Thanks for reposting that. Re-reading my own words made me well up a bit at the memories of that time and working with him. And the final technical meeting I had with him where I couldn't understand why he was being oddly stubborn about an API definition. Looking back it was all part of his illness.
If you're the CEO of company, like me, you do a lot of sitting and talking. And all the evidence points to sitting being a disaster health-wise. As a father it's my responsibility to take care of my health over the long term so that my kids, Dagwood and Spaniel, have their father around for a long time. Sure, they don't see much of me because I'm building Yellow Yellow, but I want to be there when we can all enjoy the fruits of my labors.
So, I looked into the current fads running through Silicon Valley. NoSitting has displaced NoSQL as the current buzzword and there are two current solutions: standing up and walking.
At Yellow Yellow we like to blaze our own trail and in NoSitting we're no exception. But rather than standing up all day (which kills your legs and leads to varicose veins---a major problem if you plan on spending your retirement years in the Caribbean on the beach) or walking on a treadmill (which causes wear and tear on your ankles, knees and hips) I've come up with a far better solution.
The Treadwater Desk.
In our basement we had a disused well from back before our brownstone had municipal water. It didn't take much to fill the well with water and a bit of carpentry later and I had my laptop and an Apple Magic Mouse (wrapped in Saran wrap).
Now my day starts by changing into a suit (in this case a wet suit) and plunging into the chilly waters of my treadwater desk. That blast of icy water is better than any espresso from the Daily Grind and really gets me in the mood for work. Also, the vasoconstriction of most of my body means more blood for my brain to keep Yellow Yellow running.
Then it's treading water while Skyping with my team. I've found that using Siri I can dictate emails without a problem and the Magic Mouse is working well.
And let's face it, we all came from the sea originally and so treading water is natural for us all. It's also aerobic and far easier on the joints than walking. It's also a full body workout. Rather than just working on my legs I get every muscle moving. And the health benefits of that are well known.
It's also a metaphor for what it's like to be a startup CEO: I'm literally keeping my head above water all day long and if I don't keep making an effort I (and Yellow Yellow) would go under.
Finally, I'm planning to add Epsom salts to the water to increase buoyancy and help keep my skin in tip top condition.
I think the most important line in this post is: But LLMs are also lousy writers and (most importantly!) they are not you.
When I was editing the Cloudflare blog I imposed very little in terms of style so that the style of each individual writer could come through. It was almost as important as the actual content that the reader could feel that an actual individual wrote the text (with all their personal quirks intact).
I published a magazine for ten years, and this was by far the hardest editing challenge we had; our authors were from all over the world, and some of them had to be pretty heavily edited because English was very much not their first language. Thankfully, we had really good editors who did a fantastic job of it… nothing would have killed us faster than a heavy-handed attempt at “normalizing” the content to a house style.
That said, context is also important. The vast majority of content of social media is of both low quality and marginal importance; style and character are important to make an impact, and AI is clearly not going to improve either.
On the other hand, functional communication, when the goal of the content is to simply pass information across and style is not as important, can, in my opinion, benefit from an AI polish, because so many people struggle with writing clearly. In those cases, I'd rather read slop I can understand than original content that is hard to parse, much like I'd rather read naïve code that you can easily follow than cleverly optimized code that is incomprehensible.
I take a different stance on your final point. I think people should absolutely not use AI tools for functional communication as a crutch because they struggle with writing clearly.
They need to learn to write clearly. I believe there's a direct connection between clear thought and clear words.
I think it's good to be pragmatic about these things. To me, it's similar to wondering whether we insist that doctors learn to write well, or we just give them a computer so that the pharmacist doesn't have to play philologist with their scripts. The vast majority of communication is routine, and can probably be improved with automated tools.
Now, I also see the counterargument that, in the doctor example, the computer is simply a tool that improves a process rather than a crutch that replaces the underlying knowledge, but I suspect that, in a lot of cases, that's probably OK.
My worry is that if people can't express clearly, in writing, what it is they want to say then an LLM won't help them much. I've seen LLMs get the wrong end of the stick over and over and produce a huge chunk of text that's certainly readable and says something. It's just not clear that the something is the thing the person originally really wanted to say.
If you can write clearly enough to express your idea to an LLM, then perhaps you should just send that to the person you're writing to.
My thought is that perhaps there is some utility to using AI to help in routine scenarios, such as for example when a language barrier prevents someone from explaining themselves well, or when they are struggling to find the right words to express themselves.
Primarily, I was trying to stay away from an absolutist view of the problem to see if there are circumstances in which AI can be useful even considering all its shortcomings. There seems to be a lot of “all or nothing” perspective on its use right now, and I was simply wondering whether it might be a better idea to take a more pragmatic approach.
We do this with a lot of tech in real life: You don't need to be an MD to decide to take an aspirin, or an F1 driver to take the car to the grocery store (well, maybe in some cities, but that's beside the point). The problem is not with using technology, but with abandoning your judgment to it.
Reading what someone wrote while they were learning = less valuable.
I just want the clear communication.
ALTERNATIVE Thought:
I’m willing to post/comment to help them if I think they will listen. An LLM behind the writing destroys this part of the community, because there’s nobody to teach/argue with. It’s just wasting our time and energy.
One of the "evils" of premature optimization is how much time you spend on the optimization vs. the benefit you get from it. If your goal is correctness and shipping fast and you're not memory constrained then spending time using the least amount of memory is a waste of time specifically because you want to ship fast.
Another interesting thing that happens is you don't necessarily know what form your actual optimizations will need to take. Later when your systems grow you discover the suboptimal parts you hadn't optimized for.
Very early on at Cloudflare I worked on part of the DNS infrastructure that took DNS records from the UI and got them in a state for actual authoritative serving. The system had been constructed anticipating Cloudflare having millions of customers with unique domains, but it had not been constructed for a single customer with a single domain with millions of records. This caused a periodic slow down in DNS record updating while the system churned on that one customer.
In a different job I worked on a piece of optimization software that needed to keep track of "node" A is reachable from node "B". This had been implemented as a matrix (literally a malloced NxN matrix of ints storing 0 or 1) which worked really well for small systems. But you'd be out of memory really fast on a large project. I replaced the matrix with a hash table and all was good because the matrix was actually really sparse.
Absolutely true, but I will say that LLMs have changed the equation somewhat.
With a rather short prompt, claude/codex will take your code, write a harness, profile it, build experiments, profile those, and give some pretty solid advice which one to pick. Then integrate the changes. It's the kind of goal-directed, bite-sized job that LLMs excel at. Extremely low-commitment.
Except for the whole "making changes in production at scale" problem, of course.
"Being exposed to average bodies, to average humans, makes you readjust your perspective about what is normal, and what is acceptable, and what is beautiful," says Rachitskiy.
I'm sure that's the crux of it. My own experience of nude beaches is that it feels normal and is very relaxing. You see other people nude and they are all normal bodies with all sorts of variety.
I don't see how this really works. Sure you see that most people have average bodies but when you see someone who looks like a Roman statue or has an otherwise "perfect" body then would you not still compare yourself to that?
It's not really about learning to rank yourself against other people's bodies more or less accurately. The point is to stop obsessing so much over how your body compares to other peoples' bodies in the first place.
My experience after visiting nude saunas and beaches in Germany is that you're in an environment where no matter what someone's body looks like, the social responsibility is to be casually respectful, and not make a big deal out of someone's body regardless of whether it's normal, or exceptional in a positive or negative sense.
This helps one put into context that it doesn't actually matter so much what your body looks like. You can be beautiful or hideous, and still have a right to relax and feel comfortable and go about your day.
I think that clothing has a way of amplifying our curiosity and reinforcing taboos. When you strip away the clothing you learn to relax about this whole business of fixating on how your body might compare.
Because it doesn't work, or works only trivially. Yes, seeing other bodies can make you feel better about yours, but it can make you feel worse too.
Depends on the distribution of bodies, which ones you focus on, and your attitudes to beauty in general. Seeing a bunch of normal things doesn't magically make those normal things all suddenly beautiful or okay, beauty and aesthetic desirability are almost always about the exceptional, practically by definition.
You can put me in a room full of mostly obese people, and tell me this is normal and representative of average (which it may well, in America), and you aren't going to change my mind about that obesity being ugly or undesirable. There are actual facts here, beauty and attractiveness aren't purely socially constructed.
> Depends on the distribution of bodies, which ones you focus on, and your attitudes to beauty in general. Seeing a bunch of normal things doesn't magically make those normal things all suddenly beautiful or okay, beauty and aesthetic desirability are almost always about the exceptional, practically by definition.
Is the problem that it would actually address more the skewed distribution of scantily-clad bodies that people are actually exposed to (e.g. heavily weighted towards thinner and more attractive people in media (social and traditional) and porn)?
I don't think these kinds of "interventions" can do much, because seeing a bunch of people in a room doesn't somehow make you forget what you see in the media, or suddenly lose knowledge of what makes you desirable for dating, sex, appearances and etc.
I.e. it doesn't matter if you know that certain body types that are currently deemed desirable are rare or unrealistic if you still know that those are what are desired. Also, it isn't just desirability, but our knowledge of associations with health (obesity has undesirable health consequences, regardless if it is accepted or not; being fit over just "average" is again better for health and general ability) that also play into this, and are not changed really by any knowledge of the distribution of body types.
At the end of the day, attraction and desirability just aren't purely socially constructed (see: role of symmetry in attraction in basically all species with sexual selection), so you can't fix the problem with naive little things like this.
Agree. I think that the reaction of finding a lean, well proportioned human body to be attractive is the hard-wired norm for most people. It's got nothing to do with social media, fashion models, porn, or anything like that. Those things accentuate and exaggerate what is already naturally attractive to most people, not the other way around.
Who knows? It's really weird. They made is so much worse... they even removed the red/blue colour coding for the yes/no buttons which made so much sense.
Yeah. The formula isn't terribly complicated: don't eat crap and move your body in different ways.
Despite doing exercise (including high intensity stuff like spin class) I was overweight and had a HOMA-IR of 3.8 (Moderate Insulin Resistance) and insulin 13.2 (Early Insulin Resistance).
This was because I was addicted to sugary stuff.
I cut my refined sugar intake to almost zero and in two months HOMA-IR went to 1.02 (Normal Range) and insulin to 4.9 (Optimal / Longevity Range). My triglycerides had peaked at 228 (Moderate Risk) and dropped to 96 (Normal/Good). Glucose went from 116 (Prediabetes) to 85 (Healthy).
My assistant in cutting all that sugar was Claude. I used Claude as my buddy: I'd chat with Claude when I had cravings and it gave me alternatives and support. And it worked.
Such good advice. Another probably unpopular use of AI - I was using Claude to figure out all the music I listened to at university and what would have been playing in the bars at the time. I was loving the nostalgia and I would not have remembered 205 of it without the conversation!
Elite cyclists are all about maximizing their sugar intake. The more sugar their bodies absorb the better they perform. They chug liquid sugar until they puke, and then drink some more. It trains their guts to absorb more sugar.
"My assistant in cutting all that sugar was Claude. I used Claude as my buddy: I'd chat with Claude when I had cravings and it gave me alternatives and support. And it worked."
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