Recent content in Hi, I'm Christophe Lamy on @ctlamy
There’s that dumb phase of adolescence we all go through. The one in which everything about our parents is stupid. What our parents think is stupid. Their advice is stupid. And the food they’ve been feeding us for our entire lives suddenly sucks. I was a particularly dumb adolescent. Around the time of that phase, my immigrant family discovered and fell in love with Costco. Now, I…
There’s this phrase that’s taking root in our Silicon Valley discourse. It drives me nuts and I’m making a clarion call for us to push back against its toxic ideology. It’s The Permanent Underclass . I can’t say how widely the phrase has spread but in my corner of the world - Silicon Valley, Technology - it comes up often enough that I assume most of my peers have at least heard it even if they…
I’ve been working on a new piece. It was originally intended to be a Daily but I’ve struck a nerve in myself and its message is more significant than I originally intended. In some sense this piece is the opposite side of my Daily AI makes us creative . I think it’s an important message and getting the tone right has been tricky so I’m giving myself a few extra days to…
I live on kind of a weird street. The Mission in San Francisco is filled with them. They’re these mini one-ways that cut the city’s neat grid system into sub atomic one-block units of housing clusters. Generally speaking you won’t have heard the name of any of these streets unless you happened to be visiting someone living on one. These streets are charming and they create quiet alcoves of peace…
There’s a joke I heard a while back which occasionally comes to mind. It goes something like this: “Have you heard of the brown bear effect? It’s when you’re living your normal life doing normal things and everything is normal. Then you’re talking to someone and they go ‘have you noticed that big shaggy brown bear that’s been hanging around town lately’ and then suddenly it seems like every time…
My friend faces the back when we’re at shows. I’ve only just realized. He says he’s been to a thousand shows and he’s seen a thousand lights. “The back is where the action is.” He’s facing us. He’s coming to the shows to engage with us. I think that’s so beautiful.
One paradox of creativity is that the presumption of endless possibility suffocates creation. Give an artist a blank canvas with the simple edict to realize the greatness lying dormant within? The result will be angst and agony. They’ll spiral. Jackson Pollock spends the end years of his life an alcoholic struggling to finish a painting. He dies an early death. Conversely, come to them with…
I created this site as a personal record to myself. I was in the midst of a year of creation and my original intent was to create structure for the year as well as have a tool through which to remember and reflect. It was made for me. A question I quickly received about it is why I wasn’t writing on Substack. Making a site made no sense - it was a lot of unnecessary work, and it would give…
(This was previously posted as an independent page as a sort of easter egg but with site navigation growing I’ve decided it’s in the way. I’m republishing it as a Daily for posterity and taking it down on the page.) In the mid 2000s I was a teen growing up in New Jersey trying to make sense of the world. There was no Reddit, no Twitter. Angsty teens like myself journaled on their…
I’ve had health on my mind lately. I’ve been thinking about how the internet and now AI makes health knowledge more accessible to consumers. And about our health data is locked up in walled gardens and that is kind of fked up. That’s led me down a rabbit hole of inquiring about our health system (in the USA, forgive my geographic bias) and trying to make sense of a vague feeling…
I have a problem. I’ve taken an increasingly active interest in health. My own health, specifically. I’m a pretty curious person and I also have an obvious vested interest in the topic of my health. I also admit to some near neurotic inclination to optimize and overoptimize and optimize once again. The richness of quantifiable health data interpreted via the lens of my own qualitative…
…not a feeling. A quirk of our common vernacular is that the word “love” is a more intensive expression of the word “like,” which is an expression of positive affinity towards a subject. “I like dessert, but I love ice cream.” In fact that’s the way we’re conditioned from the earliest time we that develop consciousness and concepts as young…
I have recently come into possession of a magic hat. I found this hat buried in a pile in a bustling street market in the mountains around Northern Vietnam. Or is this hat a scarf? I’m not sure. It’s a silly little thing. A set of bear ears make up the cap from which arm-scarves dangle down its ears. You wrap one arm around your neck and then you’ll find two paw mitts sitting in…
Something I find confusing is how in the public discourse I’ll hear that ChatGPT is currently really great at a few narrow use cases. Some of these are coding, brainstorming, and writing. I’m sure some people find value in some other use cases as well (therapy?) but those are ones I hear mentioned pretty often. Anyway. People identifying use cases for ChatGPT is not what’s…
This tweet was making the rounds the other day: The user presumably asked ChatGPT to do some kind of analysis that required opening a CSV file. The user asks ChatGPT whether it really did open the file or just made up the numbers. ChatGPT coughs up that it didn’t open the file and made up some numbers. The interaction makes sense colloquially, and I’m not even saying the user was wrong…
In the winter of 2017 I was on one of my solo trips and there I found myself staying at a temple on the western end of Kyoto. It was a low season for tourism. I was the only traveler residing at the temple, which itself is in an off-the-beaten path part of the city, and at night I wandered the neighborhood’s quiet streets looking for a place to eat. It was at this point that I opened an…
It all began with an impossible vision. A psychedelic sheep - looming head and shoulders over a hastily erected city in the desert - carefully tread across its streets, its uncoordinated googley eyes firing independently roving beams up into the night sky. I stood atop a shipping container cum weather bulwark. The container’s sturdy walls formed the structure for an enclosed sound stage…
… and the folly contained therein. “Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you, and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.” -Steve Jobs There’s a natural tendency to accept that the state of something, in the condition in which we found it, is what it is.
Frustration is the emotion I battle the most by far. This year’s Burn saw me step up as food lead for my camp. The year before I had felt touched by the food program the camp ran: the quality of its offering, the fulfillment and nutrition it provided, and the personal touch of providing chefs. I felt inspired to make my own mark on the program and through it touch my fellow camp members.
Every year some strangers gather in the desert and they set fire to a wooden effigy of a man. What can be confusing is that their gathering has nothing to do with the man and it’s got everything to do with everything else. I don’t think I will ever truly understand it.
The dailies. They are not daily.
I predict Sam will rename his company to ClosedAI. Alternatively, some better sounding equivalent. I was watching a Sundar Pichai interview following the Google I/O conference where he said something that struck me: “I think more than any other company, we [Google] prioritize sending traffic to the web. No one sends traffic to the web in the way we do. I look at other companies, newer…
Dating apps are broken. They’re broken for users, that is. The businesses are doing ok. The Flaw Of Dating Apps I universally hear from my friends that the apps are not working for them and that they are “giving up on the apps.” I hear this refrain with increasing frequency. The problem with dating apps doesn’t stem from a technical challenge nor from a flaw in their…
I grew up listening to music, then later a genre I was interested in was eletronic music (rip Avicii). A few years ago I started listening to DJ sets in their entirety, rather than by the individual song or album, finding that the rhythm, pace and duration of electronic music sets were helpful for creating flow state and focus. Last year I went to my first eletronic music festival, and I’ve…
Hegemon noun : someone having dominant influence or authority over others, used particularly in the domain of political science. It is generally accepted that the United States has enjoyed hegemony status on the global geopolitical stage since the end of the Second World War. One way I’ve heard hegemony described is as “if every other actor were to unite against the hegemon, still the…
I really dislike the “as I predicted, look how smart I am” type posts, but since I wrote on the topic just last Friday I can’t help but write this. Since I think it’s cheap and lame I’m writing it as a bonus daily. Ahem. So, as predicted, OpenAI proceeds to resource a novel hardware device that will be designed around the machine intelligence, primarily LLM, at the…
A logical flaw I see in common discourse is a set of mistaken assumptions that: (1) intelligence is an attribute, (2) that all intelligence is the same, and (3) two instances of intelligence can be directly and quantitatively compared such that intelligence(1) is greater or less than intelligence(2). Part of the logical error stems from our notion of IQ (intelligence quotient) as a quantitative…
A project I’ve been working on is related to helping people express and play in a novel way. It’s a useful feature, it’s technically challenging and has been satisfying to work on and you could imagine certain communities and personas using it to express themselves. But it’s not sexy . Wrestling with this leads me to an ongoing exploration - what even is sexy? You might…
I’ve figured it out. EDC. It’s a large scale carnival that’s daisy themed. And it’s electric because it’s at night and so things are lit up. It makes it really pretty. It’s an Electric Daisy Carnival. And that’s all it is.
OpenAI released their SWE coding agent today - Codex . Sam tells us that 2025 is the year of agents, and it’s reasonable to think that after the launch of Operator in Jan ‘25 and now Codex several more similar releases are coming this year and next. Although I am on the whole unimpressed with Operator from a UX perspective, and while I expect Codex to both be significantly more…
I was an avid reader as a kid, and one of my absolute favorite books was Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game and his follow on Speaker for the Dead trilogy. One of the major subplot points in the first book is the Giant’s Drink. The main character, Ender, is attending a space based military officer training academy and the cadets (children) have access to a game room in their…
A little over a year ago Apple was about to release the Vision Pro, their first major product launch in a decade. I had recently shut down Fido, my dog training venture, and I decided to make a little toy app for the Vision Pro as a way to keep busy and stimulate new ideas. I’d decided to call my project DogVision. The concept for the app was really simple - it would use the device’s…
I began the first part of my career as a manager. I was trained to look at graphs and discern patterns and find flaws and optimize systems. “Take a thing and make it better (alternatively: make it suck less)” was the general mandate. Then I built a dog training business and taught myself to code to build an app. The dog training business is gone but the lessons remain and ever since…
I’m traveling this week. This means daily tasks, such as writing to this blog, are more difficult and have to be more deliberately approached. I’m driven by routine, as a general matter, and predictability and structure is helpful to create discipline. Discipline fosters predictability and progress. It enables introspection, optimization and planning and solving complex problems over…
Yesterday I wrote about the evolution in how information is created and spreads in human society as a function of technological progress. You can read the full post here . To summarize the assertion at the core of my argument: The net effect of past technological advance can be read as a discrete set of sudden and powerful step function decreases in the cost of replicating and distributing…
The post I intended to write is taking longer than anticipated and I will not be able to finish it today. I thought about whether to post something else today or skip a day. So rather than the intended programming, the topic of today’s post is to say that I’ve decided I will strive to write and post every day. I hope you enjoyed today’s post.
Here’s a framework to understand the upcoming disruption caused by AI. It starts with a story on the historical arc of information. Unscalable beginnings In the beginning there was information in the purest ephemeral sense - information was no more than an idea - and ideas were transmitted through language. Early humans invented symbols, and then writing, and then transmitted information in…
This is, without a doubt, not the last time I will be writing about Creation. Underlying my interest in Creation is its basis in Motivation which itself is an alternative lens on Purpose. My journey is a search for purpose. Last year I attended a large scale immersive camping production experience and my experience there changed the way I thought about the world. Up to that point my driving…
Let’s try something new. This section - dailies - is a space for me to write - try and guess - daily. Something I’ve learned about my working style is that I have difficulty starting and difficulty finishing. Choosing a task and choosing to get started is difficult. I have a tendency to overthink, overanalyze, and overproject. I spent a large part of my childhood day dreaming and I…
A parable about life, goals, and living life consciously. There was once a fisherman who lived on the coast of a small island. He woke up every day at 5am and went out to catch fish. He’d catch a few, sell most at the market, save the nicest one for himself, and go back home to his wife and kids. One day, a banker was vacationing on the island and looking for lunch. He noticed the fisherman…
My journey as a developer began when I adopted my dog, Milou. Raising him as a puppy was a challenge, and having a personality of extremes, I responded to the challenge by becoming a certified dog trainer. This solved the problem for myself but not for others. Gradually I trained friend’s dogs, then stranger’s dogs, and made my process more scalable. The journey to scaling effective…