Amy Hoy: Pro Edition

welcome new followers! say hi and show me your pet and/or favorite pet-like thing! this is rocco, my gluten detection service dog

there's an oldish saying, "do you want to be right, or do you want to be effective?" and i think it needs an update "do you want to FEEL right, or do you want to be effective?" bc really there aren't any points at all for "being" right. only being effective matters.

"If you think it is bad that Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and a handful of their billionaire buddies are effectively unconstrained, then the most effective thing you can do is pick a fight over data center siting in your area." by @davekarpf.bsky.social

Sat down to write about the Hugging Face/AI incident. Ended up drawing this instead.

i read management theory stuff for fun and if you think it's boring, you're wrong there's SO much tea. "Physicists, unlike accountants such as Deloitte, are educated to ask fundamental questions to understand the nature of things and to understand them in terms of energy and speed"

a product taking up space (in the abstract) nudges us to consider how much we need, or want, it. SaaS products are a perfect evasion of any sense of taking up space.

this is really true and it's really upsetting. software is getting less powerful, less service-oriented, and just generally worse.

we have a rare window of availability at @codetv.dev, so if you're looking to make something special that helps your company connect with devs, now is a very good time to get in touch. I love working with teams that have the courage to experiment & take big swings — if that's you, get into my inbox!

This is so dystopian. 💀 54 % of Americans read at or below a grade 6 level. Which means they can’t read for context, subtext, authorial intent or bias.

oh this is very nice!

No one is ever completely “ready” for something difficult that they’ve never done before. So: Just start. But also: You know you’ll run into gaps, so realize that along the way, back off, get help, then get back to it.

it's super interesting when The Algorithm™ grabs something of yours and then lets go

the worst part about the github outages is that the engineers will probably take the blame when it’s more likely the managers’ faults it’s hard for me to imagine an engineer asking their manager to do a shittier job; these outages are usually downstream of management pressure to punt on quality

i have been violently allergic to "product LETS users" since the first time i heard it like bitch. YOU are a TOOL. you don't "let" me do anything.

I wrote about this in my newsletter this week. www.joshwcomeau.com/email/wham-l...

discord. guys. it's time for you to visualize a chat app that actually works irc did it in the 90s. you can manage it. come on now. pull your socks up.

i lol'd at this the way i lol'd when i first understood gödel's incompleteness theorem

wow. zero 9's.

It's not that difficult or expensive to understand people if you really want to understand them. Many organizations prefer to spend huge amounts of money to keep that confirmation bias high going.

Forgot to mention: I’m running a 40% launch sale! But only for the first week. ⏰

great thread, and also this is just the way things go: a variety of small, indie biz pave the way -> megacorps acquire and fuck em up -> users tolerate -> gets worse -> users revolt -> a variety of small, indie biz pave the way market concentration is bad, & it's also fragile

people will need to embrace small biz to afford these services, which they’ll need more than ever thanks to ai, which opens the door to (hopefully) more independently owned alternatives. you will just need to get used to paying for software like you do patreons/newsletter— but for a mutual vs adobe

for the last 3 years Microsoft has basically been covering their products knee-deep in shit and now we customers have to ladle out the shit with tiny spoons that Microsoft sells us and we have to read whiny blog posts about how they could not have foreseen this and also spoons will triple in price

🥹

we have empirical proof that posting is one of the only human endeavors you can approach with both infinite time and money and never get any better at. the last truly expert domain

i knew the github guys well before they made github. this whole arc has been wild to watch.

this is, frankly, the best argument that llms are actually sentient* the intro is weird but the magic starts at 0:17 *THIS IS A JOKE. ALERT: THIS IS A JOKE.

I'm looking back at this paper written 2019 & published 2021 with @andreaeyleen.bsky.social: How Computational Modeling Can Force Theory Building in Psychological Science (pdf: oliviaguest.com/doc/guest_ma...) We presented a positive view and kind, if I do say so myself, compatibilist stance. 1/