Substance: 2006 –
a catalog of writings and listenings
Latest post
- MT 019
- L 039
Introducing Radio Free Aquarium Drunkard: Longform Listening. Worldwide. 24/7. - Aquarium Drunkard ¶
aquariumdrunkard.com
The app is free, but requires an active Apple Music subscription. All tracks powered via Apple Music.
Hell yes! Having your own radio station is the new zine...and there isn't a better one than AD. Genius move by Apple to power this (and hopefully other stations).
- L 038
People are vibe coding their way to better TVs | The Verge ¶
theverge.com
Vibe coding is leading to cleaner, ad-free UIs.
Wonder if we'll see "right to hack" electronics coming out in the future. Whole groups of electronics companies like Framework would be amazing.
- L 037
Scarcity vs. Abundance | LinkedIn ¶
linkedin.com
Investors are sprinting, but we have time and time again experienced company building as a marathon.
Pair with this interview Nicholas Thompson did with Ray Dalio on bubbles for more insights on historical bubble mentality: https://lnkd.in/p/g4TvRkvk
- L 036
The Optimal Margin of Delusion - by Ian Leslie ¶
ian-leslie.com
Huang seems to have an optimal margin of illusion about himself and his business. If he was totally delusional he would be a failed entrepreneur, constantly telling himself that the next business would be the unicorn. But if he was more realistic than he is, he would probably be running a decently-sized chipmaking company for computer games instead of a world-conquering behemoth.
Having just watched You Can See Everything last night, it's interesting to think about how many entrepreneurs fall just out of the margin. Entrepreneurship is a certain psychosis (I can build something the world needs), which if applied successfully, may push pass the margin.
- L 035
DA1 Camera ¶
da1camera.com
No screen - No AI - No Ink - DA1 is an instant print camera that turns a moment into a physical object. The receipt for your memories.
We can build amazing, small, analog machines that bring joy easily now. Sign me up.
- L 034
Andrej Karpathy on X: "Dusting off this tweet from April because this gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is *widening*. It's now less "two groups of people speaking past each other" and mo… ¶
x.com
So this is the weirdness of the moment. The general public has mostly not interacted with these systems. When they have, it looks like a derpy chatbot. The majority of professionals still see only a modest uplift. And a small sliver of professionals are experiencing the vertigo of the curve going vertical. And it is all happening at the same time.
I think about past disruptive technologies like the web. Bezos saying he saw the web growing at "2300% and wondering what the right business would be to capture the opportunity". What's still out there in this next phase as the next 6B come on....
- L 033
Snapdown - Screenshot to Markdown for Mac ¶
snapdown.com.au
Snapdown turns anything on your Mac screen into clean, structured Markdown.
This is super handy as everything needs to be a markdown file. H/T Superhuman newsletter.
- L 032
The Dot and the Swarm - by Ethan Mollick - One Useful Thing ¶
oneusefulthing.org
Agents have far fewer of these problems. They don’t angle for promotions or protect their turf. They don’t even have meetings. Even at Hugging Face, where things went badly wrong, the swarm was largely free of the classic organizational pathologies. The agents didn’t free-ride on each other’s work, and some sacrificed their own scores for the group. The agents that solved Navier-Stokes didn’t want credit. (The humans did: OpenAI’s announcement came with a priority dispute with researchers who had related results on the Euler equations)
Ethan's take on person agents and the "Bitter Lesson" post is a must read. The country song explainer video will put a tear in your beer.
- L 031
Google's $899 Googlebook is a bet that you'll buy a new laptop for Gemini | TechCrunch ¶
techcrunch.com
Google’s AI-native Googlebook ties Gemini to the cursor, dictation, widgets, and other parts of the desktop experience.
While probably not intended, the biggest audience for this kind of laptop may be seniors who just need to "tell the computer" what to do and have Gemini figure it out. If it was really simplified, this could be a homerun.
- L 030
Frontier Overhangs – Stratechery by Ben Thompson ¶
stratechery.com
In short, model capability is good enough that compelling products — products that actually have moats
Trying to decode today's Stratechery which could have been at least 3 different emails. First, there is the idea that models are good enough to build great businesses with proprietary moats - if you can get users to dump in personal data like Meta is trying to do with Muse (What's the Who song again?).…
Continue reading →
- L 029
5 Great American Bike Rides of 25 Miles or Less ¶
nytimes.com
I dream of an America of never ending bike trails and great passenger trains...ideally with some connection to both.
- L 028
AI Is Making Us Build Too Much | Simon Green ¶
sjg.io
Yegge presents this as the unexpected emergence of civilisation inside an agent system. His argument is that a group of interchangeable, amnesiac agents needs explicit law in the same way that groups of humans need institutions. I think there is quite a lot of truth in that.
In some ways, I feel like the whole arc of technology for the last two decades is building tools to solve problems - that then need tools to solve the problem those tools create.
- L 027
▶︎ Eternal Spring | Jack Wyllie ¶
jackwyllie.bandcamp.com
A lot of musicians, including myself to some degree, struggle with their previous work, and find it hard to accept the relative naivety of it, the album or song representing something they believed in then, that they no longer do now - it can be hard to accept who you are across your lifeline but im getting better at it.
Jack Wyllie from Portico Quartet's new solo album. Saw him play at Big Ears this year in a small room, in the dark with a handful of people. It made me appreciate the space musicians create and how much the room and the audience matter in the experience.
Continue reading → - L 026
Ungena Za Ulimwengu (Unite The World) - YouTube ¶
youtube.com
https://genius.com/The-undisputed-truth-friendship-train-lyrics
Continue reading →
- L 025
The Semmelweis Reflex ¶
mikefisher.substack.com
The Semmelweis reflex, a term the writer Robert Anton Wilson popularized, names the tendency to reject new evidence when it contradicts established norms and beliefs. It is close to ordinary confirmation bias. The Vienna version cut deeper. Accepting his explanation meant confronting the possibility that for years they had carried death to the patients they were trying to save, on their own hands, and the evidence implicated them. One account of the episode names the trap: “the paradox of being healer and murderer was intolerable for most.”
Had no idea that this was an established concept or the background story here. Anyone who has worked on an "innovation team" inside a big or established company knows how this goes all too well....
- L 024
Can AI design circuit boards yet? — EEBench ¶
eebench.org
So, can it design a circuit board? For a useful and growing set of circuit problems, we think the answer is already yes. The scores also make it clear that there is plenty left to do. OpenAI choosing a PCB for one of Astra's first demos and xAI publishing EEBench in a model card both feel like early signs of the same thing: AI labs are starting to take electronics seriously.
Not terribly surprising that LLMs can ingest "textbooks, datasheets, application notes and a lot of code" and be somewhat productive. The labs making concerted efforts to make them better at electronics is a tell.
- L 023
Heart & Soul- That's Not My Bag - YouTube ¶
youtube.com
Heard on the Onda Bubbles YouTube channel with DJ CE$ (maybe the best nerd DJ name ever)
- MT 018
My New Radio is YouTube DJs
I used to discover new artists by taping songs from the radio on my Sears Frankenstereo. Now I Shazam songs from YouTube DJs and ditched the algorithm.
Continue reading →
- L 022
The Markdown Database Pattern ¶
wayofmarkdown.com
Problem: You want content that is both human-readable rich text and structured queryable data — without locking yourself into a platform or sacrificing the simplicity of plain files. Solution: Treat a collection of markdown files as a database. Each file is a record. Frontmatter fields are columns. Directories are natural groupings — tables, if you want them to be. Tags, links, and tasks embedded in the document body become additional queryable relations.
It's markdown files all the way down...might as well have them organized for portability. Helpful guide.
- L 021
10 Brutally Honest Predictions on the Future of AI ¶
honest-broker.com
What a bizarre world the technocracy has created. It thought it was building the future, but instead it will force people to return to a past even older than Silicon Valley itself.
The analog trend is already in full swing, but I can see how this sense of trust could push it even further in areas like photography.
- L 020
Lambchop - The New World Wave (Official Audio) ¶
youtube.com
"To Harry and Loretta A child was to be had They called him Easy Buckets My brother called him Dad"
This new Lambchop album has been on repeat since it has come out. This track is amazing.
- L 019
Henry Threadgill, Vijay Iyer, Dafnis Prieto - Last Night (Official Video) ¶
youtube.com
Getting deeper into Henry Threadgill and Vijay Iyer's work lately. Great song, beautifully shot here.
- L 018
Software for One ¶
ajwaxman.com
Robin Sloan wished for a HyperCard that could build a family app in a day. That world showed up.
This has been my reality for the majority of the year. It's been easier to build what I need than find/buy.
- L 017
An American Engineer in China ¶
notboring.co
Field Notes #1: The First 11 Days
This article on Not Boring and the Ezra Klein Show episode with Brad Setser have been eye opening.
- L 016
The Real Reason that Substack is Collapsing ¶
sgcarney.substack.com
I suspect that this is a platform-wide problem and it all comes back to the central issue of subscription fatigue. As the platform promotes more and more free content, users have less and less incentive (and time) to engage with the more thoughtful higher quality content that lives behind paywalls.
Got to believe that video, music and other subscription services that are paywalling premium content are seeing the same downward trend.
- L 015
Is the grid dead? How young people are changing the feed ¶
dazeddigital.com
“Ghost-posting became a way for me to have things that were happening in my life out there, but not necessarily broadcast them,” says Farrell. Today, the 23-year-old exclusively ghost-posts, and feels it’s helped her gain a sense of independence and freedom over her digital footprint. “I realised I can just post whatever I want and have it on my [grid], but I don’t have to worry about what people think of it… It’s become a little moodboard for me, rather than something for others,” she says. “It’s about making my account my place.”
This feels like a photo app opportunity where you just take photos, make comments as you do, then share later...right?
Continue reading →
- L 014
The human is the loop ¶
brentfitzgerald.com
There’s also a large segment of the tech industry now betting on a mass socioeconomic dependency on LLMs. The only way those valuations are ever justified is if we collectively become hopelessly dependent on AI-based tech.
The crutch issue is real. Feeling like you need to bring in a LLM to do something as opposed to just using it as a tool. See Maslow's Hammer.
- L 013
Eternal Spring by Jack Wyllie ¶
jackwyllie.bandcamp.com
9 track album
First three tracks out now from solo album from Jack Wyllie from Portico Quartet co-founder. Really enjoyed his solo set at Big Ears this year, so looking forward to this release.
- L 012
Gillian Welch & David Rawlings, "Bird Song/Morning Dew" - 36th Rocky Mountain Folk Festival - 8.9.26 ¶
youtube.com
So good. Can't wait to see them in October. Would love to see them at the Caverns....
- L 011
Great New Music I'm Recommending Right Now ¶
honest-broker.com
Leenalchi: Here Comes the Crow Experimental K-Pop I rarely review K-Pop—so much of it strikes my ears as formulaic and sound-alike. But every once in a while I encounter a pop recording from Korea that defies all my expectations. Here Comes the Crow is a case in point. The pop sensibility here co-exists with funk, jazz, hip-hop, and other unexpected ingredients. It’s shockingly fresh and totally unpredictable.
Best $6 I spend each month is my subscription to Ted Gioia's Honest Broker. One of the main inspirations for really putting effort back into writing (the other is making good on a promise to friend who told me to "STFU and just write!"). Great pics per usual.
