20.02.2026 17:55
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The great benefit of computer sequencers is that they remove the issue of skill, and replace it with the issue of judgement. With Cubase or Photoshop, anybody can actually do anything, and you can make stuff that sounds very much like stuff you’d hear on the radio, or looks very much like anything you see in magazines. So the question becomes not whether you can do it or not, because any drudge can do it if they’re prepared to sit in front of the computer for a few days, the question then is, "Of all the things you can now do, which do you choose to do? " --Brian Eno
Also, this Brian Eno quote has been really stuck in my head for weeks:
"The great benefit of computer sequencers is that they remove the issue of skill, and replace it with the issue of judgement.
... the question then is, "Of all the things you can now do, which do you choose to do?""
This is very popular, yet WILDLY poor advice: “Be constructive, don’t complain about problems if you don’t have a solution”
If you hear someone say this, please consider slapping them with a large trout.
Being aware of problems is *incredibly valuable*, whether you have solutions or not!
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Yes, very good talk by Benjamin!
I’m Alex Vindman and I’m running for the U.S. Senate. Chaos, corruption and sky-rocketing costs are crushing ordinary people, while the billionaires and career politicians profit.
I stepped up when my country needed a soldier and now I’m stepping up again to fight for Floridians.
Following the killing of AFGE Member Alex Pretti and the subsequent slanderous rhetoric that followed from top Trump administration officials, AFGE National President Everett Kelley issued the following statement: “Yesterday, AFGE brought together labor and faith leaders from Minneapolis and across the nation to mourn our fallen brother from Local 3669, Alex Pretti. We honored his life and legacy and lifted up his family, his friends, his union, Minneapolis, and our nation in prayer. “Today, we demand accountability. “In the immediate aftermath of Alex’s killing, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem betrayed the public trust by slandering the good name of our union brother and calling him a “domestic terrorist.” Alex Pretti was a patriotic ICU nurse at a VA hospital who devoted his life to serving America’s veterans. That claim was reckless, defamatory, and unsupported by the facts. Noem was preceded in this false statement by Stephen Miller, Deputy White House Chief of Staff, who is also the architect of the chaotic and failed immigration policy in Minnesota. “Our demand is clear: Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who was responsible for carrying out the policy that led to Alex’s needless killing, and Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, the architect of that policy, must resign immediately. If they refuse, President Trump must dismiss them.
The American Federation of Government Employees, which represents border patrol officers at the National Border Patrol Council, calls on Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller to resign or be fired
Miller should be the target of Dem pressure.
Yes, defund ICE, impeach Noem, sure.
But if you want maximum change on the admin's behavior, focus on getting Miller out of day-to-day decisions. Drive a wedge by making him embarassing.
Trump loves to blame someone else: make Miller the scapegoat.
If your goal is to produce some particular end product—a website, an app, an open-source project on GitHub—the sooner you can make it look like that end product, the better.
With AI, it's never been easier. Get an idea. Sketch with AI. Make a demo! 🧐💡🛠
tugtool.dev/journal/get-...
I had very good experiences rapidly prototyping UIs with Claude. For production code I still have to rewrite/refactor it because it has a tendency not to refactor when iterating on the design and it often ends up with a convoluted mess.
I meant explaining the rationale of your high-level design decisions so the agent does not break your architecture when designing new stuff.
The same goes for documenting your architecture.
Claude code is amazing for rapid prototyping!
Happy New Year! As of January 1, 2026, all ACM publications and related artifacts in the ACM Digital Library are now open access, making computing research more accessible, discoverable, and reusable worldwide.
Explore ACM’s open access journey:
👉 www.acm.org/publications...
#OpenAccess #ACM
New Alan Kay talk — 75 Years of Graphical User Interfaces
www.youtube.com/watch?v=qS20...
People mistakenly think prototypes are for discovering the right answer. They are most effective when used to find the right question.
A silver lining to coding with AI agents may be that we will finally accept the idea of programs as derivable artifacts.
It probably requires some unpacking. A reason to read this book :)
TIL "netflix and chill" used to be "come up and see my etchings"
The image is a wide horizontal illustration made up of five circular scenes, evenly spaced on a white background. Together they suggest motion, repetition, and the evolution of technology. First circle: A caveman runs toward the right. He is muscular, barefoot, and wears a simple animal-skin outfit. Second circle: A wheel constructed from human legs and feet arranged like spokes. Third circle: An abstract circle with its center. Fourth circle: A detailed steam engine from the Industrial Revolution era. Metal cylinders, pipes, and a large wheel fill the circle. Fifth circle: An antique movie projector, shown from the side. Its mechanical wheel is visible, and a cone of light projects outward. Inside that light appears a small image of the running caveman, clearly a projection and smaller than the original figure, linking the end of the sequence back to the beginning.
"Invention is translation of one kind of space into another."
— McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy
Continental philosophy version of the tile: "Software as a way of being-in-possibility."
Title of my imaginary PhD thesis: "Software as temporary stabilization of constraints within a transformation space."
"Despite the marvellous plastic qualities they occasionally exhibit, emotionally they have always been (and always will be) true first cousins to the square of the hypotenuse."
— William M. Ivins, Art & Geometry
Ouch.
Beware of the domain model where everything seems easy but nothing of interest is possible.
this fall I worked with the core Git folks on writing an official data model for Git and it just got merged! I learned a few new things from writing it. github.com/git/git/blob...
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www.cnn.com/2025/11/16/b...
"The very best creative people will only go to work in a few places." / "What I try to do is create the environment where these incredible people can make films." Man, this is what real leadership looks like. They don't make 'em like this anymore. youtu.be/R0XmBKsRJF8?...
"There is no royal road to geometry."
It’s widely known (and, I think, pretty uncontroversial) that learning requires effort — specifically, if you don’t have to work at getting the knowledge, it won’t stick.
Even if an LLM could be trusted to give you correct information 100% of the time, it would be an inferior method of learning it.
A kind of leaky abstraction. A property of the chosen representation, irrelevant to your problem, leaks to the user who interprets it.
Lots of reasons to love using Clojure, but Netflix reminded us of why we don’t want to use anything else…
In 12 years, over 7 different versions of Clojure (from 1.5.1 to 1.12.0) they had zero migrations!
I don’t know how to express how amazing that is
