Just wastebook and links this episode.

Wastebook

• “So what is a critic for? This is the second quote that’s in my notebook. It’s in every notebook because I always write it on the first page: ‘Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.’ Kurt Vonnegut.” Found by that guy Russell.

• When you’re talking on a podcast, it’s like you’re talking with your friends. When you publish in social media or blogs (probably YouTube), it’s like you’re talking to strangers.

• “[I]t’s hard to explain to the French that Americans are much more afraid of each other than they are of Russia. Conflict in the United States is usually an internal convulsion, a civil matter.” boom boom paris.

• “sitting in the buzzfeed offices just clickin' on this off tweetdeck.” Good times.

• “The best time to estab­lish alternative, non-algorithmic net­works of com­mu­ni­ca­tion & affinity was five years ago. The second best time is today!” Robin Sloan.

• And: “pageants of minor chaos.”

• “I think that [parent’s] resilience. Or, their resilience at work is an incredibly important quality to transfer [to their children] and this might be one way to do that. Ooo! Looks like I had a thought!” On bringing your kids to work, having them see you work, etc. - John Dickerson on the Political Gabfest bonus episode, March 13th, 2025z

• A lot of lunch and learn sessions, weekly meetings, and other collaborative activities focus on building and maintaining a network of knowledge rather than just learning the specific topic covered in the meeting. These activities involve sharing information and establishing connections with others to enhance your understanding and access to a wider range of knowledge.

• “toyetic.” Here.

• ”During that unplanned and somewhat chaotic scene, Jensen walked up the set and asked, “Did somebody order Denny’s?” He then started serving Nvidia Breakfast Bytes to everyone at the table while talking about his time at the diner.” Alumni.

• “All the Micheladas You Must Sip in Austin.” One of the most 2000s Austin headlines ever, from 2025.

• “Late night chemist.” Shoreditch side street.

• And now I find myself in the absurd position of having to put together a talk about playing D&D with AI at the last minute, sitting in a hotel room in Kensington. This is not the first time this type of thing has happened.

• “I recalled Hegel’s adage that governments based on voodoo religion were bound to be unstable.” Tyler.

• “So I waited in my car in a supermarket parking lot. If this Signal chat was real, I reasoned, Houthi targets would soon be bombed.” Buck-wild.

• An infinite hold my beer regress.

• “Design Fiction." bruces.

• Related: ‘I enjoy probing the domestic “limits of everyday weirdness.”’

• “1950s and 1960s Little Golden Books purchased at the Hinky Dinky supermarket down the street.” Chris Ware.

• "decision-makers can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. Career advice in 2025.

• ”a concept as antiquated as intent.” NYTimes.

• “a felicitous remove.” Spicy.

• “Significant improvement but still issues.” Oxide and Friends.

Relevant to your interests

• Actual LLM agents are coming

• The Great Tech Heist - How “Disruption” Became a Euphemism for Theft - They’re not a fan: ‘If honesty prevailed, we’d hear "Uber is a taxi company that exploits regulatory loopholes to avoid labor laws, steals 30% of drivers’ income while pushing them below minimum wage, and used predatory pricing backed by Saudi money to destroy the livelihoods of taxi drivers worldwide."'

• Semantic Diffusion - Words are fun! There’s a version of half-ass vibe coding at the end as well: generating code, but looking at it before running it.

• Misinformation in LLMs—Causes and Prevention Strategies - Comprehensive!

• Sophie’s Dice - Dice Notation - Format for representing all sorts of dice roles in text. It has the obvious like 3d6, but other like rolling for advantage in D&D with 2d20K (roll two d20’s, keep only the highest). And all sorts of whacky ones.

• The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem - Well, at least we know the robots have great taste, having been built with “multiple works by Joan Didion translated into several languages.” // “The White Album” is one of the great essays. Even her packing list is one of the top five lit-sticals ever. // Also, I mean, yeah, too bad the AI magic relies copyright violation.

• Europe is looking for alternatives to US cloud providers

• Consumers React To Tariffs With Concern And Caution - “4% of Democrats support the tariffs, and 26% of Republicans oppose them.” // Also, anecdotes of what people plan to do to deal with price increases.

• AI Talent Shortage Threatens Corporate Ambitions, Says Bain

• Tactical work in the age of layoffs - Once the company drops all the work/life balance stuff in favor of work harder or get fired, shift to mild malicious compliance. // “If your company is putting pressure on you to ship more, one solution is to spend less time on testing/refactoring/glue work.”

• Notification Summary Miscues - Good insight on LLMs: you can’t teach it things… but… sort of… you actually can add memories that it will re-remember occasionally.

• sharkdp/fd - “Intuitive syntax: fd PATTERN instead of find -iname ‘PATTERN’.”

• Time for a work reset and breakout of our humanist recession - There’s a type of office worker toil (in the SRE sense) that AI can automate for you. Once you remote that toil, you can focus on the real work, that which is mysterious and important: other people.

• Using Spring AI 1.0.0-SNAPSHOT: Important Changes and Updates - Using Claud Code to update to an incompatible API. Vibe Upgrades! (Well, not really at all since there’s thorough review and testing, not to mention Java compile time checking, etc. But still!)

• Adobe Summit 2025 - AI leadership tips from JPMorganChase CEO Jamie Dimon - “try to use numbers to prove what you think, try to use numbers to understand what you’re really doing.” // Also, some commentary on doing AI at one of the largest enterprises in the world.

• Where We Are Headed - Predictions about how AI will change work.

• Manton Reece - Micro.blog adding European servers

Logoff

Here’s the video of an interview I did a couple weeks ago with ITQ - always fun folks. I gave two talks this week - on the same day! One at SREDay London (on private cloud platform engineering), another at Monki Gras. The second was the first go at a talk about learning agentic AI by playing D&D. Next time I give it, I want to have at least a recording of coding some tools. We’ll see!