Guyren Howe

@iamwil I had a similar experience. But reading the pattern book was very effective at helping me move up a level in my design thinking. A bit like reading Strunk & White in high school.

It's not actually solving the problem. You can spend a lot of time doing busy work matching the problems to patterns. That's what I did at the beginning of my career. The only thing remotely like a pattern in programming are mathematical in nature, like combinators.

Software engineers inspired by A Pattern Language think of it as a way to break down a medium into its atomic parts, by which we can build back up again. I was surprised to learn that it's considered post-modern.

@ArthurCDent @LooseIdentity Have you tried refrying black beans? Pinto is traditional, but black beans are much yummier if you ask me, and refried is 😘

@unclouded @LooseIdentity BeHoLD I basically cooked the beans as if I was going to mash them but then decided not to because I like a lot of beans on the side. Should have picked a lane

OK so the algorithm keeps showing me birria taco videos and I keep making them and eating them & thinking about them all the time and then watching more taco videos and

@ArthurCDent @LooseIdentity Are there images somewhere I’m not seeing on X?

@LooseIdentity @unclouded Haha yeah I think was originally intending to fully mash them and do a smear on the bread. But that’s not enough beans so I changed my mind

@ArthurCDent Import? dicksmith.com.au/da/buy/boondie…

@unclouded IKR! If they let me import some seeds I reckon I can grow them

@ArthurCDent No! Say that isn’t so! Perhaps you can grow them? I imagine they’d grow great in Queensland. My end goal is to master mole. There is really nothing like it in any other cuisine and it’s so good!

@unclouded So - I only make my own. And I've been to Mexico too, up in the Taxco region :) I'm sure it's not totally authentic though. For one, I can't get tomatillos!

@Noahpinion Weaponisation of alignment is broadly under discussed.

In the story "Deus Ex Homine" by Hannu Rajaniemi, a superpowerful well-aligned AI protects humans against attacks by AI-empowered human terrorists who basically become evil gods. This story influenced my thinking about AI alignment.

@robinhanson Not sure there is a coherent scale available for this percentage. Time spent making the choices? Number of choices? Percent of one’s time spent carrying out the actions?

Cynicism is often defined as a habit of attributing behavior more to low than to high motives, compared to others. So let's see how cynical you all are. What % of human behavior is explained by the highest possible motives?

It’s going to be *fascinating* discovering which, if any, cognitive activities humans can do better than AIs. Hopefully, there will always be some things?

I will back whichever 2028 candidate vows to put a stop to this "epic conclusion" nonsense and force them to film God-Emperor of Dune.

@Noahpinion What? Have you ever *used* software? Have you used *any* software that you would actually say was good, easy to use, intuitive? This is why programmers aren’t out of a job, for quite a while yet. There is *so* much to do. guyren.me/2025/04/16/pro…

I have a (probably dumb) theory that almost all useful software that isn't an AI application was already created by 2021. AI agents are crawling all over a search space already picked clean by infinite VC dollars a decade ago.

In a fast moving world, where traditional legislation can’t keep up, are citizen advisory boards the right way to keep in check technocrats who otherwise are granted the flexibility to regulate effectively?

@samhogan @jonathoda Related: frest.substack.com/p/state-farming

What if a codebase was actually stored in Postgres and agents directly modified files by reading/writing to the DB? Code velocity has increased 3-5x. This will undoubtedly continue. PR review has already become a bottleneck for high output teams. Codebase checked-out on filesystem seems like a terrible primitive when you have 10-100-1000 agents writing code. Code is now high velocity data and should be modeled at such. Bare minimum, we need write-level atomicity and better coordination across agents, better synchronization primitives for subscribing to codebase state changes and real-time time file-level code lint/fmt/review. The current ~20 year old paradigm of git checkout/branch/push/pr/review/rebase ended Jan 2026. We need an entirely new foundational system for writing code if we’re really going to keep pace with scale laws.

@ClarksonsFarm1 I can’t tell whether Jeremy is pro- free market or not. He generally rails at regulation and such, but then he seems to favour agricultural subsidies and telling farmers what they’re allowed to do with their own land.

Repost!🙌🏼

@OrionReedOne I write about this: frest.substack.com

We need to structurally separate user data from applications so that applications become *users* of data rather than *containers* for it.

@mattyglesias And this is why programmers aren’t out of a job just yet. guyren.me/2025/04/16/pro…

When AIs do much of the work, how to replace income tax? How, IOW, do we tax the AIs? nber.org/papers/w34873

This really annoys me. Our arbitrary borders don’t mean those who happen to be in big countries should carry all the burden. All the world’s people should work together to reduce carbon emissions.

@peterrhague The most likely candidate for such an app would be a data integration and visualisation app. Think FileMaker, but for all the content online, particularly multimedia. That will require our APIs to catch up. I write about related issues at frest.substack.com

@peterrhague I share all of your feelings. My theories are two: 1. The resolution, particularly, isn’t quite there yet, but also the size. I haven’t tried Apple’s device but I suspect the generation after that might be what folks really need. 2. No-one has developed a killer app.

One technology that I really wanted to take off, but hasn't, is VR. I mean, I was a teenager the first time around, when the devices used CRTs and you needed a strong neck. Played the bird game in the arcades. The graphics on these devices was very naff. But modern devices (like the Meta Quest 3) which I own are fine. They are light weight, good image quality, decent passthrough for XR and responsive. But for some reason they don't seem to have evolved beyond toys. I've tried using them for serious 3D visualisation as part of my workflow, but its quite clunky to get them to do that. There seem a lot of barriers to development. What happened?