Posts

I just came across this weird fun little mind puzzler: Besides the many things I love about this website, made by coder / hacker / weird guy Nolan Royalty (see the footnote thing he does), I’m also just very drawn to trying to solve this. So before I look for the answer, I’m gonna try to solve it myself. If you wanna try, don’t read below. my answer I think the move is to ask Bob if Alice is lying. He’ll tell you the truth 80% of the time. You can then ask Alice if Bob is lying or not and she’ll tell you the truth 80% of the time. ...

this is me alex!

I keep trying to take shortcuts - that’s one of the main things AI can help with, after all. And one place I keep trying and failing is writing. Like with this essay. I tried by first doing a voice note and having it turn the voice note into an essay and I just…didn’t like it. It didn’t feel like me, even if the prompt I gave was “sound like me.” ...

So I just got off a call with someone interested in learning all the claude code stuff. It was fun and cool and i muttered a lot, laughed too loud, and was generally anxious about sounding smart or making myself look like anything other than an idiot. Healthy stuff! But, and, yet, the one thing i kept saying as an answer to this kind friend’s questions was simply this: just ask claude Not sure how to install something on github? Just ask claude. ...

just ask claude Here’s what’s actually changing: you think you can’t solve this stuff. And you probably can. And if you can’t, Claude can help. Or someone on the internet can help. The information is out there. The capability is out there. I’m not saying it’ll be easy. Some people have a stronger technical awareness. A depth to it. But that’s also where people like me can help. Because one of the traps of “just ask Claude” is that it’ll lead you in bad directions. ...

lets see if this works!

ok so here’s what happened. I’ve been vibe coding for like a year. I have a captioning tool that’s 70% done. a game. a blog system. all of them “almost there.” none of them shipped. so I made myself a little system. one project at a time. everything else is dormant. write it down. actually write it down. and it worked. I shipped a zine in one day that had been sitting untouched for weeks. ...

asking myself this as I read about a man named Lish. Gordon Lish. Editor of Raymond Carver. Friend of Don Delillio. I learned about him as a quick aside mentioned here in this YT video on White Noise which sent me googling and found me here at this ’expose’ in the nytimes in 1998 about how Lish edited Carver’s early works quite a lot, it seemed, and perhaps enough to say that he was the guy who wrote them? ...

I just came up with this in my last post - testing your email provider to make sure emails send good and I gotta say, i like it. Basically its a way of adding stuff that GPT said without having to rewrite it in my voice or have it be that weird amalgamation between the two. Feels like a big unlock honestly.

the feeling The feeling was stepping out of my back office, hearing a baby wailing, and realizing that that baby was not our baby — it was a neighbor’s baby. That someone else was dealing with this bullshit. Not because I want other people to deal with it, but simply because I don’t want to deal with it. And even that’s not true. It’s more that I’m just glad to be in a world where I’m not the only one who feels that. ...