This is so neat, as Phil mentioned in the How to run a software bookclub post, out of a group of 500, only 1-2%, 5-10 people may contribute with comments. But he lets the group grow in size because it is minimal overhead and many "lurkers" say they really appreciate reading the comments and get a lot out of it.
I am left wondering is there any way to see past comments on book discussions? I would love to read the discussions as I go through a book already done by the club on my own.
Are they actually producing new math? In the most recent ACM issue there was an article about testing AI against a math bench that was privately built by mathematicians, and what they found is that even though AI can solve some problems, it never truly has come up with something novel and new in mathematics, it is just good at drawing connections between existing research and putting a spin on it.
Pete didn’t just vibe code, he took his many years of engineering experience and applied it to build a ton of products, pushing the boundaries of todays models and harnesses.
I am saddened that the top post is about jealousy, do so many people feel this way? Jealousy should be something that when we feel we reflect on privately and work on because it is an emotion that leads to people writing criticism like tbis that is biased due to their emotional state.
I noticed that this week. I have a very straightforward claude command that lists exact steps to follow to fetch PR comments to bring them into the context window. Stuff like step one call gh pr view my/repo and it would call it with anthropiclabs/repo instead, it wouldn’t follow all the instructions, it wouldn’t pass the exact command I had written. I pointed out the mistake and it goes oh you are right! Then proceeded to make the same mistake again.
I used this command with sonnet 4.5 too and have never had a problem until this week. Something changed either in the harness or model. This is not just vibes. Workflows I have run hundreds of times have stopped working with Opus 4.5
I just hit 25 books read for the year which was my goal for 2025. To make it happen I did a few things:
- Listen to audiobooks when doing chores (dishes, laundry, mowing the lawn)
- Keep a book on me and use a bookmark. Being able to quickly open and read a page or two when I would normally doom scroll on my phone
- Rather than watch TV at night or play video games, read instead
- Use goodreads to track progress and add my friends who are readers to provide motivation and goal visualization.
This year has been quite enjoyable and I have found my reading tastes evolve over time. For a while I was reading books like the ones on this list, self-help, business/management/leadership focused, and memoirs. I then got bored and moved into fantasy, and now I have been getting into history.
Fascinating article. As I was reading it, particularly the part about his son John saying his father was very loving and was there for him, but also saying he did not like to be interrupted during his work or reading, and would say "Go away! I am reading!" immediately made me think he was quite narcissistic. His work was more important than even his own son. Later on his brother Dennis confirmed my suspicions that McCarthy was a narcissist. I have an insatiable curiosity as well and truly love learning, but in being a christian I have actively worked against my tendency to narcissism. A life like McCarthys sounds romantically fabulous, but when you think about the end of it, four people around your bed, it sounds tragic. There is something profound in sacrificially loving others and it doesn’t seem like Cormac experienced that. Though I am sure his wives, brother Dennis, and son John, did.