gurupanguji
Weekly Link out Louds are articles that I found great enough that I jotted them down in my notes. Sharing them so they might be useful to you too
- Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish: To celebrate the 20th anniversary of Steve’s commencement address at Stanford, we are sharing a newly enhanced version of the video below and on YouTube. It is one of the most influential commencement addresses in history, watched over 120 million times, and reproduced in media and school curricula around the world. The talk even helped inspire an unlikely NBA title comeback for the Cleveland Cavaliers when LeBron James played a clip from it in the locker room before a critical game three against the Golden State Warriors in 2016.
- How Steve Jobs Wrote the Greatest Commencement Speech Ever WIRED: The notes that he sent contained the bones of what would become one of the most famous commencement addresses of all time. It has been viewed over 120 million times and is quoted to this day. Probably every person who agrees to give a commencement speech winds up rewatching it, getting inspired, and then sinking into despondency.
- Trump's "beautiful" bill wrecks our energy future: This legislation is terrible!
- Social proof signalling loops: Have we reached that phase of life where growth at all costs are now an inherently important thing to consider?
- Everyone says they want opinionated design until they get it: The new design system is polarizing and often that's a good place to start. Especially for design.
- WWDC25 macOS Tahoe Breaks Decades of Finder History: Something jumped out at me in the macOS Tahoe segment of the WWDC keynote today: the Finder icon is reversed. You can see that in the image below. On the left is macOS Sequoia, and on the right is macOS Tahoe:
- The luxury of saying no.: The real threat to creativity isn’t a language model. It’s a workplace that rewards speed over depth, scale over care, automation over meaning. If we’re going to talk about what robs people of agency, let’s start there. Let’s talk about the economic structures that pressure people into using tools badly, or in ways that betray their values. Let’s talk about the lack of time, support, mentorship, and trust. Not the fact that someone ran a prompt through a chatbot to get unstuck. Where is the empathy? Where is your support for people who are being tossed into the pit of AI and instructed to find a way to make it work? How is the view from your ivory tower?
- This is the secret to actually making the things you want to.: The reality is that we have an incredible capacity to rob ourselves of joy. Especially when we're working on things that matter (something that I've spent eight other manifesto pieces arguing that you should be doing), we can trick ourselves into thinking that cold dispassion is the same thing as taking something seriously (or, conversely, that treating something with levity means it doesn't matter to you). This is a really big problem, because if you're going to do something that requires thought, focus or care, then you need to want to do it. It needs to, on some basic level, be at least a little bit fun.
- Computers are Big-Ass Levers: A helpful heuristic for your career in the AI era: Pretend you’ve been handed next year’s technologies today. You have early, exclusive access. What can you now do that you couldn’t before? That’s your edge. Sprint with it.
- I am disappointed in the AI discourse: Be cognitively flexible is great advice to anyone. If you find yourself morally or instinctively rejecting something, choose the opportunity to determine why? Often you might realize that you were conditioned. Use curiosity to learn even if to confirm to yourself that your opinion is still valid. In my personal experience, I've found opinions to matter less and less over time.
- Make life possible: Uncertainty is the condition of not knowing what comes next, the fear of change that is beyond our control and likely at odds with our thriving. It is a state of worry, of insecurity, of a lack of faith in the systems that keep us alive and living. It is, so often, intolerable. And yet, as Le Guin reminds us, uncertainty is also the only thing that makes life possible.
- Why agents are bad pair programmers: Continue to practice pair-programming with your editor, but throttle down from the semi-autonomous "Agent" mode to the turn-based "Edit" or "Ask" modes. You'll go slower, and that's the point. Also, just like pairing with humans, try to establish a rigorously consistent workflow as opposed to only reaching for AI to troubleshoot. I've found that ping-pong pairing with an AI in Edit mode (where the LLM can propose individual edits but you must manually accept them) strikes the best balance between accelerated productivity and continuous quality control
- What I've learned about writing AI apps so far Seldo.com: Depending how much of the hype around AI you've taken on board, the idea that they "take text and turn it into less text" might seem gigantic back-pedal away from previous claims of what AI can do. But taking text and turning it into less text is still an enormous field of endeavour, and a huge market. It's still very exciting, all the more exciting because it's got clear boundaries and isn't hype-driven over-reaching, or dependent on LLMs overnight becoming way better than they currently are. Take a look at the possibilities, find something that fits within these boundaries, and then have fun with it.
- Meet Fidji Simo The Instacart CEO Tasked With Getting OpenAI to Turn…: Interesting profile of Fidji Simo, Open AI's CPO of Apps.
- The hidden time bomb in the tax code that's fueling mass tech layoffs: This is a good article for tech workers to read. If you weren't aware of it, it's a fundamental shift in how corporations are allowed to account for your expense. This is something that was discussed in the tech circles a few years ago. To me this is correlated but it alone is not causational. There was a confluence of events - tax rate increases, over hiring and a refocus on the business fundamentals. That said, please remember, you are bigger than your job - no matter how awesome you thought it was.
- Every generation discovers the same monster.: We're doing it again.Rolling Stone recently shared stories of people who believe AI has chosen them as messiahs. Families are watching loved ones disappear into "spiritual mania" and "supernatural delusion." Every generation discovers the same monster - the technology isn't the problem, the obsession is.
- The Who Cares Era dansinker.com: It's so emblematic of the moment we're in, the Who Cares Era, where completely disposable things are shoddily produced for people to mostly ignore.
- How F1's slowest car was upgraded to a Ferrari-beater: Sauber has generally been the slowest package in the 2025 F1 field. But on the weekend its big upgrade arrived, it beat a Ferrari to fifth on merit. A dive into how they managed and might it be sustainable?
- Michael Tsai - Blog - WWDC 2025 Preview: A collection of previews of WWDC 2025 from MJ Tsai
- How Daft Punk Changed Music: How Daft Punk Changed Music - a discographical documentary of the musical legends of Daft Punk and how they've changed music forever.
- Some thoughts on human-AI relationships: In the light of the behavior of the Diabolus Ex Machina essay, this one is a good read on how OpenAI is thinking about model behavior.
- Diabolus Ex Machina: This Is Not An Essay. When chatgpt screws up, it screws up bigly without remorse and keeps making mistakes all the while apologizing if and only if you push back. And when you push back, it goes into a weird mode of non apology-apologies because there's no remorse or changing of tactics. Just fascinating.