Allie the Icon

I had to try it myself

We're hiring. The @a16z new media team is looking for a showrunner/EP to launch a16z Originals, a YouTube native editorial series with a techno-optimist POV. Episodes will run 10 to 20 minutes and geared for an audience beyond tech. If you know someone, DM me or send an email.

This is genius experimentation

can ai agents invent writing on their own? recent pet project: 2 agents share a world but each sees only half. their only communication: 7×7 pixel glyphs. they develop symbols, build theories of meaning, and evaluate their own writing. no convergence yet but fascinating to watch!

I found myself getting frustrated with remembering exactly what build/deploy/dev harness I used for each little project, and so I created a tiny `how` cli to solve the problem and I love it

@dmwlff If I were forced to only use Claude for one specific thing for the rest of my life it would be to explain git bullshit

Claude understands what I do not.

I feel extremely validated about coaching people to avoid using the "you are an expert" prompting technique for years. Speak to your agent like you would a trusted friend. Consider where you want its inference to come from in its training: respectful, productive conversations.

I need a list of people to follow here. Every single recommended post on my feed currently is the most hyperbolic “x company just KILLED y industry” bullshit I’ve ever seen. I want measured thinkers, nuanced takes. Interests: AI, automation, makers, stage tech

I use Openclaw and I agree with this message

@kepano You an your philosophies are a deep inspiration

When everyone is in a frenzy I like that we can do our thing at our own pace.

@simonw @witchof0x20 One reason bots comment stuff like this is to stuff their activity history with benign interactions so they appear as legitimate users and don’t get flagged as bots when they actually deliver a payload like an ad link or whatever their endgame is

@witchof0x20 I don't understand how that benefits the attackers though, surely it just makes the issue MORE visible?

Thankfully the LiteLLM package has now been marked as "quarantined" on PyPI so attempting to install the compromised update via pip et al shouldn't work

I just spelled hierarchy correctly all on my own for the first time in my life

File over app File over app is a philosophy: if you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read. Use tools that give you this freedom. File over app is an appeal to tool makers: accept that all software is ephemeral, and give people ownership over their data. In the fullness of time, the files you create are more important than the tools you use to create them. Apps are ephemeral, but your files have a chance to last. The pyramids of Egypt contain hieroglyphs that were chiseled in stone thousands of years ago. The ideas hieroglyphs convey are more important than the type of chisel that was used to carve them. The world is filled with ideas from generations past, transmitted through many mediums, from clay tablets to manuscripts, paintings, sculptures, and tapestries. These artifacts are objects that you can touch, hold, own, store, preserve, and look at. To read something written on paper all you need is eyeballs. Today, we are creating innumerable digital artifacts, but most of these artifacts are out of our control. They are stored on servers, in databases, gated behind an internet connection, and login to a cloud service. Even the files on your hard drive use proprietary formats that make them incompatible with older systems. Paraphrasing something I wrote recently: > If you want your writing to still be readable on a computer from the 2060s or 2160s, it’s important that your notes can be read on a computer from the 1960s. You should want the files you create to be durable, not only for posterity, but also for your future self. You never know when you might want to go back to something you created years or decades ago. Don’t lock your data into a format you can’t retrieve. These days I write using an app I help make called Obsidian (@obsdmd), but it’s a delusion to think it will last forever. The app will eventually become obsolete. It’s the plain text files I create that are designed to last. Who knows if anyone will want to read them besides me, but future me is enough of an audience to make it worthwhile.

Is Raycast like emacs for gen z?

Working deeply with AI creates a mental crash I'm learning to navigate. Pre-AI, a solid 6-hour sesh meant 1-2 meaningful cycles of work. A cold start + a messy middle + the dopamine hit of finishing something. Done. Now I'm running 50-100 of those cycles a day. Each one has the same emotional weight: ramp up, grind through the hard part, feel the rush when it works. Repeat. That's 100x the tax on your nervous system. Huberman talks about the pain of learning - how the brain actually experiences cognitive load as discomfort. Working with AI stacks that discomfort 100 times by dinner. The end-of-day crash is real. I'm still figuring out what "deep rest" means when you've compressed a month of mental cycles into a single afternoon.

This was such a fun conversation on agent safety and security, thank you for packaging it up for the masses @kylezantos!!