Joy & Curiosity #87

Travelled for roughly 16 hours yesterday and now I’m in a different timezone, with my family, everyone fell asleep at 8pm yesterday, and everyone woke up at 4:30am today (not complaining: that’s good!), and I started writing this at 5am, and the Airbnb we’re staying in is lovely but has one downside: as of right now, it doesn’t have any coffee in it.

What I’m trying to say: that’s all I got for an intro this week, friends. I need a coffee. Enjoy the links!

• This week we announced Amp Labs. Our team has been working with some exceptional companies for a while now, but now we’re entering a new phase, starting in Sydney, Australia. If you’re exceptionally good and want to help bring artificial intelligence to a global finance player, let me know.

• Software After Software on the Amp Labs website. What we at Amp believe about the future of software and why Amp and Amp Labs exist.

• I was a guest on Mayank Gupta’s podcast and we talked about everything, really: how I got into programming, why I got into programming, how I ended up going from training to get better at Vim thinking that it doesn’t really matter that much anymore, to being a co-founder of Amp. That was a really pleasant conversation, you can tell that I was a bit tired at the start, since we recorded late-ish my evening, after a long day, but then got more and more excited because Mayank’s questions were fun. Also: what an intro. Also, also: wow, he really went there with that one image in the intro.

• Seems like I’m behind the world by three weeks, but I’ve finally started to use hunk to review diffs before making commits. Since I’ve read about the Emacsification of Software right before, I forked it and added Gruvbox Dark Hard.

• John Gruber: AI Is Technology, Not a Product. I really enjoyed this one, especially this comparison at the end here: “Wireless networking is pervasive too. But Apple doesn’t have ‘a killer wireless networking product’. Wireless networking simply pervades everything Apple makes. I’m hard pressed to think of a single product Apple makes that doesn’t use some combination of Wi-Fi, cellular, Bluetooth, and proprietary wireless protocols. There was a time, not too long ago, when Apple didn’t make a single product with wireless connectivity. Now it’s pervasive in all their devices. That’s more what AI is going to be like. There’s not going to be one “killer AI device”. Everything is going to be an AI device, to some extent, just like how everything today is a wireless connectivity device, to some extent.”

• How Diamonds are Made? If you find this at least a tiny bit fascinating, I need you to read Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond? which is an absolute must-read for anyone really. Fantastic all-time article, but also infinite ammunition to sound smug in at least fifty conversations in the future.

• Benedict Evan’s AI Eats the World presentation has been updated for May 2026. As always: highly recommend clicking through it. The “Average SKUs per supermarket” slide is great.

• The 2026 Pulitzer Prizes. Good list to click through to find great writing. This firsthand account of the Texas flood in 2025, for example. I’m struggling to find the right words to describe how well the writing conveys the absolute terror you must feel when you start to think that — as a real, practical possibility; right here, right now — that you and your family are going to die, but it does. Maybe don’t read it on the plane when you’re with your family, like I was.

• Talking about kids and family: How to deal with your kid leaving. I didn’t know that Mike Monteiro was still regularly writing. Nearly everything I know about Monteiro comes from watching this many years ago: F*ck You, Pay Me. Interesting pairing.

• Anthropic’s “Profitability” Swindle: “Remember that deal Anthropic signed with SpaceX to take over Colossus-1? Well it’s also taking over some or all of Colossus-2, paying SpaceX $1.25 billion a month starting in May and June… when it’ll have a reduced fee as it ramps up! That’s $15 billion a year in compute costs, but reduced to an indeterminately-discounted level for the precise months that Anthropic is using to tell investors and the media that it has an operating profit. That operating profit is a result of accountancy rather than any improvements to its business model.”

• Ben Thompson in The Inference Shift is arguing that agents are more asynchronous than the traditional chat interfaces and that more agents will be running somewhere without a user waiting for them (agree), and that has effects on what hardware is required or what hardware can get away with: “This, by extension, will mean that the likely best approach to solving agentic inference will look a lot different than answer inference. The most important aspect for answer inference is token speed; the most important aspect for agentic inference, however, is memory. Agents need context, state, and history. Some of that will live as active KV cache; some will live in host memory or SSDs; much of it will live in databases, logs, embeddings, and object stores. The important point is that agentic inference will be less about GPUs answering a question and more about the memory hierarchy wrapped around a model.”

• DiffsHub by The Pierre Computer Company. This is faaaaaaast, nice.

• Marc Brooker: What’s Easy Now? What’s Hard Now? “I think this is different from the intuition many people have about coding agents. They see websites and UIs as ‘easy’ (see the SaaSpocalypse), and system software as ‘hard’. The feedback loop hypothesis says that this is backwards. That, in fact, we’re going to find that SaaS is ‘hard’ and system software is ‘easy’.” I think I agree, but we also can’t deny that feedback loops have changed tremendously in the last six months. I myself, for a long time in 2025, thought that feedback loops are everything. Then GPT-5.3 one-shotted a big feature. I asked it “did you run the tests?” And it said it didn’t but “I can run them now.” Then it did run them and they all passed and the code worked on first try. “Why put training wheels on someone who never wobbles?” also means that you might not need a feedback loop if you don’t need feedback. Doesn’t mean that Marc’s point is invalid, of course; I agree with him. But feedback loops will change.

• Agentation. Visual feedback for agents. Neat, need to play around with it.

• no slop grenade. It’s the new dontasktoask.com eh?

• When you want to replace the battery of the Garmin HRM200 heart rate monitor you can use the size adjuster on its own strap to unlock the battery. I love stuff like that, when you can use the thing (or parts of the thing) to modify the thing itself. There are about five equivalents in programming, but what’s the equivalent in software?

• Dave Winer in 2002: What is Stop Energy? Nearly 25 years old and still relevant.

• Two computers, one monitor, zero fiddling. I could read posts like these every day. Love it.

• I don’t think AI will make your processes go faster. This made the rounds quite a bit. It was, as far as I can tell, mostly shared as “gotcha! HA! AI won’t change a damn thing!” That’s silly, of course, but the original point still is interesting.

• delphitools, a “collection of small, low stakes and low effort tools.”

• An internal OpenAI model “has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry” and: “It looks like the solution approach is surprising to mathematicians. It was a general reasoning model rather than a specialized one: bitter lesson time. I think the stochastic parrot is now nuked from orbit.”

• “Without exageration, being oncall made me the engineer I am. […] I would argue that one doesn’t really understand how software works until they have watched it work, and inevitably fail, in production. And one doesn’t really know how to create software until they have patched together someone else’s broken pieces.” Yes, yes. How many engineers are out there who have been in this industry for five or ten years now and have never worked on the same piece of software for longer than a year? Their experience of what it means to develop software must be completely different from mine, so much so that I can’t even imagine what it’s like to not think about future-you-and-colleagues-in-2-years when shipping new things.

• Historian Jon Peterson traces the route from Prussian military headquarters to Gary Gygax’s basement. I’m not a big and not even a small board game guy, so most of this was new and fascinating to me.

• Great low-level debug story: “Two services running on the same machine. One of them opens a listening TCP socket bound to localhost, the other one connects to that. They exchange data. Every now and then, the service that initiated the connection gets an ECONNRESET while reading data from the socket -- but no other errors show up in the logs, no crashes, nothing. What’s going on?” It’s a two-parter, so don’t miss the second one. (Also, check out the author’s gallery of desktop screenshots! Made me want to use Damn Small Linux with Openbox again.)

• Six days left in the P99 Conf Call For Speakers! I recommended a friend to give a talk there since I want to hear what he’s up to.

• Will Manidis on Grindslop. A lot in there that I’m very much not sure about, other things that I find fascinating, but then there’s section on 996: “‘996’ is a mass production / central planning approach to creation. it doesn’t work for inventing new things. it only works for cog like scaling of mechanical processes. great work doesn’t happen after 100 hour weeks, it only appears in tiny fleeting random moments, embrace that […] You can assemble an iPhone with 996, but you could have never designed one.” That last one, that’s a killer line. And I agree. But also: why is only this section in all-lower-case?

• Hell yes: You don’t know HTML Lists. Made me feel like it’s 2012 again and I’m excited about discovering a new thing in jQuery or finding that one HTML attribute or element that fits the problem just so.

• Every Page of Moby-Dick, Illustrated. I started reading Moby Dick last week (constantly switching between the Gutenberg edition in the Kindle app and the audiobook in Spotify) and, man, I’m all about whaling now. Not that I condone it, obviously, but holy hell, what did you know about sperm whales? Not a thing, is what I had to reply, but now I know, for example, that “Atop the whale’s skull is positioned a large complex of organs filled with a liquid mixture of fats and waxes called spermaceti. The purpose of this complex is to generate powerful and focused clicking sounds.” Let’s see if Ahab gets him, that Moby Dick.