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Just finished The Running Ground by Nick Thompson, a memoir and reflection on aging, relationships and endurance. Inspirational! 📚
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Anthropic suggests how AI coding impacts developer learning. Takeaway: use AI to learn as you go; favour inquiry over generation. Exercise your brain!
In an AI-augmented workplace, productivity gains matter, but so does the long-term development of the expertise those gains depend on.
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Interesting technique from Vercel on providing context via a compress docs index in Agents.md vs providing a skill to look up the same.
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🔗 Why Talking to LLMs Has Improved My Thinking, Philip O’Toole
the model is not improving my thinking directly. It is improving the interface between my thinking and language. Since reasoning depends heavily on what one can represent explicitly, that improvement can feel like a real increase in clarity.
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🔗 The Human in the Loop, Adventures in Nodeland
When I ship code, my name is on it. When there’s a security vulnerability […], it’s my responsibility. I can use AI to help me move faster, but I cannot outsource my judgment. I cannot outsource my accountability.
Responsibility is key. Using AI has made me more paranoid about merging code - I don’t want the embarrassment of having yolo’d something into production without having understood what has been written. Part of the solution to this is likely to write better tests and validations and be responsible for those instead.
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Just finished On the Calculation of Volume III, Solvej Balle 📚
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Just aded a “Previous Bulletins” section to the Scottish Technology Club homepage, plus a link to the archive.
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🔗 Why Self-Improvement Starts With Maintenance, Tim Harford
Maintenance is meditative — one of Brand’s heroes, the great French philosopher/round-the-world-sailor Bernard Moitessier, told him “My rule is, a new boat every day.” By that he meant that everything on his one-man boat should be as good as new; no repair job was so trivial that it could be postponed.
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Started reading: Human Acts by Kang Han 📚
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Currently reading: English Pastoral by James Rebanks 📚
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🔗 The Hidden Risk of AI Compute, Dave Friedman
Once you view compute as risk, the strategic map changes. The service-first instinct is: “We’ll abstract this away for users, eat the risk ourselves, and charge a margin.” So you get GPU Airbnbs, fancy schedulers, nicer dashboards. Useful, but fundamentally linear. You have a better middleman in a broken market. The market-first instinct, on the other hand, is: “We’ll surface the risk, standardize it, and make it tradable. Our moat is the market structure, not the interface.”
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🔗 You’re Overspending Because You Lack Values, Sherry Ning
Standing in front of all my stuff, it hit me that all of it used to be money, and all of that used to be time. I was standing in front of the metabolic waste of my existence, materialized. I was looking at the amount of my time, therefore my life, that had been turned into garbage. And the worst part is that I could’ve prevented it.
