Buster Benson

@busterbenson.com

Founder of https://750words.com. Author of “Why Are We Yelling? The Art of Productive Disagreement”. Temporarily human. http://busterbenson.com

Any thoughts or predictions about what the next generation of AI-assisted product manager + full-stack engineer + prototype builder + data analyst role will be called? A full-stack generalist? The last employed person? It's both exciting and kinda dark to contemplate.

Does anyone want to join me in the monthly challenge on 750words.com? It starts on Monday. Here's a one month free coupon so it's free for a month, even after the free trial: MONTHLYCHALLENGE If you haven't used the site in a while (or ever) I'd love your feedback!

I'm hosting a small salon this weekend on the topic of the nature of reality, and built a fun quiz to help people identify their belief system / understanding of the nature of reality. If you want to help test it out and let me know if it works for you or not, try it here: cosmology-quiz.vercel.app

Shows the results page for my own cosmology: Buddhist Mind-Only. A couple charts and lists.

Scientists always talk about the singularity around a black hole where space bends enough that “even light cannot escape”. At my best I could run a mile in about 5 minutes. Can they start talking about the effective singularity where I wouldn’t be able to escape? That seems like an important detail.

I reached the first milestone of basically re-writing the entire frontend of 750words.com via vibe coding, upgrading the frameworks and adding a few big features. It ultimately led to 86k lines of code that I chatted into existence.

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I’m running a new experimental prisoner’s dilemma tournament, pitting ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini against a team of humans. If you’re interested in game theory and/or curious to see how well we can do against these AIs, I think this will be a lot of fun to watch.

Wanna play an Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma Tournament between ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and humans?

How will we do against the LLMs in this classic game of cooperation and betrayal?

open.substack.com

I attempted to use AI to migrate 750words.com to the latest versions or Nuxt+Vue back in February, and struggled for 2 weeks before giving up on what was likely a 1-2 month task. Yesterday I tried again (from scratch) with the latest Claude 4 and Cursor, and caught up to where I was in ~3 hours!

In your own mental simulation of the present and future, would the arrival of AGI increase or decrease our chances of mitigating the worst case climate crisis scenarios?

If I shared three links, one that pointed to Medium, one that pointed to Substack, and one that pointed to my self-hosted blog, which one would you click on and why? a) Medium b) Substack c) self-hosted blog c) none of the above

Do you use a journaling app (other than 750words.com--I know about that one!) that integrates with AI in any way? What do you think of it? I wanna round up of all the different ways this is being done and review them and share thoughts back. Hellppp!

I didn't expect it to be so delightful to boycott Amazon. They pioneered frictionless online shopping so well that now almost everyone can do it (and it's fun finding new businesses), and in the cases that I do have to visit a place in person... also not the worst thing in the world! 🌈 ✨

After using Claude 3.7 Sonnet for a week, I think it's safe to say that the days of googling error messages and strange bugs is not long for the world. I guess the question is... what will happen when people stop posting these questions (and answers) to the web? Will LLMs train themselves?

Deleted Amazon off my phone, and cancelled all my Subscribe and Saves. And won’t use them on the web anymore either. I need to spend less anyway, and seems easier to do now than it has in the past. Not sure about AWS though…

Pedro Pascal responding to transphobia on social media: “I can’t think of anything more vile and small and pathetic than terrorizing the smallest, most vulnerable community of people who want nothing from you, except the right to exist.” (via @charliejane.bsky.social) [capitalfm.com]

Pedro Pascal calls out “vile and pathetic” transphobic trolls after defending trans rights

Pedro Pascal, whose sister Lux is a trans woman, is a prominent trans ally and he has no time for transphobia.

capitalfm.com

Remember the "life in weeks" thing I built a while ago? busterbenson.com/life-in-weeks @ginatrapani.org has gone and leveled it up and made her code available as well! weeks.ginatrapani.org More people should do the exercise of identifying the formative events of their lives. Now's your chance!

Life in Weeks

My life, where each week I’ve been alive is a little box, inspired by this post by Tim Urban. When meaningful things happen (for both better and worse) I make a note of it so I can remember how much o...

busterbenson.com

I'm gonna spend a week or so tinkering with XCode and Swift and see how far I can get towards building a bare bones app for 750words.com. I've watched a couple tutorial videos and am kind of 🤯 by how much simpler app dev has gotten since Objective-C. Has anyone built their first Swift app recently?

I decided to stop doom-scrolling and read lots of fiction instead. So far I've read books 2-5 of the Stormlight Archive and am on book 3 of the Fourth Wing/Empyrean series, and also just started Blood Over Bright Haven. If those titles are familiar to you, recommend me more!

I’m about halfway through my 9-month experiment to make 750words.com sustainable. It has required some cuts in spending and Louie (8) has noticed this. Tonight he decided to get proactive and asked me how old I was and then asked Alexa what kind of jobs a 48-year old could get. It was very sweet.

Does this make sense to anyone? Continuing to try to create a nature-based calendar that organizes around lunar cycles (moonths) instead of months in a way that invites curiosity without breaking brains. Lots of planets in the night sky right now! Have you seen Venus???

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Finished book 5 of the Stormlight Archive! That was so good! I was kinda hoping this would last me a bit longer but I guess I have the Mistborn series to read now.

the threat of fascism hits different when you are firmly in community. find your people and build something resilient and beautiful. there is strength in solidarity.