“nostalgic design”: the tendency to create something for their idealized childhood www.goodreads.com/review/show/... via @omar.website
“Centuries of pedagogy, defeated by a chat window.” ergosphere.blog/posts/the-ma...
“standup update: […] i won't be able to make any further progress on this project: i need to walk in my neighborhood and listen to the breeze as it whispers through my chest and the ribs of the sugar maples, and i need to watch the blue sky fill with gold” stillness.digital/posts/2025-1...
“Linux […] is not a business at all. It's a bunch of RVs, yurts, tepees, and geodesic domes set up in a field and organized by consensus.” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_...
“his head is filled with iron and bronze, not neurons and God.” Matthew Olzmann, Replica of the Thinker
“What if AI models could figure out answers to your questions BEFORE you even ask them?” letta.com on arxiv.org/abs/2504.13171
“My Coworker, The Programmer. More of a parrot than a person. A chaos monkey disguised as a teammate. A one-man bug factory. Whispering half-formed solutions into the ears of juniors like a sick, twisted full-stack Rasputin.” deplet.ing/the-copilot-...
“Like many other self-styled thinky programmer guys, I like to imagine myself as a sort of Holmesian genius, making trenchant observations, collecting them, and then synergizing them into brilliant deductions with the keen application of my powerful mind” blog.glyph.im/2025/06/i-th...
“the world’s most brilliant, competent, and empathetic people […] spend their lives serving Marl”, a user persona that “only has one working thumb, and the only thing that thumb can do is flick upwards in a repetitive, zombielike scrolling motion.” nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyrann...
“Why study semiotics when I could be building a portfolio site?” www.terrain.com/design-liter...
“Current AI creative tools are built by non-creatives for other non-creatives to feel creative” twitter.com/weberwongwon...
"LLMs are good at the things that computers are bad at, and bad at the things that computers are good at" www.ben-evans.com/benedictevan...
“Perhaps the most significant finding was how early architectural decisions become nearly immutable in pure AI development.” towardsdatascience.com/zero-human-c...
Biotic scripts: where “botanical forms serve not merely as formal typographic inspiration, but as active authorial or designerly agents” asapjournal.com/node/graphic...
“For us, computer is the specific feeling of artifacts that allow for intimate systems of personal meaning.” github.com/timhwang/nyr...
“AI automates 57% of ‘idea-generation’ tasks, reallocating researchers to the new task of evaluating model-produced candidate materials.” aidantr.github.io/files/AI_inn...
“it’s easy to confuse usefulness of a tool with the enjoyment derived from its upkeep” chrisdone.com/posts/tamago...
Tamagotchi tooling
chrisdone.com
“Unfairly”, “expressing creativity meant mastering craft”. “AI solves this.” It is “a means of fashioning an artefact from a creative impulse without having to master the craft of expression.” www.thebookseller.com/comment/craf...
“I just mutated procrastination into a taste for curiosity in itself and would search not for answers to any specific problems but for further questions.” robhorning.substack.com/p/commodifie...
“The plausible destination that LLMs conduct towards is not entropy, but a cluster of cultural strong attractors that increase conformity, and makes it much harder to find new directions and get them to stick.” open.substack.com/pub/programm...
After software eats the world, what comes out the other end?
Malkovich. Malkovich. Malkovich?
open.substack.com
“the author of a web framwork that tries to abstract how the author thinks a browser works, is complaining about the amount of work it takes to conform their abstraction to how a browser actually works” https://bitworking.org/news/2024/09/abstractionitis/
“We simply do not have the institutional capacity to cope with that much more infrastructure coming into existence all at once.” https://berjon.com/infrastructure-shock/
“a Google Alert pointed me to a paper I wrote with Cheryl Brown quite recently. Which I did not remember us having written. Although we quite plausibly could have, as we have written many papers together, and this one is close enough to a topic we could have written about”
I have been hallucinated!
My guess is that most academics have a Scholar Alert to their names. It can be intriguing, or pleasing, or surprising, to see how one’s work is referenced and for what purposes. Sometimes it is a...
czernie.weebly.com
“Maybe you can just pytorch pipette your way to papers.” https://www.argmin.net/p/linear-doesnt-mean-easy
A completely backwards understanding of the centaur metaphor: https://caseorganic.medium.com/a-centaur-solution-for-customer-support-amplifying-ai-efficiency-with-human-empathy-8f1c7c125d28
“The prompt to create the micro-app is about the same length as the search query to find it from last time.” https://interconnected.org/home/2024/08/09/no-apps-no-masters
“We build our computers the way we build our cities—over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.” from Ellen Ullman’s Life in Code
Eolithicism: “the idea that objects don’t need to have unique, stable, pre-determined functions. This is how ordinary single-function tools can become toys with infinite, unstable identities.” https://www.sense-of-rebellion.com/text/eolithism-and-design
“The Cloud now has a greater carbon footprint than the airline industry.” https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-staggering-ecological-impacts-of-computation-and-the-cloud/
sorin@sorin.bsky.social · 2y ago“Each time you search for something like “how many rocks should I eat” and Google’s AI “snapshot” tells you “at least one small rock per day,” you’re consuming approximately three watt-hours of electricity” https://jacobin.com/2024/06/ai-data-center-energy-usage-environment