Simon Willison talking about the recently unveiled Jev:

Something I’ve found a little uncomfortable about Jev is how it very much represents a regression even further towards black box machine learning systems.

LLMs are black boxes already—you can ask them to justify their decisions, but you can’t guarantee that what they say is useful or accurate.

Jev doesn’t even give you that: put in all the text you want, the only thing you’re going to get back is a floating point number. […]

This also means that concerns about bias should be front and center. I really hope nobody uses Jev to rank job applicants—that floating point number could conceal all manner of unseen bias baked into the models

Somebody send me the prediction market bet on whether people are already building exactly this. I’m interested in making a very large wager that they are…

Seth Godin (in 2014):

We keep coming up with new things to measure (like processor speed, heat output, column inches) but it's pretty rare that those measurements are actually a proxy for the impact or quality we care about. It takes a lot of guts to stop measuring things that are measurable, and even more guts to create things that don't measure well by conventional means.

One thousand percent.

Enjoyed this documentary about Rich Hickey and the development of Clojure. A few quotes from people featured in the doc.

Stuart Halloway:

If you don’t say no to most things, you get something that doesn’t make sense in combination.

Stephanie Hickey (Rich’s spouse & collaborator):

[The view] I have on Clojure, is that this was one person’s vision, and personal investment — with all the vulnerability — it’s not the story of a thing. It’s the story of a person.

And Rich Hickey:

For my work, the most important thing is freedom. Intellectual freedom. That's something you have to give yourself. I don't think many people will pay you to have intellectual freedom. I was very lucky to give myself that opportunity once.

I want to get back to that feeling when I gave myself that sabbatical — the feeling that I could pursue my ideas without concern for the outcome.

Oh, and I have to include this great quote from Rich’s seminal talk “Simple Made Easy”:

Simplicity is a choice. It’s your fault if you don’t have a simple system.

Jason Gorman:

even if we could extend autonomous agentic horizons, we’d walk straight into the feedback latency trap – shipping faster than reality can meaningfully respond to. That’s the thing about reality – it moves at its own pace. As powerful as LLMs and agents are, they can’t make Tuesday come on Monday.

So what you’re saying is: building software requires digestion.

Dave Rupert, talking about when people quit the status quo:

I get so curious about people’s financial situations when they’re able to make such asymmetrical moves like […] What about healthcare? [Do they] have a trust fund? A recent inheritance? Bitcoin? Years of an early retirement strategy paying off? I shouldn’t ruin the anti-capitalistic vibe with such trivial capitalistic questions but I love it and my brain jumps to trying to make the math work for myself.

Me too, Dave. Me too.

Geoffrey Lit:

Software quality =

How much team uses it themselves
x
How similar team is to users
x
Taste for making good decisions

Bryan Cantrill:

this week, ex-Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon claimed  […] that the probability that AI will "kill all humans" is ">10% in the next decade" (!!) […]

how would that happen? […] Jacob Coxon cites "hacking critical infrastructure" and "extinction-level bioweapons" without further elaboration. But Coxon is not an expert on critical infrastructure, nor on bioweapons — nor, for that matter, on extinction.

Silicon Valley’s mantra should be: You Can Just Do Say Things.

It is incumbent upon us to be circumspect in our claims

Remember when people were held accountable for the things they claimed? Good times.

Celine Nguyen:

models have “read” at least 482,460 books. But even Claude Opus 4.8 hasn’t written a short story that I enjoy more than those by Lydia Davis or Jessi Jezewska Stevens — both of whom, despite being prodigiously well-read, have almost certainly read fewer books.

Idk who needs to hear this, but humans are not computers. The brain is not a CPU. Do what makes you human, not what makes you computer-y.

very distinctively human — to train yourself in ways that seem like a waste of time.

Marcin Wichary:

When Chrome started in the late 2000s, it felt like a browser that had user’s interest in mind, and protected people from ill-behaving websites. Today, it’s the operating system that needs to protect us from Chrome.

Jason Gorman frames himself as an “AI realist” in this podcast and has some interesting observations. For example, here’s what he says about how riding the LLM cuts against our cognitive abilities:

By all means, read code and copy it. But it’s gotta go in the eyes, through the brain, and out the fingers to engage those parts of your brain that makes it sink in. It’s like everyone’s on speed dial and nobody can remember anyone’s number. And the moment you take that phone away, they can’t remember anyone’s number.

If you don’t listen, his post sums up a lot of the talking points in the podcast:

software development isn’t a production process […] AI coding is an amplifier of, not a fix for, development strengths and weaknesses.

Truly autonomous and reliable long-horizon agentic software development is so highly improbable using LLMs that it’s essentially science fiction.