Mostly just getting some links out of my head

Not about AI and work

MyTaxReceipt.org - ahh I love this, put numbers into terms people can understand. “we spent eleventy zillion on $foo” - is that good or bad, who knows? but “I personally spent $7000 to be in a country that has $foo” is a little clearer.

yimby/nimby/wellmaybeimby: A friend’s acquaintance had recently moved to $TRENDY_US_CITY and was mad that other people were moving to $TRENDY_US_CITY and building new greenfield houses (like the one he lived in). This guy did not see the irony inherent there. Now, it’s possible to have a coherent worldview there (“if a house exists, you can move into it; we just shouldn’t build new houses, since say 2000; we will accept the skyrocketing prices”) but … only barely. And if you’re advocating to make that a law, good luck; your niche position may be 1% of people, surrounded in every direction by 20% of people with worse opinions (like basic-NIMBYism). I wish there was a word for this: “opinion that, if perfectly implemented, maybe makes sense, but opinions near it are worse, so best to accept that you can’t get your exact thing and go in another direction.”

Wake up babe, new Histomap just dropped

The Rare People Who Are Solid by Sasha Chapin. There’s something here tying together two things I think about a lot:

• micro-level “solid”, like when just being around someone is easy because they’re peaceful and non-reactive
• macro-level “solid”, which he calls “congruent” and I’d call something like “aligned”: how powerful it is when someone’s pursuing something that’s really earnestly a true goal for them

I think Chapin’s claim is they sort of reinforce, but largely the macro drives the micro. Hard to be Spiritually Very Present … and then everyday go off to a job you hate for the paycheck.

Sort of about AI and work

“AI Fatigue is Real” by Siddhant Khare - some combination of “all I do is code review”, “everything changes too fast”, “I can’t as fully understand the system”, and “I am context switching a lot.” I feel this.

is testing as we know it going away? speaking of whiplash from everything changing so fast. do these people just … not test anymore? doesn’t this miss the sense of “I’ve run all the tests and now I know at least those guarantees hold”? eesh. at the same time, I do feel like something should change - especially because maintaining a test suite is such a productivity drag.

sort of related: ““Technical debt” is just anything you don’t like” - me, and also Chelsea Troy at stack overflow

Practical LLM tips from Jonathan Lange

Rules for Agents by Daniel Reeves