Focused, discrete apps are the best proven way to manage complexity.

Honestly, this seems true of anything really.

Focused discrete { PRs | functions | meetings | tools } are the best way to manage complexity.

A thing that tries to do one thing succeeds or fails clearly.

A thing that tries to do many things can always partially succeed, which means it never fully fails.

I feel like mankind has an innate curiosity to pause and say “Oooh, whatcha making?”

True all around, but especially when you’re making something in the kitchen.

People who don’t draw always say the same refrain: “I’m a bad artist. I can only draw stick figures.”

That’s because you haven’t practiced. Drawing takes practice. That’s why we call it a study.

If you’d never spoken Portuguese once in your entire life, you wouldn’t say, “I’m not gifted at Portuguese.”

You’d say, “I’ve never studied Portuguese.”

I like this idea of reframing how to talk to yourself. “I’m not good at drawing” is definitely a phrase I’ve told myself countless times. But I would never say, “I’m not good at Portuguese”. I’d say, “I’ve never tried learning Portuguese.”

So why would I tell myself “I’m not good at drawing” when I’ve never studied it?

It’s not that I’m not good at it

I just have practiced it — yet.

Personal webpages are the conceptual and structural core of the WWW.

There was no time in the history of the web When building your home [page] was celebrated and acknowledge by opinion leaders

Making a personal website is “an act of emancipation”.

Quoting Cloninger:

In order to move beyond a conservative, copycat style, you must look beyond the inbred corporate web to the personal sites of today’s leading designers

(I originally read this as an essay in The Internet Phonebook.)

volunteering that an LLM has been used to generate work product is to implicitly distance oneself from the responsibility for the content

The argument here is that LLMs are useful in as much as they promote and reinforce your values. If they don’t do that, don’t use them.

we must be careful to not use LLMs in such a way as to undermine the trust that we have in one another

Extra credit: writing is a vessel for establishing trust. LLMs undermine that.

Finally, LLM-generated prose undermines a social contract of sorts: absent LLMs, it is presumed that of the reader and the writer, it is the writer that has undertaken the greater intellectual exertion. (That is, it is more work to write than to read!) For the reader, this is important: should they struggle with an idea, they can reasonably assume that the writer themselves understands it — and it is the least a reader can do to labor to make sense of it.

If, however, prose is LLM-generated, this social contract becomes ripped up: a reader cannot assume that the writer understands their ideas because they might not so much have read the product of the LLM that they tasked to write it. If one is lucky, these are LLM hallucinations: obviously wrong and quickly discarded. If one is unlucky, however, it will be a kind of LLM-induced cognitive dissonance: a puzzle in which pieces don’t fit because there is in fact no puzzle at all. This can leave a reader frustrated: why should they spend more time reading prose than the writer spent writing it?

Everyone has six things in flight and nothing actually done

You are producing more code and shipping less software.

It’s not the productivity gain we think it is.

When you speed up code output in this environment, you are speeding up the rate at which you build the wrong thing. You have automated the guessing

The bottleneck is understanding the problem. No amount of faster typing fixes that.

The competitive advantage doesn't go to the team that writes code fastest. It goes to the team that figured out what to build, built it, and got it into users' hands while everyone else was still drowning in a review queue full of AI-generated PRs that nobody has the time or the energy to read.

Good Internet is still here […it] may take effort to find. You probably won’t see it in a feed. It will not have likes and RTs. It might be months old by the time you see it. But, it’ll be here. Waiting.

The links Tyler has in his post are really fun!

I’d tell you what they are and share them here, but that would defeat the whole purpose. That is the “old” internet: follow my link, to his links, and who knows where you’ll end up from there!

Good luck on your journey.

Your ability to customize [...] is limited to the extent the developers have correctly anticipated your needs.

Code

Your ability to customize [...] is limited to the extent you can describe what you want in code

Learning to code gives you transferrable knowledge across projects and tools.

Your potential mastery of [an] RSS plugin data schema won’t help you in a different blog tool, or even using a different [...] plugin. In contrast, learning an interchange format like RSS or (here) JSON Feed is knowledge you can apply elsewhere, as are the data manipulation techniques

(This is a good series from Jan Miksovsky where he articulates all the reasons why I love Web Origami as a tool for generating websites.)

I have a hard time imagining a future where knowing how to solve problems with computers and how to control the complexity of those solutions is less valuable than it is today.

The biggest change in software development is not AI code, but a permission structure for disregarding quality in the pursuit of velocity

I never expected to find my news from strangers on a federated social network that half the internet has never heard of. I never expected a lot of things. But there's something quietly beautiful about a place where people just... share what they know. No brand deals, no engagement metrics, no algorithm nudging you toward rage […] It's the internet I was promised in 1996. It only took thirty years and the complete collapse of American journalism to get here.

The Fediverse is great. When you push it to do things you typically do elsewhere — build a brand, increase engagement, gain a subscription base — everything breaks down. That’s a feature not a bug.

It’s akin to the internet I remember from earlier days, like online forums where people just helped each other with no reason other than they wanted to.

Evaluating works of art, or any creative products of skill and imagination, requires a mind, which the machines of media automation lack. Identifying a pattern requires only a statistical procedure, which is what the machines have. Indeed, it’s all they have. People like MrBeast didn’t crack the code of virality. Machines did. MrBeast’s great strength as a contemporary creator is that he has no ambition beyond repeating a pattern. He’s a machine-listener. He attends to the machine, and he does what it tells him to do.

Complete value capture — no ambition beyond chasing what can be measured.

As the older generations die, they take with them their knowledge of what was lost when the new technology arrived. Only the sense of what was gained remains. It’s in this way that progress covers its tracks, perpetually refreshing the illusion that where we are is where we were meant to be.

how about plain text? Imagine writing and presentation software where all you do is think about what you want to say.

Software that provides the illusion and sensation that you’re getting stuff done without actually getting much done is a great enterprise sale.

If we confuse ourselves too readily with our machine creations, we not only overestimate them, we also underestimate ourselves.

Also, I like the idea to stop using the word “hallucinate”:

The language that we ourselves use matters too. Consider how normal it has become to say that LLMs “hallucinate” when they spew falsehoods. Hallucinations in human beings are mainly conscious experiences that have lost their grip on reality (uncontrolled perceptions, one might say). We hallucinate when we hear voices that aren’t there or see a dead relative standing at the foot of the bed. When we say that AI systems “hallucinate,” we implicitly confer on them a capacity for experience.

We use language that implies consciousness exists where it actually doesn’t.

The reason that beareaucrats and politicians reach for numbers is to avoid responsibility by not having to make a judgement or exercise discretion. They take themselves out of the judgement seat — “it’s not me it’s just the numbers”.

I quite enjoyed this podcast. So much, in fact, that I bought his book and am enjoying it so far too!

Computing has a long history of teaching us that there are many things we thought we understood that, when we try to explain it to the computer, it turns out we don’t.

This is true of computing specifically, but also many other intellectual exercises more broadly. To restate it:

There are many thing we think we understand that, when we try to explain it to someone else (in writing or by the spoken word), we realize we don’t understand it nearly as well as we thought we did.

you could pick out the cello from the violin, but they blend so well together. But if the balance is off, if one instrument is too loud or the tone’s not right or something’s a bit off, very quickly it is distracting and unpleasant. It’s more than just the music, the harmony, the melodies, balance is so important too. With great coffee, you should really notice the instruments unless you want to. You should just be enjoying the music.

Replace “great coffee” with “great software” and this holds.

Sadness. It’s that moment at the end of a cup of coffee where you go for one more sip and it's finished and your brain’s like, “Hey, I was drinking that! I’m not ready to be done yet.” It’s such a lovely moment of sadness. It’s beautiful because it ends. Great coffee should leave you wanting more, not worrying about what you should eat or drink to get rid of that sensation in your mouth.

There’s an art of knowing when to end something.

via R. Alex Anderson

the marketing team running this points to those sales as proof that it “works”. You can measure that. It shows up as a number. Some people in business only like arguments that can be backed by numbers. 3 is more than 2. That is indeed a fact.

But there are an infinite number of things in life that cannot be assigned numeric values.

The story of social media ever since has been a story of the refinement of feeds as a media product aimed at capturing and holding an audience. The platforms have invested billions of dollars in designing those feeds—what they contain, how they look, how they work—to make them as “engaging” as possible. To argue that the companies are still in the business of transmitting “user-generated content” is absurd. They’re not carriers anymore; they’re media companies. Yes, users still contribute posts and comments—though even those, in today’s era of influencers, creators, and AI, are often subsidized and actively shaped by the companies—but the essential content of social media is now the feeds produced by the platforms, not the individual messages posted by users. Go to Instagram and scroll through your feed. It’s obvious that what you’re experiencing is not discrete bits of user-generated content. It’s an elaborate, finely tuned media production manufactured by Instagram for an audience of one: you

What I hate most is when companies try to turn my media into a feed for their product.

The feed is the content, and the social media company is its publisher. Period.