I need to write titles that distinguish This and That posts, so here you have the January 28 edition.
It's Books
A delightful paragraph from Linda Liukas:
At Hatchard's I was waiting for B. who had vanished into the first and modern editions section. An older husband was already exasperated: I've been calling you several times, he sighed down the stairwell. His wife emerged, unbothered, brushing past him: Oh, it's books, darling, as if that settled not only the argument but the entire question of how to live.
"... as if that settled not only the argument but the entire question of how to live." Beautiful.
Hat tip Robin Sloan.
Money on the Table
Joan Westenberg in Why My Newsletter Costs $2.50:
The instinct to leave money on the table in exchange for a better relationship with your audience is neither naive nor unsophisticated.
Most CS faculty leave money on the table to work with students in a way that only colleges and universities offer.
Way to Sell the Downside
From Dan Wang's 2025 letter:
While critics of AI cite the spread of slop and rising power bills, AI's architects are more focused on its potential to produce surging job losses. Anthropic chief Dario Amodei takes pains to point out that AI could push the unemployment rate to 20 percent by eviscerating white-collar work. I wonder whether this message is helping to endear his product to the public.
I was glad to see Dan write a 2025 letter after taking a break last year to work on his book. This letter is worth a read, as always. As much as I learn from and think about his writing on China and American policy, I really enjoy the parts about books and culture more broadly.
A few items from recent weeks...
Writing Code Is Fun
David Celis, in a post of the same name:
When someone's primary job is to figure out and write requirements or manage the entities who are actually producing the code, we don't usually call that person a software engineer. We call them a product or project manager.
Not, as Celis goes on to say, that there's anything wrong with that. But I like to write code. For that purpose, looking up an answer in language documentation or on StackOverflow serves me fine.
I'm not ready to turn writing code over to an assistant programmer. When I do want to work with an assistant, though, I work with a student. I'd rather help a student learn to design and write code than help somebody's LLM gather more data.
Being a Beginner
Asha Dornfest, in You, too, can be an urban sketcher:
There's a spark of aliveness that comes with being a beginner. A combo of shock and giddiness when you do something you thought you couldn't do. The intense focus that comes when there's no prior experience to fall back on. The possibility of new and exciting things within your grasp, like finding hidden treasure inside your house.
Hat tip to Daniel Steinberg.
More Confident a Year Ago
From comments by an exec at Salesforce:
All of us were more confident about large language models a year ago...
This is a Senior Vice President of Product Marketing, talking about why Salesforce is rethinking its "heavy reliance on large language models after encountering reliability issues". It turns out that "predictable 'deterministic' automation" is more reliable.
Huh. It turns out regular old programs do many tasks really well.