Mind the Gap #3

I’ve just returned from a week off work. It felt great to be able to work on random, silly coding projects that you don’t have to ship.

Also, some friends visited from Amsterdam, and we went to the piers and took many pictures. Great time.

I also built a poor man’s Perplexity using Vercel AI SDKs to learn more about the entire workflow of building AI applications, from evals, observability, and optimizing parallel agent calls. My impression of Typescript hasn’t changed; I hate the language, but the dev experience is unmatched. It feels great to change something and see it instantly reflected in the browser.

• Reading Reflections on OpenAI gives me a strange sense of familiarity. It describes my current day-to-day work at Goodnotes. A lot of what we do “operates around some FastAPI” and “some LLMs.”
• I used to dislike @dhh and his controversial takes on software, but over the years, I’m starting to see the sense in his ideology. He recently discussed Why small teams are better on Lex Fridman’s podcast, and I agree with it. Personally, I also operate much better in a small, focused team.
• Speaking of podcasts, Sam Altman appeared on Theo Von’s podcast, which was unexpected 😂. Theo Von can really talk to anyone and make it entertaining. From NYC Garbage Man to talking about cocaine with Donald J Trump.
• Ever wonder why black credit cards are so popular nowadays? Banking on Status is a great read to learn more about how banks monetize status signaling. And if you haven’t read Signaling as a Service, that’s another excellent read.
• In the era of LLMs, everything is a conversational interface, even my TV has one. The Case Against Conversational Interfaces presents an argument on why chat interfaces won’t replace traditional knobs and buttons..