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The Sting belongs in the pantheon of films I'm deeply embarrassed to have not watched earlier. Not just because it's a great film — and it is — but because it is so incredibly my shit that I feel retroactively spurned for not having watched it sooner.
The single most pleasurable movie of all time is Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven, and it achieves that status in order to try to convey what makes filmmaking uniquely magical: a sense of shared enchantment between the audience and the director, and the ecstasy of the latter pulling a heist on the former -- not (just) trickery, but the successful creation of an ornate and difficult craft. (See also The Prestige.)
Last year, I watched The War Room, the documentary following Bill Clinton's first campaign — a film I am remiss for having never written about, because it was captivating, satisfying, and illuminating. And whether for good reasons or bad, it punctured most of my belief that the political moment we currently find ourselves in is novel in any grand sense. (See also Days of Rage, which covered the seventies; if you're ever worried about civil unrest, it's the one to reach for.)
June, like any month in which I neither write very much nor read very much, feels already cryptographic in retrospect.
There are two mental models about work and fatigue which, like my brief dalliance with Roshe Runs, I have loved and outgrown:
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I can finally cosplay as a 10x engineer and do all those projects that I didn't have the time and energy for before.
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
