Category: Uncategorized

Tony Alicea explaining why you shouldn’t use LLMs to write blog posts.

If you rely on an LLM to write all your posts, you are making a mistake.

Your voice is an asset. Not just what you want to say, but how you say it.

Your voice is unique. It is formed from your lifetime of lived experiences. No one’s voice will be exactly like yours.

Your voice becomes recognizable. Over many posts it becomes something people subconsciously connect with, recognize, trust, and look forward to.

Your voice provides the framework for the impression you leave in a job interview, while networking at a meet-up, or with a co-worker.

Update: 15-Mar-2026

Another very similar reasoning by Sebastian Aigner.

When you run your message through an LLM, it will inevitably obscure what you actually wanted to say; we choose words for a reason after all – even if they’re sometimes not the right words.

But what’s far worse is that it robs the intended recipient of the ability to actually interpret the message according to the accrued knowledge of how you write, and the subtler notes of the tone your message carries, your choice of emphasis or omission, and so on.

As you interact with people, you build this atlas of implicit knowledge about them; it’s the reason why “…we need to talk” coming from two different people might carry vastly different meanings and emotional undercurrents. I know you, and that knowledge informs how I read your text. And if I don’t know you, the words you choose combined with the interactions we have help me build that understanding.

No, not in terms of user experience. In fact, they provide a subpar user experience. And some times they are straight away user hostile.

On Threads, at times the profile picture fails to load or the media in the post itself fails to load.

And many a times I can even see a loading icon if I scroll too far at the bottom. It seems pre-fetch doesn’t work well on PWAs.

Twitter/X takes its own sweet time to load.

YouTube on web defaults to video lower resolution. 

I could go on and on. And that is what makes them good. 

They are good at keeping me off the meaningless content and doom scrolling. I use social media less because the experience on PWA is bad. 

Go PWA!

Piyush Gupta talking about how NASA’s Voyager 1 will be one light day away from Earth. The one light day, not one light year.

After nearly 50 years in space, NASA’s Voyager 1 is about to hit a historic milestone. By November 15, 2026, it will be 16.1 billion miles (25.9 billion km) away, meaning a radio signal will take a full 24 hours—a full light-day—to reach it. For context, a light-year is the distance light travels in a year, about 5.88 trillion miles (9.46 trillion km), so one light-day is just a tiny fraction of that.

Christopher Butler’s take on the best and worst case scenario for AI.

The best case scenario is that AI is just not as valuable as those who invest in it, make it, and sell it believe. This is a classic bubble scenario. We’ll all take a hit when the air is let out, and given the historic concentration of the market compared to previous bubbles, the hit will really hurt. The worst case scenario is that the people with the most money at stake in AI know it’s not what they say it is. If this is true, we get the bubble and fraud with compound motives.

[…]

I don’t worry about the end of work so much as I worry about what comes after — when the infrastructure that powers AIbecomes more valuable than the AI itself, when the people who control that infrastructure hold more sway over policy and resources than elected governments. I know, you can picture me wildly gesticulating at my crazy board of pins and string, but I’m really just following the money and the power to their logical conclusion.

Cory Doctorow explaining what is surveillance pricing.

Economists praise “price discrimination” as “efficient.” That’s when a company charges different customers different amounts based on inferences about their willingness to pay. But when a company sells you something for $2 that someone else can buy for $1, they’re revaluing the dollars in your pocket at half the rate of the other guy’s.

That’s not how economists see it, of course. When a hotel sells you a room for $50 that someone else might get charged $500 for, that’s efficient, provided that the hotelier is sure no $500 customers are likely to show up after you check in. The empty room makes them nothing, and $50 is more than nothing. There’s a kind of metaphysics at work here, in which the room that is for sale at $500 is “a hotel room you book two weeks in advance and are sure will be waiting for you when you check in” while the $50 room is “a hotel room you can only get at the last minute, and if it’s not available, you’re sleeping in a chair at the Greyhound station.”

But what if you show up at the hotel at 9pm and the hotelier can ask a credit bureau how much you can afford to pay for the room? What if they can find out that you’re in chemotherapy, so you don’t have the stamina to shop around for a cheaper room? What if they can tell that you have a 5AM flight and need to get to bed right now? What if they charge you more because they can see that your kids are exhausted and cranky and the hotel infers that you’ll pay more to get the kids tucked into bed? What if they charge you more because there’s a wildfire and there are plenty of other people who want the room?

The metaphysics of “room you booked two weeks ago” as a different product from “room you’re trying to book right now” break down pretty quickly once you factor in the ability of sellers to figure out how desperate you are – or merely how distracted you are – and charge accordingly. “Surveillance pricing” is the practice of spying on you to figure out how much you’re willing to spend – because you’re wealthy, because you’re desperate, because you’re distracted, because it’s payday…

Surveillance pricing essentially lets the seller devalue buyer’s money.

That surveillance can be weaponized against you, through “surveillance pricing,” which is when companies raise prices based on their estimation of your desperation, which they can infer from surveillance data. Surveillance pricing lets a company reach into your wallet and devalue your money – if you are charged $10 for a burger that costs the next person $5, that means your dollar is only worth $0.50

This intriguing thought by thekla on writing and using AI to write.

but on a deeper level, writing is more than just the process by which you obtain a piece of text, right? it’s also about finding out what you wanted to say in the first place, and how you wanted to say it. this post existed in my head first as a thought, then it started to gel into words, and then i tried pulling those words out to arrange them in a way that (hopefully) gets my point across. there is nothing extra there, no filler. i alone can get the thought out and writing is how i do that.

and sure, there is a lot of text that is not written with this kind of goal. but then, perhaps, we should ask why it has to be written in the first place; and if the cost of that might be higher than just the co2 that is attributable to its creation. in a similar vein, neither should we forget to ask whether those texts that are now written by ai would indeed otherwise have been written by humans, or if there isn’t an awful lot of text produced now that simply no one would have spent their time writing before.

Sandra Knispel talking about the study done by American Economic Review.

Two financial economists, from the University of Rochester and the University of Wisconsin–Madison respectively, created a model that explains how reputation, information, and retention interact in professions where skill is essential and performance is both visible and attributable to a specific person, particularly in fields such as law, consulting, fund asset management, auditing, and architecture. They argue that much of the professional services world operates through “intermediaries”—firms that both hire employees (also referred to as “agents” or “managers”) and market their expertise to clients—because clients can’t themselves easily judge a worker’s ability from the outset.

[…]

At the start of an employee’s career, the firm has an advantage, Kaniel and his coauthor Dmitry Orlov contend, because the firm (“the mediator”) can assess an employee’s talent more accurately than outside clients can. During what the authors call “quiet periods,” the firm keeps those who perform adequately and pays them standard wages.

Over time, however, an employee’s public performance—measured by successful cases, profitable investments, or well-executed projects—reduces the firm’s informational advantage. As the informational gap shrinks, the firm needs to pay some employees more because clients are now able to observe an employee’s good performance and hence update their beliefs about the employee’s skills.

“At some point, the informational advantage becomes fairly small,” says Kaniel, “and the firm says, ‘Well, I will basically start to churn. I will let go of some employees, and by doing that, I can actually extract more from the remaining ones.’”

Ironically, to the client these churned—or strategically fired—employees look just as good as the ones whom the firm kept. Churning happens not because these employees have failed but because they may be just somewhat lower-skilled than their peers. Subsequently, churning heightens both the reputation of the firm and of the employees who remain.

I found the concept of information advantage and its subsequent shrinking intriguing.

Will Larson arguing that the role of engineering manager changes based on the realities of the industry. He then goes on to share the core skills (essential to operate in all roles) and growth skills (whose presence–or absence–determines how far you can go in your career) for engineering managers.

The core skills are:

1. Execution: lead team to deliver expected tangible and intangible work. Fundamentally, management is about getting things done, and you’ll neither get an opportunity to begin managing, nor stay long as a manager, if your teams don’t execute.
   Examples: ship projects, manage on-call rotation, sprint planning, manage incidents
2. Team: shape the team and the environment such that they succeed. This is not working for the team, nor is it working for your leadership, it is finding the balance between the two that works for both.
   Examples: hiring, coaching, performance management, advocate with your management
3. Ownership: navigate reality to make consistent progress, even when reality is difficult Finding a way to get things done, rather than finding a way that it not getting done is someone else’s fault.
   Examples: doing hard things, showing up when it’s uncomfortable, being accountable despite systemic issues
4. Alignment: build shared understanding across leadership, stakeholders, your team, and the problem space. Finding a realistic plan that meets the moment, without surprising or being surprised by those around you.
   Examples: document and share top problems, and updates during crises

The growth skills are:

1. Taste: exercise discerning judgment about what “good” looks like—technically, in business terms, and in process/strategy. Taste is a broadchurch, and my experience is that broad taste is an somewhat universal criteria for truly senior roles. In some ways, taste is a prerequisite to Amazon’s Are Right, A Lot.
   Examples: refine proposed product concept, avoid high-risk rewrite, find usability issues in team’s work
2. Clarity: your team, stakeholders, and leadership know what you’re doing and why, and agree that it makes sense. In particular, they understand how you are overcoming your biggest problems. So clarity is not, “Struggling with scalability issues” but instead “Sharding the user logins database in a new cluster to reduce load.”
   Examples: identify levers to progress, create plan to exit a crisis, show progress on implementing that plan
3. Navigating ambiguity: work from complex problem to opinionated, viable approach. If you’re given an extremely messy, open-ended problem, can you still find a way to make progress? (I’ve written previously about this topic.)
   Examples: launching a new business line, improving developer experience, going from 1 to N cloud regions
4. Working across timescales: ensure your areas of responsibility make progress across both the short and long term. There are many ways to appear successful by cutting corners today, that end in disaster tomorrow. Success requires understanding, and being accountable for, how different timescales interact.
   Examples: have an explicit destination, ensure short-term work steers towards it, be long-term rigid and short-term flexible

Will also shares a framework on how to assess yourself on each of those skills.

Five years ago, I made the decision to invest in Alkem solely based on its inclusion in the Nifty Next 50 index. It was in September 2020 that Alkem was included in the Nifty Next 50 index. Without conducting any further research, I relied on the belief that companies included in Nifty Next 50 index are generally considered to be well-established and stable. And, there is a high chance of them moving to Nifty 50 index.

But what I didn’t consider was that Alkem can also be removed from the Nifty Next 50 index. This is what happened in August 2021. And it hasn’t returned back in the index since then.

After investing during the initial years, I haven’t made any new investments in Alkem since October 2023 (Figure 1).

(more…)

Joan Westenberg talking about why, in this policatical charged climate, it pays to pick a side.

When you pick a side and commit to it wholly and without reservation, you get things that moderate positions cannot provide. You get certainty in an uncertain world. You get a community that will defend you. You get a simple heuristic for navigating complex issues.

Above all: you get engagement, attention and influence.

The writer who says “this issue has nuance and I can see valid concerns on multiple sides” gets a pat on the head and zero retweets. The influencer who says “everyone who disagrees with me on this is either evil or stupid” gets quote-tweeted into visibility and gains followers who appreciate their approximation of clarity.

The returns on reasonableness have almost entirely collapsed.

But then we become prisoners of our own making. How to avoid it? Joan Westenberg suggest three simple things.

1. Diversifying your information sources.
2. Distinguish truth from noise.
3. Join communities that reward humility, not loyalty.