Short things, kept in the open. A commonplace book, formerly rabbitholes.garden.

Rachel Thomas takes a shot against vibe coding by comparing it to gambling.

No matter how much you read about China, it’s still hard to wrap your head around the fact that they’re dominant across so many different industries. It’s even crazier that Western companies are being forced to go hat in hand begging for their technology. What a stunning reversal of fortunes. It was China that was…

Matthew Adelstein makes a case for thinking about the welfare of digital minds: Why think this? First, digital minds could be produced with amazing efficiency. Computing has grown vastly more efficient. If digital minds are possible, it should be cheap to create them in enormous numbers. Second, in the far future, we…

Money may not make you happy, but it makes you free.

The robots aren’t going replace humans anytime soon. Or that’s what one hopes.

Michael Tam, chief brand officer at Shenzhen-based UBTech, which has partnerships with carmaker BYD and Apple contractor Foxconn, said its Walker S2 robots were 30 to 50 per cent as productive as humans and only in certain tasks such as stacking boxes and quality control.

Yet manufacturers are still racing to order them to avoid losing out to competitors, Tam told the FT. “You can imagine … if Tesla has the advantage of deploying their own human robots into the manufacturing line, that means maybe BYD, they are staying behind.”

Amen:

Knowledge means Ever-renewed assurance by defeat That victory is somehow still to reach; But love is victory, the prize itself. Robert Browning

Saw quote here.

Beautiful: Cummings should know — just four years earlier, he had fought that hardest battle himself: When he was awarded the prestigious Academy of American Poets annual fellowship — the MacArthur of poetry — Cummings had to withstand harsh criticism from traditionalists who besieged him with hate for the bravery of…

Brilliant post by Andy Masley as usual: I’ve been in a lot of conversations with people who are seemingly structuring their whole lives around a belief, but when I poke them and ask them simple obvious questions they act like they’ve never thought about it before. This happened a lot in education and pedagogy, a field…

A great guide on how how to write good specs for AI coding agents. It’s aimed at professional coders but even idiots like me can steal a lot of things from this guide.

LLMs are no longer predicting the next word. They’ve left you behind in their dust, you puny human.

Nathan Lambert on how we need to change the way we work in the age of AI agents:

Every engineer needs to learn how to design systems. Every researcher needs to learn how to run a lab. Agents push the humans up the org chart.

I feel like I have an advantage by being early to this wave, but no longer feel like just working hard will be an lasting edge. When I can have multiple agents working productively in parallel on my projects, my role is shifting more to pointing the army rather than using the power-tool. Pointing the agents more effectively is far more useful than me spending a few more hours grinding on a problem.

Things are so good that we can’t bear it.

I found this video helpful on how to use Obsidian with the Gemini CLI, but the same steps and logic apply to Claude Code as well. I’ve been using Obsidian with Claude Code, and my vault looks much more organized now.

I’m also experimenting with a new shortcut: I have a note called ‘to claude’ where I dump all sorts of information and instructions throughout the day. I then ask Claude to read that file to process and organize everything. I’ve also created a CLAUDE.md file with vault-specific instructions so I don’t have to keep repeating myself.

This is a pretty basic ‘normie’ setup, and while I keep seeing people on Twitter doing much more advanced stuff, this works perfectly for me. I also asked Claude Code if these skills were useful and it figured out how to use them on its own.