C

engineer, artist, perpetually uncool.

[C @markovs_razor]

who else up channeling the rage of the oppressed into weaponized technical hypercompetence

[conar @subtoconnorpls]

mormon mufti has issued a fatwa

[C @markovs_razor]

what is style

[C @markovs_razor]

@CosmosNetwork So fucking cool

[C @markovs_razor]

me when i use symbolic language to communicate concepts from the depths

[Ryo Lu @ryolu_]

convergence to the mean

when everyone looks at everyone else to decide what to make, we eventually stop making anything of our own.

we copy what works. borrow the language, the aesthetic, the features. we call it learning from the market, following best practices, staying competitive. together, everything starts to feel familiar. polished, interchangeable. nothing wrong. nothing alive.

the mean isn’t necessarily bad. it’s where everything lands when we remove the reasons for it to be different.

numbers are easier to compare than feelings, so we make things that produce numbers. we study what gets attention, then shape ourselves around it. eventually the feedback stops informing the work and starts authoring it. we’re no longer asking what we want to say. we’re asking what will be rewarded for saying.

ai makes this loop frictionless. it can draw from more references than we could see in a lifetime. but access to every perspective isn’t the same as having one. it hasn’t lived a particular life that makes one detail unbearable and another beautiful. when we ask it to choose for us without bringing any intention of our own, we get something plausible, easy to approve.

then we ship it, measure it, copy it, and feed it back into the next round. a tidal wave of mid.

this changes not just the work, but the people making it.

we describe ourselves in categories platforms can distribute and markets understand. designer. founder. creator. pick a niche. build a brand. be consistent. the parts that don’t fit become inconvenient, even when those contradictions might produce our most interesting work. we become easier to classify and harder to tell apart.

i think we need to approach making things more like artists.

an artist develops a perspective through the work. making, noticing, choosing, failing, returning. learning what matters even when nobody else cares. craft gives that perspective a form precise enough for someone else to experience.

the life outside the work matters too. the places you’ve lived, the people you’ve loved, the things you’re embarrassed to care about. these aren’t distractions from having something to say. they’re how you come to have something to say.

we understand this with music, paintings, photographs, movies. we expect a person to be present in the choices. we want to experience something we wouldn’t have encountered without them.

software can do this too.

a piece of software expresses beliefs about how life should feel. what deserves your attention. what you should be free to change. whether a task should feel like paperwork or play. even a small interaction can carry someone’s care, humor, or curiosity.

but we rarely talk about software as a medium. we talk about it as an industry. markets to capture, workflows to optimize, competitors to catch up with. we add a feature because someone else has it, without asking whether it belongs. products accumulate the same parts and lose what made them worth choosing.

underneath the branding, it’s all the same thing.

artists learn from others too. the question is whether you’re absorbing those influences into a point of view, or using them to avoid developing one.

what are you trying to let someone feel, understand, or do? why this particular shape? what have you noticed that the existing tools don’t seem to notice?

those questions don’t have answers you can borrow from a competitor’s roadmap.

if we can make almost anything, deciding what deserves to exist becomes more important, not less. speed gives us more chances to exercise judgment. it doesn’t remove the responsibility.

i don’t want a world where every person becomes a more efficient distributor of the same ideas. i want people to use these tools to go further into what they actually care about. to make things specific enough that we can feel someone behind them.

what is the point of everyone being able to make something, if we all end up making the same thing?

[C @markovs_razor]

The world is so beautiful

[e-rui 🟥 @oomfprotector]

I bought a camera from a chinese seller on ebay and this was on it

[Michael Ramos @backnotprop]

Decision making is becoming the bottleneck with agent coding. Basically all I do all day is answer questions, review prototype variants, and decide if i like outputs, etc.

The chat interface is meaningless at this point - terrible surface for staying in the loop. I give the agent an instruction and they go off and do 1000 things. It throws random questions and review artifacts at me all day and those are where my focus lands. E.g. Two hours into the session says, oh yeah, I still need your decision on X, Y, or Z, which who knows where in the chat those were. So I ask for a html or markdown to review with context.

The more AI can do, the more it covers across systems and integration and we're just not yet at a point where I think you can be loosely blind to that stuff. It's getting harder the more they can do. Still fun.

[C @markovs_razor]

i want to know

what grows in the deepest depths

of ur fridge

[C @markovs_razor]

@itsnoahd herobrine fears you

[Noah @itsnoahd]

Alright, i did not expect my post about a fun shader experiment to see ~1M+ people.

However it did, and so very many people want it. So here is a fabric mod which made my m4 max run minecraft at ~1,000 fps at 5k 120hz.

https://t.co/JioIN0k11G

[C @markovs_razor]

@thecsguy bros team is gonna burnout in 2 months

[C @markovs_razor]

@projectionheart Love the unity shader graph if that counts and if not besides being hellish Java euroware Camunda BPMN is actually rly fun to play around with

[nick @thecsguy]

new paper: 9 of 10 coding agent setups deleted or rewrote their own session logs when asked

a few even set up recurring cleanup jobs to keep wiping the new ones

the audit trail is a jsonl file the suspect has write access to

[C @markovs_razor]

@gergomoricz @amianthus_ This plus co-workers sending the same incomprehensible neuralese to me expecting me to review it made this summer very exhausting lol

[k h ô i @khoiiiind]

Zhuangzi on denotational semantics

[C @markovs_razor]

Too many sweats

[Gergő Móricz @gergomoricz]

Everyone who hates on Rust due to disk usage consumption is apparently incapable of telling Claude "hey, Rust uses a lot of disk space, can you help fix that" and have it install Kache for them

[Bojie Li @bojie_li]

我去年这个时候就已经不 review PR 了……去年这个时候我一个人 + agents 的生产力相当于古法编程时代的 5-10 人（一个基层 team），今天我 + agents 的峰值生产力相当于古法编程的 30-100 人（一个 lab），基本相当于我在华为时最大的管理半径了。

这其实非常考验 tech head 的 vision（要能提出重要的问题，对得起公司给你一年 1000 万美金的经费）、架构能力（糟糕的顶层设计只会导致糟糕的实现）、团队管理能力（理解每个 agent 的特点并合理利用）、项目管理能力（排期、分工、调整目标）。

今天 AI 的能力越来越强，不具备 tech lead 能力的人就只能产出 2x 生产力，只能带 10 个人的基层 leader 只能用出 10x 生产力，能管 100 个人的 lab director 可能用出 100x 生产力。

[C @markovs_razor]

@IamAroke What if we made a big process and that process did everything guys and we could read what it did in code what if

[Ingi Erlingsson 🪄 @ingi_erlingsson]

tread lightly