See Brian’s article on phone addiction Brian’s making too points in this article: Social media hijacks our attention The phone is the leverage point to stop them I agree deeply with the article, adding some commentary to it: I believe social media could be made significantly less addictive with some relatively small UI changes on the device level, which social media companies have relatively little leverage over The blackpill is that social media being addictive is structural. Read more...

AI art has been around for a year now and what’s absolutely mind-blowing is how little it’s changed thing. You see a bit of it - oh that ad is AI generated, people on Twitter will post Midjourney images. But you almost never see it in the real world. No Midjourney images framed on a wall, Various trad types complain about how the modern world lacks beauty. I’m not a trad, but on this one point I agree. Read more...

Why are productivity systems bad? They’re overwhelming! They kind of drown you with minutiae. You usually “know” what you need to do, and are avoiding it for other reasons. Like currently I need to do chores, and rent a boat for a vacation, along with get my friend to buy flights and call my grandmother. I know all the tasks I have to do, I’m just not making time for them. Read more...

What I’ve learned from SF is that even when you are in the same place, doesn’t mean you’re in the same world. When I was in Boston, Harvard existed with plenty of smart people for me to connect with. But I wasn’t in their world - they might as well not exist. Yesterday I was getting a ride home from a Waymo. It was raining, I was comfy cozy inside a clean Jaguar being driven home by a robot. Read more...

A work in progress list of startup ideas, gathered from 2023-2024: Autonomous tunnel logistic robots Pen Based AI Assistant Cartoon maker Coloring Book maker for children from family photos Automatic stained-glass printer

Notes on the latest research in handwriting tracking Handwriting Trajectory (2018) Arvix Notes Online Character Recognition - tracking the pen movement Offline Character Recognition - picture of finished characters Goes into offline specifically which is a solved problem (see GPT-V below) Testing GPT-V Can take an image of my notebook with my handwriting and convert it into text perfectly. Open Questions: How do we convert diagrams? Mermaid? Is this just good enough? Read more...

Why I’m giving up LogJam I hate giving something up before it’s finished but: I’m burning a ton of time on the UI and not even using it I’m unconvinced productivity apps are worthwhile It’s simply not as fun as paper and pen Final Product It’s a Mac OS X What I got from it Way more Rust exposure How to bundle Mac apps (!!!) The next thing What does the ultimate productivity app look like? Read more...

Day 0 was tough, but exciting. The morning was rough due to some physical problems, but I was able to pull it back. I roamed around downtown San Francisco, and wrote (along with GPT-4) a LOT of Rust. Some reflections: I’m probably 3 times faster as a developer with GPT-4 than without it. Rust is a pretty good language. Rock solid tooling, and the borrow checker is starting to make sense Vanilla javascript + server side rendering can get you pretty far Lot of recommendations for either NextJS or HTMX. Read more...

Day 0 begins. I have caffeine. It’s 8:51 in the morning. I slept like crap last night. No one said it was going to be easy. Let’s begin.

Today is the last day of my work for 2024. I have the rest of the year off. That means that tomorrow is Day 0. I’ve never worked at Amazon so let’s drop any connotations. Day 0 is the beginning. Day 0 is where the long, arduous, painful journey through the desert begins. Tomorrow is Day 0. Tomorrow we’re opening the rift. We’re making the leap. Many days on this journey will be hard. Read more...