I keep hearing about RAM prices but no one is talking about the real cost of AI scarcity? I haven’t seen an Anh Phoong billboard in months
sophie alpert
@sophiebits.com
you have the ability to understand things principal engineer, react person, super gay, still masking
got frustrated recently at work about people writing using AI instead of using their brains! here's my take on it: sophiebits.com/2026/06/25/t...
There are no lossless transformations of natural-language text
sophiebits.com
“I would’ve thought that was so cool if my parents had done that when I was little!” no you wouldn’t. you’d’ve thought it was normal
thinking today about how if AI takes the easy parts of our jobs then we'll just spend all day doing hard tasks instead! maybe first written about by @fredbenenson.com www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...
AI Is Coming for Your Favorite Menial Tasks
As AI gets better at performing routine tasks traditionally done by humans, only stressful ones will be left. The work experience could suffer.
theatlantic.com
saw this @muni.sfmta.com bus last night. what does it mean! this little guy is living two weeks in the future
why does every ecommerce website now offer me “You’ve earned a mystery discount!! Which of the following are you most interested in:” as soon as I click on anything I really don’t think it used to be like this
More blogging! I don't want AI agents controlling my laptop. Not because that's not useful, but because it's incredibly hard (impossible?) to do securely: sophiebits.com/2025/09/09/a...
I don’t want AI agents controlling my laptop
sophiebits.com
I keep getting into conversations with engineers where I talk about how desperately I want my database to support materialized views with incremental updates and too often I get a blank stare in response. so I wrote a new post about why you should care! sophiebits.com/2025/08/22/m...
Materialized views are obviously useful
sophiebits.com
I have a confession to make. I've gone back and forth on whether to say anything, but I can't keep quiet any longer—not only does this look bad, it makes no sense. Please stop doing the cursor-smoothy effect that Screen Studio does. It's so bad. Not how hovering on things works!! Hello!
you can always do the “5 whys” in your incident review but be careful about going past that because after like 8 whys it’s just “capitalism”
every time you think "maybe I should add a layer of caching in the application", take that energy and make the database faster instead
“Important information about disputing online: You cannot change your transgender or non-binary name here but it can be done via mail.” uh, thanks TransUnion
Union square is full of people protesting for trans youth. Over for 4000 in attendance
what are everyone's favorite tiny tools in the form of web pages? for the sake of argument, specifically ones that (a) do something useful and (b) don't send your data anywhere here's three that I always come back to:
Other news contained in this document: Via an official "Slur Update," Meta has decided "'Tranny' is no longer a designated slur and is now non-violating." I have never seen the company (or any other platform) delist a slur before.
if someone handed you a button that changes your gender instantly and kills a random person somewhere in the world, how many times would you press it?
I wanna hear the untold stories of the huge architectural and data migrations that go into the “smallest” changes like when Slack added the ability to add someone to a group DM and *move past messages* to the new conversation or how Amazon no longer asks which Kindle to send your library book to