Products, Games, Books and Links

Books

I finished Harrow the Ninth, book two of locked tomb. I'm enjoying the series so far, especially as the world building expands. A large part of this book was written in the second person which took some getting used to. It relates to the plot but it's certainly unique.

I also finished Stoner. It's received a lot of praise and while there were parts I liked I found it hard to connect with. Things were often kept quite surface level and the book skipped forward in time several times seemingly just to keep things moving. It's well written overall but I was less enamored than I had expected to be given the praise.

Games

I played some Ender Magnoila, a metroidvania which is apparently a sequel. I never played the first game but have found this one fun so far. I haven't had a tonne of time for games lately but it's worth checking out if it goes on sale.

Links

ai;dr | Sid’s Blog

Sid's

I've been thinking about this topic a lot recently. The places where I will, and wont use AI. This blog is strongly in the 'will not' category. I'm not interested in outsourcing the work here. There are plenty of other places I will, and regularly do use AI. I might write a bit more of that soon.

An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – More Things Have Happened

Context: An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into acceptin…

The ShamblogScott

ClawdBot is a very strange blip in the recent AI zeitgeist. I not not convinced half of the stories about it are real, or are really all AI and fully autonomous. Regardless, this story is a wild one and worth digging into.

Do Metaprojects

I’m learning to let go, but maybe letting go takes a lifetime.

Taylor Troesh

As someone with more hobbies than time to do them, I can relate.

Handy

Handy is a cross platform, open-source, speech-to-text application for your computer

HandyCJ Pais & Contributors

I like the idea of self hosting small AI models, I also use Linux on one of my computes at home which means a lot of the more polished speech-to-text tools are unavailable. I was recommended Handy by someone I know and it has been working quite well.

How far back in time can you understand English?

An experiment in language change

Dead Language SocietyColin Gorrie

This was just a fun read and an interesting exercise in language.

How I built Timeframe, our family e-paper dashboard - Joel Hawksley

Over the past decade, I’ve worked to build the perfect family dashboard system for our home, called Timeframe:

hawksley.orgJoel Hawksley

I've been thinking about getting an e-paper screen for a while now. Mostly just to tinker with. It is cool to see people making projects like these.

The happiest I’ve ever been

It was around January 2020. I became the head coach of a youth basketball team.

ben-miniBen Wallace

This is just a nice story about someone finding joy out in the world from helping other people. A nice read to end the weekend.

Little Ideas

• I've seen a lot of people say that it is the responsibilities of schools to accept that AI exists and change the way they assess people to allow AI. I'm on the fence. Performance enhancing drugs have existed in sports for a long time but we rarely see anyone say we should just accept them. I think the real problem is our detection mechanisms are kind of terrible and are unlikely to improve.
• When planning out the day I tend to optimise for 'fill all the time with things' rather than just 'do the things that need doing today'. I wonder what would change if I switched the two.
• Rather than 'SlopWare' or 'Vibecoding' I've started thinking of AI generated code as 'flat packed software', in the same vein as 'flat packed furniture'.
  • Is it still software (or furniture)? Yes.
  • Did you make it? Kind-of.
  • Is the quality going to be as high as something made by hand by an expert? On average probably not.
  • Are the pieces likely to be less durable? Probably.
  • Is it cheaper? Most of the time yeah.
  • Is it more accessible? Certainly.
  • Is it faster to create? Undoubtedly.

In Case you missed it (my posts)

Reflection on revamping our sales process

Over the last month or so I’ve been working on updating our sales process. The trigger for this was merging two different sales teams into a single unified team. In this merge I went over our process, our CRM setup and how we were measuring success. Some of that might

Elliot C SmithElliot Smith

The unbound potential of open tabs

I often go through a loop of visiting sites like hacker news or lobste.rs, opening half a dozen tabs in the background based on their name and then waiting days to read them. They sit in my list of open tabs and trigger a mild pang of guilt when

Elliot C SmithElliot Smith