What’s particularly ironic is that today’s Google has become exactly what its founders warned against in their 1998 paper: an advertising company whose business model fundamentally conflicts with serving users’ needs.
“The Mediocrity of Modern Google” | om.co/2025/03/2…
The Gemma 3 models are just crazy good for their size.
Apple should be partnering with Google to provide these models for their on-device usage.
Not sure how it is that I hadn’t come across this (ReAct / Thought, Action, PAUSE, Observation) before today, but it suddenly made some Gemma 3 experiments I was playing with tremendously more reliable.
LocalLLMs are fun!
For me, the act of writing code provides a certain kind of feedback mechanism, helping me gauge how well I truly understand the problem I’m trying to solve. Increased friction/resistance in finding the best solution in code means I’m out of phase with the problem in some way, and need to think on it more. Code generation tools modify or eliminate that feedback loop, and I find that disorienting at best.
It’s always great when present me gets to thank past me for taking notes (and putting them into the readme) on how to debug some library I made overly complicated.
Being able to run LLMs locally is really, really cool. Once products catch up with the functionality available there are going to be some really cool use-cases.
“The hardest working font in Manhattan”
What a fun deep-dive into this old, seemingly ubiquitous and hard-working font. Exactly the kind of thing Blogs are best at.
Pro Tip: If you’re going to use ChatGPT during your tech interview…
This interview with Ted Chiang is so, so good.
When are hobby eink displays going to get decent drivers so we can make fun fast-refreshing projects? Even cheap kindles can refresh crazy fast these days.
Took a Waymo yesterday. Annoyed at myself that it immediately felt totally normal.
I’m so over “Declarative X” (infrastructure, UI, whatever). The idea that the computer “will just figure it out” is exactly the kind of hand-wavy nonsense early-career Engineers dream about. God bless their optimism, but it’s 2025 and the computers are still stupid, and I’m tired of having to work around your black box to get my code to deploy.
Just let me tell the computer what to do.
What if I don’t want to abandon everything I enjoy just because someone else, who also likes/is part of those things, has differing views to mine?
“Creating is harder than criticizing. Much harder. This fundamental asymmetry shapes our intellectual landscape in profound ways.”
We Don’t Need More Cynics. We Need More Builders. www.joanwestenberg.com/we-dont-n… via Instapaper
I listen to a lot of ambient electronic music, especially while working. I get distracted by lyrics, so electronic/instrumental pieces are my go-to.
I really like Tom Eaton. If you’re into this kind of music check him out.
But they are still guilty of lacking the personal agency to fight it or leave in protest, and I still — potentially unjustly — condemn them.
They really don’t.
Use Tailwind so you can save 25KB of CSS while you ship 25MB of JavaScript in your “Modern Framework”
I wish something existed like CircuitPython, but in Ruby.
“Being Principal Engineer must be great; you get to make all the decisions and work on the best projects.”
Reality: Makes few/no decisions, has to work endlessly toward consensus, spends way too much time dealing with crap like legal and regulatory requirements. Almost never writes code.
Grateful that in our Year-in-Review company all hands meeting our accomplishments are just reasonable B2B work that makes our customers' lives better. Nothing about increasing engagement while we destroy the souls of our users.
We’re still hiring: grnh.se/a38072303…
A lot to take in here:
just four firms now control at least 97 percent of the $68 billion frozen potato market, the antitrust cases reveal. These four companies participate in the same trade associations and use a third-party data analytics platform — PotatoTrac — to share confidential business information. The lawsuits allege the firms’ collusion has driven french fries and hash browns to record-high prices.
“The principle “Life cannot be delegated” is simply a guidepost. It keeps before us the possibility that we might, if we are not careful, delegate away a form of life that is full and whole, rewarding and meaningful. We ought to be especially careful in the cases where what we delegate to a device, app, agent, or system is an aspect of how we express care, cultivate skill, relate to one another, make moral judgments, or assume responsibility for our actions in the world—the very things, in other words, that make life meaningful.”
Life Cannot Be Delegated theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/life-ca… via Instapaper
“A general pattern seems to be that Artificial Intelligence is used when first doing some new thing. Then, once the value of doing that thing is established, society will find a way to provide the necessary data in a machine readable format, obviating (and improving on) the AI models.”
We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis calpaterson.com/metadata….
I hate how the App ecosystem basically requires new functionality be to shoe-horned into an existing app. So many features would probably be better as their own app, but there’s no discoverability, and the ergonomics of switching/bridging apps are awful.
The fact that there are programmers who don’t like writing code, let alone writing great code, will always baffle me.
I’m not saying they’re wrong to feel that way — I will just never relate!
I think this correlates strongly with people in the industry who love/loathe “AI Coding Tools”.