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Reads

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  • Thrive in obscurity — Creative success often starts in obscurity, with many creators spending years sharing their work with few or no viewers. To stay motivated, focus on creating what you love instead of chasing popularity, as this will lead to better work and attract like-minded fans. Treat your early content as an investment for future audiences, knowing they may return to appreciate your journey later on.
  • If you are useful, it doesn’t mean you are valued — In your career, being useful means you get tasks done well, while being valued means you contribute to important decisions and have growth opportunities. Useful people may receive rewards, but they often feel stagnant and lack strategic involvement. To succeed, it’s crucial to recognize whether you are truly valued or just seen as a reliable worker.
  • My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts — The author argues that LLMs can significantly assist software developers by handling tedious coding tasks, allowing them to focus on more important work. Despite skepticism about LLM-generated code quality, the author believes that these tools can enhance productivity and reduce the need for repetitive tasks. Ultimately, while LLMs may not replace all developers, they can streamline the coding process and improve efficiency.
  • A Smart Bear » You’re a little company, now act like one — Small companies often fear that being perceived as small will hurt sales, but this can actually alienate their best customers. Instead of adopting generic corporate language, they should present themselves authentically to attract Early Adopters who appreciate personal connections and are willing to provide feedback. By being honest and relatable, small companies can foster relationships that help them grow and improve their products.
  • Letter to Arc members 2025 — The Browser Company is shifting focus from Arc to a new product called Dia, aiming to create a better browser experience. They recognized that Arc had limitations and wanted to build something that integrates AI more effectively.
  • If nothing is curated, how do we find things? — The rise of social media has made it harder to find curated content, leading to information overload and mental exhaustion. Critics and curators are needed now more than ever to help sift through the vast amount of content available.
  • Thoughts on thinking — The author feels stuck and believes that their creative efforts are overshadowed by AI’s ability to produce better ideas quickly. They reflect on how using AI has diminished their own thinking and intellectual growth, despite having access to more information than ever.
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  • What If We Made Advertising Illegal? — The idea of making advertising illegal may sound silly but couldn’t agree more. I’ve been unlucky enough to work for the industry and can’t imagine a better society with the current practices.
  • Notes on kindness — “So eventually, if you care, you leave”
  • The case against conversational interfaces — Conversational interfaces, like voice assistants and chatbots, often promise a new way to interact with technology but fail to replace traditional computing methods. Instead of replacing existing tools, AI should enhance them, allowing for seamless interactions that feel effortless.
  • How to Write Blog Posts that Developers Read — Didn’t like the main topic of the article since it’s focused on ways to attract readers to your blog posts. When I write I do it for myself and I expect other personal blogs to do the same. Anyway, some of the advice is good even if you’re not focused on attracting readers.
  • Tracing the thoughts of a large language model — Anthropic team explains how are they working on understanding Claude’s internal “reasoning” processes. This research branch could help improve AI reliability and transparency.
  • Cyanview: Coordinating Super Bowl’s visual fidelity with Elixir — Leaving aside the Elixir infomercial. Interesting read about how a team of nine have managed to build such an incredible product. It might sound simple but as someone who has been working with remote cameras in the past, ai can tell it’s more complex than it sounds.
  • Things that go wrong with disk IO — Short article emphasizing the critical importance of maintaining data integrity when developing applications that rely on disk interactions
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  • Less ceremony, more shipping — Tinybird introduces their new deployment tool, which simplifies data schema changes for teams. This tool automates the entire deployment process, ensuring no downtime and minimizing errors. By applying software engineering best practices to data workflows, it allows developers to focus more on building rather than troubleshooting.
  • PlanetScale redesign — Twitter thread about how PlanetScale redesigned their website and the impact it had. And a follow-up showing how the original redesign was done using Google Docs!
  • IO devices and latency — Nice post about IO devices latency and how they have evolved. It comes with excellent illustrations. The author also wrote a Twitter thread with the making off and the impact this kind of educational technical posts have on their marketing.
  • The good times in tech are over — I don’t personally like the post but it’s true. Good times are over for software engineers that were not aware of what their job was.
  • Before AI Grew Up — A guy explaining to his kids in the future how AI feels nowadays. Nicely written and hopefully accurate.
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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.

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