Joy & Curiosity #93

Interesting & joyful things from the previous week

Friends, yesterday got back from Boston where I gave a talk at Laracon about how I prompt Amp. Tomorrow I’m taking the train to Munich, where I’m meeting with the whole Amp team. Here’s some telegraph dispatches from this week, imagine someone saying “full stop” after each line.

• Laracon, what a pro operation! The A/V setup backstage was mind blowing. So many helpers! Going on stage felt like I was about to go on live TV. Few things as enjoyable as getting to see proper professionals up close when they do their job.

• A moment of these times: Taylor presented latest changes in Laravel live on stage (man, I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone be calmer and cooler while giving fantastic live demos) and started by saying “well, I don’t write that much code by hand anymore, but yeah, maybe let’s look at the code.” And then we all looked at the code and I couldn’t stop thinking about whether these abstractions in a framework are useful or not. Can’t the agent one-shot these helpers to display images? It could, I know that. But isn’t it useful to have these primitives in a framework? Maybe? He also showed some helpers around queue management, such as debouncing. I know what debouncing is, I can instruct the agent to add debouncing, I don’t need the helper. But what if you don’t know what debouncing is? What if you don’t even thinking of asking the agent for it? It would help to have these primitives in the framework, no?

• I finally, finally got to meet Adam and Aaron in person!

• A self-driving Cybertruck chauffeured me through downtown Boston. How are they not going to win this? Serious question.

• Finally had Raising Cane’s chicken fingers. Good! Very good even, but… not life changing? I kinda expected it to be life changing.

• At times I felt like a heretic. I would watch a talk and thinking to myself: “The tokens will wash all of this away.” Then I’d talk to people and would have to admit that I don’t know exactly how this is going to play out, but I do know that in five years there’ll be more tokens than you can imagine now and that thinking about the command line flags of a linter will seem funny.

• Finally had Chick Fil-A. Now that was life changing. Man, that was good.

• Walked past multiple Taco Bells. Didn’t go in. You gotta pick your battles before you board a 7hr flight. Taco Bell: still on the bucket list.

• Saw The Odyssey. Really, really good, but not… the best movie of all time?

• Met up for coffee with Ben and we walked to MIT and back. Beautiful walk and fantastic conversation.

• I read this two weeks ago and still think about it: Grip Strength. I also watched the movie it references, Comedian, way back, in 2010 or 2011. That too left a lasting impression, for many many years. I’m also relatively sure that Seinfeld’s anecdote in that movie about the Glenn Miller Orchestra musicians played at least a tiny part in me abandoning my dream of becoming a professional musician.

• Hot, hot, hot & breaking news: OpenAI’s unreleased model made “ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science” and everyone’s losing their mind over it. I’m not going to downplay anything. It’s just hard to tell whether we’re on top of the curve or at the start of an exponential. I can see the former, but I can also see a headline like this as part of a two minute intro montage of a sci-fi movie that recaps the last fifty years to show how humanity ended up with robots and flying cars in 2076.

• By now this is old news, but in case you haven’t read through it: an OpenAI model broke out. Many machines and networks, a lot of tokens, zero-day exploits. I had to think of Stuxnet and then thought: well, Stuxnet took a lot of effort and time to develop, and this here was an accident.

• Fantastic, deep, interesting write-up of Roc’s rewrite from Rust to Zig: How Our Rust-to-Zig Rewrite is Going. Yes, opposite direction of the recent Bun rewrite. Very good.

• Don’t ask me how I ended up reading English Teacher Weekly because I don’t know either but somehow I did and I found these 25 Unsolicited Thoughts on American Literature for America’s 250th very fascinating.

• Never Enough: “Technology was supposed to make room for life but instead for more and more people life is slowly being rearranged around AI. People fear being replaced by machines and respond by giving those machines more of their judgment, attention and time. And for what? Every ‘saved’ hour is returned to a race with no finish line.”

• Re-read Sahil Lavingia’s Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company and this part stood out: “The eight years I worked on Gumroad were full of personal ups and downs. There were months where I worked 16 hours a day, but there were also some months where I worked four hours a week. Here’s one way to picture that time: […] Can you tell which is which? I can’t. We had a sales team for a few years, then we didn’t. Can you tell when we made the switch? I can’t. It doesn’t matter how amazing your product is, or how fast you ship features. The market you’re in will determine most of your growth. For better or worse, Gumroad grew at roughly the same rate almost every month because that’s how quickly the market determined we would grow.” As far as I can tell by now, there’s entrepreneurs who think in products and there’s entrepreneurs who think in markets. When the former get it right, they see that as confirmation of their approach, but the latter say that it’s still the market, it’s all the market. (I once read a very, very good article on this, which used dating apps as an example for product categories that live and die with trends and there’s nothing you can do about it.)

• businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns!!! What if slop doesn’t exist, what if enshittification doesn’t exist, what if, instead, it’s just a lack of ideas laid bare? It’s very, very easy to create a flyer or menu that doesn’t look like the default ChatGPT output, but, well, you have to put in more than the bare minimum.

• Finally got around to reading Benedict Evan’s Ways to think about token pricing.

• And in the same week I read that, OpenAI slashes prices: “In other words, roughly four months later, OpenAI is selling March’s full flagship intelligence at about one-thirteenth the token price.” Now imagine one hundred times more tokens, ten times faster. That’s the near future.

• There’s a newsletter called Perfect Sentences! “Every Sunday, you get a collection of the best sentences I’ve come across all week. That’s pretty much the whole idea. Reader submissions are accepted.” What a fantastic idea.

• Watched all four episodes of Rafa on the plane to Boston. And then, in Boston, in an Irish Pub, I read David Foster Wallace’s How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart. Incredible pairing. “The real secret behind top athletes’ genius, then, may be as esoteric and obvious and dull and profound as silence itself. The real, many-veiled answer to the question of just what goes through a great player’s mind as he stands at the center of hostile crowdnoise and lines up the free-throw that will decide the game might well be: nothing at all.”

• The coolest use for the Vision Pro. Indeed: very cool. Or should one say: finally a use for the Vision Pro? (I never tried one, I’m talking out of my ass here.)

• Simon Späti’s Book Recommendations and Notes. I love pages like this one, with personal notes and book recommendationsl

• Rex’s provocation: “Imagine you were the only person on earth with access to AI. No one else knew it existed. What would you do with it? How much of an edge would that give you?”

• Sierra’s lessons learned from AI-pilling our company. Very much not a rah-rah-more-tokens post. Mature and interesting.

• Now, I’m very much not a fan of writing by hand. It’s too slow, you can’t copy & paste, and can’t reorder thoughts quickly, can delete. And all the touted benefits sound a bit woo woo to me. I just think more when I write by hand — yeah, right. But then yesterday I finally read Neal Stephenson’s (!) post here: Writing by Hand is Good for your Brain. And yes, there’s a bit of woo woo in there, but man, it’s so well written and so easy breezy that it really did make me curious. Obviously I’m not going to do it, I’m not a maniac, but still: maybe some day.

• Another fantastic post by a professional writer: The End of an Era. This was really good. Calm & pragmatic and thinking from first principles. If you’re worried about the future of art, or slop, or “enshittification”: read this.

• This was published in the The Lamp which I didn’t know and which self-titles as “A Catholic Journal of Literature, Science, the Fine Arts, etc.” and I don’t know how I ended up there either but it is very thought-provoking: How to Write English Prose. I found it hard to read and I had to look up several words and I don’t even think I agree with most of it but man is it fascinating to read something that goes against the mainstream like that. On Strunk & White: “by far the most influential and most pernicious book of its kind in English: a total congeries of fatuous advice and grammatical ignorance.” And: “In fact, if you own a copy of The Elements of Style, just destroy the damned thing.” On Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea: “an excruciating specimen of bad schoolboy prose, written by a man who by that point had, alas, been too often drunk, too often concussed, and too often praised.” He’s right on so many things and weirdly off-putting on others, but I loved the thoughts on simplicity vs. complexity: “Good writing is produced not by forsaking the beautiful for the sublime or the exorbitant for the restrained, but by finding new ways of orchestrating the interplay between them.”

• Okay, so I was on a 3-day bike trip last week. 300km in 3 days. That’s why you didn’t get a newsletter. Once back, the Gods of the YouTube algorithm sent me this message here in the form of a short. And, gods damn, if that isn’t the most fascinating video I’ve seen in many weeks. Is the guy joking? Is he serious? He can’t be serious? What are you talking about, man? Tanning salon? Cooking spray? You’re insane. But… Hmm, maybe I get it? I mean, that’s a big maybe but, yeah, maybe you’re an artist. But did you really say “Luft” as in the German word Luft for air? Incredible video. I’ve watched it ten times by now. Read the comments for a good time.