Author: Jason

“What Jim brought to the table is that he had the light bulb where he saw what this thing could be,” Draplin says. “Jim’s, like, reputable and stuff. People always say, well, you’re half of the thing—yeah, but I would have killed it because I might have gone to the next goofy little thing.”

Today, 20 years and more than 10 million sold notebooks later, what began as a casual side project with no real expectation has yielded a cult product that is in 2,000 stores worldwide, has a robust direct-to-consumer membership program, and, Coudal says, just came off its best year for sales and revenue. And 2025 is on pace, he adds, with hopes to surpass it.

How Field Notes went from side project to cult notebook – Fast Company

write this article as a plea to everyone: not just my students, but the blog posters and Reddit commenters and weak-accept paper authors and Reviewer 2. Don’t let a computer write for you! I say this not for reasons of intellectual honesty, or for the spirit of fairness. I say this because I believe that your original thoughts are far more interesting, meaningful, and valuable than whatever a large language model can transform them into.
— Read on claytonwramsey.com/blog/prompt/

Apparently the blog-hosting services have made it so easy to create a blog that many tire-kickers feel no commitment to continuing the blog they initiate,” said Jeffrey Henning, CTO of Perseus Development Corp. and author of the survey. “In fact, 1.09 million blogs were one-day wonders, with no postings on subsequent days.” The average duration of the remaining 1.63 million abandoned blogs was 126 days (almost four months). A surprising 132,000 blogs were abandoned after being maintained a year or more (the oldest abandoned blog surveyed had been maintained for 923 days).
— Read on www.writerswrite.com/most-blogs-are-never-seen-10312003188

(mostly) abandoned blogs
— Read on www.are.na/lucy-pham/abandoned-blogs

Writing is a shadow of thought. The better the writing, the more clearly the shadow represents the shape of the original thought. Even the best writing can never perfectly capture the original thought. Writing is one of the best tools we have to share thoughts across space and time.
— Read on actsofvolition.com/2025/05/text-is-a-shadow-of-thought/

I’ve spent my entire adult life, it seems to me, in a state of profound culture shock. I wish I were unique in this, but I’m not. You may not be afflicted with my misapprehensions, and I may not be afflicted with yours, but none of this starts “tabula rasa.” We all distort what we see. We all have to struggle to see what’s really going on.

— Read on news.ucr.edu/articles/2022/01/10/joan-didions-lost-commencement-address-revealed

I remember my dad explaining the idea of a kenning in Beowulf. A kenning is a description, usually two words, that stand in for a noun. For example, whale-road means ocean.

When my dad told me about kennings, I immediately understood their magic. Whale and road—these two words don’t have a direct connection, but when brought together, a new relationship can be unlocked. When one word lends meaning to the other, they can shift your perspective.

This is the trick to a kenning: You have to let them work their magic.

— Read on 1000wordsofsummer.substack.com/p/day-10-1000wordsofsummer-2025

Through extensive experimentation across diverse puzzles, we show that frontier LRMs face a complete accuracy collapse beyond certain complexities. Moreover, they exhibit a counter- intuitive scaling limit: their reasoning effort increases with problem complexity up to a point, then declines despite having an adequate token budget.

— Read on machinelearning.apple.com/research/illusion-of-thinking

Microsoft is adding text formatting to its Windows Notepad app. The significant Notepad update is available for Canary and Dev Channel testers on Windows 11, and introduces bold and italic styling, alongside hyperlinks and even Markdown support.

— Read on www.theverge.com/news/677474/microsoft-windows-notepad-bold-italic-text-formatting-markdown-support

For the past decade of scaling, we’ve been spoiled by the enormous amount of internet data that was freely available for us to use. This was enough for cracking natural language processing, but not for getting models to become reliable, competent agents. Imagine trying to train GPT-4 on all the text data available in 1980—the data would be nowhere near enough, even if we had the necessary compute. In 2025, our situation when it comes to automating software engineering is no different

— Read on www.mechanize.work/blog/how-to-fully-automate-software-engineering/