A bumper edition this month, since I’ve forgotten to post for a few weeks. Since February I have announced my new startup, Tract, which has been taking up almost all of my time. I’m also working with Nathan Young on a small project called viewpoints.xyz, an exploration of opinion aggregation.
I’m writing this post from VS42, after a long, tiring, and stressful trip to San Francisco. It’s important to be able to opt out of London from time to time, but, for all of its frustrations, it is home, and it always feels good to be going home.
A big productivity improvement this month: I’ve started using the Readwise Reader app and its text-to-speech functionality, while simultaneously reading the article on my laptop. The quality of the voiceover isn’t quite as good as, say, Eleven Labs, but being able to listen while reading helps me focus, and I’m certainly taking more notes. I may even get round to ankifying some of them.
I’ve read a handful of books since February, but a few stand out. Creative Selection by Ken Kocienda was a delightfully inside-baseball account of various bits of the iPhone development process. Scrappy and iterative and driven by demos and prototypes. There is a distinctive Silicon Valley way of doing things, and it’s this. Move fast and break things isn’t just some priapic aphorism, it’s an important insight.
Of course Silicon Valley didn’t develop in a vacuum, but I didn’t realise how much of it was driven by Lockheed Martin and its Skunk Works division. Skunk Works by Ben Rich was doing the rounds on Twitter recently, which reminded me that I had bought a copy a while ago and never opened it. Acquired released an episode on Lockheed which is a good accompaniment to the Rich book, and connects Skunk Works to Silicon Valley.
Acquired also have a mammoth new history of LVMH and Bernard Arnault. LVMH: The Complete History and Strategy
Beyond by Stephen Walker was one of the best books on space I’ve ever read – and that’s a pretty significant number. I didn’t realise, for instance, that the
Using Anki properly takes care, forethought, and planning. This post provides actionable advice on how to do it. And now you can generate Anki Cards with ChatGPT too.
How they dug the Victoria line, including a detailed description of how they erected a steel umbrella over a weekend to allow them to build Oxford Circus station without disrupting the traffic above.
Some smart CSS animations. And some smart Swift animation logic.
An extremely comprehensive guide to transformers.
There are an increasing number of startups that codify their process and principles. Some examples are quite lovely.
New-ish Facebook segmentation model.
An LLM-powered policy analysis tool. LLMs seem to be especially good at translating into different moods or styles. This thought can be extended to different personas too.
It’s easy to disparage modern aesthetics, but the author of this article has a point. Everything looks the same, blandly corporate. And he points to some surprising causal mechanisms to explain why.
Dumbfoundingly pretty and detailed photograph of the Sun, from the great Andrew McCarthy.
Interesting thread about the downstream pressures on the qualities of software from LLMs. What does software look like in a world where many many more people can write code?
Satellite imagery is being democratised.
An infrastructure-flavoured take on the British productivity crisis. Fingleton argues, convincingly, that we have had a) inadequate infrastructure provision for decades, b) a regulatory system that prevents commercialisation of UK research, and c) a political culture that incentivises incremental changes cloaked in the language of significant reform. The latter point is especially important.
Similarly, an account from the Harvard Kennedy School of UK regional inequality; a Twitter thread summarising the study here.
How many new homes do we really need?
This is how you should integrate AI. Naturally, embedded, in my existing workflow. Don’t make me type full English sentences.
Some charming Victorian recipes. I had no idea how important ‘melted butter’, a sauce made from a roux, cold water, salt, nutmeg and, of course, butter, seemed to be in the Victorian kitchen:
It is a very unusual thing to see well-made melted butter. It is our one English sauce, yet it is rarely properly prepared … I should beat the mixture with the back of a wooden spoon until it was quite smooth. Sauce with lumps in it is objectionable, and now is the time to dispose of the lumps.
What Brie Wolfson misses about working at Stripe, or, a paean to hard work and caring about your job.
The unintentional dystopian beauty of oil rigs.
A study of the damage to spacecraft in lunar orbit caused by the ejecta from landings.
The Browser Company are building their Windows app in Swift - and have been making some remarkable progress. I’ll write more about this soon.
Andrej Karpathy’s talk at Microsoft Build, and some great Twitter commentary.
I don’t wish to piss on anybody’s bonfire – I’m a lot less cynical about hype cycles than most – but this sort of insight is important. The bottleneck on AI is sometimes technical, but progress can be cauterised by applying technology to solving the wrong problem, or by the incentives being subtly wrong.
Michael Nielsen has been writing his sporadica, which are charming.
Similarly, Nadia Asparouhova has started to publish her working notes on her latest research project. Half-formed thoughts, agenda-setting, confusions, are often so much more instructive than the finished product. Her finished products are also brilliant.
I've started writing about the housing crisis over at Little Built.
Tiny little methanol-powered internal combustion engine for charging your phone or powering a fan. I love science.
> A big productivity improvement this month: I’ve started using the Readwise Reader app and its text-to-speech functionality, while simultaneously reading the article on my laptop. The quality of the voiceover isn’t quite as good as, say, Eleven Labs, but being able to listen while reading helps me focus, and I’m certainly taking more notes. I may even get round to ankifying some of them.
Have you tried Natural Reader? I just downloaded it yesterday.