Interesting Things I've Read (or Watched) /
Some Interesting Things I’ve Read/Watched: Link Dump #5
I am still trying to get rid of my backlog of links I wanted to post about, so please bear with me.
John Warner, Building a Creative Practice (2023) [link]
An article about what a “creative practice” is (tl;dr: a set of rituals and habits that you perform that help you digest your experiences and influences and create interesting work) and why the author does not believe that AI can be creative.
If you get into a groove with your creative practice some very woo-woo stuff will start to happen, and it won’t be entirely clear how. A particular line or a story twist or a metaphor will appear on the page and you’ll be like, Holy crap, where did that come from? It will seem mystical, but it came from your practice.
Yup, relatable.
Aden Barton, How Harvard Careerism Killed the Classroom (2023) [link]
Alternate title: Hey, what’s up with all these Harvard students who don’t care about getting a legitimate education anymore and are selling out to big consulting firms instead?
Amanda Guinzburg, Diabolus Ex Machina (2025) [link]
This piece is about AI, but you should read it with no context.
Cal Newport, Why Do We Work Too Much? (2021) [link]
The author explores reasons for the current stress culture in knowledge work – why do we feel the need to take on work until we hit a breaking point?
Adam Mastroianni, An invitation to a secret society (2023) [link]
Tl,dr: You can just do amateur science, and you don’t need permission from anyone to do it.
Joshua Tyler, The End Of Independent Publishing And Giant Freakin Robot (2025) [link]
This article is part of the explanation for why search engines suck now: basically, the owner of this independent media site explains that they need to shut down their business because Google, wanting to please big brands, has been promoting their content and suppressing content written by independent publishers.
God, I miss when search engines used to actually work.
Quote:
Google’s engineers were adamant that there is no problem with our website or our content. In fact, some of the geeky Googlers there regularly read our articles and seem to genuinely like us. However, my take away was that we don’t fit in with the search monopoly’s new business model, and so we won’t be shown to anyone.
That business model seems to largely revolve around pleasing big brands. During the course of our conversation with Google, an Independent site owner asked why a “Best Shoes To Buy” (not the actual keyword analyzed, just an example) list from a big retailer like Nike always seems to outrank a “Best Shoes To Buy” list from an actual, unbiased reviewer. Google’s response was to ask, “Well if we don’t rank those big brands first, won’t they be mad?”
Justine Tunney, AI Training Shouldn’t Erase Authorship (2024) [link]
This article is about how AI is built to steal ideas but doesn’t keep a record of who came up with them.
In a world of infinite automation and infinite surveillance, survival is going to depend on being the least boring person. Over my career I’ve written and attached my name to thousands of public source code files. I know they are being scraped from the web and used to train AIs. But if I ask something like Claude, “what sort of code has Justine Tunney wrote?” it hasn’t got the faintest idea. Instead it thinks I’m a political activist, since it feels no guilt remembering that I attended a protest on Wall Street 13 years ago. But all of the positive things I’ve contributed to society? Gifts I took risks and made great personal sacrifices to give? It’d be the same as if I sat on my hands.
fasterthanlime, POV: I’m on my third coffee and you just asked me how the internet works (YouTube Video) [link]
Probably the most entertaining crash course to how the internet works I’ve ever seen.
Steve Yegge, Done, and Gets Things Smart [link]
The main idea of this article is that you should aim to hire brilliant people, not just above average people, because everyone else will feel the urge to improve just through their proximity to the brilliant people.
Quote:
For your startup (or, applying the recursion, for your new project at your current company), you don’t want someone who’s “smart”. You’re not looking for “eager to learn”, “picks things up quickly”, “proven track record of ramping up fast”.
No! Screw that. You want someone who’s superhumanly godlike. Someone who can teach you a bunch of stuff. Someone you admire and wish you could emulate, not someone who you think will admire and emulate you.
You want someone who, when you give them a project to research, will come in on Monday and say: “I’m Done, and by the way I improved the existing infrastructure while I was at it.”
Someone who always seems to be finishing stuff so fast it makes your head spin. That’s what my Done clause means. It means they’re frigging done all the time.
Kelsey Piper, Giving people money helped less than I thought it would [link]
This is one of the most surprising articles I’ve read. Basically, the idea is that a lot of studies found that giving low-income people money didn’t measurably improve policy outcomes such as mental health, employment, or education. The question I come out of this is “why?”, and it’s definitely making me reconsider whether UBI would actually work. (My thoughts on UBI are, honestly, very complicated right now.)
Ronald W. Dworkin, When I lost my intuition [link]
Quote:
That morning, I asked myself why my medical intuition, which, over the years, had struck its roots deep into the ground, had begun suddenly to hop about from place to place. The answer was terrible: although I still had all my professional knowledge and clinical experience, something had given way in my mind, a crack had opened, and I stared through a narrow black fissure into a void. I read five journal articles that discussed gum chewing and anaesthesia. Yet, the circumstances in each study were slightly different from my own case; also, the studies disagreed with one another. Even when clustered together to intensify their warm and comforting effect, to make medical practice seem well-ordered and predictable, five journal articles offer no guarantee, no sure thing. They are like stars in the night sky that shine bright, and warm the heart, and seem to give life secure limits, but nevertheless exist in that unnamable Nothing, the alien, cold and dark universe where people come face to face with the unknown. Nothing had really happened, but my anxiety aroused in me wild imaginings, and neither my knowledge nor my clinical experience could dispel them. The anaesthesia monitors seemed to become transparent, like shadowy lights in darkness. And, when that darkness enveloped the operating room, I trembled before the infinite.
Cedric Chin, Ability to See Expertise is a Milestone Worth Aiming For [link]
The idea of this post is that the better you get at doing something, the better you get at evaluating other people’s skill at it, whereas a complete novice in a field doesn’t even have the vocabulary or language or mental models to understand why or how one people might be more skilled than another. His main argument is that you should always aim to reach the “vocab point” in a new skill, which is what he describes as the level of proficiency where you sort of need to make up your own language to describe the subtleties you notice about how to practice the skill.
Quote:
I think any practitioner who has gotten to a vocab point in some skill domain should know that expertise consists of many tacit … feelings. Why would a jazz musician pick one riff instead of another? Why would a writer pick three anecdotes over two? In most forms of expertise, skill tends to express in terms of feel — “it felt right”, or “it made sense to me.” Sometimes these experts can explain it. Other times not.
It’s not too surprising, then, that there comes a point when you engage with a community of fellow practitioners, and people begin to talk about what ‘feels right to them’, or ‘what it feels like to do that counter-intuitive thing, and oh yeah this other thing feels the same way’. Taking part in these kinds of conversations is only possible once you reach a certain level of expertise. More importantly, you’ll know when you’ve reached that point; the tenor of the conversations you can have with fellow journeymen will have changed permanently.
RFC 7168 - The Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol for Tea Efflux Appliances (HTCPCP-TEA) [link]
This is the origin of the HTML Error Code 418: I’m a teapot. (Which is a joke, but is apparently implemented on some servers. I love joke RFCs.)
Marriane Belloti, Yes, You Can Charge More [link]
The idea here is that how much you’re able to charge for services has a lot more to do with your network than it has to do with your actual skills.
Dan Goodin, Here’s the paper no one read before declaring the demise of modern cryptography [link]
This is a fascinating story that highlights how prevalent miscommunication between researchers and the general public actually is.
Nina Markl, Saying “No” to generative AI in the university: 10 reasons I hate generative AI (and you should too) [link]
What it says on the tin. These reasons are interesting!
Helen Lewis, The Bluestocking: On Writing[link]
This is really cool writing advice! I’m mostly putting this here for future me to go back to it.
Quote:
Observe the interview rule of three. Can’t remember where I got this tip—maybe a Cory Doctorow interview? But it was to come away from an interview and immediately write down the three most interesting takeaways from it. Particularly for projects where you are interviewing many people over many months, it will really help to flick through these little summaries of your interviews before sitting down to write. (One of the worst moments in any longread is realising you have 40 hours of tape to revisit.)