AI
Matt Ross and
AI
Showing off your portfolio of bespoke Claude Code projects and looking at others’ portfolios is a new social activity that has already acquired the quality of campy tedium we associate with people in the 70s subjecting each other to slide shows of unremarkable vacations. Or people in the 80s and 90s inflicting VHS home videos on each other.
Archival Selves
What it produces is something like hypomania: a state where your productive capacity genuinely increases. You’re not imagining that you’re getting more done, you actually are, but your evaluative faculty is unaccustomed to this mode of creation. You lose the ability to distinguish between “this is good” and “I feel good making this.” Everything... See more
Vibe Coding and the Maker Movement
Say what you want about Elon Musk, but he was absolutely correct that Twitter was carrying a ton of needless employees. This reckoning was coming, and “AI” is just a convenient scapegoat.
Block Lays Off 4,000 (of 10,000) Employees
Voice is asymmetric. Speaking is high bandwidth. But listening is low bandwidth.
Speaking is quick, listening is slow
The flex isn’t what you’ve accomplished anymore. It’s what’s working while you’re sitting here not working.
Token Anxiety
Through extensive experimentation across diverse puzzles, we show that frontier LRMs face a complete accuracy collapse beyond certain complexities. Moreover, they exhibit a counter-intuitive scaling limit: their reasoning effort increases with problem complexity up to a point, then declines despite having an adequate token budget. By comparing LRMs
... See moreParshin Shojaee • The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity
“The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity.” They can’t think. Water is wet.
In 2013, the Chicago Sun-Times fired all 28 of its staff photographers. Every single one. Including John H. White, who had won a Pulitzer Prize.
The plan was simple. Reporters would shoot their own photos using iPhones. The technology had gotten good enough. The cameras were in everyone’s pockets. Why pay 28 salaries for something the existing staff
... See moreAll of the people I love hate this stuff, and all the people I hate love it. And yet, likely because of the same personality flaws that drew me to technology in the first place, I am annoyingly excited.
archive.is
I feel this intensely and think about it all the time. Many people for whom I have tremendous respect, people I have been reading for many years, people who I look to to make sense of the world really do seem to dislike AI. All I can tell you is that for the last few years, I have been obsessively playing with it, building things with it and spending a lot of time trying to make sense of it. I can’t stop. It’s the exact same feeling and drive I had when I first installed Mosaic in the 90s. But this feels quite a bit different.