Kyle Baxter

Moving onto greener (or bluer) pastures now since this place is irretrievably condemned. It’s been real. If you want to reach me, I’m over at Bl*sky with the same username: bsky.app/profile/kbaxte…

@geoffreylitt This is an ultra anti-pattern of the last 10-15 years: prioritize design to make something approachable upon first seeing it, but less how the user uses it over time; result being a very low local maxima for how much someone can do with it. The above is the inverse.

An often forgotten part of Alan Kay’s mantra “simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible” is that you *start with the complex cases*

@maticrobots One other question: I’m assuming that Matic has the ability to know when its waste bag is full? The lack of a bin sensor on Roborock’s robots is one of their most significant issues.

@maticrobots (Also, to fanboy for a second: I love what you’ve done with Matic, both as someone in technology/AI and product design, and as a vacuum robot addict. It’s refreshing to see such thought put into product design in this space as evidenced by your reply.)

@maticrobots How do you feel the experience is filling up its onboard water tank vs filling up a Roborock’s dock water tank? Roborock I need to fill up every couple days; seems like Matic for our house would be daily (but no need to empty the dirty water tank, which is nice)?

@wabi Excited to see what this looks like. I’m hoping it’s overlapping with some of these concepts: inkandswitch.com/essay/malleabl…

T̶h̶e̶r̶e̶'s̶ ̶a̶n̶ ̶a̶p̶p̶ f̶o̶r̶ t̶h̶̶a̶t̶ There’s an app for you. Meet Wabi: the first personal software platform. Generate beautiful, useful and fun little apps informed by your life.

@geoffreylitt Jumping out of my Twitter hiatus for this, but thoughts. I’ve found that going on walks without bringing your phone (but still being in touch bc of the Watch) is really nice. I don’t miss it and I have no temptation bc it isn’t there. If the phone is around you’ll still use it.

trying out apple watch to reduce phone addiction... simple theory: with the cellular watch, i can ditch the phone entirely and remain reachable by family! feels really good not having the phone. time will tell if i just develop a watch addiction now lol. lmk if you have tips for low-stimulation apple watch usage! i am minimizing notifications/apps, making the screen grayscale...

@sh_reya Super exciting, and congrats to everyone involved on publishing! Can’t wait to read this one—I’ve been waiting for it!

"RAG without the lag" is part of a broader MLOps agenda in our research group: making ML pipelines easier to build, debug, and trust. Work led by Quentin Romero Lauro (who did an REU with us)--who will be applying for PhD programs next year! Was a very fun collaboration with @Qromerolauro, @SepantaZeighami, @adityagp Do reach out if you are interested in us giving a talk on this work at your org or group!

⭐new MLOps preprint⭐ RAG is everywhere, but building RAG is still painful. When something breaks--the retriever? the LLM?--developers are left guessing, & iterating is often slow we built a better way & used it as a design probe to study expert workflows 👇

@JDVance When a president attempts to gut a bedrock amendment for our rights and society, pardons the criminals he directed to attack Congress, and tries to take control of spending power from Congress, he is a would-be autocrat. And you’re his pathetic little hype man.

Memo to the press: When a president is elected by the People and then does what he promised to do, that’s democracy. When a president is thwarted by unelected bureaucrats, that’s oligarchy. President Trump refuses to bend the knee to that oligarchy. Buckle up!

@zerovalueadd @levie He was. And I respect him a lot. But there is nothing to be optimistic about.

@kbaxter @levie Eh, Levie was very vocally pro-Harris / anti-Trump. He's just taking an optimistic approach to a bad situation.

Here’s what’s great about Trump getting a $500B investment commitment in AI in the US: At a moment when there’s a global race for AI dominance, it focuses all the attention back on America on Day 1. It’s not a given that America remains the leader in AI, in particular given the advancements in China and elsewhere. Further, we’ve already seen other countries courting major investments in infrastructure for compute and chip production. There’s a flywheel on these investment cycles, and more dollars beget more infrastructure, and more infrastructure begets more progress, which begets more dollars. We have a hugely important task in front of us. America needs to become more self-reliant in building chips, we need massive datacenter capacity, we will need major growth in energy to lower prices of powering datacenters, and we continue to need the best researchers in the world working for us. This can only be accomplished with a government agenda that is focused on accelerating progress in AI and its surrounding ecosystems. Immediately, this administration sent a very clear message around America’s supremacy here. It didn’t mix in 50 other topics on regulation and adding friction to building in AI right now. It was unambiguous, and focused solely on America winning in AI.

@levie Or maybe it was pardoning the mob he directed to attack Congress while they certified his defeat in the 2020 election in an attempt to seize power. Maybe that’s what secured the investment? What do you think?

@levie I bet that EO gutting the 14th amendment really sealed the deal for getting that investment commitment.

@swyx This rhymes with something I wrote in 2013 in response to devices like Fitbits: “unconscious computing.” tightwind.net/2013/01/uncons…

everyone's asking what's next after chatbots what if after chatbots there was just... nothing? the best ai ux may be NO ux at all. just agents quietly working for you in the background harrison has coined some notable new interaction patterns for "ambient agents" here - i previously called them proactive agents - that are worthwhile. we'll probably be fleshing out these design patterns a lot over 2025. i remember he was talking about this over a year ago, and the madman finally did it!! where many others failed with "ai email assistant", langchain/graph seems to have succeeded.

@eugeneyan Such great returns to thinking through and making good test sets and evals

I don't know of anyone who regrets investing in robust evals x.com/eugeneyan/stat…

Models are temporary. Evals are forever.

@Gok @tszzl Most non Rs or R-leaning independents appreciate the effort to create useful Covid-19 vaccines rapidly. Much of the right, on the other hand, are on the spectrum of “they’re worthless and shouldn’t have been required” <-> “they killed a lot of people” <-> “Gates chipped us”

@tszzl this is the take of 80% of Democrats

operation warp speed was og trump’s greatest success a take uniquely hated by all sides

@Patterico One can read this election in a less negative way (reaction against inflation, pandemic), which I think is correct, but even in that reading the American people see maintaining our republic as less important than punishing an incumbent, or can’t see Trump for what he is. Dark.

Nick Catoggio is the greatest political writer of our times. Here he is spitting fire in the wake of the Trump victory. thedispatch.com/newsletter/boi…

I'm cautious about sayihg what I really feel right now, especially on this platform, because I know it would be mocked. And that, itself, is a symptom of what I see, the glee that many now take in other Americans' sadness and fear. We are remaking ourselves in his image.

For her. For all our daughters and sons. For America. 🇺🇸