Agent. I mean: yeah.

• Amazing: a “jelly slider” built with TypeGPU. As far as I understand it, the “jelly slider” was a joke someone made somewhere, but then someone else, of course, thought: I should built this. And here we are.

• Your URL is your state. I love a clean URL and I love when I can copy a URL and it reconstructs the complete state.

• So, apparently there’s a thermal printer, hooked up to a Raspberry Pi, which is connected to the Internet, where everybody can submit print jobs to this printer, and a camera records and streams when the printer prints, and you can see all the wonderful little drawings that the printer has printed in this gallery. Lovely.

• Kimi K2 Thinking is out.

• Did you know that there’s a framework for building TUI applications in Rust and it’s called Ratatui? Isn’t that the most amazing name? So if you did know, why didn’t you tell me? What a name!

• Talking about names: ever heard of Bending Spoons? That’s the Italian startup that’s acquired Evernote, Meetup, and, very recently, AOL. Bending Spoons itself is now valued at $11 billion. $11 billion! But the thing I couldn’t believe while reading this company profile was the CEO’s name: Luca Ferrari! What a name. I’m jealous.

• This is a bit left field, but since I am fascinated by what’s colloquially and often without the proper respect described as tech wear, this website by Nike about the jersey they made for Eliud Kipchoge was interesting. It’s more than a pat on the back that Nike is giving themselves here — more like two big hands massaging the shoulders, saying “well done, you, well done” — but interesting, still.

• A YouTube Education. This made me feel pretty dumb about how I use YouTube. Good stuff.

• In case you’ve never used git bisect: you need to read this! Then go and try it. The first time you experience the power of binary search is magical. git bisect is magical. I use it a ton. I’ll jump on the chance to try it. When others go “let me check out these 4 commits that could be the cause of the bug”, I’ll get out git bisect, even if it might take longer. It’s so good and it gave me a hope-to-do-this-before-my-time-here-ends wish I threw on the pile: I really, really want the chance to run git bisect in the automated way, where you give it a script and then it goes and finds the command on its own. That’d be something.

• rands: Become the Consequence. “Welcome to Senior Leadership! You made it! There’s no delegating this task, but it’s not a task. It’s a strategy, and you don’t delegate strategy; you explain it loudly, repeatedly, and then you become The Consequence.” It’s possibly a bit too abstract to be useful if you haven’t lived through the exact problems described here, but I found the example of how to increase the quality (reduce bugs) interesting and the whole thing is a good lens to look through.

• A bit clickbaity, a bit shallow, but still thought-provoking, at least for me: Notes after listening to CEO of Vercel for 2.5 hours straight. What I got stuck on was #16: “Reveal complexity gradually: simple first, power later.” It sounds right, doesn’t it? And I think I agree, but then, arguably, two of the most successful and beloved developer tools of all time, Vim and Emacs, do the exact opposite, don’t they? Or at least that’s the first two I thought of. And it got me thinking: wait a second, both editors are great pieces of software, yes, but are they great products? I honestly don’t know.

• Talking about Emacs: How I am deeply integrating emacs. I read this, thinking: yeah, I had the same dream once too, but now it’s dead and I can’t believed I ever dreamt it. I do love reading about it though.

• The 512KB Club, “a collection of performance-focused web pages from across the Internet”. There’s some real gems in that club. Lots of lovely, little, personal websites.

• This made me want to create my own book wishlist.

• Was reminded of Hillel Wayne’s Are We Really Engineers? this week. In my head, this article is always in the background, always hovering somewhere when the word engineering is used. “Most people don’t consider a website ‘engineered’. However, and this is a big however, there’s a much smaller gap between ‘software development’ and ‘software engineering’ than there is between ‘electrician’ and ‘electrical engineer’, or between ‘trade’ and ‘engineering’ in all other fields. Most people can go between ‘software craft’ and ‘software engineering’ without significant retraining. We are separated from engineering by circumstance, not by essence, and we can choose to bridge that gap at will.”

• Jean Yang, founder of Akita (acquired by Postman): Angel Investors, A Field Guide. I barely know anything about angel investing, except that if “angel investor” shows up on someone’s bio it’s likely they’ve recently made some money. So this was very interesting. And this bit has to be highlighted: “I was at dinner with my a16z investor Martin Casado when I told him I wanted investment from Kevin Durant. It was fall 2018, KD was playing for the Warriors, and he had won Finals MVP earlier that year. I was a KD fan and had heard he did tech investing. Martin said, ‘How sure are you that you want him?’ He sent one text to someone who happened to be walking into KD’s house at that very moment. KD said congratulations and the following week I had Thirty-Five Ventures on my cap table.”

• 21 Facts About Throwing Good Parties. I don’t throw a lot of parties and neither do I wonder about how to throw a good party, but this was good.

• The new Siri will use Gemini models, it seems.

• “I have AiDHD. It has never been easier to build an MVP and in turn, it has never been harder to keep focus. When new features always feel like they’re just a prompt away, feature creep feels like a never ending battle. Being disciplined is more important than ever.”

• The Best Way to Use AI for Learning. I started reading this without knowing that it’s essentially a sales pitch for the app the author built, but still walked away with some ideas. I wish I was this structured when learning new things.