Chase McCoy on the current state of many AI products:

the configuration surface [of AI tools] is so large, the knobs to turn so numerous, and the interplay between those knobs so mysterious that I could spend an eternity optimizing my setup without ever knowing if the result was meaningfully better or worse.

Chase McCoy starts with some good irony:

An irony of the personal computing revolution is that, while everyone has a supercomputer in their pocket, a majority of our actual computing has moved to machines in the cloud that we neither own or control.

Then moves on to the eighth wonder of the world, web browsers:

The web browser is…a universal surface for running and accessing software on any device; the stability of the platform and the ubiquity of its distribution mechanism is unrivaled by the postal service alone.

And ends with the why to it all:

The point of all this isn’t to replace the open web: it’s to create a low‑friction space, a laboratory, where we can experiment with and run software without the headache of sign‑up flows, hosting providers, authorization, dependency overload, or vendor lock‑in.

Chase McCoy articulates this idea of “reversibility” in the world of art restoration:

One of the foundational principles in art restoration is reversibility: the notion that any intervention made to a work should be removable without harming the original. It’s a kind of humility encoded into the restorer’s practice, a tacit acknowledgment that today’s best solution might be tomorrow’s regrettable overstep.

Would love this idea ported to tech.

Let’s normalize making today’s solutions easily reversible.

Let’s humbly acknowledge that our current selves might not Know Everything™️, and our future selves (or comrades) may very well be better situated to solve what we’re attempting now.

Great piece from Chase McCoy:

The rise of graph and database-like features in popular tools like Notion or Obsidian is a sign that the simple filesystem has failed us. And that failure has pushed us towards other solutions which require sacrificing ownership of our data.

If an average consumer wanted to organize information like they might in Notion while maintaining ownership and storing their data locally, I literally do not know of a solution that doesn’t involve administrating a database. That’s crazy, right?

I agree. That is crazy.

Our computers should be databases! We should be able to script them, access them using browser APIs, browse them via a first party application, etc. They should accrue data and knowledge over the course of our lifetimes, becoming more useful as we use them. They should be ours, something we can control and back up and preserve long after we’re gone.

Yes. This is exactly what I want.