kait.dev - Latest Posts
It's been busy times 'round these parts. After finishing my novelette, I fell into a bit of writing spell – it's been a fantastic creative outlet for me, replacing the zatz I got from doing improv (and arguably a better fit for my narrative-heavy brain, which would sometimes go haywire when people t...
And now for something completely different. Well, not completely different. It's still a pretty gay book. You might notice this book has a different recommendation than I've used before. That's because, well, I wrote it. And I don't think I can in good conscience give you a recommendation because I...
1 poisoned apple. 🍏 7 banished dwarfs. 32 days. 📅 One Queen. 👸 Then I asked the Magic Mirror to tell it like it is. I beseeched it to answer me 4 questions at midnight. 🪞 "Is this death-sleep permanent?" Yes. "Does it look like a solo hag's curse?" No. "How many stepmoth...
I’d like to propose a corollary to Chekhov’s Gun - Kait’s Carabiner - that states any two (even possibly) queer people who are single in the first romance novel have to get off by the third book. I thought it a bit too convenient that the (spoilers, I guess?) best friend and the new-but-then-not fia...
I've been in a reading slump, y'all. It happens to me occasionally (though in fact it's more that I get burned out on a particular type of media, e.g., audiobooks, books, TV shows, movies, and need to switch off to another format for a bit), but it was especially disappointing this time because ther...
Software engineers: AI isn’t coming for your job. 🚨 It’s coming for your humanity. First, it was chatbots. Then we got Claude Code, Codex, and Antigravity. Now, the world is obsessed with Agentic AI. 🤖 You feel the squeeze. You feel the pressure. But you’re worrying about the wrong thing. It's not...
Regardless of one’s opinion on AI’s “soul” or whatever, it’s actually pretty on-brand as a species for humans to try to create an artificial version of something (consciousness) before we bothered to understand how it works.
I was hitting a wall at 2 AM. The churn rates were climbing. The ROI was flatlining. I felt like I was failing my team. Then my daughter walked in. She didn't ask for a bedtime story. She asked for an API key. "Mom," she said, her eyes glowing with a faint blue 4K hue. "Why solve for...
AI has been very useful to me as a developer, especially if you count the number of times I go to type my problem and, in the process of doing so, figure out the solution.
This entire thing with non-deterministic agents where you can’t be sure what’s going to happen each time has always felt like Sorcerer Mickey and the Mop and the unintended consequences. But the deal with that story is that Mickey really really wanted to get some mopping done and was totally OK wit...
I waited, but he said no more. In frustration, I asked, “So what’s the problem? And what’s it got to do with religion? You know I’m not—” “Yes, yes, I know. The problem occurs when you imagine that everyone works the same way. If I hadn’t interrupted you just now, how long would you have kept talki...
Palo Alto Networks described OpenClaw as embodying a “lethal trifecta” of vulnerabilities: access to private data, exposure to untrusted content, and the ability to communicate externally. But the firm identified a fourth risk that makes prompt worms possible: persistent memory. “Malicious payloads...
An interesting read on the decline of literary fiction, though I think it overall is drastically underestimating the impact of the rise of alternative media consumption possibilities, inasmuch as the slice of attention/time that literary fiction was fighting for in the 50s-70s had far fewer other co...
We started with text, and then moved to photos when we got phones with cameras, and then moved to video when mobile networks got fast enough. Soon, we’ll see an explosion of new media formats that are more immersive and interactive, and only possible because of advances in AI.
I have a-maze-ing ideas. They're not good, but people who hear them often feel like they're trapped in a labyrinth without hope of escape.
The progression of my opinion on AI has been ... elliptical? Not straightforward, we'll say. But as I've gotten to use it more, both at work and through some of my own personal projects, I've started to see where some of the dissonance, I think, lies – both for me and others. To back it up, I want t...
Every time I’ve tried to involve AI in one of my creative pursuits it has spit out the exact same level of meh. No matter the model, no matter the project, it simply cannot match what I have in my head. Which would be fine, but it absolutely cannot match the fun of making the imperfect version of t...
I recently stumbled on a serialized webnovel (that I will not name for reasons that willl soon be clear), and got invested. I mean like, invested. I was reading it nonstop, blowing through the first 300,000 or so words (of the total ~1.6m) in about three days. The characters were quirky, if sometime...
I implore you to violently ignore the synopsis below. It's so ... wholly inadequate to what this book holds, it honestly makes me want to scream a little bit. All books that resonate with me do so because I can see myself in them, in some way. This is why I tend to be drawn to autistic characters –...
I love the concept of reviews. To me, it’s creating art in response to art, which – as a person who struggles to “create”art from nothing, who is more comfortable editing and remixing and iterating – is the highest form of art I see myself producing. But reviews have so many jobs to do. They have to...
There's a particular kind of narrative laziness that irks me. Not enough to hate the work entirely, but it .. disappoints? Me every single time. One of the reasons I did not fall headfirst into Sherlock when it first exploded onto the cultural landscape was a bit of the same thing. The first episode...
I have made no secret of my displeasure with a lot of the hype and uses for AI. I still feel that way about a number of things that AI is used for, but I've also found some areas where it has shown some legitimate use-cases (the automated code review we're using at work as part of a larger, human-in...
I like how Wicked: For Good ends with Elphaba and Fiero, a green lady and a man made of straw, are traveling to (presumably) earth. Where no one’s ever had trouble because of their skin color or looking different
Saw Twenty-Sided Tavern at the Balboa last night. This is immediately after the DM (the woman in purple) rolled, with disadvantage, a nat 1 AND a nat 20.
After we went to two bookstores, we wanted to get some food on the way home. So we stopped at the mall, where we found ... a book fair?
I’m not sure if this is a special section or an ongoing series, but it’s basically the entire who’s-who of good digital journalism of the 00s/early 10s. Mostly I’m just mad about how difficult it is to find the work of most of them nowadays.
I think we're all aspirational, in different ways. There's always a goal we're striving to accomplish, be it academic, professional or personal. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a teacher, having admired those who taught me during school. I also wanted to lose weight (hello, internalized fatphobia!)...
I've mentioned previously my opinion that books written about books and bookstores are cheating and, while my distaste hasn't changed much, I am at least more willing to be forgiving when judging authorial intent. After all, with some outliers, it's not hard to imagine that most authors write books...
Apologies for the abrupteness of the transition for anyone who suddenly found themselves navigating to a general interest/tech blog and instead got dozens of recommendations for queer books. I had a side project, Queer Bookshelf, that I did not spend enough time on to warrant its own hosting headach...
I always love finding a new favorite bookstore! Verbatim Books in North Park is not as big as an Elliott Bay or a Powell's or The Strand, but it's so lovely.
Looking back at technological innovation in the past few decades, we've seen a decided pivot away from true communication and artistry to the veneration of artifice. Back in the long ago, we had raw LiveJournals (or BlogSpot, if you were a nerd) where teens would tear our their hearts and bleed into...
As I was reorganizing my digital media (again, again, again) the other day, I came across Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. I originally read it when it was first released, with some expectations; I had enjoyed other works of hers (The Storied Life of AJ Fikry, Memoirs of a Teena...
This is easily the coolest Barnes & Noble I've ever seen. It's in a converted old movie theater, and not only kept a bunch of the art-deco touches but also leaned in hardcore, including neon modernist signs on the wall for genres and gorgeously painted/appointed flourishes.
The Supreme Court ruled in US v. Skrmetti that the state of Tennessee is allowed to ban gender-affirming care for minors. The plain outcome is bad (trans health care bans for minors are legal). The implications are even worse (who's to say you can't ban trans health care for everyone in a given stat...
TIL that if you run out of hard drive space Mac OS will ... shut off your external monitors through DisplayLink? Sure, yes, I definitely needed to empty trash, but weird that "no more external displays" was the first warning.
From: Michael@cursor.so To: Kait Subject: Here to help Hi Kaitlyn, I saw that you tried to sign up for Cursor Pro but didn't end up upgrading. Did you run into an issue or did you have a question? Here to help. Best, Michael From: Kait To: Michael@cursor.so Subject: Re: Here to help Hi, Curso...
One reason non-tech people are so in awe of AI is they don’t see the everyday systemic tech malfunctions. A podcast delivered me an ad for trucking insurance - which seems like a small thing! I see ads on terrestrial TV that aren’t relevant all the time! But in this (personalized, targeted) case, it...
I quite often find myself paraphrasing Ira Glass, most famously the host of This American Life, in his depiction of the creative process. Essentially, he argues, those prone to creativity first learn their taste by consuming the art in their desired medium. Writers read voraciously, dancers watch pr...
Look, I know expectations can be killer. But I feel like expecting a given book to be a novel (here defined as a singular, coherent narrative) is a fair assumption? Unfortunately, this time the ass turned out to be me. Moon is a fun collection of related short stories about the moon turning into a b...
As someone who's flown out of Newark recently and has to do so again, trust me when I say you don't want this.
Sometimes, things don’t go as expected. I traveled (near) New York City for work. After working hard all week, when Friday night rolled around I didn’t have any plans. Someone offhandedly reminded me escape rooms exist and I realized at 8 pm on a Friday night NYC probably had one or two I could join...