Joy & Curiosity #63

Interesting & joyful things from the previous week

This was the second time in four months that I happened to be in San Francisco when a new model was released by a major provider. “Gemini 3 just dropped” was overheard in the coffee shop.

Very busy but fantastic week.

• We switched Amp to Gemini 3 Pro. I know that for some people Gemini 3 feels off, but I honestly think it’s the best model I’ve used as an agent so far. It’s fantastic.

• I’m still holding my breath and I’m pessimistic, but hallelujah! if this actually happens in a way that’s noticeable: Europe is scaling back its landmark privacy and AI laws.

• What I found the most surprising about Every’s Vibe Check on Gemini 3 is that they’re saying it’s “not yet a writing champ”. Maybe I can’t judge it on that, I very rarely use LLMs to generate more than a single sentence of prose, but I thought Gemini 3’s descriptions of bugs, its summaries of what it did, its investigations — I thought those were well-written and surprisingly well-formatted too. I actually said out loud: “if I would see a PR description written like that, I’d try to hire the person who wrote it.”

• Paul Dix, CTO of InfluxDB: “I believe the next year will show that the role of the traditional software engineer is dead. If you got into this career because you love writing lines of code, I have some bad news for you: it’s over. The machines will be writing most of the code from here on out. Although there is some artisanal stuff that will remain in the realm of hand written code, it will be deeply in the minority of what gets produced.”

• “Older programs were all about what you need: you can do this, that, whatever you want, just let me know. You were in control, you were giving orders, and programs obeyed. But recently (a decade, more or less), this relationship has subtly changed. Newer programs (which are called apps now, yes, I know) started to want things from you.”

• Are You Playing to Play, or Playing to Win? Read it two days ago and already think that these definitions of scrub and maestro will stick with me. “One time I played a scrub who was pretty good at many aspects of Street Fighter, but he cried cheap as I beat him with ‘no skill moves’ while he performed many difficult dragon punches. He cried cheap when I threw him 5 times in a row asking, ‘is that all you know how to do? throw?’ I told him, ‘Play to win, not to do ‘difficult moves.’‘ He would never reach the next level of play without shedding those extra rules in his head”. Can’t help but think of programming and typing code by hand.

• “#! was a great hack to make scripts look and feel like real executable binaries.”, from: #! magic, details about the shebang/hash-bang mechanism on various Unix flavours.

• “A friend of mine tells Claude to always address him as ‘Mr Tinkleberry’, he says he can tell when Claude is not paying attention to the instructions on CLAUDE.md when Claude stops calling him ‘Mr Tinkleberry’ consistently”

• This is from all the way back in April and you actually notice that when reading, I’d say, which is interesting in itself, but the whole piece is great and contains a lot of gems: Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

• “I’ve started a company in this space about 2 years ago. We are doing fine. What we’ve learned so far is that a lot of these techniques are simply optimisations to tackle some deficiency in LLMs that is a problem “today”. These are not going to be problems tomorrow because the technology will shift. As it happened many time in the span of the last 2 years. So yah, cool, caching all of that... but give it a couple of months and a better technique will come out - or more capable models. [...] What I’ve learned from this is that often times it is better to do absolutely nothing.”

• Joan Didion, On Self-Respect: “In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. The measure of its slipping prestige is that one tends to think of it only in connection with homely children and with United States senators who have been defeated, preferably in the primary, for re-election. Nonetheless, character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.”