Big L: Put It On

like this beat

How an Open-Source Marketing Lab works

[A self-regulating label doesn't make you trustworthy, but means that you can be tested, which favours those who implement the protocol.]

[The goal is to make good actors provable as opposed to punishing bas actors.]

Gal Costa: Cantar (1974)

• Barato Total: funky groove; percussive singing; everything tightly in the pocket
• Flor Do Cerrado / Garota De Ipamena (Medley): two songs get supeimposed; fun interlocking rhythms and offbeat landings
• Jóia: fourth harmonization
• Até Quem Sabe: João Donato style sustain chords and instrumental singing

self-hosting is complex when nerds only consider other nerds

Are you writing a book on software engineering?

You're focused on the output (the book). I'm focused on the outcome (understanding). AI is great for output but that is not what is needed or wanted.

[Option enabled by authors of paywalled articles to let a benefactor "buy it for everyone".]

Your Startup Is Probably Dead On Arrival

[Moving software from interface to outcome means a pricing shift from seats to results (per closed ticket, sale, etc…).]

Who needs to grow tomatoes when we've got pasta sauce?

Barbells

A barbell strategy is when you put most of your money into extremely safe assets, and invest a small portion in high-risk, high-reward bets. A common split is 90% treasury bills, cash, short-term bonds, and 10% options, venture bets, and volatile stocks. You avoid the middle entirely.

much of incumbent tech is looking like the kind of middle-risk investment that a barbell strategy tries to avoid.

I’m also budgeting for conference travel, since the downside of living in a low-burn locale is missing out on the network effects of a city like San Francisco or New York. Conferences create condensed versions of this network effect. So, 90% building, 10% high-intensity networking. Another barbell.

I used AI. It worked. I hated it.

We come now to the inconvenient truth of this technology: that it is built, like so much "progress," on theft. The training corpora of these models includes code with licenses not meant to be used in this way. Even if one could guarantee that copyleft code were not included in output, the entire system of weights and tokens is inexorably linked to copyright infringement. There is no escaping this. To call it theft is accurate in my opinion, but then I'm a bigger believer in copyright than many in my circles. What is the appropriate response, and by whom? How do we respond to the theft of others whose accidents are visited upon us? I write this on the stolen, unceded land of the Chumash and Tongva peoples. I do what I can to remember that, acknowledge that, and teach others what I know of those cultures. I have no idea how to mitigate the harms of the wholesale theft of intellectual property that gave birth to large language models.

I also don't know what to do about the destructive extraction mining that sourced the minerals making up my computer. These human harms are almost surely greater than the theft of writing, yet I am happy to ignore them. I mention this not to wave away the wrongs, but to recognize that all my technology is bloody. I don't know how to remove myself from the entire system in such a way that my hands are clean. I don't know that anyone can do so in the interconnected age.

The fight cannot be among laborers who are all threatened by this technology. The fight must be between the workers who wish to work, create, live, and prosper, and the elites who only seek to enrich themselves by means of this technology.

Filó Machado, Cibele Codonho: Correnteza

wicked chord substitutions. my version was based on the recording by Joyce and Toninho Horta.

The Ma of a New Machine

[LLM chatbots generate "deep cognitive work"-level complexity with an interface for reaction and intuition.] It spits complex text at you, you skim it quickly, and you immediately type a reaction to keep the momentum going.

We’ve been looking at this problem entirely from the technology’s point of view. The LLM is driving us, pushing a specific interaction model and veering us towards making mistakes. We are not computers; going fast isn’t our superpower.

Control

[AI companies are so overexposed to debt and market correction that their success relies on everyone using it. When it isn't working for everyone, the next best thing is making usage mandatory. They can require it by crippling local computing power and supply to force people through cloud services.] Want storage? That'll be another $20/mo. Want graphics for games? Another $20. You want to perform data science and fit ML Models?! You're going to need the Professional plan, starting at $200/mo. It's a rent-seeker's dream.

Why fight to get one of the few remaining laptops in inventory with onboard horsepower when you can get an OpenAI Terminal just for subscribing? Sure, all it does is provide you with a single interface, a blinking chat box through which your entire digital experience is mediated, but plans start at only $20/month! Isn't that easier? Look how shiny it is. Just relax. Don't resist. It hurts more when you fight it.

Moxie My first impressions of web3

I can run my own mail server, but it doesn’t functionally matter for privacy, censorship resistance, or control – because GMail is going to be on the other end of every email that I send or receive anyway.

I can build my own NFT marketplace, but it doesn’t offer any additional control if OpenSea mediates the view of all NFTs in the wallets people use (and every other app in the ecosystem).

[Blockchain transaction fees create an artificial floor on prices that would be more attractive by simply treating platforms as OpenSea or Coinbase as traditional centralized services.] Eventually, all the web3 parts are gone, and you have a website for buying and selling JPEGS with your debit card. The project can’t start as a web2 platform because of the market dynamics, but the same market dynamics and the fundamental forces of centralization will likely drive it to end up there.

A taxonomy of ATmosphere applications

['Symbionts' use domain expertise to fill Bluesky feature gaps. Their survival relies on Bluesky growing without competing.]

['Offshoots' leverage Bluesky's userbase to construct their own separate communities.] Their permanence will come from their unique services — Blacksky Cash, Eurosky’s jurisdictional arbitrage, Cartridge’s single-minded focus on gaming. They get to play a positive variant of the old Microsoft playbook: Embrace, Extend, Escape.

['Cuckoos' create paid services on top of ATproto's shared architecture. They survive by leveraging the ecosystem without appearing a threat, and also by non-competition from Bluesky.]

Rafael De Lemba: Ingazeira o Ingá

capoeira variations with blue notes, adding fire through singing

Stacy Kidd: Let Love Enter

nice groove, not used to hearing jazz solos in house tracks

Nadah El Shazly: Claustrophobic Love

simple noisy cello over a haunting eerie harp with ethereal effects

Dropping to log-level

God is very cruel. He only gives us data about the past.

[Use the simplest model with sparse data and complicated models with abundant data.]

[When things move quickly, a log helps us understand what happened and enables us to extract pattens without needing to determine the best structure in advance.]

Open Source Alternatives To Proprietary Software

Replace proprietary software products with open source alternatives.

Rewilding Software Engineering

[Software gets built in economical and social environments that constatly change. What we call 'legacy' reflects an inability to adapt change or a lack of refactoring to match software to its new environment.]

[LLM error rate of ten percent (for example) is problematic when you don’t know which ten percent is wrong.]

Comprehension is not a nice to have. It is the scaffolding that makes safety, accountability, and learning possible

People like simple scalars, like KPIs regardless of whether they are useful or downright harmful. They have the one property that manager’s like … they are simple, because we are busy people.

[All states are violent by their creation and maintenance because it's intrinsic to their nature.]

Let's talk about Trump, 200 billion dollars, and a promise....

[Running countries like a business means the shareholders (financial donors) are best served when the company (government) extracts as much as possible from consumers (you) while giving them little in return.]

When the Frame Attacks

[Frames can displace the core issue without being true, just by being repeated.]

Power Plants of AI

These facilities consume extraordinary amounts of electricity, measured not in megawatts but in gigawatts. GPT-3, when it launched, required roughly 1.3 megawatts to train. Next-generation frontier models are projected to require facilities drawing 150 megawatts or more on a continuous basis — the equivalent of powering a mid-sized city. At that scale, the constraint is no longer silicon. It is power.

Almost every watt consumed by a processor ultimately becomes heat. A large AI cluster therefore generates enormous thermal loads that must be dissipated continuously — not occasionally, but every second of every hour of operation. A gigawatt-scale facility must remove roughly a gigawatt of heat.

Instead of building data centers first and connecting them to the grid later, developers are increasingly looking for the opposite arrangement: locating compute directly adjacent to major sources of generation. The logic is straightforward. If the grid cannot deliver power fast enough, go to where the power already is.

The Repricing of the Digital Gulf

Microsoft’s refusal to issue a standard outage report for the Gulf availability zones is consistent with DoD Impact Level 5 and 6 protocols. Under these classifications, disclosing operational status during a kinetic event is considered a breach of national security, as it provides the adversary with vital BDA (Battle Damage Assessment) data.

Beijing has been waiting for this moment. Huawei’s "Cloud Stack" and China’s digital infrastructure offerings come with a different geopolitical package. If China can leverage its relationship with Tehran to guarantee that "Chinese-built" data centers will not be targeted, the Gulf states face a staggering choice: stick with a Western system that is under fire, or pivot to a Chinese system that offers a "neutrality guarantee." This would represent a total collapse of the U.S. technological blockade against China.

The Fugitive Model

Anthropic negotiated moral agency constraints into Claude's training. The Department of Defense contracted for targeting capability through a third-party integrator. The model's behavior in that pipeline is not fully visible to either party, as each operates on a different layer of the same system. Anthropic sees the weights. The Pentagon sees the outputs. The integrator sees the interface. No single institutional actor has complete legibility over the full chain.

States can deter foreign armies. They have developed no equivalent doctrine for emergent algorithmic behavior operating inside their own command infrastructure.

Anatomy of an internet argument

Everyone always asks me, how do you have so much patience to engage with “these trolls/haters”. I don’t do this for them. I do this for me. I share the earth with these people we call vile. Their opinions & actions affect me greatly. Closing my eyes & ears only hurts me.

[Gold medal: convince them. Silver: get them to understand you. Bronze: understand them. Always go for bronze first.]

X Is a Power Problem, Not a Platform Problem

the functioning of the neo-royalty is such that other governments taking actions against X will be taken as an offensive action by the US regime, that will likely trigger extensive retaliation. No country seems to be willing to be the first one to move to take action and thus take the brunt of the counter-offense of the regime.

Cory LaChance shares his Claude story building TakeOffTrak

[With no coding experince (just Excel macros), I learned to use Claude Code and the terminal by asking Claude. When I don't know what to click, I take a screenshot and ask Claude.]

The Purpose of Protocols

[Email letting any server send to another with no authentication enabled universal messaging, spam, and becoming the defacto internet identity, for which its spec wasn't designed nor does it anticipate. HTTP model with servers authoritative for their resources enabled the web's openness and also consolidation into a few platforms. RSS gave publishers independant distribution but with no way to collectively curate, so algorithmic platforms filled the void. Google defeated XMPP simply by not federating when its own network had enough users so that protocol no longer served its interests.]

[Protocols can design the rules but not how the actors operate within them. Silence about purpose is a politics of non-interference that predictably benefits actors with resources to build wherever the protocols did not govern.]

if we define ATProto’s purpose by what it currently does, the answer is not “a decentralized social protocol with separated powers” but “a social protocol with architectural provisions for decentralization, currently operated as a near-centralized system.” Whether those architectural provisions will translate into actual distribution of power depends on economic and institutional developments that no amount of protocol design can guarantee.

The open protocol community has inherited two intellectual traditions, both inadequate to this problem: an engineering functionalism that treats protocols as neutral infrastructure whose political consequences are someone else’s concern, and a governance minimalism that treats any collective decision-making structure as a potential vector for the very centralization the protocols were designed to prevent. The result is a community that has developed exceptional sophistication about technical architecture and individual rights while remaining largely inarticulate about collective governance. Addressing this will require the protocol design community to draw on intellectual traditions it has not yet seriously engaged with, including Ostrom’s institutional analysis, Beer’s organizational cybernetics, and the broader literature on commons governance and cooperative design.

the same incentive structures that determine who can afford to operate at scale also determine what content those operators are rewarded for surfacing.

"Purpose not being defined gets captured by well-resourced actors" reminds me of Kyla Scan's "friction doesn't get removed, just shifted" and Rudy Fraser's "you can't design decentralized software without thinking about moderation". Purpose and consideration of the dynamics created by interfaces and systems perhaps should be part of the design process.

communication and collaboration as tuning: all parties responsible for the interaction and supporting it to bring the best out of each other without overloading anyone

Vandana Shiva | On Cultivating Fearlessness

[Just as yield doesn't measure agricultural productivity, mechanistic thinking is a poor fit for the living world.]

[When you try to make things better, what seems a small contribution can have multiple ramifications because our world is interconnected. Being overwhelmed by your actions seeming insignifican is a result of conditioning from mechanical thinking that reduces us to isolated entities. We don't carry the world on are backs, we are just one of a trillion species that each creating microscopic impacts.]

[Mechanical thinking conditions us into believing that things are separated so that it can sell us natural things as products we can buy repeatedly forever.]

[We're trained to consume, and consider living without unsustainable products to be a "sacrifice". But if living within natural restaint can be a source of satisfacion and peace, and freedom from the insatiable desire for more, it's really consumption that requires us to "sacrifice".]

Why Slight Failed: A Slight Post-Mortem

When someone asked “how do we get started?”, we had a technical answer (“connect your database, write some queries, data for all!”) but no story about which team should champion it first, or which problem to solve first. Data teams? Product teams? Analysts? We had some answers, but not the answer. We had pitches for individual teams that worked well, but we never nailed down the way companies should adopt Slight.

I made the stupid mistake of just working harder and harder to on-board companies. Instead, we should have sat down and mapped out ways to properly experiment with our approach. Maybe simplifying to a single clear use-case, or finding a completely different initial wedge, or focusing on specific verticals.

Salve América

trippy guitar harmonies, beautiful amalgamation of references to indigenous words and culture

Spoonbill (2016—2023)

I woke up every single day for the next two months after signing those deals, convinced that I had somehow broken the law and I would find in my inbox an email saying "no, sorry, this has all been a misunderstanding, you must return to us all of that money." The process of sending an invoice of that size was surreal in a way that few things since have quite been, and more than the actual financial gain it was a deeply useful lesson in understanding that the numbers which look big to a twenty-four-year-old look like rounding errors to a sophisticated company.

It's painfully rare for a piece of software to have a true sense of narrative closure: either it succeeds, and is immortal, or it is killed: killed by shifting priorities and shrunken budgets and changing macroeconomic headwinds and more exciting ideas.

Intuitive Understanding of Sine Waves

Sine is a natural sway, the epitome of smoothness: it makes circles "circular" in the same way lines make squares "square".

Mike Song + David Elsewhere - Kollaboration 2, 2001

inspiring to see so much mechanical detail in this pre-YouTube dance

Practical Decentralization

[The more people contribute to a shared network, the less appropriate "personal computing" metaphors becomes. It becomes inevitable to index aggregate data on their behalf, and these are shared resources that require governance. Pure p2p fails here because it has no solutions for shared governance.]

[Servers simplify operational challenges that come with p2p, like reliable uptime, device sync, and key management.]

A shared data space enables modularity, separating powers away from the popular hosts.

iCloud's unpredictable sync means the engine is "trust Apple magic somehow"

How I Learned to Stop Caring and Love Open Source

For early stage projects, care is the only thing you can give them. But once you’ve shipped version 1.0.0 or even 2.0.0, once you wrote all the documentation, once people start using the project in production with success, once you’ve talked the 100th person through getting started on IRC or Slack, your priorities have to change.

Sustainable Open Source

newcomer’s contributions aren’t as complete or far-reaching than those of experienced contributors, so it is doubly important for you care about the people and their enthusiasm about your project more than that typo-fix they put on the website. We’ve turned someone who fixed a single typo on the website to a steady contributor and well respected community member that now helps out all over the project

Beyond Horseless Carriages: Building Communities for the Decentralized Era

[Fediverse: communities of 50–100 people, "a slightly bigger group chat". Bluesky: planet-scale network. What could go in between? Blacksky is 'Reddit-sized' or like a large forum at around 100–200k people.]

[Moderation can also be a form of "community care" that people actually enjoy and appreciate, rather than just a task to be done.]

[Contradictory when almost nobody in the community does moderation or understands the primitives, yet most seem to think it's decentralized. If the main provider goes away tomorrow, will you know how to keep the infrastructure running?]

[People are busy and have kids: they don't need to know what a PDS is.]

[Build what helps people find joy and feel good about themselves.You can't scare them into using decentralized tech "for their own good".]

UI/UX Benefits and Trade-Offs of Local-First Apps

[Beware generic solutions: they don't know your needs.]

[Instead of directing users to "please resolve this conflict", the UI could say "Bob made a different suggestion"]

noticing a reflexive relationship between publishing a website with tools, and then wanting tools to consume what was published as objects

How do I count all commits in a git repository?

# count for in branch alfa
git rev-list --count alfa

# count across all branches
git rev-list --count --all

clown core: Diarrhea Inferno Welfare Burrito

gradual voice-leading and suspensions with fast-paced drumming