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š a linked post to
ashley.dev »
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originally shared here on
I wish I could say I was past this part. That Iāve grown thicker skin by now. But the truth is, I still care. Not about applause. I care about peopleās time. I care about making things that are worth showing up for. And that pressure? It can be paralyzing.
Still, something in me wants to try. Slowly. Gently. Maybe Iām not going back to who I was. Maybe Iām heading toward something new, something more honest.
This post was extremely timely because I literally talked with my therapist about this yesterday.
Iām writing about this today because itās been one of my ācan LLMs do this reliably yet?ā questions for over two years now. I think theyāve just crossed the line into being useful as research assistants, without feeling the need to check everything they say with a fine-tooth comb.
I still donāt trust them not to make mistakes, but I think I might trust them enough that Iāll skip my own fact-checking for lower-stakes tasks.
This also means that a bunch of the potential dark futures weāve been predicting for the last couple of years are a whole lot more likely to become true. Why visit websites if you can get your answers directly from the chatbot instead?
The lawsuits over this started flying back when the LLMs were still mostly rubbish. The stakes are a lot higher now that theyāre actually good at it!
I can feel my usage of Google search taking a nosedive already. I expect a bumpy ride as a new economic model for the Web lurches into view.
I keep thinking of the quote that āinformation wants to be freeā.
As the capabilities of open-source LLMs continue to increase, I keep finding myself wanting a locally-running model at arms length any time Iām near a computer.
How many more cool things can I accomplish with computers if I can always have a āgood enoughā answer at my disposal for virtually any question for free?
The single best trait to predict whether I'm looking at a good programmer or a great one is undoubtedly perseverance. Someone that takes to each new challenge like a dog to a bone, and who struggles to sleep until the next obstacle is cleared.
Today (literally today), I delivered the final story for the third project Iāve had at my day job since starting back in October.
This project involved a lot of unknowns and uncertainties, and resulted in a ton of code that was written and thrown away in order to arrive at the final stab at version 1.
It was painful. Ask my wife and sheāll tell you I spent many days in doubt, riddled with anxiety and impostor syndrome, feeling like a fraud.
But then, just like that, Iām able to click the āsquash and mergeā button, and itās done. The clouds lift. Itās incredible.
Sort of reminds me of Courtney Dauwalterās pain cave metaphor. Every time I start an engineering project, I go into the pain cave and start chiseling away at the walls.
Once Iāve chiseled enough, I am rewarded by stepping back out of the cave and celebrating what Iāve built. Itās an incredible feeling.
Itās a short lived euphoria, though. I only get a few moments before I dust myself off, grab a quick bite to eat, and begin my descent back into the cave to start chiseling away on the next project.
š a linked post to
whygodwhy.com »
—
originally shared here on
bro straight up, but tenderly: if the only thing you use your apple watch for is to find your apple phone than it is time to lose your apple watch. OK DONE. drop kicked into the sea / reset and quietly handed to a family member. no looking back, no tears. the future starts today. what else.
I havenāt worn my Apple Watch for three days now, which is the longest period of time Iāve been without something on my wrist since I got a Fitbit a decade and a half or so ago.
What I miss, in no particular order:
Ability to find my phone
Apple Pay without having to pull out my phone
What I donāt miss, in no particular order:
Feeling pressured to get up and move around
A general anxiousness whenever my wrist budges
The feeling of an encumbered wrist
I felt like I should end this link with something, but instead I went back and read the rest of this article, which excellently ends with:
Canāt figure out what else to say to wrap this up, but I suppose resisting the need to wrap up every blog post with a CTA is its own form of protest
Reach out to someone in your life whoās putting in the workānot for likes, not for a brand, but because they give a damn. Because theyāre trying to make something better. Tell them what you appreciate about them. Be specific. Be honest. And say thank you. Like you mean it, because you do.
š a linked post to
github.com »
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originally shared here on
Iāve had this on my todo list for a while now, and I finally went through and got myself removed from all the high priority sites.
Iād recommend everyone take the time to go through and opt out of having your private information on these lists.
I set up a spreadsheet and worked down it over the course of a couple weeks. It really didnāt take much time at all, and I donāt know, I feel better knowing itās marginally more difficult for people to find out where I live and how to call me.
Jon Batiste ā The Quest for Originality and How to Get Unstuck
š a linked post to
youtube.com »
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originally shared here on
This is an episode of the Tim Ferriss show that I will undoubtedly revisit many times for years to come.
The best part is toward the end, where Jon asks Tim a question like, āWhat are the 5 things that you would possess if everything else was wiped away, and the only knowledge or inspiration or experience that you could draw from were of those five? Instead of the pursuit of more broad vision and connectivity, how can you go as deep as you can within a handful of things that are for you and leave the rest?ā
After Tim answers the question, he flips it around and asks Jon, who in turn says, āCan I answer you with my piano?ā
Another big takeaway from this episode for me was this mantra:
āĀ Youāre in a period of rapid growth. New job, new challenge, new responsibility ā when youāre leveling up, impostor syndrome loves to make an entrance.
āĀ Youāre surrounded by high performers. The more talented the people around you, the easier it is to assume youāre the odd one out.
āĀ You actually care. If the work didnāt matter to you, you wouldnāt be questioning yourself in the first place.
This sums up how Iāve felt at my new role1 for the past several months. The nice thing is whenever I talk to my coworkers about it, they all seem to resonate equally with those feelings.
Which, according to my pal Colleen here, means Iām definitely in the right place.
At what point will I feel like itās no longer my ānew jobā and just my ājob?ā Related question: when does a company no longer get to claim to be a startup? Is there a timeframe? Org size? Or is it a vibe, something that describes the culture and mentality of the team? ↩
Maybe, like a lot of other middle-aged professionals suddenly finding their careers upended at the peak of their creative power, I will have to adapt or face replacement. Or maybe my best bet is to continue to zig while others are zagging, and to try to keep my coding skills sharp while everyone else is āvibe codingā a monstrosity that I will have to debug when it crashes in production someday.
I enjoyed this piece because I think it represents the feelings I hear from artists. You might not consider computer programming an art form, but if art is humans expressing themselves, then writing code absolutely qualifies.
And like a lot of other artists, many of us "computer peopleā make money by doing our art for other people. It turns out that for the last fourty years, we could do our art for other people and we'd get paid quite well to do so.
But now that anyone can basically vibe code solutions to basic problems1, a increasing set of non-nerds is able to use computers themselves. That naturally will drive down our value.
I use "value" here in a cold, hard, capitalistic sense. Maybe it's our turn, as artists who care about making efficient, beautiful, artistic computer programs, to worry about how we'll derive value in a world where anyone can vibe code their ideas to life.
What's wild is just how fast the bar for what counts as "basic" is raising. ↩