Joy & Curiosity #91

Interesting & joyful things from the previous week

Last week, my 9-year-old started using iMovie on the iPad. She doesn’t know anything about editing. She doesn’t even know what editing is.

But we opened iMovie after I told her, “You can use this to cut out the part of the video where you see my hand.” She said, “What do you mean, ‘cut out’?”

So we cut the video up, removed some parts, moved others around. She then figured out how to add sounds and a soundtrack. Then, together (me, her, ChatGPT), we learned how to make the soundtrack play only at certain points in the video and so on.

While we were doing that, I kept thinking that a model or an agent could probably do that. Or maybe in a year. And then you could just say what you want and it would edit the video. Cut here, cut there, make this the first scene, move these around, and so on.

Then it hit me: she wouldn’t know what to say, would she?

She doesn’t know anything about editing. She’s seen movies before, sure. That means she’s seen J cuts, L cuts, jump cuts, other types of transitions, title screens, and end credits; but she doesn’t know what those things are, does she? So how could she ask for them? By pointing at something else? “Make this look like that”? Would that work? Would that lead to the same results?

And that, of course, made me think about software engineering. I hope it does the same for you.

• You can now remotely start Amp agents anywhere you can run amp: Agents, Anywhere. We spent a lot of time this week talking to customers and after demoing the things in the Agents Anywhere post on Monday and Tuesday and one person saying “this is the best thing I’ve seen today, I need this” we decided to get it out as fast as possible. And here we are: agents, anywhere you want.

• We also launched The Dial which resonates a lot with people. I’m still surprised by what a difference it makes.

• Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines: The Future Worth Building Is Human. There is a lot to love here but I really, really, really, really liked these two paragraphs: “In 2014, Toyota, long a master of the automated plant, brought its expert craftsmen back onto the line with the explicit goal of growing craftsmanship and knowledge. The man who led this, Mitsuru Kawai, put the reason this way:’“To be the master of the machine, you have to have the knowledge and the skills to teach the machine.’ The production of knowledge and application of intelligence lift each other; they are not substitutes. The work people do may change, and turn toward more of what only people bring, but the best organizations will make the fullest use of both. AI should enable each organization to be excellent in its own way, not to erase the differences between them.” Read the whole thing and then compare it to basically everything Dario Amodei or anyone else from Anthropic has said publicly. When I make that comparison, I’d say that Thinking Machines seems to cherish humanity and Anthropic seems to fetishize Claude and would probably prefer a more human-like Claude over many humans. When I read this line in the article: “Human values, just like human knowledge, reside in the heads of individual people and resist consolidation. But today, the values and voice of AI are decided in a handful of places. A single locus of value alignment, however well run, becomes a locus of power to be captured.” I can’t help but think of Amodei twirling his hair in his fingers, nodding, saying that AI is going to wipe out however many double digit percent of all entry-level jobs.

• There it is, finally: Rewriting Bun in Rust. Jarred’s post on how he used Fable and “5.9 billion uncached input tokens, 690 million output tokens, and 72 billion cached input token reads — around $165,000 at API pricing” to rewrite Bun in Rust. It’s a very good, very interesting post. There’s a lot to think about here, for example: “I think this would've taken 3 engineers with full context on the codebase about a year, during which time we wouldn't be able to improve Node.js compatibility, fix bugs, fix security issues or implement new features. We never would've done that. The realistic alternative was to do nothing and keep fixing the bugs at the top of this post forever.” I agree with that. I think it’s not something anyone would’ve done. But the question is: would a company that has to pay API pricing do it now? Read the whole post, this is just one part of it I found interesting, there’s more in there.

• I was this close to not linking to it, because ths newsletter is called Joy & Curiosity after all and not Jesus Christ, Man, Maybe You Shouldn’t Have Posted That? but you could argue that it is curious and if one of you hasn’t been around for some Ruby or JavaScript drama 2010-2015 and is curious about it then this will give you a taste: Andrew Kelley’s Thoughts on the Bun Rust Rewrite.

• Half-Baked Product. If you’ve ever been at a startup for more than six months, you will nod to at least some of it. You could argue that the post is very cynical and I’m relatively sure it was even written to be cynical, but I don’t know. I find it fascinating. Nearly 15 years of startups and when I read the post I don’t how stupid the characters in the story are, but the things they experience are close to unavoidable, question is how to make the best of them.

• Equally fascinating: How Successful Companies Go Blind. Man, I love reading stuff like this. How companies and organizations grow and change or not change, how incentives change — I could read about that all day long.

• If, so far, you made it through life without being neurotic about CO2 levels and air quality, but want to be, go and read this: The bottleneck might be the air in the room. I have only one critique and it’s about this part: “And it is invisible from inside. Nobody in the room feels impaired. They feel a little tired, a little foggy, a little checked out, and they put it down to the length of the meeting, a bad night’s sleep, or the person who won’t stop talking. The one variable almost nobody checks is the air.” Clearly the author has never been to Germany.

• “The Art Institute of Chicago’s API includes a has_not_been_viewed_much field on artwork. It’s a boolean that describes whether an art piece hasn’t been visited on their website very much. […] what are these artworks? Why aren’t they being viewed? I can’t answer the latter, but, if you have a moment for the former, please take some time to browse.”

• Maybe you should learn something: “You can learn new things. Pixel art, touch typing, 3d modelling, music, calligraphy, wood working, knitting, a language. Whatever is practical and calls to you, you can learn. In the long term, learning new things is fun and makes life richer in ways you can’t even imagine, and it’s a time investment that will pay dividends for life as these skills never really go away. There are even social aspects, as you’ll quite literally become a more interesting person to talk to.” Wonderful.

• Okay, so we all know John Gruber, author of Daring Fireball, and we also all know that when he writes a post titled Claude’s Criminally Bad Electron Mac App Is an Inside Job where it’s going: he’s going to shit on Electron and say that it’s a disgrace to the Mac and that a proper, native macOS application is far better, etc. etc. etc. That’s exactly what I expected when reading that post, but — and excuse the language here — holy fucking shit, those last three paragraphs? I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone attack a programmer over chosing Electron like this. Hot damn. I mean, Gruber is a great writer and I’m sure that he went over the top like this for comedic effect, but man am I glad to not be Felix Rieseberg.

• gingerBill: Good Tools Are Invisible. I think I would’ve vehemently disagreed with him a few years ago on the points re: TUI and Vim. Now? I think I agree with most of it. Good post.

• “Julius Caesar was the first propagandist. When he was off in Gaul conquering provinces, he would journal and send back snippets to Rome. He wrote so much that in Latin classes today, you study his works. When he came back to Rome, he walked in and they basically handed him the crown. Tell your story, nobody else will do it for you.” Good list.

• Lost and Found: “When something turns up at a stadium or an airport, staff photograph it, log it, and wait. Hundreds of places use one software tool for managing lost items, and I scraped their archives: thousands of accidental portraits of lost stuff.”

• I’ve been sitting on this next link for a solid year, waiting for just the right moment to share it. I think it’s now, but you need to do me a favor: ignore every bias or prejudice you might have and go into this open-minded, okay? Alright. So here it is. It’s a one hour video of Tom Platz giving a workshop on barbell squatting in a German gym. You don’t have to watch the whole thing, no. But if you’ve squatted before or seen Tom Platz’s legs, you probably want to. What I want to show you are two segments. The first one starts here and goes on for 2-3 minutes. It shows Platz coaching German bodybuilder Hoffmann through a single set of very light squats. It’s only 60kg, but the number of reps is… well, insane. If you’ve never lifted before, yes, I know how ridiculous this looks and sounds. Platz screaming “dig! dig! one more! you’re getting stronger!” I mean, it is ridiculous, grown-ass men lifting weights they don’t need to lift and shouting at each other while doing so. But watch it! Watch how Hoffmann does “two more!” many, many times; how he finds another rep somewhere and gets up again; the look he has on his face once he’s done a rep and thinks he’s done with the set and Platz says “two more!” again; how he then falls over and can’t walk; and then how Platz says: “Congratulations, you have achieved failure.” And then Hoffmann says “I think I lost the ability to go to 100%. […] I have all those doubts in my head.” The other thing I want you to see is the ending. After squats, they also do leg extensions and then Hoffmann talks to the camera man and again talks about going to 100%: “If you’re working out alone you have to constantly remind yourself that you might be training hard, but 95% or 98% isn’t enough. Today I was close to 100%. But the real art is to not only do that when there’s a camera, but to always do it, even when you’re alone, even when it’s a Saturday evening and you’re alone in the gym and no one’s watching. Then you still have to push through. And you have to do it over and over again. Whenever someone asks what the difference is between a normal bodybuilder and a champion: this is it.”