So much in this article from Dan Luu resonates — it’s like holding up a mirror.
On average, humans have a high ability to ignore negatives in […] their own work or work their company does. For better or for worse, I seem to have the opposite of this and my thoughts immediately go to the flaws in myself and my work
Also:
overall, I don't know that I'd rate anything I've done as good.
Me too, Dan. Me too. (I should probably go to therapy for this, tbh.)
I've seen people and teams with a high degree of quality blindness ship things that have reduced or even no chance of success because of product quality issues. It's one thing to knowingly and deliberately trade off quality for speed, but when I've seen this happen there's always been a kind of quality blindness where everyone involved with the project thinks they're shipping something very high quality when that's not the case.
Been there. Seen that.
it's also easier than ever to improve quality, whether that's better performance, fewer bugs, etc.
But, to do this, you have to actually notice that this is possible, that quality can be improved.
It might be easier than ever from the perspective of automating tedious work, but I’d argue it’s harder than ever from an incentives perspective. It seems fewer and fewer people and organizations have the ability to notice quality issues in the first place, and so there are no incentives to allocate the time or resources to improve them.
I've tried to see if I can get a job somewhere where I just fix quality issues all day. This has never panned out
Dream job. If you’re looking for someone like that, reach out lol.
Some people love to make something. I love making something good.
Laurie Voss:
At some point every piece of software is a formalization of a human desire. Somebody wanted something, and the software is a precise enough statement of that want that a computer can act on it.
We’re all about to become formalizers, but to do that, we first have to listen.
The input the software development industry is about to need in unlimited quantities is people who can extract requirements from humans, define good, and exercise taste, and we do not make those people
Of course, listening is hard. So nerds are gonna try and make an automated, scaled version of listening that takes humans out of the equation, but it just ain’t gonna work very well.
You cannot do product discovery mechanically short of reading people’s thoughts. You can't train it into a model, because it isn't in the training data, because it's in the head of one specific baker who's never written it down and wouldn't know how to if you asked them. Somebody has to go and get it out of her, and then turn it into something exact enough to build, and then check that what got built is actually what she meant, which it never is the first time.
Bryan Cantrill:
This pattern of Fool’s Expertise is repeated over and over again among AI doomers: their experience in one kind of system (e.g., LLMs) lends them unwarranted authority in another — authority that goes largely unchecked by people like Klein who don’t delineate between different kinds of expertise.
It’s ironic — and yet perhaps only logical — that AI and its creators mirror each other, mistaking an ability to process vast amounts of information across disciplines as genuine expertise in them all.
Newscaster voice: “Now, let’s go over to Ja Rule Anthropic employees and see what they think about the situation….”
Great piece from the late Om Malik:
A man who controls one of the most powerful AI companies on earth telling a national television audience he should not have this power. While keeping it.
The confession is doing structural work. If you admit the danger, you establish yourself as the one honest actor. And if you are the one honest actor, your safety claims do not require external verification. You have pre-certified yourself through the performance of self-doubt. The confession is not transparency. It is inoculation against scrutiny.
Honestly, there’s a ton in this piece. It’ll be worth re-reading every once in a while.
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…
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.
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.