Posts

Quote: Alan Kay

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 Perspective is worth 80 IQ points Alan Kay’s line “Perspective is worth 80 IQ points” isn’t about literal intelligence. He’s pointing out that the ability to shift viewpoint, reframe a problem, or see a system from a higher level often produces more insight than raw analytical horsepower. Many problems look hard only because they’re being viewed from a narrow frame. Change the frame, and what looked complex becomes obvious or solvable. Why Perspective Feels Like “+80 IQ” A few mechanisms: Reframing reduces complexity. Seeing the structure of a problem—rather than its surface detail—often collapses the difficulty. It mimics what we associate with “smartness.” Most people get stuck in the default frame. They try to optimize inside an assumption instead of questioning it. Someone who steps outside can leapfrog them without being “smarter.” Systems thinking detects leverage points. Understanding how components interact exposes shortcuts, invariants, and constraints th...
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Notes on: How Video Games Inspire Great UX

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My notes on:  https://jenson.org/games/ which I found via:  https://youtu.be/1fZTOjd_bOQ?si=kCGSE2uNczIJjiQ- Alan Kay quote is hard to understand until an insight from a user test “changed my perspective”. First learning (on the surface, we go deeper and beyond it) pretty soon: Games have the ability to force situations, such as running into a canyon and having nowhere to go but up a ladder. Apps on the other hand, usually have the opposite, offering a broad toolkit of choices. Games, I thought, can exploit narrative to force situations which made their life easier. However this does not mean that games have it easy, on the contrary most games fail: You have to design a great game to get people to have the confidence that practicing is worthwhile. And we start going deeper right away now: Raph convinced me to forgo any quick and easy ‘cookbook of tricks’ approach to this problem and go deeper and understand better how games are built, from the bottom up Fist bit of wisdom: Mo...
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[Acquired] Google: the AI company (Part 1)

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You can't say you understand today's AI landscape without listening to this massive (4 hours!) Acquired episode on Google, focusing on its AI roots . Over three episodes, Acquired has a little over 12 hours worth of podcast just on Google! Well worth it IMO for  the greatest business in history . Selected highlights: [07:23]   basically every single person of note in AI worked at Google with the one exception of Yann Le Cun who worked at Facebook This is truly mind-bending to think about, especially considering that Google is (at the moment) not the first name that comes to mind when we think about AI (LLMs) today. But the real kicker comes a few minutes in when we learn that did you mean? (launched in 2001!!) and google translate  (2006) are the first practical application of language models to its search business which made it exponentially more effective. About 25 years ago, Google was already running machine learning in production, at fantastic scale (about 15...
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Using LLMs at Oxide

Once again , some supremely well-thought and useful content from Oxide:  https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0576 This time it is about the use of LLMs within Oxide , here are my main take aways: start from values ! A phenomenal example of how values can be so much more than the vanity checklist that most companies use them for focus on the receiving end : why should I spend time reading something that the author did not think was worth enough spending the necessary time to write it? Again, goes back to their strongly writing-oriented culture and values corollary of item number 2: self review AI-generated code before asking others to review it!
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On supplychain attacks and dependency cooldowns

After the recent npm attacks  there have been many recommendations to leverage dependency cooldown as an additional mitigating factor. Dependency cooldown works by instructing the package manager to ignore releases that are younger than a certain threshold. The reasoning is that a vulnerable package will eventually be detected (and removed) in less time than the threshold, therefore preventing the attack. This, combined with dependency pinning (including transitive dependencies!), is a very powerful tool, but introduces an issue for anyone using internal dependencies. For those the cooldown will have the undesired side-effect of blocking internal dependency updates which might contain urgent fixes. I haven't checked all package managers, but I did check some of the most popular languages. Also, cooldown is not supported everywhere and sometimes is supported with noteworthy exceptions. Nodejs Use or switch to pnpm and use a combination of minimumR...
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On the Thoughtworks Technology Radar 33 - Nov 2025

Thoughtworks just published volume 33 of their Technology Radar . I found some interesting gems in it that I thought were worthwhile re-sharing: LiteLLM : I've been playing around with it to share AWS Bedrock models over a local, OpenAI-compatible API and I am impressed with the breadth of features (for example budgeting). The AI ecosystem is vibrant and flourishing. Continuous Compliance : so happy to see this mentioned! Personally I would expand the term to include other compliance tools like Vanta and I am convinced that this kind of automation and software will be essential for organizations to scale while meeting increasing regulatory demands. AGENTS.md : as someone who reads Simon's Willison blog, this is no surprise and a welcome confirmation (another file to watch out for:  CLAUDE.md ). Oxide : I wrote this post almost exclusively to mention Oxide 😅, a company I admire. Whenever people ask me about my cloud exit strategy, my answer is: Oxide. Here's why .
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(Quote) Conterfactuals

Excellent insight on conterfactuals in the context of (some of) the analysis of that latest AWS outage (emphasis mine): Counterfactuals are seductive. They tidy up messy stories . “If only we’d done X.” “If only they’d noticed Y.” They sound analytical, but they’re fictional . As the saying goes, “If my grandmother had wheels, she’d be a bicycle.” Once we start changing the facts, we’re not talking about reality anymore: we’re imagining a different one that didn’t happen. It’s easy to laugh at Joey, but we all do it. Just look at all the hot takes on the large AWS outage this week. We look back at a failed project, a near miss, an incident or accident, and feel the seductive pull of “they should have..” or “they shouldn’t have…” because we crave causality and coherence. When something goes wrong, we want to believe that there was a single point of failure that we can fix for next time, reassuring ourselves that it won’t happen again. But as Dekker reminds us,  “…[counterfactuals] ...
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