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Just back from the gym - thinking about Doing More is Often Easier by David Cain
always be curious about what’s just beyond your usual stopping point. Doing more often makes things easier, not harder.
My usual stopping point felt like just about the end of the road, but it was actually the beginning of a hidden, hyper-rewarding territory where exceptional results happen.
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Key take away from “What It’s Like Working For A Company That’s Forcing AI On Its Developers” - the process matters for creativity:
“I have no idea how he ended up as an art director when he can’t visualise what he wants in his head unless can see some end results”, Bradley says. Rather than beginning with sketches and ideas, then iterating on those to produce a more finalised image or vision, Bradley says his boss will just keep prompting an AI for images until he finds one he likes, and then the art team will have to backwards engineer the whole thing to make it work.“He doesn’t know that the important thing isn’t just the end result, it’s the journey and the questions you answer along the way”.
“What follows from these discussions is me explaining why, usually over hours rather than minutes, that these tools have no place in a professional game development pipeline or production and actually hinder the development of visuals”, Francis says. “I also find myself explaining to them how the iteration and ‘idea’ phase of a project is where the best stuff happens, how exploring things through artistic labor is where your best ideas come to fruition, and why would we want an AI (that we don’t even own) to do that for us with art that isn’t ours to use?”
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Just reading “What it’s like to interview a software engineer preparing with AI” where candidates basically used AI to fake or puff up their experience. Seems to me like meetups/in-person connections will become more important to validate what people really know and what they are really like.
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On Trump Tariffs, Mckinley, and Closing Society, DigressionsImpressions
“Mercantilism is never just about the balance of trade. It’s always and everywhere an attempt to direct state violence against those who wish to shape their own lives unguided by the superior wisdom of the nation, the people, or race. Policing the border means control over romance, marriage, friendship, and gender, that is our most meaningful choices; it is an attempt to control who plays with who and who learns from who. Free trade and free meaningful control over one’s life are the same side of the coin.”
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Impossible progress can come quickly. The Information, James Gleick:
“Across the English Channel, a submarine cable twenty-five miles long made the connection between Dover and Calais in 1851. Soon after, a knowledgeable authority warned: “All idea of connecting Europe with America, by lines extending directly across the Atlantic, is utterly impracticable and absurd.” That was in 1852; the impossible was accomplished by 1858.
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Chesterton’s answer to the semantic apocalypse is to will yourself out of it. If you can’t enjoy My Neighbor Totoro after seeing too many Ghiblified photos, that’s a skill issue. Keep watching sunsets until each one becomes as beautiful as the first (the secret is that the innumerable company of the heavenly host sings in a slightly different key each time).
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Nice quote from Einstein describing fundamental science discovery: “highest form of musicality”
““That [the] insecure and contradictory foundation [of Bohr’s quantum hypotheses],” Einstein would say, “was sufficient to enable a man of Bohr’s unique instinct and perceptiveness to discover the major laws of spectral lines and of the electron shells of the atom as well as their significance for chemistry appeared to me like a miracle. . . . This is the highest form of musicality in the sphere of thought.”” (Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb)
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From Open Socrates, Agnes Callard:
“My own approach to Socrates might be described as “hard-line intellectualist”-I think that Socrates is just what he seems to be, namely someone who believes that we don’t know, that if we knew we would act on our knowledge, and that philosophythe pursuit of such knowledge-is the only sure road to becoming a better person. Why is this collection of views so implausible?
If you posed this question to the many scholars who try to save Socrates from his own intellectualism, they would say “because it is obvious that someone could have knowledge-such as the knowledge that it is wrong to steal, or kill-but be unwilling to act on it.”
Socrates' response is: What makes you think that was knowledge?
The real source of the opposition to Socratic intellectualism is not the commonsense observation that people often act in ways they are ready to repudiate, but the insistence that what we sometimes act against deserves to be called “knowledge.””
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Started reading On Freedom, Timothy Snyder 📚
“The five forms are: sovereignty, or the learned capacity to make choices; unpredictability, the power to adapt physical regularities to personal purposes; mobility, the capacity to move through space and time following values; factuality, the grip on the world that allows us to change it; and solidarity, the recognition that freedom is for everyone.”
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Geoffrey Litt writes on “avoid the nightmare bicycle” from Changing Minds, Andrea diSessa:
Good designs expose systematic structure; they lean on their users’ ability to understand this structure and apply it to new situations. We were born for this.
Bad designs paper over the structure with superficial labels that hide the underlying system, inhibiting their users’ ability to actually build a clear model in their heads.
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Simon Willison writes Hallucinations in code are the least dangerous form of LLM mistakes
If you’re using an LLM to write code without even running it yourself, what are you doing?
Hallucinated methods are such a tiny roadblock that when people complain about them I assume they’ve spent minimal time learning how to effectively use these systems—they dropped them at the first hurdle.
AI is going to lower the barrier to folks getting creative with code, but if you are a seasoned developer you have to be an active participant to get the most of out LLMs.
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Reading A Cumulative Culture Theory for Developer Problem-Solving, C. Hicks:
We hypothesize that understanding how collective solutions are shared between developers, and keeping such transmission functional, may prove a more powerful explanatory factor in technology innovation than any individual cognition or performance variance among developers. It is also likely more accessible to those who wish to intervene on and increase technical innovation. While interventions attempting to improve working memory have often proven impractical, unethical, or unlikely to succeed, interventions attempting to improve cycles of adaptive response between individual-and-social systems, incorporating improvements to the psychological context that promotes social sharing and teaching, have emerged as intervention targets which associate with lasting objective outcomes in achievement and performance (see Walton, 2014; Hicks, 2024; Lichand et al., 2024).
Culture creates innovation.
Another important aspect of cumulative culture is that it helps individuals both learn from and imitate processes of creativity. For instance, developers’ participation in interest-driven technical communities which share niche, unusual, or obscure solutions may bolster developer problem-solving along with well-documented social benefits from support, role modeling, and sense of belonging (Townley, 2020; Trinkenreich et al., 2023). Alongside these social benefits, exposure to infrequently-noticed features of a problem can cognitively benefit developer problem-solving because this helps individuals to overcome functional fixedness, i.e., the cognitive bias which discourages people from seeing novel solutions (McCaffrey, 2012).
This is one of the reasons why I run the JavaScript meetups and Scottish Technology Club. I want to be exposed to technical excellence, creativity and innovation. Sharing and supporting with a community is a key mechanism. If we all do it, Scotland improves, we create and attract more opportunities.
