❧ As I build out this new blog I run into familiar issues. If I want people to run across my writing, it would help to be part of some discovery feed. And if I want to invite and foster conversation around the writing, being part of a social network with built-in identity is almost essential.

For reasons of mental hygiene, however, I’m avoiding all algorithmic platforms as much as I can. I also want to own everything about my site for ideological reasons, sure, but more importantly because it’s fun and I want to make my site and its backend as bespoke as suits me. That rules out not just platforms like Substack (which I nevertheless find heavy-handed and stifling) but also open indie platforms like Micro.blog and Bear that still have control of your data.

The compromise I’m circling around is a hybrid system. First, a comments system that uses Google Sign In for identity because (essentially) everyone has a Gmail account and that will let normies frictionlessly drop in a reply to a post. Yes, I let Google’s tentacles in, but just instrumentally. I will end up owning the comments data. Second, and interwoven with these normie comments, will be Webmentions, which with any luck will help bring me into conversation with IndieWeb blogs. That should not just be gratifying in itself, but it should help with discoverability.

The one reservation I have is that in general (and realizing I’m painting in broad strokes), I have found that IndieWeb sites that support Webmention tend to be about, or talk mostly about, IndieWeb development, software development, and related subjects almost exclusively. It’s a highly self-referential ecosystem, it seems to me. The IndieWeb also strikes me as skewing quite progressive and intolerant. It reminds me of my foray into Nostr. I found the tech fascinating, but the conversation there was almost exclusively about Nostr and Bitcoin and skewed overwhelmingly right-wing. That said, it won’t change if more people don’t join in. [09.21.26]

❧ Cal Newport, whom I’ve long admired, recently wrote for the New York Times explaining why we shouldn’t be panicked by AI doom stories. I largely agree with his op-ed and yet I find it a bit strange.

His argument is basically this: The AI elite are Rationalists or heavily influenced by them. Rationalism is extreme, obsessive, overconfident, and weird. Therefore we should completely discount the alarms they raise.

Maybe he hedges enough so he’s not saying that the discounting should be complete, but it sure feels that way in this op-ed and his other posts and podcasts.

I have no problem stipulating that Rationalists and their extended universe seem like a weird sex cult, and that this is grounds enough not to take them completely seriously. But that just means we need to be more skeptical about their claims, not dismiss them altogether. If nothing else, the fact that they’ve built and are in charge of these impressive systems should recover for them some of the credibility they lose for being weirdos.

As exasperated as Newport and other non-apocalyptic technologists seem to be with the ASI-pilled Bay Area weirdos, the fact that those weirdos believe in X tells us nothing about the likelihood of X. The expert critics are better off patiently explaining why AI can’t technically lead to such doom (if they can). Indeed, just as much as I would like the AI doomers to rely less on parables and thought experiments and more on technical details, I would also like the critics to tell me what probabilities we should assign to catastrophic outcomes and why. [09.20.26]

❧ If you’re not someone who has coded much, I’m not sure you can appreciate how merited the more reasonable hype around AI is. Things that used to take me weeks to do now take me hours. And more importantly, it’s allowed me to customize my computing experience more than I ever imagined would be possible.

No matter how much you love a piece of software, there is always a thing or two you wish it would do differently. More typically the software available to us is nothing like what we would want for a task, especially in terms of a UI that makes sense to us.

Now that coding agents have gotten quite good, however, I don’t hesitate to just write from scratch the app I want to use, with the exact UI and functionality I want, even if I already have a good enough commercial alternative. Todo lists, editors, whatever. And I will also make bespoke tools that do something for which I’m the only customer.

It’s remarkable what I can get done, and it makes me think that this power is going to have to show up in the productivity stats eventually. Even if it’s just software that AI supercharges.

Yet I can also see the downsides. Since I didn’t write this code myself, I don’t really understand it and don’t know how good it is. That may come back to bite me. Given my coding proficiency, however, I can’t believe it’s doing worse than I would do. That said, the real alternative to a vibecoded app is not one I would write by hand, but instead simply using the hardened commercial app. I’m also taking on a maintenance and upkeep tax whose size I can’t now appreciate.

And then there’s the addiction piece. This can’t be an original insight, but using AI lately has reminded me of Addiction by Design, the book on machine gambling about which Stably and I recently podcasted. Sitting alone at a machine, dropping in ‘credits’ and ‘tokens’ of inscrutable value, pulling a lever, getting back variable rewards, repeating this turn after turn, and ultimately losing track of time and oneself. In a way all flow is like this, but the jury may still be out on whether in the long run vibecoding induces the ‘good’ kind of flow that produces mastery and a sense of agency, or the ‘bad’ kind that surrenders agency to the machine’s rhythm. [09.20.26]