Entries for August 2025
Lauren Goode convinced her editors at Wired to let her spend a couple of days at a tech company called Notion learning how to vibe-code (i.e. AI-assisted computer programming): Why Did a $10 Billion Startup Let Me Vibe-Code for Them — and Why Did I Love It?
Expanding a mermaid diagram or alphabetizing a list of dog breeds hardly seemed like sticking it to the coding man. But during my time at Notion I did feel as though a trapdoor in my brain had opened. I had gotten a shimmery glimpse of what it’s like to be an anonymous logical god, pulling levers. I also felt capable of learning something new — and had the freedom to be bad at something new — in a semi-private space.
Both vibe coding and journalism are an exercise in prodding, and in procurement: Can you say more about this? Can you elaborate on that? Can you show me the documents? With our fellow humans, we can tolerate a bit of imprecision in our conversations. If my stint as a vibe coder underscored anything, it’s that the AIs coding for us demand that we articulate exactly what we want.
During lunch on one of my days at Notion, an engineer asked me if I ever use ChatGPT to write my articles for me. It’s a question I’ve heard more than once this summer. “Never,” I told her, and her eyes widened. I tried to explain why — that it’s a matter of principle and not a statement on whether an AI can cobble together passable writing. I decided not to get into how changes to search engines, and those little AI summaries dotting the information landscape, have tanked the web traffic going to news sites. Almost everyone I know is worried about their jobs.
One engineer at Notion compared the economic panic of this AI era to when the compiler was first introduced. The idea that one person will suddenly do the work of 100 programmers should be inverted, he said; instead, every programmer will be 100 times as productive. His manager agreed: “Yeah, as a manager I would say, like— everybody’s just doing more,” she said. Another engineer told me that solving huge problems still demands collaboration, interrogation, and planning. Vibe coding, he asserted, mostly comes in handy when people are rapidly prototyping new features.
These engineers seemed reasonably assured that humans will remain in the loop, even as they drew caricatures of the future coder (“100 times as productive”). I tend to believe this, too, and that people with incredibly specialized skills or subject-matter expertise will still be in demand in a lot of workplaces. I want it to be true, anyway.
A very interesting read. Over the past several months, I have been reading a lot about LLMs and coding, particularly pieces by experienced coders who have switched to using LLMs to code. There is a lot of silly (and perhaps dangerous) hype around AI, but over the past several months, LLMs and supporting tools have gotten unnaturally good at programming, when directed properly. Here are some of the things I’ve read recently in case you’re curious about what’s possible now:
I’m curious to know if any experienced (or inexperienced) coders among you have tried any of the recent suite of AI-assisted coding tools and what your experience has been. (Your general thoughts about AI — particularly its potential downsides, which have been amply documented elsewhere — are best left for some other time & place. Thx.)
I love stats like this: LeBron James has played against 35% of all of the players that have ever played in the NBA. I’m curious if there’s an older player who played with James in 2003 and how much of NBA history the two of them collectively span.
Polymatt decided he was going to make a 3.5” floppy disk from scratch — and actually did.
I’m not sure how many of you have actually cracked one of these things open and taken a look inside, but it’s actually a little bit more complex than I expected. Recreating a shell isn’t going to be the tough part. It’s actually this: recreating the media itself with some PET film and a bunch of chemicals. These disks are incredibly thin, and the magnetic film itself is measured in microns. It’s going to be quite the feat in order to figure out how to apply something that thin.
Fantastic. If you enjoyed the Building a Watch From Scratch in a Brooklyn Basement video, you will probably like this one:
Wanting to get the most out of my new machine, I wanted to look into purchasing what’s called a drag knife. It’s a tool that would go in where the bit is that would allow you to create very precise cuts on things like paper or film. And after realizing I’d have to pay over $150 for one of these things, I thought, maybe I could make one. So that’s what I did. For me, one of the most satisfying things is using a machine to make more tools or features for that machine.
I’m not saying I want to buy myself a CNC machine, but I’m not not saying it either. (via @ernie.tedium.co)
Lauren Groff: “In mid-April, I flew to Japan because I’d become obsessed with an 11th-century Japanese novel called The Tale of Genji.”
William Maranci took Nine Inch Nails’ Closer and mashed it up with Ray Parker Jr’s theme song to Ghostbusters and it’s maybe a little bit genius and a little bit cursed? Like one commenter says, it’s “the musical equivalent of cats and dogs living together”.
See also Eminem’s Lose Yourself mashed up with ELO’s Mr. Blue Sky.
This is cool: Internet-in-a-Box. “Up to 32 users who are within about 100m of the hotspot can connect to the device and access or download the content that exists on the device: Wikipedia slices, medical knowledge, videos, and books.”
An incomplete list of things Jane Austen disliked, including “people who pretend to like music too much” and “practical marriages”. “Anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying without Affection.”
How NASA’s Juno probe changed everything we know about Jupiter. And also: “Juno may be a scientific mission, but it also revealed Jupiter as a living van Gogh painting hanging in the sky.”
As an occasional yoyo-er, I’ve watched a fair amount of yoyo routines, but this championship-winning routine by 8-time world champ Hajime Miura is the best one I’ve ever seen. Miura’s routine falls somewhere on the spectrum between magical illusion & performance art; even the music is perfect. The result is mesmerizing. (via the kid should see this)
Gutted: How Deeply Trump Has Cut Federal Health Agencies (ProPublica). “Food and drug facility inspectors are having to go to the store and buy supplies on their own dime so they can take swab samples to test for pathogens.”
David Garry accidentally bought over 10K Greg Briley baseball cards. “The cards were all perfect. The overall impression was as if someone in 1989 had a hazy vision that someone on the 1989 Mariners was going to be an all-time great.”
Notes from a Burner Phone 101 workshop. Participants learned about “phone-related risk modeling, privacy-protective smartphone practices, the full spectrum of burner phone options, and when to leave phones behind entirely”.
“You do not need the strongest powers of observation to see that crime is a pretext — and not the main reason — for the military occupation of Washington by federal agents and soldiers from the National Guard.”
I recently found this quote on social media and quite liked the sentiment:
You can say “all are welcome,” but if wolves and sheep are both welcome then you’re only going to get wolves. The smart sheep will go somewhere else and the naive sheep will be eaten and processed. If you welcome Islamophobes and Muslims then you’ll get Islamophobes. If you welcome Klan members and people of color then you’ll get Klan members. If you welcome nativists and immigrants you’ll get nativists.
Refusing to choose is a choice. It’s a choice in favor of the people who prey on others and who refuse to acknowledge the humanity of those they hate.
The quote didn’t have a source but was attributed to someone named Adam Bates. With the sorry state of Google and glut of people sharing it out of context, it took me a little while to track down the original quote on Facebook; it’s part of a longer post denouncing anti-LGBTQ+ & anti-immigrant sentiments within the libertarian movement.
See also Karl Popper’s paradox of tolerance:
If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.
Rebecca Solnit: On Not Meeting Nazis Halfway:
Nevertheless, we get this hopelessly naive version of centrism, of the idea that if we’re nicer to the other side there will be no other side, just one big happy family. This inanity is also applied to the questions of belief and fact and principle, with some muddled cocktail of moral relativism and therapists’ “everyone’s feelings are valid” applied to everything. But the truth is not some compromise halfway between the truth and the lie, the fact and the delusion, the scientists and the propagandists. And the ethical is not halfway between white supremacists and human rights activists, rapists and feminists, synagogue massacrists and Jews, xenophobes and immigrants, delusional transphobes and trans people. Who the hell wants unity with Nazis until and unless they stop being Nazis?
And how not to become a Nazi bar:
I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, “no. get out.”
And the dude next to me says, “hey i’m not doing anything, i’m a paying customer.” and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, “out. now.” and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed
Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, “you didn’t see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them.”
And i was like, ohok and he continues.
“you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it’s always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don’t want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.
And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it’s too late because they’re entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.
(via @tressiemcphd)
Writer & designer Frank Chimero took the summer off (“I quit my job at an opportune moment and called it a sabbatical”) and wrote a short post about the experience:
The summer is now mostly spent, and I am writing to say: not much has happened. I swept away the everyday to make space for the profound, and my days refilled with everyday things. No a-has, no takeaways, no transformation, no strong convictions about the future of technology, design, or Frank. But also: no crises, no existential dread (at least about myself), and very few reservations about quitting as the right choice. I am more spacious inside and enjoying a refreshed ability to attend to the things in front of me. Most people call this a vacation, I guess.
I never really wrote about the seven-month sabbatical I took three years ago because, as Chimero notes, not much happened. Or perhaps more accurately, the changes that took place didn’t reveal themselves or manifest for months (or even years) afterwards. As I wrote after being back to work for a year:
I still haven’t written too much about what I did and didn’t do during my time away — I thought I would but found I didn’t have a whole lot to say about it. The truth is I’m still in the process of, uh, processing it. But it’s clear to me that the extended time off was an incredible gift that has revitalized me — I’m really enjoying my work here and have great plans for the future that I can’t wait to get going on.
While I can tell you with absolute certainty that my sabbatical was transformative, pinpointing the critical things I did or didn’t do during my time off is still difficult. All I can say is: if you feel like you need one and have the opportunity, take a sabbatical. Just don’t expect your life to change that quickly because of it.
Fun & simple little browser game: Dodge This. “Move to dodge the bullets. How long can you survive?” My high score so far is 76.6 seconds.
The newly launched Eclipse Atlas website contains “over 2,000 historic and modern eclipse maps dating from 1654 to the present” as well as maps & guides for future eclipses. (The 8/2/27 eclipse will last for 6m23s near Luxor in Egypt!)
Dr. Katelyn Jetelina (aka Your Local Epidemiologist) has a frustrating update on how Covid vaccines are probably going to work this fall under the ideologically corrupt Trump regime.
The FDA is expected to license the Covid-19 vaccine. Word is that the label will be restricted to adults 65+ and people at high risk.
The Vaccine Integrity Project and professional organizations likely won’t align with RFK Jr.’s FDA license, which will cause confusion.
If you’re younger than 65 and don’t have a chronic condition, could you still get it after the label change?
Yes, but it will be complicated. While a provider could prescribe it off-label, in practice, it’s likely that most people won’t be able to access it that way.
Jetelina continues:
If you’re under 65 and not high risk, the window to get a Covid-19 vaccine is right now — before the FDA label changes. Once it happens, access will be limited immediately (if it isn’t already). CVS is no longer booking appointments. As far as we know, Walgreens and local pharmacies still are.
That was as of Monday — no idea if that’s still the case. And of course, because this is the United States, insurance will probably be a mess too:
Recommendations from these two organizations are really important for insurers. The hope is they see them and cover all vaccines, regardless of what RFK does. It also provides extra information to physicians who will prescribe off-label if RFK Jr’s FDA changes the label (as expected) this Friday.
We will not know if any of these recommendations affect insurance coverage until insurance companies confirm coverage.
[insert a lot of profanity here; seriously, this makes me so incandescently mad that if I wrote anything more it would contain every fucking swear word I know and then some]
Sources: Aug 18 thread on Bluesky, Aug 20 thread on Bluesky, Aug 18 newsletter.
What Happened When I Tried to Replace Myself with ChatGPT in My English Classroom. “Was it still necessary or valuable to learn to write? […] At the end of the semester, they would decide by vote whether A.I. could replace me.”
The World Is Burning, But Want to Meet Up for Thirty-Four-Dollar Cocktails? “Nothing makes me want to drink a fancy aesthetic cocktail more than what’s happening right now.”
Hey folks. I’m dropping my son off at college today1 so the site is going to be a little slow until I get back midweek. In the meantime, you can check out some of the great sites on the KDO Rolodex on the front page of the site (scroll down some), and I’ll see you back here sometime on Tuesday or Wednesday. 👋
“Venus Williams is making history in her return to the U.S. Open later this month as the oldest singles player to take the court in more than 40 years.” Go Venus!
This music video, directed by Kevin McGloughlin for Max Cooper’s song Repetition, features remixed fractal-like forms from the constructed world (roads, skyscrapers, wind turbines, etc.) interspersed with scenes from nature. Totally mesmerizing. (You’ve got a give it a minute to get going though, especially if you’re not a fan of gradual repetitive music. I was in a trance by the end. 😵💫)
Kieran Healy recently became a US citizen. “I know the nationalities of my fellow oath-takers because of the next stage of the ceremony. This was the Roll Call of Nations. I did not know this was going to happen.”
Giles Clement tends to go a little overboard with his hobbies. During the pandemic, he taught himself to repair old watches and then decided to try building one himself. Taylor Scott Mason made a short documentary about Clement and his effort to build a watch from scratch in his basement:
Aside from the movement, Clement builds every component of his watches completely from scratch. He even constructed two of his milling machines and designed the typeface for the numbers on the watch face.
My shop is built around two 3 axis CNC machines which I built from scrap steel, surplus parts and a bunch of cussin. The larger of the two has an epoxy granite frame which gives a sturdy platform for cutting titanium and stainless cases, case backs and crowns. The smaller machine sports a 100k RPM spindle and the ability to cut extremely fine details needed for the hands and dials.
I’ve also built a pad printing machine for dials a polishing lathe, a lume injector for hand and dial applications and several drawers full of jigs and fixtures needed to manufacture parts.
You can read more about Clement’s process on his website and buy one of his watches from his online shop. Prices start at $2250.
In the latest issue of his monthly newsletter, Robin Sloan shared a quick reflection on why the Criterion closet interviews are so effective, entertaining, and worth participating in for celebrities (emphasis mine):
Let’s think about the format that is the Criterion closet:
1. Makes people look smarter, rather than dumber;
2. invites them to praise other artists, other work; and
3. demonstrates the way in which praise is reflected back upon the giver, a positive-sum game, with no limit to the size of the pie.
His observation immediately reminded me of how Sloan — and many other of my favorite curators/writers/bloggers/link sharers — writes his newsletters & blogs posts. That kind of generosity, in some ways a result of the connective nature of hypertextual media, is a big part of what first attracted me to the open & personal web and keeps me engaged ~30 years later. And as someone who tries to adhere to #2 as much as possible these days, I can tell you that praising the work of others is great for one’s soul.
What other examples of generous media can you think of?
From the inbox: “ldial is a website for listening to a curated list of community radio stations from across the US. I took efforts to make it super fast. To me, the random button feels like magic.”
“If you want to fight for what’s right in this moment, and forge politics that exist in opposition to what Trump represents, you must protect anyone chased by the fascists.”
Radiohead dropped a surprise album yesterday, a live album of songs from Hail to the Thief. You can find the album on various streaming platforms, including Bandcamp, Spotify, and Apple Music. The band’s lead singer Thom Yorke says of the album:
In the process of thinking how to build arrangements for the Shakespeare Hamlet/Hail to the Thief theatre production I asked to hear some archive live recordings of the songs.
I was shocked by the kind of energy behind the way we played and it really helped me find a way forward.
For us, back in the day, the finishing of this record was particularly messy and fraught, we were very proud of it but there was a taste left in our mouths, it was a dark time in so many ways…
Anyway we decided to get these live recordings mixed (it would have been insane to keep them for ourselves) by Ben Baptie, who did an amazing job.
It has all been a very cathartic process, we very much hope you enjoy them.
Radiohead is great live — they should rerelease live versions their whole discography. I’m listening to this right now, thinking about a friend who is no longer with us; they would have loved this album.
“Competitive authoritarianism [can be seen as] a prevalent form of government throughout American history — one which we have only tentatively started to move away from in recent decades.” Interesting historical context.
On the disorienting thrill & agony of picking up a new sport (or relearning an old one) in midlife. “Falling as an adult means calling friends and family to tell them ‘I had a fall.’”
The latest post from The Pudding starts off about as good as possible to attract the likes of me: “This is a project about onions and math.” I mean, yes. I’m in. And I enjoyed the interactive article, Dicing an Onion the Mathematically Optimal Way, but the design was absolutely delightful and onion-y:
They even used an onion gradient for the border of the page. This must have been so fun to work on! Initially, I thought they’d designed the onion font, but a quick search turned up Handmadefont’s OnioType Font:
From the description, it sounds like the letterforms are made from real onions:
Each letter is lovingly crafted from a perfectly sliced red onion, where nature’s concentric rings do most of the design heavy-lifting. Vivid purples, tender whites, and sudden flashes of yellow form shapes so unexpectedly elegant, you’ll never look at a salad the same way again.
But I dunno…Photoshop might be a better guess. Still! I love this font and kudos to The Pudding for putting it to good use.
The Colors of the World, Seen From the International Space Station. “Recent photographs from crew members aboard the ISS show some spectacular views of auroras, moonsets, the Milky Way, and more, seen from from their vantage point in orbit.”
Back in the earlier days of microchips, the designers would sometimes add tiny images to the chips, for fun. From NPR:
Many of the doodles came from engineers who weren’t doing it for an audience.
“We did it for ourselves,” said Willy McAllister, a retired electrical engineer who worked for more than a decade at Hewlett-Packard (HP) and helped craft a chip with the sleek image of a cheetah on it. “Nobody ever expected it to be cracked open 10 years later and marveled at. That was never the point.”
The cheetah was picked as a visual representation for an HP project code named after the world’s fastest land animal.
And from a recent NY Times story:
“They were the maverick days, like the early days of flying,” Mr. John said. “At that time, it could do no harm to the chip, so it was purely creative expression.”
Mr. John tried, with mixed results, to recreate a yacht from the period’s Old Spice advertisements. Another colleague who was thin drew elaborate muscles. The doodles were drawn with a chip design tool.
The most important reason behind the covert graffiti, Mr. John added, was for the doodles to say: “I’m signing my name on this chip, so it’s got to mean something.”
You can find many more microchip doodles at Silicon Zoo.
Dictators love a crisis. “For reasons of both personality and political ambition, Trump needs a crisis to govern — or rather, to rule. And if the actual conditions of reality will not give him a state of exception, he’ll create one himself.”
vintage post from May 2017
· gift link
In a talk about Taoism called Swimming Headless, Alan Watts shared with his audience the parable of the Chinese farmer.
Once upon a time, there was a Chinese farmer who lost a horse. Ran away. And all the neighbors came ‘round that evening and said, “that’s too bad.”
And he said, “maybe.”
The next day, the horse came back and brought seven wild horses with it. And all the neighbors came around and said, “that’s great, isn’t it?”
And he said, “maybe.”
The point, according to Watts’ interpretation of Lao Tzu’s teachings, is “to try to live in such a way that nothing is either an advantage or a disadvantage”.
The whole process of nature is an integrated process of immense complexity, and it’s really impossible to tell whether anything that happens in it is good or bad, because you never know what will be the consequence of the misfortune. Or you never know what will be the consequences of good fortune.
I read the Tao Te Ching in an English class in college, and I remember not getting it. It was a small class, only six students, and none of us white midwestern kids had ever read any Eastern philosophy before and didn’t really understand it, to the professor’s frustration. I wish I could take that class again; I’d get so much more out of it now. (via @sausaw)
“Today, general officers no longer seem to see themselves as guardians of the constitutional order. It now seems clear to us that the military will not rescue Americans from Mr. Trump’s misuse of the nation’s military capabilities.”
The ‘What It’s Like To Be…’ podcast features interviews with people about their jobs (recently: a deli owner, a harbor pilot, a hospice nurse, and a brain surgeon). The host told me it’s “Studs Terkel meets Ted Lasso”.
A forthcoming book from long-time technology writer David Pogue: Apple: The First 50 Years. “Deeply researched & lavishly illustrated, Apple: The First 50 Years includes new interviews with 150 key people who made the journey, including Steve Wozniak…”
A 90-minute video of making a batch of woodblock prints “from blank paper to finished print” from the printer’s POV. Relaxing & ASMR-adjacent.
“‘This Show Felt Like It Was Falling Out of Me’. Six female artists on how they prepared for their major solo debuts this fall.”
At 40, She Discovered She Was One of America’s Best Free Divers. Sara Burnett took a free diving intro course and a year later she competed in a world championship for the US team. “Why am I doing an extreme sport at this age?”
If you’re still back-to-school (or racing-the-tariffs) shopping, these M4 Macbook Airs are somehow still on sale. “$800 is an absurdly low price for so much computer.”
Car and plane travel from Canada to the US has dropped sharply year-over-year, with a 37% drop in July car trips and 26% drop in air travel. Not sure why they call it a “boycott” — the Trump regime’s outright hostility to outsiders is the cause here.
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