Sacha

Ask for things that feel unreasonable, to make sure your intuitions about what’s reasonable are accurate (try not to be a jerk in the process). If you’re only asking for things you get, you’re not aiming high enough. Jobs are a great example: Especially if you’re early in your career, you should aim to get rejected from most things you apply for.

“I think there's a whole class of people who are allergic to code...they don't even want to know it exists...and Val Town is not the product for those people. The product for those people is Claude Artifacts or Github Spark.”

As Varoufakis points out in Technofeudalism , one of the paradoxes of capitalism is that when you as a worker are hired somewhere, there are two kinds of value being exchanged. There’s your ‘exchange value’, or how much money your time is worth in the free market. And then there’s your ‘experiential value’, the value of your qualities as a human... See more

Readers, I highly recommend the prescient article written by the incomparable and much missed Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, on rabbisacks.org:

Future Tense: The New Antisemitism

What is it & how do we deal with it?

1 November 2007

In the latest piece in his series Also True for Humans , about managing AIs like you'd manage people, Michael explores the inner workings of AI agents—the next generation of assistive AI technology—and what they need to succeed. He goes in-depth on the reason and act (ReAct) pattern, one of the first attempts to give large language models the tools... See more

Google also (separately?) released Deep Research, which is a truly useful agentic AI tool. Give it a research topic, and it'll spider through hundreds of websites, refining its search based on what it learns, before delivering a comprehensive report with citations.

In my way of thinking, radical agency involves finding real edges: things you are willing to do that others aren’t, often because they’re annoying, unpleasant, or obscured in a cloud of aversion.

Design to code is about automating beautiful visual designs into clean code that matches the designed look. It takes a collaborative approach between designers and developers to get it right, which ultimately turns days of work into minutes. But how did we get here, and where is it going?

Steve is the cofounder and CEO of Val Town, a cloud-based platform for developers to write, share, and deploy code directly in the browser.