Notes

Unfortunately, it seems that today’s big LLMs are more like physicists than philosophers. Rather than more knowledge improving their awareness of their own ignorance, it only makes them more cocksure about knowing everything.

I meet so many aspiring designers who proudly assert that they’re really good at “ideas”. The world does not need more idea people, at least until it catches up on the inspiring backlog of Matt Webb’s ideas. We need to make home-defragging robots before dreaming up new things to buy.

Klarna is going DIY on software thanks to AI.

I bet if you’re on a dev team there, you are either:

• frustrated that your productive colleagues and “ignore the bullshit” team are having their good work credited solely to their use of copilots, or
• scared because you know it’s time to find another job and all you know how to do is consume user stories.

I just re-read this classic post about leadership in the metaverse and it strikes me how similar the experience seems, from my outsider perspective, to running a large open source project. Is OSS a metaverse?

Open Interpreter’s Local Model Computer protocol feels very important. Apple and Microsoft have struggled to bootstrap ubiquitous scripting APIs despite there being obvious user benefits. And not just to nerds; the Kin and Newton (and, farther back, BeOS) showed the tremendous UX potential of a UX-strong OS. They also demonstrated how difficult it is to sustain an ecosystem of developers willing to enable it.

But if users are finding LLM chatbots useful, and they can in turn use our computers for us, that might break a chicken-and-egg stalemate.

The strategy of empowering a nitwit despot just to get SCOTUS stacked in their favor really paid off for the antifederalist anarcho-capitalists today.