I just got off stage from the great dev/ai/nyc event with John Borthwick, we had a wide-ranging discussion that we’ll post online soon. We had hundreds of people in the room and hundreds on the waitlist… the energy in NYC is electric!
As a few recommendations from the event, I recommended revisiting the movie Her and Iain M. Banks Culture series, John recommended The MANIAC about John von Neumann, which I’ll add to my reading queue now.
In an age where AI can generate an infinite amount of stuff, what matters? Some of the most interesting writing I’ve read on this comes from Will Manidis, who makes it biblical and says that Craft is the Antidote to Slop:
From Genesis, man enters not a paradise without labor but a world of intentional creation. The LORD God places man in the Garden of Eden “to dress it and to keep it” (Genesis 2:15) establishing labor not as punishment but as sacred vocation. This original calling invites us to co-create the Kingdom, tending and developing the world with intention and care. Our fundamental purpose is not consumption but participation in the ongoing work of creation.
The serpent’s temptation represents the first shortcut in human history.”Ye shall be as gods” (Genesis 3:5) was not an invitation to deeper engagement with creation, but a way to get out of the work required to tend to it. The consequence wasn’t the introduction of work itself, but its corruption into burdensome toil: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread” (Genesis 3:19). Humanity’s first sin was, in part, choosing the easy shortcut over the meaningful process – preferring effortless gain to the demanding but fulfilling work of tending the garden.
You can read the rest as screenshots on X or on his Substack, but I hope he gets a real website soon. This also makes me think you should watch the We Are As Gods documentary on Stewart Brand, supported by the amazing folks at Stripe Press.
Telex has launched a new design and a gallery of some interesting examples. It’s really cool to see what people are starting to do with Telex, it really gets back at the fun of hacking and coding at the beginning, when a computer does something for you that makes you gasp.
My colleague Eduardo Villuendas has been making some cool music with it.
This really gets to my vision for Gutenberg to be a builder that anyone can use to create an incredible website, like legos anyone can assemble anything they imagine on the web. This is why I said Gutenberg is bigger than WordPress.
Hat tip to the Gutenberg Times. As I said in 2022, you need to learn AI deeply, there is so much fun stuff happening. They even like it on Reddit.
Nick Diego writes how Telex Turns Everyone into a WordPress Block developer.
There are many levels to the excellent Scott Alexander satire of God, Iblis (Islamic word for devil), and Dwarkesh Patel, one of the best new podcasters of this era.
There are people who have gone their whole lives without realizing that Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, Baa Baa Black Sheep, and the ABC Song are all the same tune […]
If they’re used to stories about surgeons getting completed with the string “man”, then that’s the direction their thoughts will always go… Also, how come God can’t make humans speak normally? Everything they say is full of these um dashes!
Which leads to a hat tip to Brian Gardner on the incredible McSweeney’s Em dash responding to the the AI allegations.
So next time you read something and think, “AI wrote this—it has a lot of em dashes,” ask yourself: Is it AI? Or is it just a poet trying to give you vertigo in four lines or fewer?