Screenshot Loops as Security
I thought Claude's computer use (the new Chrome extension) was slow (watching it work felt like waiting for a careful driver at a four-way stop). Screenshot, analyze, take action, screenshot agai…
Commentary
64 posts
The Augmentation Revolution Hiding in Plain Sight
Everyone's debating whether AI will replace workers. They're missing the revolution: it's already augmenting millions of us. Edward Zitron’s "The Case Against Generative AI" ma…
Renting Intelligence by the Hour
[saw how new features over the last year are all either "Pro-first" or even "Pro-early", have had lingering thoughts about this since ...] Think of the gap between two people tack…
Tempo and the Real Fintech Use of Blockchain
Parsing the Signal from the Noise When Stripe announced Tempo, its new blockchain for payments, Hacker News erupted in a 1,000-comment storm of crypto skeptics versus true believers. The debate matt…
Post tech ?
The Great Reversal: From Numbers to Words For the past two centuries, we’ve lived in the age of the numeric. The hard sciences—physics, engineering, computer science—have dominated our understanding…
Party switch
A comment in a recent NYT article, that sums up the current moment: When I was a much younger man, the party of "progress" and "the future" and "youth" was the Democrati…
A sobering blog rant
An engineering blog-post with a title like “the death of the junior developer”? Written by Steve Yegge? Gotta read it, right? Sourcegraph has their own chat assistant, Cody, but the point is more gen…
Trump from Mars, Biden from Venus
One surprising aspect of "political polarization" is the ways it's correlated with men vs women. From this NYT article about a post-debate poll: In the pre-debate poll, Mr. Trump had l…
“Insight Porn”
The only reason I bother trawling through HN is for the occasional gem like this: (Source) Hacker News is just a part of the larger web. It's the same reason you see so many people arguing over…
Warfare as Reality Show
I have been following the Russia-Ukraine conflict for several months now (not since the beginning, but since perhaps October 2022). The show I’m not going to get into the political who-did-what-and…
On heros becoming villains
It has been surreal to watch several of my early heroes become "villains" Matt Taibbi: got turned on to him after insightful reporting after 2009 (remember Goldman Sachs as giant squid) --…
Wiring up
(Originally a draft post for a longer series on “the first day of the 90s”) I found this piece amusing and naive. “The Internet in the 90s” is something that will be revisited later, but for now, her…