I’m writing about this today because it’s been one of my “can LLMs do this reliably yet?” questions for over two years now. I think they’ve just crossed the line into being useful as research assistants, without feeling the need to check everything they say with a fine-tooth comb.

I still don’t trust them not to make mistakes, but I think I might trust them enough that I’ll skip my own fact-checking for lower-stakes tasks.

This also means that a bunch of the potential dark futures we’ve been predicting for the last couple of years are a whole lot more likely to become true. Why visit websites if you can get your answers directly from the chatbot instead?

The lawsuits over this started flying back when the LLMs were still mostly rubbish. The stakes are a lot higher now that they’re actually good at it!

I can feel my usage of Google search taking a nosedive already. I expect a bumpy ride as a new economic model for the Web lurches into view.

I keep thinking of the quote that “information wants to be free”.

As the capabilities of open-source LLMs continue to increase, I keep finding myself wanting a locally-running model at arms length any time I’m near a computer.

How many more cool things can I accomplish with computers if I can always have a “good enough” answer at my disposal for virtually any question for free?

The single best trait to predict whether I'm looking at a good programmer or a great one is undoubtedly perseverance. Someone that takes to each new challenge like a dog to a bone, and who struggles to sleep until the next obstacle is cleared.

Today (literally today), I delivered the final story for the third project I’ve had at my day job since starting back in October.

This project involved a lot of unknowns and uncertainties, and resulted in a ton of code that was written and thrown away in order to arrive at the final stab at version 1.

It was painful. Ask my wife and she’ll tell you I spent many days in doubt, riddled with anxiety and impostor syndrome, feeling like a fraud.

But then, just like that, I’m able to click the “squash and merge” button, and it’s done. The clouds lift. It’s incredible.

Sort of reminds me of Courtney Dauwalter’s pain cave metaphor. Every time I start an engineering project, I go into the pain cave and start chiseling away at the walls.

Once I’ve chiseled enough, I am rewarded by stepping back out of the cave and celebrating what I’ve built. It’s an incredible feeling.

It’s a short lived euphoria, though. I only get a few moments before I dust myself off, grab a quick bite to eat, and begin my descent back into the cave to start chiseling away on the next project.

bro straight up, but tenderly: if the only thing you use your apple watch for is to find your apple phone than it is time to lose your apple watch. OK DONE. drop kicked into the sea / reset and quietly handed to a family member. no looking back, no tears. the future starts today. what else.

I haven’t worn my Apple Watch for three days now, which is the longest period of time I’ve been without something on my wrist since I got a Fitbit a decade and a half or so ago.

What I miss, in no particular order:

• Ability to find my phone
• Apple Pay without having to pull out my phone

What I don’t miss, in no particular order:

• Feeling pressured to get up and move around
• A general anxiousness whenever my wrist budges
• The feeling of an encumbered wrist

I felt like I should end this link with something, but instead I went back and read the rest of this article, which excellently ends with:

Can’t figure out what else to say to wrap this up, but I suppose resisting the need to wrap up every blog post with a CTA is its own form of protest

Reach out to someone in your life who’s putting in the work—not for likes, not for a brand, but because they give a damn. Because they’re trying to make something better. Tell them what you appreciate about them. Be specific. Be honest. And say thank you. Like you mean it, because you do.

I’ve had this on my todo list for a while now, and I finally went through and got myself removed from all the high priority sites.

I’d recommend everyone take the time to go through and opt out of having your private information on these lists.

I set up a spreadsheet and worked down it over the course of a couple weeks. It really didn’t take much time at all, and I don’t know, I feel better knowing it’s marginally more difficult for people to find out where I live and how to call me.

If you're ready, step in.
If you’re not, keep performing.
If you don't have a choice, I see you—and I hope you get free.

But know this:
You are not the problem.
The system was never built for you.
And you don’t have to shrink yourself to survive it.

I’m not here to help you bounce back.
I’m here to help you stop pretending.
And start returning.

Saw this on Brad Frost’s site and felt compelled to share it here.

I do wish I saw it three years ago, but hey, “second best time to plant a tree” and all that.

This is an episode of the Tim Ferriss show that I will undoubtedly revisit many times for years to come.

The best part is toward the end, where Jon asks Tim a question like, “What are the 5 things that you would possess if everything else was wiped away, and the only knowledge or inspiration or experience that you could draw from were of those five? Instead of the pursuit of more broad vision and connectivity, how can you go as deep as you can within a handful of things that are for you and leave the rest?”

After Tim answers the question, he flips it around and asks Jon, who in turn says, “Can I answer you with my piano?”

Another big takeaway from this episode for me was this mantra:

I feel good
I feel free
I feel fine just being me

Impostor syndrome thrives when:

→ You’re in a period of rapid growth. New job, new challenge, new responsibility — when you’re leveling up, impostor syndrome loves to make an entrance.

→ You’re surrounded by high performers. The more talented the people around you, the easier it is to assume you’re the odd one out.

→ You actually care. If the work didn’t matter to you, you wouldn’t be questioning yourself in the first place.

This sums up how I’ve felt at my new role¹ for the past several months. The nice thing is whenever I talk to my coworkers about it, they all seem to resonate equally with those feelings.

Which, according to my pal Colleen here, means I’m definitely in the right place.

Maybe, like a lot of other middle-aged professionals suddenly finding their careers upended at the peak of their creative power, I will have to adapt or face replacement. Or maybe my best bet is to continue to zig while others are zagging, and to try to keep my coding skills sharp while everyone else is “vibe coding” a monstrosity that I will have to debug when it crashes in production someday.

I enjoyed this piece because I think it represents the feelings I hear from artists. You might not consider computer programming an art form, but if art is humans expressing themselves, then writing code absolutely qualifies.

And like a lot of other artists, many of us "computer people” make money by doing our art for other people. It turns out that for the last fourty years, we could do our art for other people and we'd get paid quite well to do so.

But now that anyone can basically vibe code solutions to basic problems¹, a increasing set of non-nerds is able to use computers themselves. That naturally will drive down our value.

I use "value" here in a cold, hard, capitalistic sense. Maybe it's our turn, as artists who care about making efficient, beautiful, artistic computer programs, to worry about how we'll derive value in a world where anyone can vibe code their ideas to life.

I suspect Netscape used 88x31 "sample" sized buttons to promote their "Now" rewards program and browser. But then they released "official" 88x32 buttons to registered rewards program participants. It would be a quick and easy way to verify if your site was using an "authorized" image.

But if all you wanted was a "Now" button or if you wanted to modify or remix it, well you'd just grab the unofficial 88x31 "sample" size buttons off the Netscape site and riff. And riff people did. I also suspect this usage guideline "No Alteration Allowed - The Netscape Now button must not be altered in ANY way. Do not shrink it; take it apart; change its proportions, color, or font; or otherwise alter it from the Netscape-supplied version." did little to discourage people and probably outright encouraged them just for spite - y'know because the Internet. By the end of the decade and well into the 2000's everyone used 88x31 buttons - from software giants like Microsoft, advertisers, media outlets, technology sites, to Geocities homesteaders - everybody.

This origin story (theory?) for the 88x31 button is wild.

I've been going through the hard drive which contains all my documents since... well, basically the beginning of my computing life, and I recently came across a bunch of old 88x31s that I used for various websites of mine.

Here they are for your amusement:

I don't care what you say: that "Tim's World" one still rules.