Maybe you still struggle to write in Pulaar, or in your rinky-dink language. But here in the AI-connected, English-speaking world, we don't need to write anymore. In fact, I don't remember the last time I wrote English. I have one master agent that I talk to and tell what I need to get done. It breaks down the tasks and serves them to spawned agents that get the work done.

I spend $3,000 a month on tokens. I use them mostly for:

• Research and search
• Summarization and transcription
• Writing (the big one)
• Art and music

My great transition this year, as a programmer, was that once I accepted that AI can merge code without needing my review, I could let go. What this meant was that when AI writes English for me, I no longer need to review it before publishing. It can write English, and it writes it well.

Okay, let me add this here before I go too far: /s.

I read this blog post yesterday, and I'm always baffled to hear technical people write these words:

Writing code is solved.

As a software engineer who uses AI, I feel like I must be holding it wrong. I've found a correlation between the number of lines of code written and the number of bugs found. Whether a person or a model generates the code, the longer the PR, the higher the odds of finding an issue. So when someone says coding is solved, I automatically assume they were mediocre at best before using these tools.

If we look at it technically, we could say, in the same vein, that writing English is solved. The AI can write correct sentences, write paragraphs, or publish an entire document. If you have doubts about the content, you can have a second AI verify it and fix potential hallucinations. But of course, that's not how it works in the real world. The moment people detect AI-generated text, even if it is after reading the whole text, they reject it.

It feels empty, deceitful. What is an anecdote from an LLM to convey, when the experience never actually happened? Yes, code is not to be consumed like English. It is for the machine. But it is subjective in its purpose because we humans have to read it eventually.

Writing code is not solved, just as writing English cannot be solved. Writing is subjective and has no solution because it isn't a problem. If anything, AI for writing is a testament to this saying:

"Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte." — Blaise Pascal

I've seen the picture of the iPhone Duo, still in the store, perched on a stand, its screen flickering with broken white lines.

Apple has touted testing the screen hinge, opening it mechanically thousands of times. The phone survived every test it was put through. Yet here it is, on the stand, with a broken screen.

Wait till the product meets its first customer.

I'm sure the tests worked in theory and in the delicate hands of its engineers. But customers' hands are anything but delicate. Remember Elon Musk's wrecking ball? They must have tested the Cybertruck's window beforehand, but it took just one person outside the test group to break the glass with a single throw.

I remember when my nephew was barely a year old, not even able to walk. I handed him a wooden spoon in the living room as a distraction while I ran to the kitchen to get some food. As soon as I got there, I heard a snap. I came back to find this little boy holding the spoon, broken in two. It was a hard spoon, and there was no way his one-year-old hands could break it in half, yet there was the proof in front of me.

So yes, Apple tested the rigidity of the screen with fancy machines, but the iPhone Duo never stood a chance against the customer's hands. Unless we are holding it wrong?

I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work. — Office Space

I was watching a video where a guy said he has 8 agents working in the background. He was stressed out and was trying to "get shit done." At one point he said "I have no time to myself."

That was very confusing. Let's assume for a second that the AI agents were doing all the work for him. Maybe it was some tedious work that would have taken him so much time to do manually. Now, he doesn't have to do the work because someone else is doing it. Why is he still busy?

It seems like the goal of productivity is to reduce the amount of work needed to create a set of results. But the moment you create the same results in less time, you are incentivised to use the new gained time to produce even more results.

You will rest when you grow up — My Mom.

But now that we are grown up, our employer changed the tune just a bit:

You will rest when you are dead.

As I mentioned before, it takes me way too long to edit a single video. So I am releasing it in chunks. If I never finish it, well then at least I'll have a few videos out.

What is the video about? Well, it is about the future we were promised, versus the one we are actually living in. It's not dystopian, but it seems like the goal of tech is supposedly to automate the tedious and mundane, so we can have more time to do the things we love. But along the way came the word productivity. The goal of productivity is not to get free time. It is to produce more in the same amount of time. Not produce more in less time. Read this a couple times for it to stick.

Click the image to load

The first one was 1 minute long. Today's will be two minutes. And the next will be 3 minutes long. Then I'll have to think about Fibonacci.

For me, boredom is just a signal. It means I've hit a roadblock and my brain is trying to convince me not to go any further. "Give up. This sucks anyway. Why are you still wasting your time on this silly thing?"

That's how I feel when I do things I'm really bad at. I think I'm not good at making YouTube videos. Whenever I think of a subject I find really exciting, I start writing, record a first pass, and then load DaVinci Resolve.

With my current schedule, job, family, and responsibilities, I've found that it takes me a whole week to polish three minutes of video. That means I hear the same material I wrote and recorded over and over until it becomes completely boring. After a few weeks, I lose interest in the subject and have no motivation to finish it.

But I think that's just an excuse I tell myself. I like the videos I've managed to complete. I wish I could change some parts, but I still like the final product. It's just that the process gets in the way, and it does so because I have no expertise in making videos. But then again, I always go back to my trusted method: if you're bad at something, do it at least a hundred times before you decide to give up.

We all suck at the beginning, and we're in no position to judge a craft until we've practiced it enough to love it or hate it. So here's to another attempt. I'll be publishing videos in the coming weeks. The first one will be just a minute long, the second will be two minutes long, the third... you get the gist. Hope you enjoy it.

"I'm sorry, you're out of time, we have to move on. Senator, what's your response? You have three minutes."

Watching a political debate these days feels useless. Candidates get two minutes to make their case, and their opponents get even less time to reply. I'm reminded of Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman, where he argues that what passes for debate on TV is nothing more than an audition or a performance review. It is only an opportunity to come up with catchy sound bites or to appear likable.

On the other hand, if you want long-form, one-sided podcasts where politicians can babble uninterrupted for hours without being challenged, you can tune into Joe Rogan, Lex Fridman, or whichever pseudo-comedian is trending.

Our choices seem locked between traditional media, where you barely have time to clear your throat, and one-sided online echo chambers.

So why not a third option? Two candidates sitting down in a long-form podcast format. Debate the issues, prove your point, and take turns. No commercial breaks required. If it takes three hours, it takes three hours.

This format isn't new, in fact, it plagues social media right now. The problem is that it's mostly driven by influencers, or people of no consequence, chasing viral moments. They are either doing gender wars, or arguing whether it was a Nazi salute or not. When you switch to traditional media, the talking heads on CNN, Fox, or Piers Morgan's show are just that. Talking heads.

Of course, this might never happen because candidates have almost zero incentive to subject themselves to it. If they're unprepared or rely on weak arguments that don't hold up past a 15-second clip, a three-hour deep dive could destroy their campaign.

Still, it would be nice to see Michiganders give this a shot in the coming month.

We’ve given in to using LLMs for writing at work. From emails and Slack comments to full-on documentation, everything is AI-generated. However, I’ve realized it only ever saves me time when I’m being lazy. That is, it’s great at converting meetings into transcripts, summarizing those transcripts into action items, and keeping information accessible.

But it’s pretty bad because the result is ridden with invisible errors. But what counts as an error if you trust the LLM and never meticulously read the output? And how much time are you really saving if you end up spending that time proofreading?

I went back to a meeting transcript after a developer struggled to turn my AI-generated summary into a coherent ticket. Looking through the source transcript, I noticed that at one point it recorded the word "embroidery." I mean, we work for a large telecom company, the chances of me using that word are slim to none. Nevertheless, the AI summarized the conversation and included "embroidery" as an action item.

In the words of Claude himself:

It's not just X, it's Y.

I chuckled, but it made me think about all the BI slop we generate daily in the name of using AI technology. It feels helpful. Creating massive documents makes us look productive. Generating a pull request with changes across hundreds of files seems impressive. Asking AI to validate an idea feels instructive. Unless you take the time to scrutinize the results.

I can only imagine what the world will look like when we feed all this slop back into the machine.

Last week I opened Edge to test my Internet connection, because that's the only thing I use it for, and noticed something new. Right beneath the address bar was a new bar with a button offering to let the browser launch automatically whenever I start my computer. That was strange. Yes, I open the browser the moment the computer starts, but why would they want to do that for me?

And just now, I opened Chrome, and saw the exact same message but for Chrome:

It looks innocent enough. We all start browsing the web right away when we turn on our computers, so what's the big deal here? Well, the big deal is that everyone wants to be the front page. Defaults matter. While we all want to believe we have agency, the numbers don't lie. Most of us never change the default settings. Just last year, Google paid Apple close to $20 billion just to remain the default search engine on Apple products.

While we're all distracted by the AI race, the one race that actually matters is who remains the front page of the Internet. Microsoft is trying to claim that spot by loading its browser at Windows startup. Now Google is trying to win that space back by doing the same with its own browser.

On my Mac, Anthropic has been very aggressive about trying to load Claude automatically. I suspect every company will be pursuing this aggressively in the near future. The quality of your product is secondary to the exposure it gets. Not even benchmarks matter if you can't be on the user's front page.

Google still holds the front page of the Internet, and that makes up for its AI model not being at the top of the benchmarks.

Note there are no options to dismiss. Only "Set later"

But don't let them take this space from you. They are all fighting for your attention. I urge you to simply consider pressing the little X button they tuck into the corner. It's your computer, use it the way that suits you best.

This was so casually uttered by LG executives in their sales pitch to advertising companies.

We own the glass.

What they mean is, they own your tv. They own everything on it. You may have paid for the box, but they own the glass. They can run anything they want on it, and you have agreed, in the terms and conditions, that you will inform anyone entering your household that the TV may record them without warning.

TVs come equipped with microphones, wifi radio, and tracking software. That’s enough to monitor everything that’s happening around it.

If you haven't watched the research video essay published by Gamer Nexus, I highly recommend it. I've said it many times before, TVs are cheap because you aren't simply watching them, they are watching you and listening, and reporting back to the mothership. This info is then used to sell you more stuff.

What scares me in all this is that the solution I often tell people may no longer be true. I often tell people, just disconnect your TV from the network and you are all set. Now imagine just for a second. What if they add a cellular radio to the device? One with an esim. Then that is it. You can no longer disconnect your device from the internet. They now own the glass in your house, and have a permanent connection that you cannot disable.

They own the glass. We are merely vessels to their business.

I was debugging an issue and I found a link to my blog!

Interviewing a senior software engineer

Biggest challenge so far in any coding project?

My biggest challenge isn't code per se. It is explaining to someone else what I am trying to do with the code. It is surprisingly hard to convert the thoughts in my head (or the code) into something coherent someone else can understand.

I still believe that. I don't even remember when we had this discussion, but I'm glad Walter has kept it up. And a great reminder of my priorities.

If you weren't coding, what would you be doing?

I'd be a writer. (not a good one, but one nonetheless)

Yep.