144 mentions · 42 chunks · 34 episodes
...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...
... one of the reasons I religiously take the time to do a synthesis pass with the Bits and Bobs each week. I want to take the proto insights, the snippets of ideas, and synthesize them into a more stable and coherent form that will stan...
Israel Shalom, commenting on last week's Bits and Bobs, reminds us about wheels on luggage. "Growing up, our luggage didn't have any wheels. We'd have to lug stuff around literally. Then someone ...
Trail of Bits releases some mitigations for security issues in MCP. However, superficial layers on top of a fundamentally insecure base actually makes it more dang...
... give them juice concentrate, you can get unlimited glasses of orange juice. My Bits and Bobs are concentrated insight–hard to drink on their own, but delicious when you add water!
...atic thinking LLMs can write infinite Op Eds for you, on demand. The backlog of Bits and Bobs feels exceptionally valuable to me in the age of AI.
...e already know how this movie ends. If you want to dig in more, I fed my recent Bits and Bobs into ChatGPT's Deep Research and it gave a more in depth report diving into the parallels.
Someone asked me why I publish Bits and Bobs each week. The weekly reflection is the load bearing part. The publishing is just the thing that makes me feel compelled to keep up the stre...
... poetry. But what's happened is backwards! Turns out machines are way better at bits than atoms. Atoms still require humans and will for a long time.
...working notes cards in it, with hundreds added every week. I also re-import the Bits and Bobs into it every week. In the past I've found being able to pass the Bits and Bobs to Claude as background context made it a much more powerful...