I love re-reading the short stories of H. P. Lovecraft each year. Especially his best works, his classics, like: The Call of Cthulhu At the Mountains of Madness The Shadow over Innsmouth The Colour Out of Space The Dunwich Horror And on. Sure, Lovecraft is probably a terrible person, but awesome at his art (cosmic horror). Anyway, I often flirt with the idea of writing fiction, and writing horror short stories like Lovecraft, would be a great achievement for me. ...

I was thinking again about copywork. Chatting with some LLMs, we came up with a list of notable writers that are known to have used or advocated copywork. Here’s what we got (warning: quotes could be fabricated!): Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Rum Diary) “I just wanted to feel what it felt like to write that well. I’d just type out pages of The Great Gatsby or A Farewell to Arms, just to get the feel of it inside me.” ...

I just saw this tweet go by Amjad Masad, Replit’s CEO: Whatever you need… make an app for that. Now on your phone. For everyone. Free. pic.twitter.com/hxFLGaCLmg — Amjad Masad (@amasad) February 4, 2025 It’s a video promoting “coding on the phone”. Watch it. Personal, bespoke, on-demand, disposable, etc. software. I love this! I love the direction we’re going! Some names for this, after chatting with my bro gpt4o: On-Demand Software Development: Like cloud computing, but for instant, local, personal software. Ephemeral Coding: Like Snapchat for code—software you generate when you need it, and discard when done. LLM-First Programming: The same way we talk about “Mobile-First” or “Cloud-First” design. Personal Computation: Instead of general-purpose software for others, this is about computing tailored to you. Generative Programming: Like generative art, but for software. The goal isn’t writing code—it’s guiding code into existence. I want the “thing”, not the hours of coding to get the thing. Especially with modern web-programming stacks that I don’t grok at all. Give me hugo :) ...

I’m reading “Tiny Habits” by B. J. Fogg. It’s a classic on behavior design, and I. can’t believe it took me this long to get to it. I love it so far. Lots of frameworks. Anyway, “motivation” is a big part of his framework. When I raised this, I raised an eyebrow. I thought we (collectively) had thrown out the idea of motivation in favor of discipline. As Jocko has been telling us for a decade: ...

I’m finishing up my read through of “The Art & Business Of Ghostwriting” by Nicolas Cole. The best chapter is Chapter. 16: Crafting Your Irresistible Ghostwriting Offer(3 Key Components). It’s a great book. I don’t want to ghostwrite, but there’s really good advice in there and it’s well written. Anyway, Chapter 16 has a framework for crafting an offer. Not new, much like the material from Russell Brunson and Alex Hormozi, but it’s well presented. ...

I’ve read a ton of books on health, nutrition, and specifically “low carb” over the years. The one’s I’ve re-read the most are by Fung/Taubes/etc., for example: The Obesity Code (Fung) Why We Get Fat (Taubes) The Case for Keto (Taubes) Good Calories, Bad Calories (Taubes) And on… I don’t spam friends/family about eating low carb (my wife is already on-board), but I am asked why I re-read books on the topic so often, especially since I’m not involved in health/nutrition in any way. ...

We all should be making our custom readers. I tripped over another banger tweet by Andrej Karpathy: Last ~hour I built a custom LLM reader app so while I read Wealth of Nations I can ask questions about any paragraph. When you click a paragraph and “Ask” it calls an LLM, builds context window of what this is, copy pastes the full chapter, the paragraph, and the question. Works great. Here’s the tweet: ...

Consider receiving an an occasional nudge. We might get these sporadically and indirectly in a work environment. You’re “thinking” or browsing the web, a college wonders over, you talk, it shake you lose and you get back to work. So, we can bot-ify this, but better? Drop in the daily TODO’s into doc, have an LLM check the doc and monitor your screen or project directory. They can then decide how and when to give you a little nudge to “get back to it” or “push beyond”. ...

I love the movie Gattaca. I’ve probably watched it a dozen times since I first saw it in the late 1990s. Especially when dvd’s were a thing. These days, it’s very hard to find if and where an old classic is available. Anyway, here’s a synopsis of the movie via our friend gpt4o: Gattaca (1997) is a sci-fi thriller set in a dystopian future where genetic engineering determines a person’s social status and opportunities. The story follows Vincent Freeman, a naturally conceived “in-valid” with genetic imperfections that limit his aspirations. He dreams of traveling to space but is denied entry into the prestigious Gattaca Aerospace Corporation due to his inferior genetics. ...

Like most programmers, I’ve been thinking a lot about the future of programming. There’s a lot of chatter on the wild web that given LLMs can generate snippets, functions and even whole scripts based on prompts, and they’re often very good, that we’re headed to a world where human-written code may be less and less likely. We’re collaborating on code for now, but that won’t last. We will first alpha-go and then stockfish professional programmers out of existence. ...