Joy & Curiosity #89

Interesting & joyful things from the previous week

Friends, Joy & Curiosity is going into a bit of a summer break. Two, three, maybe four weeks. I’m not sure yet. But it’s now been three years of writing this newsletter on my weekends and I feel a need to not do that for a while. I want to have some unstructured time: to play, to experiment, to write or maybe not write, to do something different on my Sunday mornings.

But today I still have for you, a bag of links:

• Unlike what seems to be most of the Internet, I still don’t know what to make of this document that Anthropic published: When AI builds itself. It is remarkable, for many different reasons. For example, some say that the intention behind publishing this is to hype themselves up before an IPO and this section here does have a smell of “everyone but us must be stopped”: “If it were possible to effectively slow the development of this technology to give ourselves more time to deal with its immense implications, we think that would likely be a good thing. But if a slowdown simply lets the least cautious actors catch up technologically, it could leave everyone less safe.” But those concerns are founding maxims for Anthropic, so I don’t doubt they’re sincere. And if they wanted to hype themselves up, would they share all these concerns about AI’s progress in the future? “The evidence we’ve laid out here suggests that we’re likely heading into this scenario. But speeding up one part of a process often just shifts the bottleneck elsewhere […] But achieving recursive improvement alone does not suggest an immediate change in how industrial production occurs, societies organize, or markets function. More intelligence can’t learn what a drug does over decades of use, can’t hold elections sooner than a constitution dictates, and can’t turn a stranger into an old friend in a weekend. For most people, the felt pace of this future will still be set by the bottlenecks, even if the laboratory upstream runs at the speed of compute.” And then, of course, there are these quotes floating around the page. I don’t understand why they chose to put this one in there: “On days where everything works well, I can’t help but think nothing I do matters, everything is automated and better and faster than I ever will be. But then there are days where everything breaks and I don’t understand why and I realize I have no idea what I’ve been up to anymore.”

• Ted Chiang: No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious. He doesn’t use the term “stochastic parrot” and yet I couldn’t help but shrug as if he had. Conscious or not, does the distinction matter on a practical level? It might for Anthropic’s IPO, at least, when Chiang writes: “If we think of Claude as a sentence-continuation machine, Anthropic can reasonably take steps so Claude doesn’t emit sentences saying that sentence-continuation machines are unethical. But as soon as we imagine Claude to be an entity with a moral status remotely comparable to a human’s, then we have to consider whether Anthropic is engaged in something comparable to slavery.”

• Seth Godin: Stop ruining it.

• Andrew Trigell, a hacker’s hacker (go read his Wikipedia page), on “rsync and outrage”: “for the people saying things like “I’m a PhD from xyz uni and I’m telling your LLMs are just stochastic tools that make everything up and the world will fall apart if you use them”, I’m here to tell you that you are out of date. The world of software engineering has changed dramatically in the last few months.” Go read the whole thing.

• Patina as proof: The shift from quiet luxury to lived-in aesthetics. “People increasingly distrust things that look too new, too frictionless, or too optimised. Patina communicates time, friction, and human use. Wear is proof that something existed in the world before it reached you. In a culture saturated with AI-generated imagery and algorithmically optimised products, that proof is becoming scarce and therefore valuable.”

• Carson Gross, creator of htmx: “Code is Cheap(er)” Yes, it is. And a lot flows from that. Let’s see how long it takes for the second order effects to be talked about.

• Why share? Great example of these second order effects.

• Changing How We Develop Ladybird: “We will no longer accept public pull requests. […] This is not a change we make lightly. Many valuable contributions have come from outside the maintainer group over the years, and we are grateful for them. […] For decades, code contributions have been how open source projects learned who to trust. People would show up, do the work, take responsibility for their changes, and stick around. Over time, trust emerged from the work itself. AI tools have changed the economics of this very quickly.”

• From the Typewriter interview with Brad Neely:
  
  Q: “I ‘smoke’ a cigarette peneil in the studio. Do you perform any silly rituals when you’re working?”
  A: “Wasting time. Allowing tangents to take over. Chasing a thought down to its root only to find that the deeper you go all thoughts are connected at the roots so you can’t ever get to the bottom of a thing but rather you go round and round through the circuits of connectivity. I keep a thumbtack in my lips when drawing, so I feel you on that, Kleon. I do a lot of ‘problem busting’ on the treadmill or stationary bike.”

• Cheese Paper: “a text editor specifically designed for writing, particularly fiction.” I’ve never used an editor like this, so I found the features interesting to consider, and also: what a great name!

• The Newest Instagram “Exploit” is the Goofiest I’ve Seen. I got goosebumps reading this, imaginging that I’m the guy responsible, who forgot to add the additional checks.

• how to train your goblin. Beautiful presentation. Made me want to start doing RL runs.

• “I expect we’ll see a shift in emphasis from taste to character, in which the premium is placed on contradiction over cohesion and the specificity of one’s interests over generalized cultural fluency. I’m thinking: incongruous hobbies (ex. Rosey Grier’s Needlepoint for Men), niche and unprestigious collections (stamps? pennies?), and prickliness toward commercial fluency and palatability. Not driven by a desire to be cool or interesting per se but by a desire to be free of the pasteurized good taste, the style without substance, that the algorithm often encourages.”

• Justin Jackson: Do the hardest thing.

• Why A Retractable Pen? I urge you to click on this and scroll through the page. It’s beautiful and interesting and well-made. And I’m not only saying that as someone who dis- and reassembled probably hundreds of pens in his life. It’s a great page.

• Fatih’s Review of the MoErgo Go60 Keyboard. It’s long, it’s detailed, it has beautiful photos, it has videos, it was — as everyone can see — made with love, it made me want to buy a new keyboard.

• How To Read More. I’ve averaged between 20 and 30 books a year for multiple decades but really struggled in the last few years. Maybe because I picked longer books (hey, The Power Broker) or because I read more articles or because I work out more and fall asleep roughly four minutes after my head hits the pillow. But I don’t know. So I opened this article and laughed out loud when I read the first “tip”: Quit your job. Hope you get a laugh too.

• 7min clip of Ed Catmull talking about how the “braintrust” worked at Pixar and then on whether it’s possible to apply the Pixar way of working at different companies. I read Creativity, Inc. many years ago (highly recommend it) and hearing that the Disney acquisition led to Frozen was very interesting. Paid off, didn’t it?

• Making Software is available in early access.

• I had the week off and was in the mood for some Russian short stories (if you haven’t: go and read A Swim in a Pond in the Rain). I really like Chekhov, it turns out. The Student was great (and it’s very short). And so was The Lady with the Dog. Gogol’s The Overcoat I enjoyed too.

• Then I went through The New Yorker archive and read some of the Greatest Hits of the last 100 years that I hadn’t read before: Undecided (funny, great!), The Lie Factory (“Campaigns, Inc., the first political-consulting firm in the history of the world, was founded, in 1933, by Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter. […] Political consulting is often thought of as an offshoot of the advertising industry, but closer to the truth is that the advertising industry began as a form of political consulting.”), The Paperboy’s Secret (what writing), and The Musk Ox and Me, written by Jon Lee Anderson. If you had asked me at 17 what life I wanted to live, I think I would’ve shared a dream that sounds pretty much like Anderson’s actual life. Go read the first three paragraph to see what I mean. Then read the rest because of the musk oxen and Alaska and some beautiful writing.