Confessions to a data lake

visual interfaces of our tools should faithfully represent the way the underlying technology works: if a chat interface shows a private conversation between two people, it should actually be a private conversation between two people, rather than a “group chat” with unknown parties underneath the interface.

We are using LLMs for the kind of unfiltered thinking that we might do in a private journal – except this journal is an API endpoint. An API endpoint to a data lake specifically designed for extracting meaning and context. We are shown a conversational interface with an assistant, but if it were an honest representation, it would be a group chat with all the OpenAI executives and employees, their business partners / service providers, the hackers who will compromise that plaintext data, the future advertisers who will almost certainly emerge, and the lawyers and governments who will subpoena access.

When you work through a problem with an AI assistant, you’re not just revealing information - you’re revealing how you think. Your reasoning patterns. Your uncertainties. The things you’re curious about but don’t know. The gaps in your knowledge. The shape of your mental model.

When advertising comes to AI assistants, they will slowly become oriented around convincing us of something (to buy something, to join something, to identify with something), but they will be armed with total knowledge of your context, your concerns, your hesitations. It will be as if a third party pays your therapist to convince you of something.

Puppy Wisdom, if we can hear it.

[When a baby dog bites, it can be painful but also totally normal. Why can knowing this give me so much patience towards an animal, yet I take it so personally when my partner does something which hurts? Getting hurt and processing it together can also be a normal part of relationships, and you can't have one without the other.]

projects solve the creator's need.

products are the intersection of the creator's capacity to build a solution, solving other people's needs, and their means to compensate the work. no intersection, no product.

A Gentle Introduction To Learning Calculus

Math and poetry are fingers pointing at the moon. Don’t confuse the finger for the moon.

Jackson Kiddard

Anything that annoys you is teaching you patience.

Anyone who abandons you is teaching you how to stand up onyour own two feet.

Anything that angers you is teaching you forgiveness and compassion.

Anything that has power over you is teaching you how to take your power back.

Anything you hate is teaching you unconditional love.

Anything you fear is teaching you the courage to overcome your fear.

Anything you can’t control is teaching you how to let go.

How do we build the future with AI?

[The bigness and slowness of government] is supposed to create space and resources to account for the communities that a “lean” approach deliberately ignores.

building for yourself on a saturated platform doesn’t shift paradigms if you are already the main character

it’s not like masses of sheeple relish in the experience of catching a cab and couldn’t describe a theoretical better option if they tried. It’s that realizing such a thing requires availability of copious investment capital in the face of non-negligible risk. People who can pursue this kind of thing are either previous-tech-exit-rich or poised-to-convince-venture-capitalists-rich. Their stories are fun to tell and hear, but not practical mogul origin stories for the vast majority of tech workers.

In the nineties, the Dorm Room Garage Dudes had an appreciable head start on relationships and resources to build the commercial web. But by the time the mobile platform came along, those same people had become billionaire tech moguls with cliques that garnered names like ‘The Paypal Mafia.’ This gave them an order of magnitude more opportunity to move first on mobile. Over time, that lead has continued to grow, and with it the time from market creation to market saturation has shortened.

Immutable Infrastructure, Immutable Code

A system becomes legacy when understanding it requires historical knowledge that isn't encoded anywhere except the code itself.

The tragedy is that teams recreate this failure mode faster with AI, because mutation feels cheap while understanding quietly becomes expensive. You can generate a thousand lines in seconds. But the moment you start editing those lines, you've created an artifact that can only be understood historically. You've created brittle legacy code in an afternoon.

If knowledge only exists in the implementation, it's not knowledge. It's risk. Regeneration forces you to make the implicit explicit, or accept that it wasn't essential.

Burn it. Regenerate it. Trust what survives the fire.

Let's talk about a Christmas Carol and its lessons....

[The systems and experiences that shape people can explain them without excusing them.]

If you refuse to examine how you became who you are, you'll mistake your coping mechanisms for virtues.

Filó Machado: FÉ CEGA / FACA AMOLADA

pure musicianship with mostly guitar, beatboxing, and vocal rhythmics leading to some very happy music; complex harmonies remind me of Toninho Horta and Jacob Collier (especially the changing shirts).

How we grade presentation night

[I often explain informal series of 5-minute talks as "open mic" with slides.]

[We can grade them as "learned something new", "knew this but enjoyed it", or "unknown"; "unknown" is not bad and not a property of your talk: it has to do with the relationship between your talk and the receiver."]

How to free your mind from BIG TECH propaganda

[Techno-optimists promote the idea of progress as a high score that constantly accumulates (often conveniently through their platforms); this masks the way new technologies commodify and become baseline needs, their absence leaving us not simply with 'less', but an incapacity to function in society that expects it everywhere.]

[I appreciate that they shared this in a public space and not via direct message or email because it enables others who might find the information useful to discover it.]

[Direct messages can contribute too, but the risk is higher that no one will see it.]

Destigmatize being dumb

Any system that rewards finding flaws will improve. Apple, Google, etc will pay you a lot of money if you can find a security flaw in any of their systems. The military does this with matters of life & death (if admitting failure is punished, people hide failure). If you find an inefficiency in the economy, you can make a lot of money fixing it (through betting on the stock market, or starting a business).

Mestre Gato Preto: The art of the berimbau

mostly berimbau without singing, solo and with the drum section, great swing

On motherhood

[Just as you find your footing, they start to change. I swear she grows with each blink.]

learning and teaching are two sides of the same coin, so caring or not caring about one implies the same about the other

What does it mean to be seen, all the time, by everyone?

[We are not individuals or ever alone: just the current contact point into a community.]

[Act in ways that would fill the healthiest people you know with pride.]

How to quit Spotify

In 2024, Spotify stopped paying artists for songs that had fewer than 1,000 streams, despite the fact that 81% of musicians on the platform don’t cross that threshold.

pop star Lily Allen says she makes more money selling pics of her feet on OnlyFans than she does from Spotify royalties.

LOW BRIDGE ROTATION: The only guide you'll ever need

[When your knees are almost touching the floor, most of your body weight is already on that side to support your backbend.]

[Use a wall to practice lowering into bridge while resting on the edge of your palm.]