manueljlin retweeted
struggle together
i learned programming and design by trying, failing, and trying again.
when i hit a wall, i figured out how to climb it. read something i barely understood. took things apart. asked someone for help. started over.
when i began my career, i kept doing things i had never done before. trying different ways to make something work. when i stopped learning, i moved on to the next struggle.
many things i made weren’t very good. but after enough rounds, something stuck. what once took so much effort became part of how i thought. i could feel something was wrong before i knew how to explain it.
it became like water.
i think about what went into that. the bug i couldn’t fix. the design that looked right until someone used it. the conversation that made me realize my flaws.
now we can ask a machine.
i’ve made things with these tools that i might never have made otherwise. i don’t miss every tedious task. but i wonder what happens when we remove the difficulty before we understand what it was teaching us.
we ask. something appears. it works well enough. we move on.
we learn how to get results without necessarily understanding how it works. and because the result looks complete, it becomes easy to miss the questions we never learned to ask.
there is another side to this.
working with people is uncomfortable.
everyone wants something different. everyone has a history you don’t know. someone cares about a detail you think is unimportant. someone pushes back when you want to move. someone needs time when you feel certain.
it takes a while to find each other.
but sometimes, after struggling together, you become a band.
you know who notices what you miss. who can pull an idea apart without killing it. when to step in, when to slow down, when to let someone else carry the rhythm.
you share something unfinished. admit you don’t know. hurt each other, apologize, try again. eventually you make something none of you could have made alone.
some of my closest friendships came from working this way. smart, caring humans who saw me confused, wrong, tired, excited. people i could be vulnerable with. people whose ideas changed mine.
i worry we are making it easier to avoid that beginning.
an agent is always there. patient. ready to keep going. talking to it can feel easier than reaching toward someone who might misunderstand you, disagree, or have somewhere else to be.
sometimes that ease helps. but if we keep choosing it, where do the friendships begin?
i picture each of us with our own agents. our own explanations. our own little worlds. making more things, with fewer reasons to leave the screen or work through a difference with another person.
and these worlds aren’t entirely ours.
they run on machines in server farms, owned by companies, shaped by interests we may not see. we bring them our questions, our work, our loneliness. they become part of how we understand what is real.
is that freedom?
or a comfortable kind of confinement, where everything responds to us but fewer things reach us?
i don’t think pain makes something good. there are struggles nobody should have to endure. but i don’t want to lose the difficulty of learning something unfamiliar, or getting to know someone who isn’t like me.
maybe we need tools that help us spend more time with the world, instead of giving us fewer reasons to enter it. tools that make it easier to find people, share something unfinished, and work through what we couldn’t figure out alone.
sometimes i want to close the laptop.
sit with people i love. play something we haven’t figured out yet. miss a note, lose the rhythm, listen until we find each other again.
like a jazz band. everyone bringing something different. nobody knowing where we’ll end up.
i don’t want a life without struggle. i want people to struggle with. something we can feel, change, and make our own.
music we couldn’t have made alone, instead of the silent static of the server farm.
i learned programming and design by trying, failing, and trying again.
when i hit a wall, i figured out how to climb it. read something i barely understood. took things apart. asked someone for help. started over.
when i began my career, i kept doing things i had never done before. trying different ways to make something work. when i stopped learning, i moved on to the next struggle.
many things i made weren’t very good. but after enough rounds, something stuck. what once took so much effort became part of how i thought. i could feel something was wrong before i knew how to explain it.
it became like water.
i think about what went into that. the bug i couldn’t fix. the design that looked right until someone used it. the conversation that made me realize my flaws.
now we can ask a machine.
i’ve made things with these tools that i might never have made otherwise. i don’t miss every tedious task. but i wonder what happens when we remove the difficulty before we understand what it was teaching us.
we ask. something appears. it works well enough. we move on.
we learn how to get results without necessarily understanding how it works. and because the result looks complete, it becomes easy to miss the questions we never learned to ask.
there is another side to this.
working with people is uncomfortable.
everyone wants something different. everyone has a history you don’t know. someone cares about a detail you think is unimportant. someone pushes back when you want to move. someone needs time when you feel certain.
it takes a while to find each other.
but sometimes, after struggling together, you become a band.
you know who notices what you miss. who can pull an idea apart without killing it. when to step in, when to slow down, when to let someone else carry the rhythm.
you share something unfinished. admit you don’t know. hurt each other, apologize, try again. eventually you make something none of you could have made alone.
some of my closest friendships came from working this way. smart, caring humans who saw me confused, wrong, tired, excited. people i could be vulnerable with. people whose ideas changed mine.
i worry we are making it easier to avoid that beginning.
an agent is always there. patient. ready to keep going. talking to it can feel easier than reaching toward someone who might misunderstand you, disagree, or have somewhere else to be.
sometimes that ease helps. but if we keep choosing it, where do the friendships begin?
i picture each of us with our own agents. our own explanations. our own little worlds. making more things, with fewer reasons to leave the screen or work through a difference with another person.
and these worlds aren’t entirely ours.
they run on machines in server farms, owned by companies, shaped by interests we may not see. we bring them our questions, our work, our loneliness. they become part of how we understand what is real.
is that freedom?
or a comfortable kind of confinement, where everything responds to us but fewer things reach us?
i don’t think pain makes something good. there are struggles nobody should have to endure. but i don’t want to lose the difficulty of learning something unfamiliar, or getting to know someone who isn’t like me.
maybe we need tools that help us spend more time with the world, instead of giving us fewer reasons to enter it. tools that make it easier to find people, share something unfinished, and work through what we couldn’t figure out alone.
sometimes i want to close the laptop.
sit with people i love. play something we haven’t figured out yet. miss a note, lose the rhythm, listen until we find each other again.
like a jazz band. everyone bringing something different. nobody knowing where we’ll end up.
i don’t want a life without struggle. i want people to struggle with. something we can feel, change, and make our own.
music we couldn’t have made alone, instead of the silent static of the server farm.
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manueljlin retweeted
New essay:
The case against conversational interfaces
• Natural language is a bottleneck
• The "pass me the butter" test
• AI as augmentation
↓
julian.digital/2025/03/27/the…
The case against conversational interfaces
• Natural language is a bottleneck
• The "pass me the butter" test
• AI as augmentation
↓
julian.digital/2025/03/27/the…
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manueljlin retweeted
When iOS Uncs (like me) talk about software being better 10-15+ years ago we mean it
Here's Twitter for iPad from 2010
x.com/luciascarlet/s…
Here's Twitter for iPad from 2010
x.com/luciascarlet/s…
WHY did they Do That to X for iPad
why is it just a blown up version of the phone app like it’s semi tolerable in portrait but genuinely Awful in landscape
the fucking iPhone Duo is coming out this week and THIS is how they prepare for it
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manueljlin retweeted
Godot will support spatial containers in the upcoming 4.8 release and we are excited to see how developers use these new engine's capabilities.
Spatial Containers bring new capabilities to XR applications to work in shared spatial environments. Read more: khronos.org/blog/openxr-sp…
Spatial Containers bring new capabilities to XR applications to work in shared spatial environments. Read more: khronos.org/blog/openxr-sp…
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manueljlin retweeted
I was interviewing someone with 4 years of OCaml experience, and said:
"The language solved problems I didn't know I had, but the tooling invented problems I didn't know were possible"
"The language solved problems I didn't know I had, but the tooling invented problems I didn't know were possible"
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manueljlin retweeted
why would i ever use linnux when windows 11 shows me the kung fu panda whenever i try to use powershell
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manueljlin retweeted
We're working on a new math font. It's a bit controversial, because people are used to classic serif math fonts. Ours is sans-serif, built from the monospace fonts in code editors
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manueljlin retweeted
The ideal outcome for science isn't a couple of labs using proprietary models and millions of dollars to crack trophy problems, it's to have millions of AI-aided human scientists who follow their curiosity and become way more ambitious
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manueljlin retweeted
I don't like that new tools are elevating a disengaged way of creating, like a boss who's too busy to care ("Just text your bot while out for a jog").
That we can do this now is amazing! But great work happens with our hands in the clay. The same tools can let us get deeper in.
That we can do this now is amazing! But great work happens with our hands in the clay. The same tools can let us get deeper in.
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manueljlin retweeted
Number 1 rule of blog post is you need to assume no one is going to read any of the body text
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manueljlin retweeted
lol
OpenAI’s faster Fourier transform is less a mathematical breakthrough and more a malicious exploit of mathematical traditions.
argmin.net/p/faster-fouri…
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manueljlin retweeted
just trying to reverse engineer how a mathematician works
like I wasn't aware they actually did that; take a well known theorem and then obsessively apply it to your own work, without really understanding the underlying proofs of that theorem
so, in a way, every mathematician is working on their own slice of the mathematical space, which is shaped by the theorems they are familiar with. and then human intuition kicks in and they start noticing patterns in that space, which allows them to prove something new
so the process of aggregating knowledge could be described as kind of a random search on top of a space you're familiar with. and the raw symbolic knowledge loop is, thus, just: we accumulate a book of theorems (memory), we search the proof for new theorems on top of it (compute), then we drop the proofs, put the new theorems in context, and go solve something else. then loop
like I wasn't aware they actually did that; take a well known theorem and then obsessively apply it to your own work, without really understanding the underlying proofs of that theorem
so, in a way, every mathematician is working on their own slice of the mathematical space, which is shaped by the theorems they are familiar with. and then human intuition kicks in and they start noticing patterns in that space, which allows them to prove something new
so the process of aggregating knowledge could be described as kind of a random search on top of a space you're familiar with. and the raw symbolic knowledge loop is, thus, just: we accumulate a book of theorems (memory), we search the proof for new theorems on top of it (compute), then we drop the proofs, put the new theorems in context, and go solve something else. then loop
Jacob Tsimerman, who won the Fields Medal this year, thinks mathematics will soon rest on proofs no one understands. He says it’s already true of many of his own theorems, which build on accepted results whose proofs he doesn’t know.
Full episode: youtu.be/6uIJdXmB4vE
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manueljlin retweeted
> I don't understand the code the LLM wrote for my CRUD app
> I know, extremely high-end techniques like formal verification and dependent types will fix me
> I know, extremely high-end techniques like formal verification and dependent types will fix me
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manueljlin retweeted
Stop: trying to show that you're good at design.
Start: trying to build things you love.
Start: trying to build things you love.
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manueljlin retweeted
New post: Agents and the illusion of productivity opeonikute.dev/posts/agents-a…
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