What are some examples of idiosyncratic computer usage?
- Use the browser URL bar to turn rich text into plain text.
- Open Photo Booth to check the webcam before joining a call instead of built-in functionality.
We will look at this era as the dark ages of technology. So much content lost.
Hopefully we see more of: local-first, multiplayer, and with a document model that doesn’t make your content die after VCs pull out.
The way
@github
does access control is still the 🐐. Need access to an internal tool? Open a pull request with a justification.
More products should be pull request inspired.
I've been tracking my location (~0.5M data points) for the past year in a SQLite database.
In combination with my
@Obsidian
journal, my credit card CSV data, and my internet browsing history I now have a pretty great year in review.
My
@github
dashboard sidebar is jurry-rigged and I ❤️ it. It's just a Markdown file that I can populate with a GitHub Action.
P.S: Before you try it, it's not a publicly available feature and internally has an active user count of 1.
I want Apple/Google Maps to make their products more malleable. Let me write a quick layer that shows my friends or the midpoint cafe between me and someone I’m meeting.
Decompose the app!
P.S: Why is “Find My” an app?!
this is why we need more apps with an architecture of participation (e.g. vs code, obsidian, etc.)
right now every team wanting to make a cool utility has to build the rest of the fucking owl too.
This is why I’m excited about LLMs. I don’t want them to do my thinking, writing, or sketching. I want them to liberate me from having to think like a computer.
Zed is now open source!
Our mission is to revolutionize developer collaboration, building the world's best code editor in the process. After working together in Zed as a small team, it's time to scale up to transform Zed into a collaboration platform.
There has been so little innovation in calendar software.
The two meaningful additions to calendaring in the last decade have been: Calendly-style scheduling links and Cron’s “block event on [other calendar].”
Give me tags, filters, automation, custom metadata fields, image
A calendar app that lets me slice my time by different facets:
- Focus time vs meetings
- Different projects
- Zoom vs in-person (v different energy dynamics!)
- Stress level (casual chat vs intense meeting)
- Fixed vs flexible commitments
PlanetScale is nuking the free DB behind
What should I use to replace the DB on this glorified hit counter?
Leaning towards Deno Deploy or Cloudflare KV
A significant portion of the internet in your backpack!
I was on a plane over the Pacific yesterday (no WiFi). Before taking off I downloaded the OSS Mistral model (ollama run mistral).
On the flight I had various general knowledge, programming, and math questions.
It got 9/10
Meh.
I don’t want to hear the same joke over and over again but I do use the same professional software over decades.
Serious software for serious output has a learning curve and that’s OK.
👋 VS Code, NeoVim, Blender, Excel, Figma, Bloomberg Terminal, KiCAD
ChatGPT voice has had a lot more impact on my day to day than I would have anticipated.
I now regularly have long conversations and debates with it.
One approach I take often:
Me: ChatGPT, is my understanding of [subject] correct? [understanding]…
Assistant: No, think of it
1 hour Apple Vision Pro review:
1. I cannot believe how crisp the native UI is – an engineering marvel.
2. Passthrough feels depressing not magic.
3. The thing is heavy and you never forget you're wearing it.
4. The gesture based input is designed for consumption.
Today’s early-stage startups cosplay PMF.
Beautiful landing pages, a privacy policy that makes iTunes jealous, 2FA, SOC2, a NASCAR-level logo wall...
If this trend continues, seed startups will soon have an “Investor Relations” tab.
Do you have 1,000 daily users? 100? 10?!
Database dopamine!
Every week I get this report from
@PlanetScale
:
- My slowest queries
- Changes in storage
- Utilization
I'm not even a Big Boy™ user of PlanetScale but this is delightful.
When dumb queries are slow I am reminded to fix them. When they are fast I feel good
“English is the new programming language” is such nonsense.
We invent programming languages to strike a delicate balance between precision and concision.
@chan_k
Exceptional. Can you share anything on the process? How did you tinker on the animations? Did the hardware design come first? So many questions!
I don’t understand why all these AI hardware companies are trying to ship polished consumer experiences.
Make a device for hackers/enthusiasts and iterate. Mimic the early PC era…
Modern computing environments are so noisy.
Push notifications, "What's happening", emoji barf, ads nested in ads, "Your suggestions", __Trending__, Up Next™, toast toast toast...
Quiet software is exceedingly rare.
@adamwathan
We’ve discussed it. Requires great framing. GitHub is one of the only social networks where doing–not talking–is rewarded. Would have to figure out how to preserve that.
💜 Erosion Resistance (): We gave it a good try.
P.S: This
@heroku
app has run continuously since the day it was deployed–without any human intervention.
people underestimate how much the difficulty of making UIs is a bottleneck for how sophisticated our tools are. anybody who has been in / adjacent to the tools for thought space knows this firsthand because we've all been nerd sniped into building our own text editors at some
I mean, we still play chess and run 100m sprints. Watching humans do incredible things is magical.
If anything the Cambrian explosion of fast food content will increase our desire to witness true humanity. Flaws and all…
If you use Chat GPT a lot, DM me. I have something I'd love for you to try and get feedback on.
P.S: Include a screenshot of a Chat GPT convo you found particularly enjoyable.
You can always tell when marketing machines have taken over at a dev tool company.
The newsletters are always poorly targeted and have the nutritional density of a rice cracker.
Sadly the english translation does not do this clip any justice.
His (unintentional) comedic timing is impeccable, the shoulder shrug and the jump cut to that dresser, the word choices, and the helplessness in trying to decipher the intention behind these things...
This may be
I'm looking for an open source codebase that has moderately complex business logic, a fairly sizable database schema, and ideally some user interface.
The language doesn't matter. Anything come to mind? If
@linear
were open source it would be the ideal candidate.
It takes about ~3 minutes to get any of the llama models running locally and another ~3 minutes to deploy them on Fly.
My kind of infra and DX.
Small sharp remix-able tools!
Large language models are fun, but waiting for your local CPU to crunch numbers isn't. Our friends at have a setup for running Ollama on their GPUs so you can use any model you want. See here for more!
Metamuse 67 // Dynamic documents
With
@mschoening
and
@geoffreylitt
• Data detectors, live searches, and language models
• The beauty of personal microformats
• The
@inkandswitch
research process
• Why Stable Diffusion is like a slot machine
Notion was the tipping point for me. I used to keep my second brain in Notion. I thought I could rely on their offline caching. The data was right there, locally cached in JSON but my session had expired. All I could see was a login screen. What I wanted to see was my car manual
@helenhousandi
@github
It’s more of a curse than a blessing. I get mentioned on every issue and PR that handles min() and max(). Notifications are useless to me.
We will crave human-only content, human-scale networks, "the algorithm"-free zones, and human-speed "reality" in ways that are not priced in at all...
Buy a theater company, start a community garden, and hoard printed books—the good ones; you won't need "The 4-Hour Work Week."
Apple makes the best guest badge lanyards.
1) The badge doesn't twist/rotate.
2) They don't rattle.
3) The textile and clip are monochrome.
4) They are subtly color-coded based on access.
@cooperx86
Unsure about the financial question but I think the Ruby community, culture, mindset produced the best product thinkers for a decade or so. Even when the products weren’t written in Ruby, the feel was there.
Worth noting many Herokai (including myself) had a cloud-first value in 2012. We celebrated an empty Dock on macOS. Almost everyone has changed their mind since.
@joshm
It would be amazing if Arc were a little more aggressive in becoming a good app environment (aka everything Electron is used for).
Example:
Let my website donate a global shortcut to Arc. When pressed, I can respond to it regardless of whether the app was an open tab.
How does this new design prioritize the consumer in any way? Most of the pixels on the screen transmit 0 information. Literally 0.
Stop designing software like glossy magazine editorials that look good in a keynote.
If LLMs are really good at generating code will we see more professional tools that shifted to direct manipulation revert (VCS pun intended)?
For example:
@KittyCADInc
/
@openscad
(image source: )
The fact that IDE infrastructure is now largely open source (Visual Studio Code, LSPs) makes migrating from one IDE to another a lot less painful than it used to be.
Cursor is "just" another flavor of Visual Studio Code with cool additional AI features.
Zed replaces the GUI but
I tried solving this in 2009. I'm happy to report we have made remarkably little progress.
On the other hand I can buy a centralized monkey pic with some decentralized floopsy flops and a chatbot can get me a 1600 on my SATs...
God works in mysterious ways.
Extremely smart, driven, and rational founders always make the same mistake:
They assume that other humans will do the "right" thing given the same information.
If they are lucky enough to get enough users to have support tickets, engaging with them is the best cure for this
@rauchg
Local-first doesn’t preclude collaboration.
Also, I’m pretty sure I can still open a Keynote file from 2006. I have one on an old hard drive. I’ll report back.
I’m of course not going to defend their syncing. 🤭
has trained a groundbreaking model with many millions of tokens of context that performed far better in our evals than anything we've tried before.
They're using it to build an advanced AI programmer that can reason over your entire codebase and the
Can someone point me to a blog post that explains how to set up a modern Python development environment?
From what I gather I need:
- Something that installs various Python version
- Something that sets up virtual environments
- Something that installs packages
I'm more excited about
@OpenAI
's keynote today than any other tech keynote in the past 5 years.
If these rumors materialize, we're going to see a lot of situated software[^1] being built in the next year.
[^1]:
Ten months ago, we launched the Vesuvius Challenge to solve the ancient problem of the Herculaneum Papyri, a library of scrolls that were flash-fried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.
Today we are overjoyed to announce that our crazy project has succeeded. After 2000
@sriramk
@paulg
I have never heard of this word and neither Google nor Google Trends indicate that this is anything more than a clever compound noun (Komposita).
See: Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän
Company news: We totally revamped our compensation system this summer. In short, "Flex Comp" now gives everyone a simple UX where you see your total compensation and choose a mix of Cash/RSU/Stock via simple sliders.
🖥️🖋️ Programmable ink has changed how I think about HCI. Almost every way we interact with computers today is "programmer bullshit". Watch this talk by
@szymon_k
: