182 mentions · 51 chunks · 42 episodes
The process of writing Bits and Bobs is good agent-free thinking time. Helps me keep my mind fit, so when I do use agents (which is most of the other times) I can reach farther ...
AI can only run away in a world of bits, not atoms. Atoms are rivalrous in a way that bits are not. But watch out, because the financial world is also a bits-to-bits world~
An insight from Michael Sinanian on last week's Bits and Bobs: "Working with an aviation client right now and it's made me appreciate how FAA/IATA/NTSB establish the basic 'rules of the game' within whi...
If you are in the world of bits then you can flit between things easily. You don't have to luxuriate in one option. You can't luxuriate.
...erriding factor. But that is because it brings an atom-like movement cost. Your bits have to be moved to the silo I'm in to be useful to me. That movement cost is downstream of the physics of trust we use today.
Bits are way easier to fork than atoms. Bits can be copied with basically zero cost and atoms can't be. That allows experimentation and evolution at a str...
Apparently my early-morning reflection / distillation practice to create Bits and Bobs was shared by Robert Merton.
An insightful comment from Brendan on my Bits and Bobs: "Norbert Wiener has a great take on this. Life creates a local decrease in entropy by drawing on energy from elsewhere, most fundamentally ...
People intuitively will pay more for more atoms than bits. Because atoms obviously and intuitively have a marginal cost.
...mmand from the terminal to turn on a dangerous developer feature. The fact that Bits and Bobs is a Google Doc is itself a form of gauntlet. The gauntlet tests two things: 1) Does the user have the capability to make it through the gau...
...ely you don't do it. Often you want a handful of iterative synthesis passes. My Bits and Bobs has three synthesis passes: 1) Capturing very rough notes live when something feels worth capturing. 2) A couple of days later, cleaning up ...
James Cham vibecoded a tool to visualize the appearance of concepts in Bits and Bobs over time. I love it!
My Bits and Bobs are bite size. They stand on their own. Often with a top-level insight and then exposition or unpacking or wrinkling. But adjacent ones are ...
Software eats the world because it can be replicated ad nauseum. Bits are non-rivalrous.
...software, but few other industries do? Mostly because software is data, data is bits, and bits are non-rivalrous. You can have the bits, and I can too. Atoms are inherently rivalrous, but bits are inherently non-rivalrous. Open source...
...e to share reflections: Field Notes. He was directly inspired for the format by Bits and Bobs!
...ling point creates unforeseeable value. For example, maybe you have a number of bits of functionality spread out across some scripts. Then you refactor it into one CLI with a consistent UI. Technically nothing new is now possible… but...
...nd of disclaimer for how I use AI in my public writing. The summary: I write my bits and bobs by hand, sometimes using AI as an editor to bounce ideas off of. Some other prose essays I publish use AI in the writer seat, fed with a tig...
...is where leverage is created. That's why compounding engineering works. And why Bits and Bobs generate so much leverage for me. The synthesis pass is important but never urgent. This is the closest to my secret: I just give the synthe...
...commendations to you quickly. They get your context and desires from just a few bits of signal. A family with young kids that looks exhausted from travel says "where should we go to eat" and he recommends the local deli right around t...