Reads 2025W09

A few interesting articles I read over the past few months

It’s been a while since the last time I published a post with the list of articles I’ve read. This one contains the highlights from the past few months.

We Were Wrong About GPUs — Fly.io invested in GPU Machines to support AI/ML tasks for developers, but they learned that most developers prefer using APIs for AI instead of managing GPUs themselves. Despite the challenges and costs of deploying GPUs, they found that the demand for these machines was lower than expected. The company is now scaling back its GPU ambitions while focusing on improving its core product offerings.
Why I think AI take-off is relatively slow — Tyler Cowen argues that the rapid adoption of AI is slowed down by inefficiencies in less productive sectors and human bottlenecks, like regulatory delays. He believes that while AI can improve productivity, it will not transform the economy as quickly as expected due to the challenges of integrating it with human work. Overall, Cowen suggests that AI might boost economic growth modestly, but noticeable changes will take time.
Is it okay? — The author discusses the impact of language models on creativity and copyright, arguing that their reliance on the entire internet raises ethical concerns. He believes that if these models only replicate existing content without contributing to human creativity, it is problematic. However, if they lead to significant advancements in science and technology, their use may be justified.
The Inner Ring — The concept of the “Inner Ring” describes the human desire to belong to exclusive groups, which can lead to negative actions and feelings of exclusion. This longing for acceptance can overshadow genuine connections and fulfillment in life. True happiness comes from focusing on meaningful work and relationships rather than chasing after superficial insider status.
Introducing S2 — Introduction to S2, a new approach to streaming data storage.
Ghostty: Reflecting on Reaching 1.0 — This is a personal reflection on the project.
How to Pick Your Life Partner - Part 2 — To endure 20,000 days, 100 vacations, and 100,000 leisure hours with another human being and do so happily, there are three key ingredients necessary.
How to Pick Your Life Partner - Part 1 — Given that the choice of life partner is by far the most important thing in life to get right, how is it possible that so many smart people get it so wrong?
The secret inside One Million Checkboxes — Teens wrote secret binary messages in One Million Checkboxes. The author found them.
Group Chat: The Best Way to Totally Stress Out Your Team — The perils of the modern communications conveyor belt that never ends, divides your attention, fractures your time, and chains you to FOMO.
Reflections on Founder Mode — Reflections on a recent Paul Graham piece – and on the culture at Oxide
Founder Mode — At a YC event last week Brian Chesky gave a talk that everyone who was there will remember. Most founders I talked to afterward said it was the best they’d ever heard. Ron Conway, for the first time in his life, forgot to take notes. I’m not going to try to reproduce it here. Instead I want to talk about a question it raised.
Obsession — Reflections on the concept of healthy obsession and how it can be a source of motivation and success.
Leaving Neovim for Zed — A journey through text editors and how I landed on Zed after years of Neovim
Why I Built Litestream — Despite an exponential increase in computing power, our applications require more machines than ever because of architectural decisions made 25 years ago. You can eliminate much of your complexity and cost by using SQLite & Litestream for your production applications.
It’s in the stories — The author reflects on the importance of storytelling in leadership, sharing anecdotes about influential figures.
Two Threads, One Core: How Simultaneous Multithreading Works Under the Hood — Simultaneous multithreading (SMT) is a feature that lets a processor handle instructions from two different threads at the same time. But have you ever wondered how this actually works?
Why German Strings are Everywhere — German Strings are a custom string format developed for optimized data processing, adopted by many databases, focusing on performance and memory efficiency.
The Kafka Metric You’re Not Using: Stop Counting Messages, Start Measuring Time — Traditional offset-based monitoring can be misleading due to varying message sizes and consumption rates. To address this, you can introduce a time-based metric for a more accurate assessment of consumer group lag.

March 9, 2025 – @jrdi