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One of the things that may be apocryphal—because I’ve never bothered to actually look it up, just kept it kicking around in my head—is David Foster Wallace’s justification for the emphasis on footnotes in Infinite Jest: that they’re meant to be a physical metaphor for the give-and-take of a tennis match. You flip from the start of the book to the very end dozens, then hundreds of times, until you get to the final chapters where the flipping becomes more like leafing, as you get closer and closer...
I, like so many other people in the Tyler Cowen / Stripe Press extended universe, have deeply enjoyed Dan Wang's annual letters over the past years. And I was delighted to see that he returned to writing in the form of a long-form book, largely about the same subject. In writing my thoughts on this book, I returned to some of his earliest letters, which I found had aged like wine: I cannot recommend enough carving out an afternoon to read them.
Long Story Short, feels like in many ways a synthesis of everything Raphael and Lisa have been trying to do and say, packaged in a slightly more mature and restrained way than the excesses of Bojack Horseman and their respective written fiction (everyone should read Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory).
After what has felt like a long winter of habitual reliance on my existing tools, I’m finally playing around with some new ones. This is a healthy habit—so long as you don’t convince yourself that you’re just one more App Store download away from a previously unimaginable level of personal satisfaction and joy.
More in technology
Here are the Vim forks I know about: Neovim: “a Vim-based text editor engineered for extensibility and usability, to encourage new applications and contributions.” Vim Classic: “a stable, long-term support fork of the ubiquitous text editor, maintained without the assistance of generative AI tools.” EVi: “a hard-fork of Vim v9.1.0 (Jan 2024) before AI was used in the project.” MacVim: “a macOS version of the Vim text editor, providing a graphical user interface for Vim, while tightly integrating with macOS and providing features specific to the platform.” This list doesn’t include Vim-inspired editors like Kakoune, Vim-style plugins for other editors like IdeaVim, or Vim “distributions” like LazyVim. Contact me if you know of other forks!
Vicky, driving me home from O'Hare, got sixteen dollars for the best conversation I had in months. The last line is hers.
I’ve had “AI usage statements” in the back of my mind ever since I read Ethan Marcott’s blog post sharing a round-up of his favorite ones. I didn’t consider writing one for this site, since it had the smell of status-signaling. Like a quasi-political declaration of allegiance to some sort of in-group (be it pro-AI, anti-AI, etc). I couldn’t be less interested in that.1 But then something happened that caught me completely off-guard. I was reading a post on my friend’s personal blog. This was a guy that I knew personally and looked up to. I’ve been reading everything he had been writing for years. About two-thirds of the way through a long (and fairly insightful) blog post, I had a sudden realization that the post had been written by AI. I’m not the best at detecting this kind of thing, but once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it. It was unmistakable. And the thing is, I didn’t feel indifferent or even disappointed, as I might have predicted. I felt betrayed. For somebody who considers themselves open-minded—even optimistic—towards the development of AI, I didn’t know where this feeling was coming from. I have theories… maybe it has something to do with the social contract between the writer and the reader. Whatever it is, I didn’t want anyone who was reading my blog (hi mom 👋) to feel the same thing. So for the sake of transparency, here is my AI usage statement: The content of this website is written by me. I do not use AI to generate the text you are reading because writing from scratch helps me process my thoughts (which is one of the main reasons I blog in the first place). I don’t currently use AI-powered writing tools (grammar-check, spell-check, dictation tools, etc), but I may experiment with them as long as they don’t undermine the thinking process. The code for this website was originally hand-written, but I have since used AI to make several useful updates. I expect to continue using AI to write code for this website and other personal coding projects. When I create a public project exclusively with AI, I mention that fact in the project README.2 I am experimenting and my AI usage may change. When it does, I’ll update the policy here on my /about page, which is where it will live long-term. To explain why, see Paul Graham's Keep your Identity Small. ↩ For an example, see s-tier ↩ Thanks for reading this post via RSS! Let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment on the original post or sending me an email.
Amend 4.0 has been released: amend-4.0.sit (StuffIt 3 archive, includes source code and THINK C 5 project file) c838ee34931c00c03869affe7f9d6b85c0bbc51dd1242d11e8682a3774fdd0e3 SHA1: 040059d0b3302f1bd6ec0207b9a2f12dccdda374 Changes in this version: New repository format that tracks author e-mail in addition to name; existing repositories are migrated automatically on open Add inregrated resource file support; .rsrc files can be added directly to a repo and files are converted to DeRez-style ASCII output before diffing, so running SADerez to produce separate .r files on every change is no longer required Allow Command+. to cancel loading a repo Allow Command+. to cancel diffing; if diff text has already been output it will remain available, otherwise the window will be closed Center settings dialog, make sure author name is present Use database transactions to avoid leaving repository database files in a partially-committed state if we crash Numerous bug fixes
We launched an AirTag silencing tool recently. We have always made products we want for ourselves, and this was no different - we wanted it for AirTags on our bikes. (Some of us here have bikes more valuable than our cars.) In retrospect though, this also has the side effect of aiding someone with bad intentions to track someone that wouldn’t get phone notifications. We have removed the product and will use our patent on it to prevent anyone else from making one in the future. Sincerely, Elevation Lab
