Joy & Curiosity #88

It’s been a fantastic week. The Amp team met in San Francisco and together we hung out in a beautiful house, drank coffee and diet coke, ate way too many snacks, and hacked on Amp.

A single timezone, many overlapping hours, synchronous communication with even the option to tap someone on the shoulder. You could feel the clock rate of the team go up. Our #shipped channel was busy. What a team!

But I didn’t get a lot of reading in. And now the sun is up, the coffee’s finished, and I’m going for a run.

• Amp Neo is now Amp. It’s out, for everyone. Generally available, fully released; the infrastructure scaled, the clients resilient. It’s been tested on three cross Pacific flights already. Go and try it. Try the plugins, try the remote control. I’m very proud of this architecture and this team and that we made this work — infinitely scalable agents, running everywhere. And it’s only the start.

• Fantastic little post by Patrick: Fast is better than slow. There’s between ten and fifteen things I want to quote here, so go read the whole thing instead.

• Then go and read the section about being fast on nat.org and and Patrick Collison’s Fast page.

• Benedict Evans on Predicting AI job exposure: “The counter-argument to all of this would be to say that, yes, well done, there are important exceptions, as there always are, but directionally and in aggregate, it is ‘surely’ correct to say that jobs that involve a lot of repetitive clerical work are most exposed, and this is how many jobs that is, and by how much. That sounds good, but you don’t know if the exceptions are bigger than the rule. Suppose we’d looked at the internet in 1995 and said that this would destroy the value of physical distribution for media - this was ‘directionally correct’, but in practice that meant totally different things for record companies, newspapers, TV companies and movie studios. Are you trying to say something that has some predictive value, or just observing a truism? On average, we’re all dead. Half of the jobs you’ve analysed might be entirely unaffected, and there might be other big pools of jobs to be transformed that you miss entirely. You don’t know.”

• The new Ferrari Luce has been revealed. It’s the Ferrari designed by Jony Ive and Marc Newson. I’m not a big car guy, so I don’t have a strong opinion on whether it looks good or not, but after everybody else had a strong opinion I went through the list of Ferrari models and remembered that I don’t like the look of most Ferraris.

• “If you’re the kind of person who is skeptical that AI coding is good for anything, then I doubt this post will persuade you. But if you’re the kind of developer who uses agents to write multi-hundred-line PRs that you barely understand yourself, I’d invite you to slow down a bit and try this other, slower style of ‘vibe coding.’”

• I honestly don’t know what to think of this, one for the Curiosity column: I Am Retiring from Tech to Live Offline.

• This post by Jeff Geerling made me want to go buy a MacBook Neo. But I don’t need one. Maybe my kids do?

• “Have you ever read that Hacker News comment by the early FedEx employee about how they chose Memphis as the location for their headquarters?” “No. It’s a Hacker News comment?” “Yes, it is, let me find that for you.” Here it is.

• This is art.

• I’ve used the term “thundering herd” approximately three hundred times in the last few weeks and realized that I kinda assumed everyone knows what it is. So if you don’t, click that link. Another piece of terminology that I assumed everyone knows: pets vs. cattle. But: why would they? So, if you don’t know what someone could mean when they use the terms pets and cattle when talking about infrastructure: go and read this.

• I really, really need to understand jj revsets more. I learned that jjui lets me hit shift-l and change the revset very easily, but I never know exactly what I’m looking for. So I’m linking to this excellent post here hoping that it’ll get me to learn revsets. (Send me your favorite revset aliases, please.)

• Simon Willison: I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit.

• Lovely idea: apartment birds, heard recently. Built by Teddy.

• Insignificant Bullets, Evil Poachers, and L.A. Culture. Always fun to read Herzog.

• My Name Is David Chang, and I Hate Fancy Beer. If I could, I’d print this out and shove it into everyone’s face whenever they ask me why I don’t like IPAs. Actually, you know what, I just might and put it in my wallet, just in case. The whole point of beer is that it’s simple. Four ingredients and that’s it. My stance: if you think a normal beer is boring, you might just not like beer then. Go and do your own thing then, but don’t call it beer. Why? Imagine you’re really into bread. Say you love a really good sourdough bread. You not only love the taste, but also how it’s made, how traditional it is, how simple. But then someone comes along and goes “sourdough bread? boring!” and puts fucking raisins in it and sells it as Craft Bread and when you decline the dumb raisin bread people ask you “wait, I thought you liked bread?”