Jim Nielsen’s Notes

Laurie Voss: At some point every piece of software is a formalization of a human desire.

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…

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.

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.

Seth Godin (in 2014): We keep coming up with new things to measure (like processor speed, heat output, column inches) but it's pretty rare that those measurements are actually a proxy for the impact or quality we care about.

Enjoyed this documentary about Rich Hickey and the development of Clojure.

Jason Gorman: even if we could extend autonomous agentic horizons, we’d walk straight into the feedback latency trap – shipping faster than reality can meaningfully respond to.

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?

Geoffrey Lit: Software quality = How much team uses it themselves x How similar team is to users x Taste for making good decisions 🔗

Bryan Cantrill: this week, ex-Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon claimed  […] that the probability that AI will "kill all humans" is ">10% in the next decade" (!!)

Celine Nguyen: models have “read” at least 482,460 books.

Marcin Wichary: When Chrome started in the late 2000s, it felt like a browser that had user’s interest in mind, and protected people from ill-behaving websites.

Jason Gorman frames himself as an “AI realist” in this podcast and has some interesting observations.

Marcin Wichary: There is also something great in seeing an interface that grows with you, or one where you can say “I wonder if…” based on your prior interactions and expectations, and the interface actually rewarding you for that thought.

Lea Verou: Once you’ve spent a lot of time and effort on something, you overestimate how much it matters to everyone else Too true!

Bryan Cantrill: If [you’re] fine with an LLM crafting prose from your prompt, spare us all the wasted cycles and just give us your prompt.

Pete Millspaugh: It’s kind of hard to believe that important parts of internet infrastructure run like this: a plain text file maintained by a group of volunteers online.

Michelle Barker: Maybe [coding this thing] would be easier with an LLM.

Robin Spielmann takes a stab at defining “design engineer”: The role [of a design engineer] is: there is a specific set of tasks that has to be done in every digital product, and on most teams nobody is responsible for them.

Alex Wellerstein: As a humanist at a moment when the most profound disrespect to humanistic endeavor, art, thought, and ideals are being broadcast constantly from the engines of capital, the halls of governance, the administrators of higher education, and…

Chris Coyier has a lot of good <li> elements in this post: Be yourself is such great advice and amazingly hard to act on.

fiddery on her Bear blog: To our disappointment […] the restaurant revamped their menu with AI.

John Gruber commenting on apps that change what the screen looks like when a screenshot is taken: I think it’s bullshit.

Interesting talk by Feross Aboukhadijeh, CEO of Socket, on where we are with security, open source, and AI.

Jonathon Van Maren, writing about James Herriot who wrote All Creatures Great and Small and his disposition to stay in the land he called home: Herriot never left the Dales, even when it was in his financial interest to do so.

John Gruber: It’s not like the problem with the current Claude Mac client is merely the technical detail that it’s written with a bloated non-native framework.

I loved this talk from Bryan Cantrill at Monktoberfest 2022.

I love a few good thoughts from Charlie Munger, so saving these for later.

This is why you want design engineers The designer learns their proposals aren’t strategic input — they’re suggestions engineers will simplify into whatever is actually buildable.

Mandy Brown: To reduce reading to the practice of empathy is to divorce it of its real power and pleasure: to enjoy the fruits of another person’s creative effort, to think with the writer and their characters, not becoming them, but becoming more fully y…