Flood The Zone - The “bullshit singularity: infinite bullshit at zero-cost” // Understanding the utility of Frankfurtian “bullshit” is an under appreciated thought technology. If you can spot it, you can analyze it and figure out if you should filter it out or not: use it weight claims and world-views (often negatively). You can also use it to evaluate your own actions, if you find that you are bullshitting, to check facts and see if you’re acting based on truth and logic, or just vibes. This especially true in marketing, but also life decision. // Also, the AI’s need to be careful about eating too much of their own bullshit as the results mutate into even worse bullshit.
How to Prepare for a Meeting Where Emotions Will Run High - Probably good advice for life too.
Rebuilding the Social Security Administration’s Codebase - “Still, it’s interesting to think about how this should be done. I wonder if they could run the new system in a sandbox for a year, feeding it all the same inputs, and see whether it generates the same outputs.” // This feels like the kind of advantage government modernization projects have over commercial. There is not as much urgency. If the lifetime of a government agency and software is in centuries (we hope!), you can take a year to just run tests. Plus, you have an existing system to both compare to and keep the plane flying while you change the engines.
sharkdp/fd - “Intuitive syntax: fd PATTERN instead of find -iname ‘PATTERN’."
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.
Where We Are Headed - Predictions about how AI will change work.
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."
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.
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.