Quotes

A lot of people say AI will make us all "managers" or "editors"...but I think this is a dangerously incomplete view! Personally, I'm trying to code like a surgeon. A surgeon isn't a manager, they do the actual work! But their skills and time are highly leveraged with a support team that handles prep, secondary tasks, admin. The surgeon focuses on the important stuff they are uniquely good at. [...] It turns out there are a LOT of secondary tasks which AI agents are now good enough to help out with. Some things I'm finding useful to hand off these days: - Before attempting a big task, write a guide to relevant areas of the codebase - Spike out an attempt at a big change. Often I won't use the result but I'll review it as a sketch of where to go - Fix typescript errors or bugs which have a clear specification - Write documentation about what I'm building I often find it useful to run these secondary tasks async in the background -- while I'm eating lunch, or even literally overnight! When I sit down for a work session, I want to feel like a surgeon walking into a prepped operating room. Everything is ready for me to do what I'm good at.

And what of the dead? I own that I thought of myself, at times, almost as dead. Are they not locked below ground in chambers smaller than mine was, in their millions of millions? There is no category of human activity in which the dead do not outnumber the living many times over. Most beautiful children are dead. Most soldiers, most cowards. The fairest women and the most learned men—all are dead. Their bodies repose in caskets, in sarcophagi, beneath arches of rude stone, everywhere under the earth. Their spirits haunt our minds, ears pressed to the bones of our foreheads. Who can say how intently they listen as we speak, or for what word?

“How is it possible for one to own the stars?” “To whom do they belong?” the businessman retorted, peevishly. “I don’t know. To nobody.” “Then they belong to me, because I was the first person to think of it.” “Is that all that is necessary?” “Certainly. When you find a diamond that belongs to nobody, it is yours. When you discover an island that belongs to nobody, it is yours. When you get an idea before any one else, you take out a patent on it: it is yours. So with me: I own the stars, because nobody else before me ever thought of owning them.” “Yes, that is true”, said the little prince. “And what do you do with them?” “I administer them”, replied the businessman. “I count them and recount them. It is difficult. But I am a man who is naturally interested in matters of consequence.” …On matters of consequence, the little prince had ideas which were very different from those of the grown−ups. “I myself own a flower”, he continued his conversation with the businessman, “which I water every day. I own 3 volcanoes, which I clean out every week (for I also clean out the one that is extinct; one never knows). It is of some use to my volcanoes, and it is of some use to my flower, that I own them. But you are of no use to the stars…” The businessman opened his mouth, but he found nothing to say in answer. And the little prince went away.

So you can think really big thoughts and the leverage of having those big thoughts has just suddenly expanded enormously. I had this tweet two years ago where I said "90% of my skills just went to zero dollars and 10% of my skills just went up 1000x". And this is exactly what I'm talking about - having a vision, being able to set milestones towards that vision, keeping track of a design to maintain or control the levels of complexity as you go forward. Those are hugely leveraged skills now compared to knowing where to put the ampersands and the stars and the brackets in Rust.

The Net is the greatest listening engine ever devised. These days anyone can choose, with its help, to be well-informed. You have to make the effort to figure out which key people are really on top of what you care about, so that you can start listening to them. Plus, you need to deploy some saved searches. Once you’ve done these things, then when you turn your computer on in the morning, it’ll tell you if anything’s happened that you need to know about.

It is universally admitted that the unicorn is a supernatural being and one of good omen; thus it is declared in the Odes, in the Annals, in the biographies of illustrious men, and in other texts of unquestioned authority. Even the women and children of the common people know that the unicorn is a favorable portent. But this animal does not figure among the domestic animals, it is not easy to find, it does not lend itself to any classification. It is not like the horse or the bull, the wolf or the deer. Under such conditions, we could be in the presence of a unicorn and not know with certainty that it is one. We know that a given animal with a mane is a horse, and that one with horns is a bull. We do not know what a unicorn is like.

I get a feeling that working with multiple AI agents is something that comes VERY natural to most senior+ engineers or tech lead who worked at a large company You already got used to overseeing parallel work (the goto code reviewer!) + making progress with small chunks of work... because your day has been a series of nonstop interactions, so you had to figure out how to do deep work in small chunks that could have been interrupted

I think that AI has killed, or is about to kill, pretty much every single modifier we want to put in front of the word “developer.” “.NET developer”? Meaningless. Copilot, Cursor, etc can get anyone conversant enough with .NET to be productive in an afternoon … as long as you’ve done enough other programming that you know what to prompt.

When visiting any Web page, the site owner is easily able to ascertain what websites you've visited (CSS color hacks) or places you're logged-in (JavaScript errors / IMG loading behavior). They can also automatically exploit your online bank, social network, and webmail accounts (XSS). Additionally, the browser could be instructed to hack devices on the intranet, including DSL routers and printers. And, if that's not enough, they could turn you into a felon by forcing requests to illegal content or hack other sites (CSRF).

According to interviews with former employees, publishing executives, and experts associated with the early days of AMP, while it was waxing poetic about the value and future of the open web, Google was privately urging publishers into handing over near-total control of how their articles worked and looked and monetized. And it was wielding the web’s most powerful real estate — the top of search results — to get its way.

113. Education is so slow, disorganized, accidental that sometimes it seems I could have relaxed for forty years and then learned everything I know in a few months of really efficient study. Then again, I’m not sure what I know. 115. Of very few subjects can it be said that the order in which we would teach them is the order in which we really learned them. The beginning is what we first see when we get to the end and turn around. 116. If I didn’t spend so much time writing, I’d know a lot more. But I wouldn’t know anything. 312. I could explain, but then you would understand my explanation, not what I said.

Why do I know ye? why have I seen ye? why Is my eternal essence thus distraught To see and to behold these horrors new? Saturn is fallen, am I too to fall? Am I to leave this haven of my rest, This cradle of my glory, this soft clime, This calm luxuriance of blissful light, These crystalline pavilions, and pure fanes, Of all my lucent empire? It is left Deserted, void, nor any haunt of mine. The blaze, the splendor, and the symmetry, I cannot see but darkness, death, and darkness.

As an independent writer and publisher, I am the legal team. I am the fact-checking department. I am the editorial staff. I am the one responsible for triple-checking every single statement I make in the type of original reporting that I know carries a serious risk of baseless but ruinously expensive litigation regularly used to silence journalists, critics, and whistleblowers. I am the one deciding if that risk is worth taking, or if I should just shut up and write about something less risky.

Whether you think coding with AI works today or not doesn’t really matter. But if you think functional AI helping to code will make humans dumber or isn’t real programming just consider that’s been the argument against every generation of programming tools going back to Fortran.

Netflix asks partners to consider the following guiding principles before leveraging GenAI in any creative workflow:  1. The outputs do not replicate or substantially recreate identifiable characteristics of unowned or copyrighted material, or infringe any copyright-protected works 2. The generative tools used do not store, reuse, or train on production data inputs or outputs. 3. Where possible, generative tools are used in an enterprise-secured environment to safeguard inputs. 4. Generated material is temporary and not part of the final deliverables. 5. GenAI is not used to replace or generate new talent performances or union-covered work without consent. [...] If you answer "no" or "unsure" to any of these principles, escalate to your Netflix contact for more guidance before proceeding, as written approval may be required.

I find it fascinating that novelists galore have written for decades about scenarios that might occur after a "singularity" in which superintelligent machines exist. But as far as I know, not a single novelist has realized that such a singularity would almost surely be preceded by a world in which machines are 0.01% intelligent (say), and in which millions of real people would be able to interact with them freely at essentially no cost. I myself shall certainly continue to leave such research to others, and to devote my time to developing concepts that are authentic and trustworthy. And I hope you do the same.

[On Reddit] we had to look up every single comment on the page to see if you had voted on it [...] But with a bloom filter, we could very quickly look up all the comments and get back a list of all the ones you voted on (with a couple of false positives in there). Then we could go to the cache and see if your actual vote was there (and if it was an upvote or a downvote). It was only after a failed cache hit did we have to actually go to the database. But that bloom filter saved us from doing sometimes 1000s of cache lookups.

I started eating with them [the chemists] for a while. And I started asking, "What are the important problems of your field?" And after a week or so, "What important problems are you working on?" And after some more time I came in one day and said, "If what you are doing is not important, and if you don’t think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?" I wasn’t welcomed after that; I had to find somebody else to eat with!...In the fall, Dave McCall stopped me in the hall and said, "Hamming, that remark of yours got underneath my skin. I thought about it all summer, i.e. what were the important problems in my field. I haven’t changed my research", he says, "but I think it was well worthwhile." And I said, "Thank you Dave", and went on. I noticed a couple of months later he was made the head of the department. I noticed the other day he was a Member of the National Academy of Engineering. I noticed he has succeeded. I have never heard the names of any of the other fellows at that table mentioned in science and scientific circles.

The secret of Tokyu Hands is that everything on offer there inclines, ultimately, to the status, if not the perfection, of hikaru dorodango. The brogues, shined lovingly enough, for long enough, with those meticulously imported shoe-care products, must ultimately become a universe unto themselves, a conceptual sphere of lustrous and infinite depth. Just as a life, lived silently enough, in sufficient solitude, becomes a different sort of sphere, no less perfect.

One day a man of the people said to Master Ikkyu: "Master, will you please write for me maxims of the highest wisdom?" Ikkyu immediately brushed out the word 'Attention'. "Is that all? Will you not write some more?" Ikkyu then brushed out twice: 'Attention. Attention.' The man remarked irritably that there wasn't much depth or subtlety to that. Then Ikkyu wrote the same word 3 times running: 'Attention. Attention. Attention.' Half-angered, the man demanded: 'What does "Attention" mean anyway?' And Ikkyu answered gently: 'Attention means attention.'

Much of the substance of what constitutes “government” is in fact text. A technology that can do orders of magnitude more with text is therefore potentially massively impactful here. [...] Many of the sub-tasks of the work of delivering public benefits seem amenable to the application of large language models to help people do this hard work.

Hubris is the greatest danger that accompanies formal data analysis...Let me lay down a few basics, none of which is easy for all to accept...1. The data may not contain the answer. The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data.

Black milk of daybreak we drink it at nightfall we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night drink it and drink it we are digging a grave in the sky it is ample to lie there A man in the house he plays with the serpents he writes he writes when the night falls to Germany your golden hair Margarete he writes it and walks from the house the stars glitter he whistles his dogs up he whistles his Jews out and orders a grave to be dug in the earth he commands us strike up for the dance Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night we drink in the mornings at noon we drink you at nightfall drink you and drink you A man in the house he plays with the serpents he writes he writes when the night falls to Germany your golden hair Margarete Your ashen hair Shulamith we are digging a grave in the sky it is ample to lie there...

According to public financial documents from its parent company IAC and first reported by Adweek OpenAI is paying around $16 million per year to license content [from Dotdash Meredith]. That is no doubt welcome incremental revenue, and you could call it “lucrative” in the sense of having a fat margin, as OpenAI is almost certainly paying for content that was already being produced. But to put things into perspective, Dotdash Meredith is on course to generate over $1.5 billion in revenues in 2024, more than a third of it from print. So the OpenAI deal is equal to about 1% of the publisher’s total revenue.

How to use a skill (progressive disclosure): After deciding to use a skill, open its SKILL.md. Read only enough to follow the workflow. If SKILL.md points to extra folders such as references/, load only the specific files needed for the request; don't bulk-load everything. If scripts/ exist, prefer running or patching them instead of retyping large code blocks. If assets/ or templates exist, reuse them instead of recreating from scratch. Description as trigger: The YAML description in SKILL.md is the primary trigger signal; rely on it to decide applicability. If unsure, ask a brief clarification before proceeding.

We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges. When soldiers take their oath they are given a coin, an asimi stamped with the profile of the Autarch. Their acceptance of that coin is their acceptance of the special duties and burdens of military life—they are soldiers from that moment, though they may know nothing of the management of arms. I did not know that then, but it is a profound mistake to believe that we must know of such things to be influenced by them, and in fact to believe so is to believe in the most debased and superstitious kind of magic. The would-be sorcerer alone has faith in the efficacy of pure knowledge; rational people know that things act of themselves or not at all.

And now, in Anno Domini 2024, Google has lost its edge in search. There are plenty of things it can’t find. There are compelling alternatives. To me this feels like a big inflection point, because around the stumbling feet of the Big Tech dinosaurs, the Web’s mammals, agile and flexible, still scurry. They exhibit creative energy and strongly-flavored voices, and those voices still sometimes find and reinforce each other without being sock puppets of shareholder-value-focused private empires.

You don’t need to be the world’s leading expert to write about a particular topic. Experts are often busy and struggle to explain concepts in an accessible way. You should be honest with yourself and with your readers about what you know and don’t know — but otherwise, it’s OK to write about what excites you, and to do it as you learn.

Business rules engines are li’l Conway’s Law devices: a manifestation of the distrust between stakeholders, client and contractor. We require BREs so that separate business units need not talk to each other to solve problems. They are communication and organizational dysfunction made silicon.

Those masterful images because complete Grew in pure mind, but out of what began? A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street, Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can, Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone, I must lie down where all the ladders start In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

The third one, Brattain, practically with tears in his eyes, said, "I know about this Nobel-Prize effect and I am not going to let it affect me; I am going to remain good old Walter Brattain." Well I said to myself, "That is nice." But in a few weeks I saw it was affecting him. Now he could only work on great problems. When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems.

Explanations of historically important events that focus on the actions of a special few therefore misunderstand their true causes, which are invariably complex and often depend on the actions of a great many individuals whose names are lost to history. Interestingly, in the natural world we don’t find this sort of explanation controversial. When we hear that a raging forest fire has consumed millions of acres of California forest, we don’t assume that there was anything special about the initial spark.

It was a good answer that was made by one who when they showed him hanging in a temple a picture of those who had paid their vows as having escaped shipwreck, and would have him say whether he did not now acknowledge the power of the gods,—'Aye,' asked he again, 'but where are they painted that were drowned after their vows?' And such is the way of all superstition, whether in astrology, dreams, omens, divine judgments, or the like; wherein men, having a delight in such vanities, mark the events where they are fulfilled, but where they fail, though this happens much oftener, neglect and pass them by.