Ben Stukenborg

I’m in love with the beautiful desires underlying why we do things.

I think if we keep chasing nostalgia we'll never find the spark that led to eras/aesthetics like this in the first place. Creatives need to be experimenting again.

Everyone's going to become a programmer Just like how we went from no one writing to everyone writing, after the printing press

Proud owner!

DELINEATE ROLES BY PROBLEM DOMAIN

WE NOW MOVE AT SPEED OF THOUGHT

REORG FOR UNBRIDLED AGENCY

It’s still a wild idea that you can just give an AI agent a task and leave your computer for a bit and come back and it’s done. The ability to kick off coding, building a prototype, doing deep research, doing data analysis, generating a pitch, or any other common knowledge work task and then move on to something totally different is still so wild. We’re likely wildly underestimating the true impact and benefit in a world where useful work is not longer tied directly to the human’s time behind the keyboard. We’ve never been able to decouple output (value) from human input (time) in knowledge work before. I’d guess something like a small percentage of knowledge workers right now truly are tapping into this phenomenon. The world of work is going to be very different when this is the default behavior.

Software design is evolving so sweetly into something I do *for myself*. I work out all the options with @tldraw, finalize in @figma, and build with @cursor_ai, going back to design when building reveals issues and opportunities. The working app is now what I present to my team.

"And I think people generally attribute causality to things outside themselves... because most things that you end up doing seem obvious to you. But when you talk to other people, it's very obvious that it is not obvious at all, right?"

"If [you believe] your actions are substitutable and someone else would have done it anyway, it's actually quite tricky to maintain motivation."

Socialism is the suicide pact of mediocrity.

@SaiDhanak Congrats, Sai.

Just became a U.S. Citizen 🇺🇸. If you're not wearing a Prada Bolo Tie for your ceremony, accompanied by an ex-marine, and using ChatGPT Voice to do a mock interview (prompt attached), you don't deserve it.

let's build a floorplan generator explicitly hooked up to the list of pattern language rules infinite alexander

@KTmBoyle Amazing explanation of this phenomenon (how people influence/are influenced)

Important lesson: Flattery is free and it will get you far, and it will especially get you far with the anti-establishment. This pod is very effective, but it’s not just his words— it’s the establishment reaching out to those it once rejected and praising them, after years of them yelling into the void. It’s a structural advantage institutionalists have— no matter how based or independent you are, everyone secretly wants to be praised by the New York Times. Human nature is undefeated.

@chrisman @GovStitt @NellieSandersOK My home state! Huge congrats 👏🏻

Thrilled to partner with visionary Governor @GovStitt and Education Secretary @NellieSandersOK to bring the magic of the Synthesis AI tutor to Oklahoma schools and families. Tutor will be available to ALL third grade students in the state this fall. Proud to work with the administration to serve the people of the great state of Oklahoma!

@tldraw Yes!!! I can finally stop storing (and searching for) tldraw links in docs

If you do sign up... you'll reach this screen: a beautiful view of your recently-visited files, synced to the cloud and synced between devices.

Programming is now just speaking/writing

@mnovendstern True pleasure comes from what you can do when the pain is gone. You need the pull of a better life (to believe better life is possible) not just the push of being in painful struggle.

One of the great misspecifications of life is that the pain of having a need vastly outweighs the pleasure of satisfying that need

Beauty is beautiful. Strength is strong. @mnovendstern

@karpathy A human-written book on exactly this: a.co/d/dTN8ola

Earlier today after a chat I was looking for books on what the founding fathers would have thought about today's America. I didn't find a great match but it occurred to me that it could be an interesting test of the o1-pro sub I'm paying $200/mo for. So: Founding fathers on today's America A treatise by o1-pro, prompted iteratively: 1. generate a good outline of the treatise and the chapters 2. generate all chapters in turn 3. generate final "summary" chapter, put all previous chapters in the context Chapter 1: The Constitutional Framework Under Modern Strain Chapter 2: Liberty and Surveillance in the Digital Age Chapter 3: Political Parties and the Founders’ Intentions Chapter 4: Economic Power and Corporate Influence Chapter 5: Equality and Civil Rights Beyond the Eighteenth Century Chapter 6: Education, Citizenship, and Civic Virtue Chapter 7: Religion, Secularism, and the Public Sphere Chapter 8: Military, Foreign Policy, and America’s Global Role Chapter 9: Technological Advancement and Democratic Discourse Chapter 10: Renewing the American Experiment Elevenlabs for audio. Veed for subs and video. Ideogram for thumbnail. Available as either text on my blog site, or as the 1h21m listen (see links in the reply). I read the full thing and I thought it was pretty good and at least on a high level mildly interesting and insightful, but I'm not versed enough to fully judge it as "great", "not bad" or "slop", or spot hallucinations (if any) maybe others can help as a kind of test of the o1-pro LLM capability. Slop or not? In any case, it's the first time I thought to generate a custom "book" for myself on a topic I wanted to think more about and couldn't quite find the right book on, partly inspired by the progress in LLM capabilities. What you see here is the "out of the box" naive attempt, possibly it's a lot better to e.g. attach a lot of supporting materials (founding documents or articles) into the context window, etc.