Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts
📖 Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts by Stanislas Dehaene (2014). Lots of fun details.
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The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can't Cure Our Social Ills
📖 The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can't Cure Our Social Ills by Jesse Singal (2021). Relevant when it was published; even more relevant today.
The Explosive Child
📖 The Explosive Child by Ross W. Greene (2021; via Ron Arazi ). Many such cases.
My Agents Setup
I've gotten a lot of requests for my agents setup, especially my AGENTS.md configuration file. It's undergone a few iterations, but below is a current snapshot. Here is my current setup: OpenRouter API Key : This is a bit of text that lets you talk to any of the models they support (and they support them all). By all accounts (and their Privacy Policy), they have a solid reputation for not storing…
Questions to ask when evaluating neurotech approaches
📝 Questions to ask when evaluating neurotech approaches (Abhishaike Mahajan; via Jeremy Wertheimer ). So many potholes.
Improving Single Executable Application Building for Node.js
📝 Improving Single Executable Application Building for Node.js (Joyee Cheung). My own work on cosmofy has made me interested in how single-file executables work elsewhere. In this case, they do binary surgery on platform-specific files (ELF, PO, Mach-O) while cosmofy works in a platform-independent way.
Two Major Studies, 125,000 Kids: The Social Media Panic Doesn’t Hold Up
📝 Two Major Studies, 125,000 Kids: The Social Media Panic Doesn’t Hold Up . I need to read the study, especially since that the headline already confirms my previous beliefs.
The Context Collapse Problem
📝 The Context Collapse Problem The difference between legible and non-legible systems will continue to become more and more stark. How soon before an LLM asks to "jump in call" so it can understand the project requirements?
Medical Roundup #6
📝 Medical Roundup #6 (Zvi Mowshowitz). The entire shift in the rate of diagnosis of autism is explained by expanding the criteria and diagnosing it more often. Nothing actually changed. [...] Using the same word for all these things, and calling it the autism spectrum, does not, overall, do those on either end of that spectrum any favors.
Conversation: LLMs and the what/how loop
📝 Conversation: LLMs and the what/how loop (Martin Fowler). Managing cognitive load while programming. But as any experienced programmer knows, the real challenge is not converting requirements to code, but building systems that survive change. What makes systems easier to manage as change happens?
Proving (literally) that ChatGPT isn't conscious
📝 Proving (literally) that ChatGPT isn't conscious (Erik Hoel). The argument has two sides any theory of consciousness needs to avoid (the "Kleiner-Hoel dilemma"): It has to be falsifiable : If the theory depends on some feature, but I can construct a system with the same input/output behavior, but lacks that property, then your theory is falsified. It cannot be trivial : If the theory is that…
Giving University Exams in the Age of Chatbots
📝 Giving University Exams in the Age of Chatbots (Lionel Dricot). Very creative.
Creating Your Own Opportunities
📝 Creating Your Own Opportunities (Matheus Lima / Terrible Software). Sometimes, you can just make things better. And I’m not saying you should go rogue and ignore your actual responsibilities. Do the work that’s asked of you first. But once you’ve got that handled, look around. What’s the adjacent thing that nobody’s tackling? What’s the improvement everyone complains about but nobody owns? What…
Applying to High Schools in Israel for Dummies
📝 Applying to High Schools in Israel for Dummies ( Josh Vogel ). I've heard applying for high schools in NY/NJ can also be fraught with complexities.
Trust, Delegation, and the Trap
[Editor's note: Based on feedback from Claude on my post about my experience with coding agents , I asked Claude to interview me and I could provide it with logs and transcripts. Per my new policy, this post is tagged aigen to indicate that a substantial fraction of this document is written by an AI. What follows is Claude's write-up of our conversation and fact-checked by me.] Contents…
Coding Agents are Addictive
Despite having used LLMs since before they could produce reasonable English paragraphs, and despite reading Simon Willison and Armin Ronacher wax rhapsodic about what they've been able to accomplish the AI agents, I've been stuck in the occasionally-copy-from-chat routine. Then Steve Yegge introduced beads which seemed interesting until it turned out to be a bit of a nightmare . But there was…
Why I Stopped Using nbdev
📝 Why I Stopped Using nbdev (Hamel Husain). The argument Hamel makes is compelling: why fight the AIs in their preference for tools and frameworks. My counter is: I still want good taste. Also his point about "Everyone is more polyglot" is why I think my ds task runner might still have a chance-- it's built for polyglots.
What I learned building an opinionated and minimal coding agent
📝 What I learned building an opinionated and minimal coding agent (Mario Zechner; via Armin Ronacher). Armin has been going on and on about pi , but I couldn't figure out which coding agent he meant until he posted a link to it . After a few days using Claude Code (more on this later), I switched to using pi-coding-agent and haven't looked back. The main advantages are the ability to switch…
Mantic Monday: The Monkey's Paw Curls
📝 Mantic Monday: The Monkey's Paw Curls (Scott Alexander / Astral Codex Ten). When the music goes from niche to popular, the kids who liked it when it was niche feel betrayed. Compare with plastics (rare + high status => ubiquitous and dead common) and GPS (rare + military defense => driving from home to work). When prediction markets were weird and niche, they were high status. Now they're…
Fly’s new Sprites.dev addresses both developer sandboxes and API sandboxes at the same time
📝 Fly’s new Sprites.dev addresses both developer sandboxes and API sandboxes at the same time (Simon Willison). I've worked on just-in-time compute boxes. Impressed by how disposable they made the compute.
A Software Library with No Code
📝 A Software Library with No Code (Drew Breunig; via Simon Willison ). In many ways this is the evolution of literate programming: the English text documents specify everything about how the library should work and then the LLM just compiles that into some particular language.
Speeding up bash startup
Previously : How long do commands run? VSCode has had a fancy terminal IntelliSense for some time now. For some reason, it only worked on my macOS laptop, but not on my Linux machine. So I started digging around and found an important caveat for the integrated terminal: Note that the script injection may not work if you have custom arguments defined in the terminal profile, have enabled Editor:…
Matt Pocock on Ralph Wiggum
🐦 Matt Pocock on Ralph Wiggum (Matt Pocock). The technique is simple enough that matches my intuition for how work gets done in a sprint. Matt also has a nice video explainer .
Logging Sucks - Your Logs Are Lying To You
📝 Logging Sucks - Your Logs Are Lying To You (Boris Tane). Argues for passing a context object around and logging that object (with all the details you could possibly need) when something goes wrong. Extends the concept of structured logging to "wide events".
Where’s My Orbital Habitat?
📝 Where’s My Orbital Habitat? (Harry Law / Asterisk). What happens when you're looking for your next moonshot, but the costs keep getting too high.
Fighting Fire with Fire: Scalable Personalized Oral Exams with an ElevenLabs Voice AI Agent
📝 Fighting Fire with Fire: Scalable Personalized Oral Exams with an ElevenLabs Voice AI Agent (Panos Ipeirotis). Despite the combative framing, it's actually probably quite good that scalable oral exams are back. Especially for those students who actually want to learn the material.
Why Stripe’s API Never Breaks: The Genius of Date-Based Versioning
📝 Why Stripe’s API Never Breaks: The Genius of Date-Based Versioning (Harsh Shukla). I got through most of this post before it was revealed that Stripe has a version-level description of which features were added to the API and adapters that convert inputs and outputs into the appropriate version level based on date. Very cool, but how do you handle security issues in versions? You options (as…
Predictions Scorecard, 2026 January 01
📝 Predictions Scorecard, 2026 January 01 (Rodney Brooks). Every year, Rodney updates his predictions. Always a good read.
Money Matters: Dilemmas in Practical Monetary Halachah
📖 Money Matters: Dilemmas in Practical Monetary Halachah by Rabbi Yosef Fleischman (2024; via Jeremy Wertheimer ). The first of two volumes. A wide range of scenarios.
The Gene: An Intimate History
📖 The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee (2016; via Siraj Raval ). The book makes many concepts in biology understandable. Combining the author's personal history makes it heart-warming.
The 3 a.m. Call That Changed The Way I Design APIs
📝 The 3 a.m. Call That Changed The Way I Design APIs (Sreenivasa Reddy Hulebeedu Reddy / The New Stack). Hard-earned principles.
On deathbed advice/regret
📝 On deathbed advice/regret (hazn; via Tyler Cowen ). I agree with the main point of the post which is why I've usually taken deathbed regret and converted it into specific advice. For many years, I've had the following (lightly edited) list towards the top of my todo list: Don't ignore your dreams Don't work too much Say what you think Cultivate friendships Be happy
Introducing Beads: A coding agent memory system
📝 Introducing Beads: A coding agent memory system (Steve Yegge). The whole thing was vibecoded and is kinda crazy, but I've actually been looking for a way to track issues from within git . Apparently the agents really like it.
Six New Tips for Better Coding With Agents
📝 Six New Tips for Better Coding With Agents (Steve Yegge). Programming by hand is artisanal. Programming by copy-pasting from a chatbot is obsolete. The future appears to be conducting an orchestra of bot swarms.
Childhood and Education #16: Letting Kids Be Kids
📝 Childhood and Education #16: Letting Kids Be Kids (Zvi Mowshowitz). I grew increasingly angry while reading this. Zvi documents so many rage-inducing examples of bad rules around letting children do things on their own.
Programming principles for self taught front-end developers
📝 Programming principles for self taught front-end developers (Kilian Valkhof / Piccalilli). This is high-level advice/heuristics with really good examples.
cosmofy 0.2.1
cosmofy 0.2.1 is available. Lots of little bugs after this morning's big release. If you have uv installed you can use cosmofy : uvx cosmofy # or install it uv tool install cosmofy Read more . Release Notes 0.2.1 - 2025-12-24T18:35:27Z # Fixed #42 minor typos; added links in README #58 only do the Windows dance if literally trying to replace sys.executable #96 files not saving to cache #97 , #98…
cosmofy 0.2.0
cosmofy 0.2.0 is available. So many things came together for this release: Three open source developers I follow (William McGuan, Simon Willison, and Charlie Marsh) were all in a twitter thread where the concept of something like cosmofy was mentioned. I learned how to make CLIs sort of work the way Astral's tools do . I learned just how many crazy options GNU ls supports . If you have uv…
cosmofy fs ls: emulating GNU ls
Previously : pythonoid , baton When I was designing the low-level zip file manipulation tools for cosmofy , I wanted an easy way to see the contents of the bundle. We're so used to using ls for looking into directories that I thought it would be cool to emulate as much of ls as I could. But then it turned out that ls has a crazy number of options . I actually went through them all and tried to…
baton: emulating Astral's CLI approach
Previously : pythonoid Imitation is the highest form of flattery which is why as part of the cosmofy 0.2.0 release, I decided to change everything about how the CLI behaved to make it work more like the way the tools from Astral work. I have a long-term plan for Astral to take over making Cosmopolitan Python apps. It's a long shot, but if they do, it'll be a huge win for cross-platform compatible…
Is Cognitive Dissonance Actually a Thing?
📝 Is Cognitive Dissonance Actually a Thing? (Shayla Love / The New Yorker; via Tyler Cowen ). I need to believe it's a thing and not a thing at the same time.
How I Found Myself Running a Microschool
📝 How I Found Myself Running a Microschool (Kelsey Piper / Center for Educational Progress). Over the past 10 years I have migrated to essentially this view: you need direct instruction to get the basics and a foundation; you need to see people enact the values you want to transmit; and you need a strong motivating project to get you over the humps when the going gets tough.
Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work
📝 Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work (Simon Willison). Strongly endorse.
Ideas Aren’t Getting Harder to Find
📝 Ideas Aren’t Getting Harder to Find (Karthik Tadepalli / Asterisk). Knowing what is causing productivity growth to start to slow is critical to selecting appropriate policies for how to get it going again. Karthik makes a good case for why the idea that "ideas are getting harder to find" is wrong and why it's more of a failure of the market to weed out bad ideas and promote good ones.
AI has Educators Polarized
📝 AI has Educators Polarized (Arnold Kling; via Zvi Mowshowitz ). Nice framing: some think education is adversarial, others that it's cooperative.
Oliver Sacks Put Himself Into His Case Studies. What Was the Cost?
📝 Oliver Sacks Put Himself Into His Case Studies. What Was the Cost? (Rachel Aviv / The New Yorker). Seems like a high cost. The whole field has taken such a pummeling since 2017, that it makes me think of The Simpsons meme .
Justified
📝 Justified (Bite code!). just is a Rust-based task runner and here's a good write up about its features. If I wasn't writing ds (my own task runner), I'd probably use just . I'll probably experimentally support some subset of just 's syntax in ds .
Book Time #26: How I Read
📝 Book Time #26: How I Read (Aaron Gordon / Book Time). My process for selecting books is very different from Aaron's, but it's nice to see someone else's process. Mine: I get recommendations from friends, colleagues, podcasts, and other books. I add them to a list (currently an Amazon Wishlist). I prefer digital books over physical books because I can make them into audiobook (at 4x) and they…
The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, 3rd Edition
📖 The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, 3rd Edition by Christopher Vogler (2007; via Chanan Berkovits ). You may have heard of Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces , but how about something with more contemporary references? Also, does the obligatory meta thing and shows how the process of writing itself follows the mythic structure.
On the Consumption of AI-Generated Content at Scale
📝 On the Consumption of AI-Generated Content at Scale (Shreya Shankar). Thoughtful take.