Good stuff here…

Doing your own business (or other high agency job like academic) feels like a strange mix of semi-retirement and permanent overtime.

great article that sums up modern best practices for python development by César Soto Valero

This. Abstraction, all the way up.

so true. the reciprocal also applies - take interest in others, ask questions and engage. don’t just wait for your chance to speak

you know we haven’t peaked when leaders in the field are still routinely amazed by the capabilities of these models

It doesn’t take much to amuse an idiot. Thanks for the therapy bills, mom! 😜

We are so back

Qwen-image is pretty good Simon Willison

I have expected this for 2-3 years now, but thought we were still 2+ years from it… 🤯

works a treat. I’m going to share the “assistant response preferences” section with other humans so they know better how to speak with me 🤪

What if the models are already better than most people will ever need for chat? The signs were present, even before today’s release. There is a growing gap between power users and normies. What might that might mean for long-term profitability? Tech surplus = ripe for disruption.

Interpreting human intent and using it to guide their interactions is tricky stuff. It is something you learn quickly tuning game controls - aim assist, jump timing, stick response curves, etc. all very hard to do well for all people. Turns out it’s hard for LLM routers as well.

chet

cultural “optimizers” Democracy intends to represent collective will and wisdom. ... Politicians discovered that dividing people wins more votes than uniting them, that promises beat plans, that tribalism trumps truth. The metric of votes has replaced the purpose of governance.

chomp on this (now with more natties)

Expert and completely unbiased opinion here…

A fun thing to do when you need to wait around for a few minutes is to use your phone to ask Claude Opus the following question about some random discipline or field: “What would you say is THE core insight or analytical trick of crystallography?” Replace crystallography with

Be like 37signals. Balance scalable software products (revenue), small teams (profit), and culture (mastery, purpose, autonomy). Always Be Curious. Make cool / valuable shit. Share it. Have fun. 🙌🏼

I’d say they can withstand a drop to only 80% margins. This will get worse as many SAAS businesses become features of AI systems. The age of ephemeral software is upon us.