Recent content on KVNCNNLLY
Fast on the heels of my last post about a SETI@home for AI Assisted Research , I decided to get a prototype concept in place for at least the portion I could reasonably address: curation of research-focused AI prompts. I decided to call it Prompts for Progress . 
 To kick this off, I set some agents loose on the web to collect published prompts from AI-assisted math and science research. I’ve…
If you were online around the turn of the millennium, you may have vivid memories of the SETI@home project. It was a beautiful example of capturing the public interest in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, i.e. looking for aliens. The way it worked was simple (for the consumer): as home computers became more common throughout the ’90s, the SETI team realized they could pool the…
Each year I try to make sure I catch the Conversations with Tyler retrospective, in which Tyler reflects on the year’s episodes and related content. I like hearing Tyler’s own self assessment, what stood out to him, and what he enjoyed or did not enjoy. This year also included a review of top picks made in 2015. 
 Typically I listen to the episode and then note items that stand out…
My earlier post about the rise of voice as a UI had me pondering what exactly is it that makes voice input ideal in some circumstances and entirely undesired in others. Spoken language is faster per word and, in a naive economic sense, “better” 1 . And yet, there are times where I have no interest in “going fast”. Why? 
 This topic makes me think of Andy Clark’s…
I’ve been trained to keep things short, and so have you, which is part of what I want to talk about today 1 . 
 This is becoming rapidly obvious, but it’s worth jotting down: we’re at the beginning of a major transition to voice as a table stakes UI. If you look for it, you’ll see it in many places, but various applications and services are integrating voice into their…
I met a tourist visiting San Francisco for the first time recently, and when asking about their impressions of driving in the city they said “there are a lot of stop signs”. I never really paused to think about whether this is a uniquely SF thing, or just somehow more pronounced in SF. 
 In any case, what you do notice in SF is the lack of a stop sign. Drivers here 1 really love…
I don’t want to be too verbose on this topic, but I think the era of app slop is upon us and the reasoning goes something like this: 
 
 Vibe coding has real struggles - it works great in some cases, and the barrier to entry is very low 
 However, unique anything is a recipe for hardship 
 Business logic with more than one condition or multiple steps? Good luck! 
 Tired…
There are a lot of models these days. I find myself asking the same question – like literally the exact same prompt copy and pasted – to various models from various providers. I use the exact same prompt because I’m curious to probe how the various models behave. The improvements that are coming at an ever-increasing pace 1 certainly drive this behavior. Who doesn’t want to…
It occurred to me the other day with the OpenAI International Math Olympiad results that OpenAI is either very good at keeping corporate secrets a secret, or they have highly ethical employees, or both (likely)! If this were not true, I would have expected the prediction markets to have reflected the likely performance outcome prior to the actual IMO event, i.e. signifying the leak in the form of…
I’m Kevin. I live at the intersection of fatherhood, physics, data, product, and tech startups. 
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