Hi!...
After working in software engineering and infrastructure for 7 years, I quit my job last year and became a solo freelance developer. I did this primarily due to a mix of anxiety about AI and what it meant for me (exacerbated by working for a software company that was having an enormous identity crisis), and what I'd call a more normal career curiosity having never done it before. It's now been ~10…
About a year ago, I was working for a large SaaS company. My perception was that everybody could sense AI was going to massively disrupt us in a negative way, but nobody could say that in public. The company pressed forward, trying to rebrand itself as an AI company, hosting conferences about this new "agentic" world and how we were leaders in it. Meanwhile, our AI products were undifferentiated…
I have a new rule for myself that I'm trying to (imperfectly) follow. Whenever you feel frustrated about some circumstance you find yourself in - maybe the bus is late, maybe your boss annoyed you, whatever - ask yourself if it's a temporary frustration or if you've felt this before. Typically I catch the second kind when I'm complaining about something. The rule is, if you've felt it before: Do…
Lately I've found myself intentionally refraining from reading comments on as much as I can - Reddit, YouTube, even my beloved Hacker News. Not all the time, but it's a growing impulse. I feel that comments on average are negative. They make me feel bad about the post, and they make me feel bad about people because I wonder why everyone is so negative. Recently, I discovered BearBlog Discover…
This week OpenAI released a new offering called Operator. Operator is basically an AI agent that will browse the web for you. They weren't the first to do it, Anthropic released something called "computer use" a few months back, but with their brand recognition they've caused a stir. My take is that Operator is the beginning of the end for the open internet. If you've been using ChatGPT as much as…
Over the past few years, I've been willfully ignorant of the deep learning world. I think there's a few reasons for this. The main reason is a hype cycle of epic proportions. I think the worst hype cycles in the tech world tend to occur when a technology is applied to a specific domain and provides some real value, which is then followed by a huge wave of trying to apply that technology to many…