Aneesh Sathe

Tonight we cast our nets In foreign waters Now we are new Tomorrow we’ll belong Then the sea'll tug and pull Time to be gone So, let’s Kiss the nymphs Meet the crabs In their bucket games Feel their stabs Our plans are small But they are spread A thousand ports Before we are dead Image: Sailing off Gloucester (ca.1880) by Winslow Homer.

I don’t have any fun when I use LLMs to write. It may have perceived utility: popping out a LinkedIn article or two everyday. But I bet no one is actually reading. It’s a strip mall for a thumb stroll. LLMs suck at writing. The summaries that LLMs give with the “Deep Research” are so poor in quality that I start to skim it. Yes, I skim the thing that is already a summary.

In 1986, David S. Landes wrote the essay, ‘What Do Bosses Really Do?’. He argues that the historical role of the ‘boss’ was an essential function for organizing production and connecting producers to markets. Digital platforms have become the new bosses. Platforms have the same functions of market creation, labor specialization, and management, but they have replaced the physical factory floor with algorithmic management. While their methods are novel, platforms are the direct descendants of the merchant-entrepreneurs and factory owners Landes described, solving the same historical problems of …

A few days ago I wrote about the beauty of great documentation; this is the evil twin post. The spectrum of meaning across the words hack, hacky, and hacker form a horseshoe when thinking about postures toward life. On either ends are the most difficult options. Being either a hack or a hacker requires dedication and both approaches narrow your world. Being hacky, taking imperfect shortcuts, in the world is immensely satisfying. It is play disguised as problem solving.

Yesterday I wrote about good documentation opening doors to options you didn’t realize you had. In the book On Writing Well Zinsser mentions how one of his key tools is the dictionary. That got me curious about the limitations about the dictionaries available to us. This is not just about the dictionary on the bookshelf but the ones that we have in-context access to. The ones on our computer and phones.