When to use AI? “If your job is to move heavy things from one side of the room to another, you should use whatever assistive tech you have on hand: a wagon, a forklift… even a robot. But at the gym, it makes no sense for that robot to lift weights for you.” www.schneier.com/blog/archive...

for most things

Alex Wise@engineer.sitereliability.best · yesterday

I blame everyone getting SaaS-brained over the past decade and largely not having interesting data to search over anymore.

rule of thumb for RAG/vector search: if you would consider it a bug if it returned less than 100% of the hits, then vector search is not for you, you’re looking for SQL

This is what Audible's pricing model gets so right.

Gordon@gordon.bsky.social · yesterday

Macropayments

In case you are a sicko thinking about building a local-first Airtable: the specific thing that makes Airtable so great (besides foreign keys) is its automation system... Send an email when condition is met, etc. So you could charge a SaaS subscription just to send emails etc.

Gordon@gordon.bsky.social · yesterday

which of you sickos is going to create a localfirst airtable?

nooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Techmeme@techmeme.com · yesterday

Bending Spoons agrees to acquire Airtable in an all-cash deal valuing the US software company at $1.285B, set to close by 2026-end, its first post-IPO deal (Reuters) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

writing code by hand must have been an incredibly deep learning experience

Gordon@gordon.bsky.social · 2d ago

Copying manuscripts by hand must have been an incredibly deep learning experience. Working through the ideas of Plato or Aristotle or Augustine line by line. Swimming in author’s head for months.

Copying manuscripts by hand must have been an incredibly deep learning experience. Working through the ideas of Plato or Aristotle or Augustine line by line. Swimming in author’s head for months.

in the same way "problem selection" has become more and more important, playing to your outs -> "solution selection" a problem can be solved many ways but how should _I_ solve it _now_ is the founder mindset the process of implementing said solution seems less important than ever

Star Axis is complete. 50 years in the making, land artist Charles Ross has finished his monumental observatory in New Mexico. An open lens tracks Polaris and the 26,000-year cycle of Earth's precession. Read the beautiful feature in the NYT -> www.nytimes.com/2026/07/22/a...

Playing to your outs gordonbrander.com/notes/playin... Imagine no one will be writing code in two years. What does it look like to pay to my outs as a dev? Probably it looks like being a founder.

My personal site is now part of the Atmosphere ☁️😌 gordonbrander.com/notes/ecosys...

opinions are now facts

13 The number of DNS root servers. There’s a set of root servers around the world whose primary job is to store domain-IP pairs. There are only 13 such servers. Technically, it’s 13 IP addresses shared by about two thousand actual servers around the world. 12 organizations run those 13 root servers

$0 The initial cost to register a domain in 1993. Domain registration was free when it first opened to the public in the early nineties. The internet will probably be pretty niche, anyway, right?

LLMs are unbelievably useful for market research.

daily affirmations for us decentralization appreciators

apenwarr@apenwarr.ca · 6d ago

One step at a time! We‘ll get there if we keep reminding ourselves that it doesn’t have to suck, it just incidentally currently sucks

A sneak peek at brick building on protocol 👀

Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows

Benjamin@benjaminschneider.ch · last yr.

what book(s) come to mind that are like this?

End users don’t care at all. But app developers care, and users want apps. Remember the third party twitter and reddit apps before they got locked out? With bsky, app developers can’t get locked out, which means their business is viable. Make it inviting to build the new tweetdeck or hubspot.

dario chuckled. "you mean the chaos tokens?"

This actually sucks. There is nothing fundamental about computers that means they should be like this

skelly tayne@ohnoether.bsky.social · 7d ago

give a man a hosted platform, he'll say he can do it better for a lifetime let a man self-host a platform, he'll rejoin your hosted platform in 3 months

New atproto app idea I demoed yesterday where you record what you’re grateful for and tag someone. Each orb is a recording, and is used to power a generative synth for a dynamic ambient soundscape. Definitely zoned out to this last night 👽

This is like classic 2 sided market stuff. Generally you have to pick a side to start with and establish enough of a beachhead to gather momentum and then start bringing the other audience in to create a self-sustaining ecosystem.

best loop engineering tutorial

Agents are actors newsletter.squishy.computer/p/agents-are...

Agents are actors

Multi-agent is just actor model

newsletter.squishy.computer

aron@adler.dev · last wk.

bro since when can claude subagents spawn their own subagents that can also spawn their own subagents?

Lesson I keep relearning: avoid investing in infrastructure too early **except** the infrastructure that lets you increase the speed of your prototyping loop.

alternative

Gordon@gordon.bsky.social · last wk.

How to survive in the AI information economy: you gotta be Rick Rubin maxxing. The thing he is bringing is not a set of mechanical skills (commoditized). What he is bringing is a unique set of tastes, perspectives, and values.

"I would push back"... slightly troubling how the models seem to get more opinionated as they get smarter.

Gordon@gordon.bsky.social · last wk.

The AI doesn't have opinions. It has been engineered to avoid opinions (this is what alignment means). You have to bring the opinions, the values, the taste. So: design will be commoditized last.

How to survive in the AI information economy: you gotta be Rick Rubin maxxing. The thing he is bringing is not a set of mechanical skills (commoditized). What he is bringing is a unique set of tastes, perspectives, and values.