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[36]Capital
Toward A Theory Of Kevin Roose
[37][IMG]
By [38]Albert Burneko
11:15 AM EDT on June 18, 2025
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250Comments
"You can't be a serious critic," New York Times technology reporter Kevin Roose
wrote on Tuesday, [44]on Bluesky, about artificial intelligence, "if you're in
denial about how useful it is." Narrowly, in strict terms, this is true: You
can't be a serious critic of anything if you are in denial about any part of
it, where "in denial" describes an irrational and unfounded rejection of
empirical reality. That's hardly even worth saying, but it's also not really
what Roose is saying.
What Roose wants is to put an entire suite of claims about the technology
presently doing business as "artificial intelligence"—not just that it has more
than zero uses (a thing nobody really denies) but that it truly is artificial
intelligence or anything like it; that it represents a profound leap forward
for technology and human endeavor; that it is the future; that, as such,
adopting it and integrating it into day-to-day work and life processes is the
smart move—beyond dispute. He wants to marginalize the many technology experts,
media knowers, and sharp lay readers who have for years been calling his work
on behalf of those claims appalling boobery. He wants his readers to view all
of those critics as coterminous with whatever minor body of irrelevant
five-follower internet loons might bother trying to argue the literal
uselessness of a predictive text generator or a program that collates search
engine results into layperson's language. He wants his readers to think of all
the critics as united in an essentially pathological relationship with the
observable world. And he wants the juice of dancing this shitty little
passive-aggressive jig on Bluesky, the social-media platform where many of
those critics will encounter his work and, while dunking on it, also share it
around to some number of people who will read it.
Why do this crap? I think that I would be embarrassed. I think that after I'd
[45]gassed up cryptocurrency and NFTs in the New York Times and told New York
Times readers that the Bing search engine was trying to [46]steal me away from
my wife, I would have asked my editor if maybe I could cover the Broadway beat
for a while instead of continuing to smirk at the world while pouring fire ants
down the front of my shorts for a living. So: Why do it? But also: How?
I think about these questions a lot, certainly more than I should. (Not just
about Kevin Roose! Sometimes also about Felix Salmon.) Some two decades since
the digital-media attention economy took shape and, sheesh, like 13 years into
my own career working in that economy, the list of the cold incentives that
might drive a journalist toward this type of routine—attention, website
traffic, access to industry honchos otherwise not inclined toward talking to
the press, the possibility of later getting a nice job from one of them—is
depressingly easy to conjure. But that list's plausibility as a Kevin Roose
Explainer is, for me, limited by my fixed standing assumption that other people
have and value dignity.
Something occurred to me the other day when I was thinking about this—not even
Tuesday! Not even prompted by this particular Kevin Roose Bluesky post!—and has
been sort of following me around since, making me feel squirmy and
uncomfortable and haunted. What occurred to me was the possibility that what
had seemed, to me, like it could only come from a chilling and impossible level
of cynicism might come instead from a perverse and even more chilling variety
of mostly genuine belief. Not in the transformative power of AI! I'm talking
about something wider and deeper and more frightening than that: a genuine and
horribly earnest belief in not believing in anything.
My suspicion, my awful awful newfound theory, is that there are people with a
sincere and even kind of innocent belief that we are all just picking winners,
in everything: that ideology, advocacy, analysis, criticism, affinity, even
taste and style and association are essentially predictions. That what a person
tries to do, the essential task of a person, is to identify who and what is
going to come out on top, and align with it. The rest—what you say, what you
do—is just enacting your pick and working in service to it.
I was thinking about a lot of different stuff. I was thinking about the
phenomenon of small-fry sports-bettor bros with no passion for any serious
right-wing politics going big for Donald Trump in 2024 based on a view of their
vote as something like a wager, and of Trump as the bold, ambitious
choice—risky, but with the bigger potential payout. I was thinking about
sophisticated, high-achieving tech-industry types abruptly throwing off all of
their (thin, half-cooked, fundamentally dogshit, but still) liberal-libertarian
politics to get behind an explicitly authoritarian program and help build its
surveillance state. I was thinking about bushy-tailed go-getter types in legacy
media who kept their language carefully bland around policing reform,
anti-racism, and social justice during those topics' brief heightened salience
around the George Floyd protests, and then smoothly pivoted to criticizing the
excesses of woke when the winds changed. I was thinking about randos whom Elon
Musk would not cross a sidewalk to piss on if they were on fire, who, when
Trump invited Musk to gut federal government agencies and programs that benefit
their own lives, rushed to tweet GIFs of Musk, like, dunking on somebody's head
at his critics. I was thinking about [47]bag culture. And I was thinking about
Kevin Roose, serially and with apparent enthusiasm donning each next pair of
gigantic clown shoes handed to him by this or that Silicon Valley titan, and
dancing in them long past the point when everybody else figured out it was all
on behalf of a grift.
To these people this kind of thing is not cynicism, both because they believe
it's just what everybody is doing and because they do not regard it as ugly or
underhanded or whatever. Making the right pick is simply being smart. And not
necessarily in some kind of edgy-cool or subversive way, but smart the very
same shit-eating way that the dorkus malorkus who gets onto a friendly
first-name basis with the middle-school assistant principal is smart. They just
want to be smart.
So these people look at, say, socialists, and they see fools—not because of
moral or ethical objections to socialism or whatever, or because of any
authentically held objections or analysis at all, but simply because they can
see that, at present, socialism is not winning. All the most powerful guys are
against it. Can't those fools see it? They have picked a loser. They should
pick the winner instead.
Likewise, when all the rich guys got behind cryptocurrency, and all the rich
cryptocurrency guys got behind Donald Trump, for these people the thing to do
was very obvious, even if they had previously regarded crypto as a scam: not
just to buy some cryptocurrency—the kind of move any cynic might make—but to
adopt the attitudes and positions of a crypto enthusiast. Neither their
conscience nor their concept of dignity troubles them in this switcheroo,
because they take for granted that this is the precise way everyone forms the
stuff they say and appear to think. In their view, someone like me dumps on
cryptocurrency not because of an analytical conclusion that it sucks and is a
scam, or because of a moral conclusion that as a scam it is reprehensible, but
because I am making a pragmatic prediction that it will fail; my arguments for
it being bad, in this view, are at best just the articulation of the reasons
why I think it will not win.
Personally, when Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election and threw open
the regulatory gates for crypto, I saw it as a bleak and bitter vindication of
crypto skepticism: Critics had always been right to have identified it as a
tool of predators and scam artists, and now, in its embrace by the most brazen
undisguised crook in American society and the gleeful removal of all safeguards
protecting people from it, everyone could see it for what it is. For the
specimens we are examining here today, they saw almost the exact opposite: not
just a victory for crypto and its boosters, but an actual self-evident
refutation of crypto skeptics' arguments—for the simple reason that these
people understood those arguments to have always been at root a prediction that
crypto would lose, and crypto had won.
This has not been how I have approached my life—I think that's sort of
painfully obvious—and I think in general it is mostly not how people approach
their lives. I think in general even really flawed and derelict people like me
are trying to figure out what's right or what's best or what's just or what's
fair, or at least some workable compromise between the demands of those pesky
ideas and our desire for near-term comfort and stability. I think in general
people only form associations on the basis of what they think will win in
certain discrete circumstances, like betting on a horse race or making
stock-market trades or whatever; the rest of life is more complicated than
that. You vote for the candidate you think will represent your interests in
government and you hope they will win; you do not try to figure out who is
going to win and then vote for them. You praise the beauty of an artwork
because you think it's beautiful, not because you expect it will smash
auction-price records. You root for the Sacramento Kings because you are a sick
pervert, not because you believe they will ever win the NBA Finals.
And so, for probably most people, it would be sort of uncomfortable to, for
example, shrug off the social ideas you'd vocally advocated for and throw
yourself behind a political movement in direct opposition to all of them! Not
only on principle—you'd actually believed that stuff, after all—but because of
things like dignity and even vanity: People in general do not want to look like
turncoats, scumbags, or frontrunners. Likewise, for probably most people, the
dissolution of a succession of huge tech-industry hypes having exposed you as a
[48]world-historic stooge and imbecile might temper your eagerness to deliver a
public Funkmaster Flex routine on behalf of AI companies! Not even for
particularly admirable reasons; you might just be tired of looking like a
world-historic stooge and imbecile in the New York Times.
But now imagine believing that victory, whenever it arrived and on whatever
terms it was accomplished, would automatically redeem all that debasement. If
you believed that Trump winning would mean that everyone who supported him was
right to have done so, because they had picked the winner; that the mega-rich
AI industry buying its way into all corners of American society would mean that
critics of the technology and of using it to displace human labors were not
just defeated but meaningfully wrong in their criticisms; that some celebrity
getting richer from a crypto rug-pull that ripped off hundreds of thousands of
less-rich people would actually vindicate the celebrity's choice to participate
in it, because of how much richer it made them. Imagine holding this as an
authentic understanding of how the world works: that the simple binary outcome
of a contest had the power to reach back through time and adjust the ethical
and moral weight of the contestants' choices along the way. Maybe, in that
case, you would feel differently about what to the rest of us looks like
straight-up shit eating.
This, I think, is how a guy like Kevin Roose can do what he does without
apparent embarrassment, without ever seeming to have learned anything or to
have been chastened in the least by a series of cigars exploding in his face
right after he told everyone in the world that smoking these
guaranteed-not-to-explode cigars was the way of the future. He is playing the
long game. Non-fungible tokens turned out to be a musical-chairs scam, Web3
nothing more than a Sony PlayStation in helmet form, crypto at best a
speculative asset class and at worse a wilderness of Ponzi schemes. AI might
turn out to be just the ruinous money-pit Potemkin singularity that critics and
scholars and experts (and I) think it is.
My theory of Kevin Roose is this: His bet is not on any of these individually,
but on the very rich and very powerful men and institutions backing them. He
thinks they are going to win, and that when they do win, it won't matter that
the rest of us regarded his sucking up to them as a disgrace to journalism and
human dignity. He is, I suppose I must grant, being very smart.
Recommended
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Only Kevin Roose’s Editors Despise Him More Than I Do
[51]213Comments
[52]Albert Burneko
April 25, 2025
[53]A robot dances onstage
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[60]Albert Burneko
[61]@albertburneko.bsky.social
Assignment Editor
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My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts
Author
Thomas Ptacek
Name
Thomas Ptacek
@tqbf
[38] @tqbf
A psychedelic landscape. Image by [39] Annie Ruygt
A heartfelt provocation about AI-assisted programming.
Tech execs are mandating LLM adoption. That’s bad strategy. But I get where
they’re coming from.
Some of the smartest people I know share a bone-deep belief that AI is a fad —
the next iteration of NFT mania. I’ve been reluctant to push back on them,
because, well, they’re smarter than me. But their arguments are unserious, and
worth confronting. Extraordinarily talented people are doing work that LLMs
already do better, out of spite.
All progress on LLMs could halt today, and LLMs would remain the 2nd most
important thing to happen over the course of my career.
Important caveat: I’m discussing only the implications of LLMs for software
development. For art, music, and writing? I got nothing. I’m inclined to
believe the skeptics in those fields. I just don’t believe them about mine.
Bona fides: I’ve been shipping software since the mid-1990s. I started out in
boxed, shrink-wrap C code. Survived an ill-advised [40]Alexandrescu C++ phase.
Lots of Ruby and Python tooling. Some kernel work. A whole lot of server-side
C, Go, and Rust. However you define “serious developer”, I qualify. Even if
only on one of your lower tiers.
[41]level setting
† (or, God forbid, 2 years ago with Copilot)
First, we need to get on the same page. If you were trying and failing to use
an LLM for code 6 months ago †, you’re not doing what most serious LLM-assisted
coders are doing.
People coding with LLMs today use agents. Agents get to poke around your
codebase on their own. They author files directly. They run tools. They compile
code, run tests, and iterate on the results. They also:
• pull in arbitrary code from the tree, or from other trees online, into
their context windows,
• run standard Unix tools to navigate the tree and extract information,
• interact with Git,
• run existing tooling, like linters, formatters, and model checkers, and
• make essentially arbitrary tool calls (that you set up) through MCP.
The code in an agent that actually “does stuff” with code is not, itself, AI.
This should reassure you. It’s surprisingly simple systems code, wired to
ground truth about programming in the same way a Makefile is. You could write
an effective coding agent in a weekend. Its strengths would have more to do
with how you think about and structure builds and linting and test harnesses
than with how advanced o3 or Sonnet have become.
If you’re making requests on a ChatGPT page and then pasting the resulting
(broken) code into your editor, you’re not doing what the AI boosters are
doing. No wonder you’re talking past each other.
[42]the positive case
four quadrants of tedium and importance
LLMs can write a large fraction of all the tedious code you’ll ever need to
write. And most code on most projects is tedious. LLMs drastically reduce the
number of things you’ll ever need to Google. They look things up themselves.
Most importantly, they don’t get tired; they’re immune to inertia.
Think of anything you wanted to build but didn’t. You tried to home in on some
first steps. If you’d been in the limerent phase of a new programming language,
you’d have started writing. But you weren’t, so you put it off, for a day, a
year, or your whole career.
I can feel my blood pressure rising thinking of all the bookkeeping and
Googling and dependency drama of a new project. An LLM can be instructed to
just figure all that shit out. Often, it will drop you precisely at that golden
moment where shit almost works, and development means tweaking code and
immediately seeing things work better. That dopamine hit is why I code.
There’s a downside. Sometimes, gnarly stuff needs doing. But you don’t wanna do
it. So you refactor unit tests, soothing yourself with the lie that you’re
doing real work. But an LLM can be told to go refactor all your unit tests. An
agent can occupy itself for hours putzing with your tests in a VM and come back
later with a PR. If you listen to me, you’ll know that. You’ll feel worse
yak-shaving. You’ll end up doing… real work.
[43]but you have no idea what the code is
Are you a vibe coding Youtuber? Can you not read code? If so: astute point.
Otherwise: what the fuck is wrong with you?
You’ve always been responsible for what you merge to main. You were five years
go. And you are tomorrow, whether or not you use an LLM.
If you build something with an LLM that people will depend on, read the code.
In fact, you’ll probably do more than that. You’ll spend 5-10 minutes knocking
it back into your own style. LLMs are [44]showing signs of adapting to local
idiom, but we’re not there yet.
People complain about LLM-generated code being “probabilistic”. No it isn’t.
It’s code. It’s not Yacc output. It’s knowable. The LLM might be stochastic.
But the LLM doesn’t matter. What matters is whether you can make sense of the
result, and whether your guardrails hold.
Reading other people’s code is part of the job. If you can’t metabolize the
boring, repetitive code an LLM generates: skills issue! How are you handling
the chaos human developers turn out on a deadline?
† (because it can hold 50-70kloc in its context window)
For the last month or so, Gemini 2.5 has been my go-to †. Almost nothing it
spits out for me merges without edits. I’m sure there’s a skill to getting a
SOTA model to one-shot a feature-plus-merge! But I don’t care. I like moving
the code around and chuckling to myself while I delete all the stupid comments.
I have to read the code line-by-line anyways.
[45]but hallucination
If hallucination matters to you, your programming language has let you down.
Agents lint. They compile and run tests. If their LLM invents a new function
signature, the agent sees the error. They feed it back to the LLM, which says
“oh, right, I totally made that up” and then tries again.
You’ll only notice this happening if you watch the chain of thought log your
agent generates. Don’t. This is why I like [46]Zed’s agent mode: it begs you to
tab away and let it work, and pings you with a desktop notification when it’s
done.
I’m sure there are still environments where hallucination matters. But
“hallucination” is the first thing developers bring up when someone suggests
using LLMs, despite it being (more or less) a solved problem.
[47]but the code is shitty, like that of a junior developer
Does an intern cost $20/month? Because that’s what Cursor.ai costs.
Part of being a senior developer is making less-able coders productive, be they
fleshly or algebraic. Using agents well is both a both a skill and an
engineering project all its own, of prompts, indices, [48]and (especially)
tooling. LLMs only produce shitty code if you let them.
† (Also: 100% of all the Bash code you should author ever again)
Maybe the current confusion is about who’s doing what work. Today, LLMs do a
lot of typing, Googling, test cases †, and edit-compile-test-debug cycles. But
even the most Claude-poisoned serious developers in the world still own
curation, judgement, guidance, and direction.
Also: let’s stop kidding ourselves about how good our human first cuts really
are.
[49]but it’s bad at rust
It’s hard to get a good toolchain for Brainfuck, too. Life’s tough in the
aluminum siding business.
† (and they surely will; the Rust community takes tooling seriously)
A lot of LLM skepticism probably isn’t really about LLMs. It’s projection.
People say “LLMs can’t code” when what they really mean is “LLMs can’t write
Rust”. Fair enough! But people select languages in part based on how well LLMs
work with them, so Rust people should get on that †.
I work mostly in Go. I’m confident the designers of the Go programming language
didn’t set out to produce the most LLM-legible language in the industry. They
succeeded nonetheless. Go has just enough type safety, an extensive standard
library, and a culture that prizes (often repetitive) idiom. LLMs kick ass
generating it.
All this is to say: I write some Rust. I like it fine. If LLMs and Rust aren’t
working for you, I feel you. But if that’s your whole thing, we’re not having
the same argument.
[50]but the craft
Do you like fine Japanese woodworking? All hand tools and sashimono joinery? Me
too. Do it on your own time.
† (I’m a piker compared to my woodworking friends)
I have a basic wood shop in my basement †. I could get a lot of satisfaction
from building a table. And, if that table is a workbench or a grill table,
sure, I’ll build it. But if I need, like, a table? For people to sit at? In my
office? I buy a fucking table.
Professional software developers are in the business of solving practical
problems for people with code. We are not, in our day jobs, artisans. Steve
Jobs was wrong: we do not need to carve the unseen feet in the sculpture.
Nobody cares if the logic board traces are pleasingly routed. If anything we
build endures, it won’t be because the codebase was beautiful.
Besides, that’s not really what happens. If you’re taking time carefully
golfing functions down into graceful, fluent, minimal functional expressions,
alarm bells should ring. You’re yak-shaving. The real work has depleted your
focus. You’re not building: you’re self-soothing.
Which, wait for it, is something LLMs are good for. They devour schlep, and
clear a path to the important stuff, where your judgement and values really
matter.
[51]but the mediocrity
As a mid-late career coder, I’ve come to appreciate mediocrity. You should be
so lucky as to have it flowing almost effortlessly from a tap.
We all write mediocre code. Mediocre code: often fine. Not all code is equally
important. Some code should be mediocre. Maximum effort on a random unit test?
You’re doing something wrong. Your team lead should correct you.
Developers all love to preen about code. They worry LLMs lower the “ceiling”
for quality. Maybe. But they also raise the “floor”.
Gemini’s floor is higher than my own. My code looks nice. But it’s not as
thorough. LLM code is repetitive. But mine includes dumb contortions where I
got too clever trying to DRY things up.
And LLMs aren’t mediocre on every axis. They almost certainly have a bigger bag
of algorithmic tricks than you do: radix tries, topological sorts, graph
reductions, and LDPC codes. Humans romanticize rsync ([52]Andrew Tridgell wrote
a paper about it!). To an LLM it might not be that much more interesting than a
SQL join.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. It doesn’t matter. If truly mediocre code is
all we ever get from LLMs, that’s still huge. It’s that much less mediocre code
humans have to write.
[53]but it’ll never be AGI
I don’t give a shit.
Smart practitioners get wound up by the AI/VC hype cycle. I can’t blame them.
But it’s not an argument. Things either work or they don’t, no matter what
Jensen Huang has to say about it.
[54]but they take-rr jerbs
[55]So does open source. We used to pay good money for databases.
We’re a field premised on automating other people’s jobs away. “Productivity
gains,” say the economists. You get what that means, right? Fewer people doing
the same stuff. Talked to a travel agent lately? Or a floor broker? Or a record
store clerk? Or a darkroom tech?
When this argument comes up, libertarian-leaning VCs start the chant:
lamplighters, creative destruction, new kinds of work. Maybe. But I’m not
hypnotized. I have no fucking clue whether we’re going to be better off after
LLMs. Things could get a lot worse for us.
LLMs really might displace many software developers. That’s not a high horse we
get to ride. Our jobs are just as much in tech’s line of fire as everybody
else’s have been for the last 3 decades. We’re not [56]East Coast dockworkers;
we won’t stop progress on our own.
[57]but the plagiarism
Artificial intelligence is profoundly — and probably unfairly — threatening to
visual artists in ways that might be hard to appreciate if you don’t work in
the arts.
We imagine artists spending their working hours pushing the limits of
expression. But the median artist isn’t producing gallery pieces. They produce
on brief: turning out competent illustrations and compositions for magazine
covers, museum displays, motion graphics, and game assets.
LLMs easily — alarmingly — clear industry quality bars. Gallingly, one of the
things they’re best at is churning out just-good-enough facsimiles of human
creative work. I have family in visual arts. I can’t talk to them about LLMs. I
don’t blame them. They’re probably not wrong.
Meanwhile, software developers spot code fragments [58]seemingly lifted from
public repositories on Github and lose their shit. What about the licensing? If
you’re a lawyer, I defer. But if you’re a software developer playing this card?
Cut me a little slack as I ask you to shove this concern up your ass. No
profession has demonstrated more contempt for intellectual property.
The median dev thinks Star Wars and Daft Punk are a public commons. The great
cultural project of developers has been opposing any protection that might
inconvenience a monetizable media-sharing site. When they fail at policy, they
route around it with coercion. They stand up global-scale piracy networks and
sneer at anybody who so much as tries to preserve a new-release window for a TV
show.
Call any of this out if you want to watch a TED talk about how hard it is to
stream The Expanse on LibreWolf. Yeah, we get it. You don’t believe in IPR.
Then shut the fuck up about IPR. Reap the whirlwind.
It’s all special pleading anyways. LLMs digest code further than you do. If you
don’t believe a typeface designer can stake a moral claim on the terminals and
counters of a letterform, you sure as hell can’t be possessive about a
red-black tree.
[59]positive case redux
When I started writing a couple days ago, I wrote a section to “level set” to
the state of the art of LLM-assisted programming. A bluefish filet has a longer
shelf life than an LLM take. In the time it took you to read this, everything
changed.
Kids today don’t just use agents; they use asynchronous agents. They wake up,
free-associate 13 different things for their LLMs to work on, make coffee, fill
out a TPS report, drive to the Mars Cheese Castle, and then check their
notifications. They’ve got 13 PRs to review. Three get tossed and re-prompted.
Five of them get the same feedback a junior dev gets. And five get merged.
“I’m sipping rocket fuel right now,” a friend tells me. “The folks on my team
who aren’t embracing AI? It’s like they’re standing still.” He’s not
bullshitting me. He doesn’t work in SFBA. He’s got no reason to lie.
There’s plenty of things I can’t trust an LLM with. No LLM has any of access to
prod here. But I’ve been first responder on an incident and fed 4o — not
o4-mini, 4o — log transcripts, and watched it in seconds spot LVM metadata
corruption issues on a host we’ve been complaining about for months. Am I
better than an LLM agent at interrogating OpenSearch logs and Honeycomb traces?
No. No, I am not.
To the consternation of many of my friends, I’m not a radical or a futurist.
I’m a statist. I believe in the haphazard perseverance of complex systems, of
institutions, of reversions to the mean. I write Go and Python code. I’m not a
Kool-aid drinker.
But something real is happening. My smartest friends are blowing it off. Maybe
I persuade you. Probably I don’t. But we need to be done making space for bad
arguments.
[60]but i’m tired of hearing about it
And here I rejoin your company. I read [61]Simon Willison, and that’s all I
really need. But all day, every day, a sizable chunk of the front page of HN is
allocated to LLMs: incremental model updates, startups doing things with LLMs,
LLM tutorials, screeds against LLMs. It’s annoying!
But AI is also incredibly — a word I use advisedly — important. It’s getting
the same kind of attention that smart phones got in 2008, and not as much as
the Internet got. That seems about right.
I think this is going to get clearer over the next year. The cool kid
haughtiness about “stochastic parrots” and “vibe coding” can’t survive much
more contact with reality. I’m snarking about these people, but I meant what I
said: they’re smarter than me. And when they get over this affectation, they’re
going to make coding agents profoundly more effective than they are today.
Last updated •
Jun 2, 2025
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@tqbf
[65] @tqbf
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[40] https://www.amazon.com/Modern-Design-Generic-Programming-Patterns/dp/0201704315
[41] https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/#level-setting
[42] https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/#the-positive-case
[43] https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/#but-you-have-no-idea-what-the-code-is
[44] https://github.com/PatrickJS/awesome-cursorrules
[45] https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/#but-hallucination
[46] https://zed.dev/agentic
[47] https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/#but-the-code-is-shitty-like-that-of-a-junior-developer
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[49] https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/#but-its-bad-at-rust
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[52] https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/course/15-749/READINGS/required/cas/tridgell96.pdf
[53] https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/#but-itll-never-be-agi
[54] https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/#but-they-take-rr-jerbs
[55] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43776612
[56] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_port_strike
[57] https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/#but-the-plagiarism
[58] https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.17035
[59] https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/#positive-case-redux
[60] https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/#but-im-tired-of-hearing-about-it
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June 19, 2025
[4]Helix
I had insomnia a few nights ago, so I started fiddling with different things,
including the CLI tasks tool dstask, which is sort of TaskWarrior without the
misanthropy. (I kid.)
So a kind of nice thing about dstask is that with dstask #{note number} note
you pop open $EDITOR in a Markdown note attached to the task. dstask is aware
of any Markdown checklists inside the task note and blocks completion of the
task if there are open ones.
That's maybe bad for me because I am a compulsive subtask-maker with a bad
habit of opening a task, loading the subtasks into my buffer, and just doing
them all without looking back. So if I stick with it dstask may shape my habits
that way.
For some annoying reason, dstask also barfs if $EDITOR has an argument, e.g.
emacsclient -nw, and I found myself once again writing some kind of wrapper for
emacsclient. That is not Emacs' fault, but it raised the perennial question
"when does $EDITOR come into play and do you need a whole-ass Emacs config for
those times?"
So I think "your go-to for this used to be jed, which acts like Emacs where it
matters." But I've been using evil in Emacs for years now: If I want to keep my
muscle memory between quick CLI edits and my whole-ass Emacs config, what I
really need is something from the vi family.
It being 3 in the morning, I embark on a tour of modern vi's, looking for some
sweet spot of "nimble" and "feature-packed." I burn through a few neovim
tutorials and starter kits (nooooooope) before stumbling into a feud between
neovim people and Helix people on reddit.
So around 4 I'm running brew install helix and going through :tutorial.
It's pretty nice! It launches quickly. No plugin system so the futzmonkey sort
of has to stay in its cage, but it's very batteries-included. I found a [5]
tutorial for setting it up for Markdown that wasn't overwhelming and helped me
get a sense of how its config works.
It is not "just a batteries included vim." It has its own keybinding grammar
(subject/verb, not verb/subject), so after bonking my head on those changes a
few times I [6]cheated and lifted a few vimisms.
I guess I also went through a quick consideration of micro, but the CUA-style
default keybindings confused me the way nano often confuses me.
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[151]Fantasy [152]Technology
Generative AI as a magic system
• Post author By [153]Tracy Durnell
• Post date [154]June 24, 2025
• [155]3 Comments on Generative AI as a magic system
• ❤️
We treat generative AI like magic… and magic systems have rules. When creating
fantasy worlds, writers think about who can use magic, how magic is performed,
what it’s able to do, what its constraints are, what the source of magic is,
and what it costs. I’m applying a bit of reverse worldbuilding to the real
world to extrapolate the rules of the AI magic system.
[156]Islands in the Sky by Death Valley Girls
Who can use AI magic: magic users pay to use corporate AI magic systems. Those
who are wealthy and tech savvy enough can host their own local model. Free
magic use is mostly limited to corporate largesse ultimately intended to build
magic dependency.
How AI magic is cast: AI spells are cast with written text input through a
digital interface. Spells are refined and recast until the outcome satisfies
(spells produce different results every time they are cast).
What AI magic can do: AI spells can produce combinations of words that are
[157]interpreted as writing, code-like material that sometimes runs as code,
images that resemble art, and video that resembles reality. It can create
imitations of specific human creators’ work, as well as individual’s speech and
appearance. It can also mimic human conversation for a span of time before the
spell dissipates. AI magic is near instantaneous, allowing people without
technical skills to produce text and graphics faster than writers and artisans.
What AI magic cannot do: AI magic [158]cannot produce the same outcome twice,
nor act upon existing conjurations, instead casting spells anew each time. AI
magic itself cannot reference sources, though may be used in tandem with other
tools that enable citation ([159]though with questionable accuracy). AI magic
cannot reason or write, but its conjurations may create [160]the illusion of
intelligence through their statistical consistency with written language use.
The source of AI magic: AI magic derives from statistical analysis of
human-created art, [161]writing, speech, music, and video, classified and
sorted by human laborers in low-cost geos.
The cost of AI magic: Resource costs of AI magic include [162]power, [163]water
, and high-end chips, which themselves require specialized manufacturing and
rare earth minerals.
Social costs include the [164]reinforcement of racism and sexism, as well as
mental harm to AI trainers assessing inputs to the magic system.
Societal costs include [165]job elimination and [166]job intensification as
positions able to be reproduced in part by magic are [167]eliminated and that
magic work is shifted to the remaining workers.
Information costs include the [168]destruction of the [169]online publishing
incentive structure / [170]information commons, leading to more paywalled
content; an [171]increase in low-quality material, which makes finding accurate
information harder; as well as the danger of [172]political propaganda by
poisoned magic systems.
Individual user costs include critical thinking skills, writing abilities, and
patience for conversing with humans.
Further reading:
[173]The new magic of AI vs. the old magic of artists by Kening Zhu
See also:
[174]Generative AI and the Business Borg aesthetic
• Tags [175]artificial intelligence, [176]computer generated, [177]cost,
[178]Labor, [179]LLM, [180]magic, [181]metaphor, [182]rules, [183]
worldbuilding
[70c71f48c24aa2fcf7]
By Tracy Durnell
Writer and designer in the Seattle area. Reach me at tracy@tracydurnell.com or
@tracy@notes.tracydurnell.com. She/her.
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3 replies on “Generative AI as a magic system”
[cfbec22f5a11e] [187]Colin says:
[188]June 26, 2025 at 5:12 pm
I very much like the breakdown of costs into those categories, it really spells
(ha) it out well. I’d taken a Genie/ Demonology approach to AI magic, be keen
on your thoughts – [189]https://vonexplaino.com/blog/posts/article/2024/10/
ai-ai-compthulu-fauxthagn-the-ai-grimoire.html
[190]Reply
[70c71f48c24aa] [191]Tracy Durnell says:
[192]June 27, 2025 at 7:51 pm
This is totally delightful Colin! I especially like the Cults framing. This
line — “asking the same thing multiple times gets different answers. It’s just
like magic. Or insanity.” — perfect 😄
[193]Reply
[IMG_9150-100x] [194]Joe Crawford says: @ [195]artlung.com
[196]June 27, 2025 at 6:11 pm
Generative AI as a Magic System
[197]Reply
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06-17-2025[18]DESIGN
[19]
How Field Notes went from side project to cult notebook
Two decades after Aaron Draplin and Jim Coudal launched Field Notes, the analog
notebook company is crushing it in the digital age.
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How Field Notes went from side project to cult notebook
[Photo: courtesy Field Notes]
BY [26]Zachary Petit
Listen to this Article[27]More info
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Field Notes cofounders Aaron Draplin and Jim Coudal have convened to ostensibly
talk about their cult-fave memo book brand. But Draplin—the gregarious,
hilarious Portland proprietor of Draplin Design Co.—just wrapped up jury duty.
And almost 10 minutes into our conversation, he’s regaling us with courtroom
sketches he made during the trial. (“Of course, I had to figure out some way to
exploit it for creative purposes.”)
Such freewheeling is just part and parcel of knowing Draplin, but Coudal has a
knack for seamlessly and seemingly effortlessly steering the conversation back
to the subject at hand. It underscores a point: Without Draplin, there would be
no Field Notes. And without Coudal, there would definitely be no Field Notes. 
“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.”
[i-1-91352784-field-notes-at-20]Jim Coudal and Aaron Draplin [Photo: courtesy
Field Notes]
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.
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It all goes back to Coudal’s light bulb—and, of course, Draplin’s before it. He
had been drawing all his life and learned bookmaking at the Minneapolis College
of Art and Design. When Draplin left the Midwest for the West Coast in 1993, he
began collecting [32]memo books that agriculture companies historically gave
out as promos, and was taken with their lineage and practical design. He
decided to make some of his own notebooks in 2005, and the pragmatism and charm
of those promos—the vernacular type treatments, layouts, voice—found their way
into Field Notes’ DNA. He hand-printed 200 notebooks on a desktop[33] Gocco and
later invested $2,000 into a first run of 2,000 notebooks with “FIELD NOTES”
printed on the cover in Futura. His goal? To give them out to friends. And one
of those friends along the way happened to be Coudal, of Coudal Partners, the
measured mind to Draplin’s mad scientist. 
[01-91352784-field-notes-at-20][Photo: courtesy Field Notes]
“He just said, ‘There’s something here,’” Draplin recalls. 
Coudal’s team made a website. On the day it went live, they made 13 modest
sales via PayPal. But that was okay—again, he and Draplin both had their own
gigs, and Coudal says Field Notes wasn’t a priority for either of them.
But, “Before you know it, there’s media attention . . . and we’re seeing real
numbers,” Draplin says. 
According to Coudal: “One by one we fired all our clients because this Field
Notes thing was getting bigger and taking up more of our time—and it was a lot
more fun than making work we were proud of for people we didn’t particularly
like.”
[08-91352784-field-notes-at-20]Stanley Donwood, Is a River Alive? [Photo:
courtesy Field Notes]
THE FIELD NOTES FORMULA
When the pair formally launched the brand, Coudal says projects at his studio
had three mandates: They had to make money, as the team had mortgages and kids
to put through school; they had to be something the team would be proud of; and
they had to be able to learn something new from it. Field Notes checked the
boxes.
Draplin’s goals were more straightforward. He says he was making a buck for
every grand the agency he worked for did. The mid-aughts were the dawn of the
modern “maker” movement, and there was an opportunity to craft your own future.
He did just that with a concrete design system for the brand’s signature
notebooks from the get-go.
“There’s never been a piece of type on any Field Notes material that wasn’t
Futura or Century Schoolbook, two beautiful, hardworking American fonts,”
Coudal says. Other assets like the highly structured copy on the inside covers,
as well as the logo placement on the front, were likewise sacrosanct. “We can
do different printing techniques, and we can do different-size notebooks, and
we do a lot of things. But we don’t mess with what made Field Notes Field
Notes.”
[i-3-91352784-field-notes-at-20][Photo: courtesy Field Notes]
They sold the 3.5-by-5.5-inch 48-page books in packs of three, and the business
grew slowly—but steadily. And as it grew, Coudal says, it became easier: The
more notebooks you make, the cheaper each one becomes because you’re buying in
bulk. When they began scaling up their print runs, they were able to get the
price down to a couple dollars per book, and sell the three-packs for $13 to
15—which got them into stores. (Today, you can find them everywhere from indies
to Barnes & Noble.) 
One critical moment came in February 2010, when J. Crew featured Field Notes in
its catalog, alongside the retailer’s other “personal favorites from our design
heroes.” There was a Timex watch, Ray-Bans, Sperry shoes—“and out of fucking
nowhere, Field Notes,” Coudal says. “And when that happened, a lot changed for
us.”
Coudal says it gave the brand instant credibility—after all, if it was good
enough for J. Crew, it was good enough for your store. In time, friends began
sending him screenshots of Field Notes in TV shows; he and Draplin would see
people jotting notes in them in bars and elsewhere; on the design web, they
became an obsession. By 2014, there was even a[34] subreddit dedicated to them
titled “FieldNuts.” 
Meanwhile, Draplin dropped into a New York store where the notebooks were
arranged “amongst $600 sweaters and $800 jeans.” And the proprietor told him he
could be selling the notebooks for $29.95 or $40—which is something he would
not do.
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“That’s my favorite part—this stuff is accessible, right?” Draplin notes.
[06-91352784-field-notes-at-20][Photo: courtesy Field Notes]
SUBSCRIPTION STRATEGY
In 2009, Field Notes launched a set of color variants, and does a new
installment every quarter, which subscribers can get annually for $120. They
are up to 67 editions. And over the years, the program has grown to include
elaborate series like the brand’s popular[35] National Parks books,
celebrations of[36] spaceflight and [37]letterpress, and dozens more themes. 
Coudal says the first few print runs were around 1,500 packs each—but they have
grown to the 30,000-to-60,000 range today. He adds that aside from “a couple
very strange years around COVID,” gross revenue and DTC sales (which account
for about 50% of the business) have increased almost every year since 2009.
[05-91352784-field-notes-at-20]Rocky Mountain National Park by Rory Kurtz,
Great Smoky Mountains National Park by Chris Turnham, Yellowstone National Park
by Brave the Woods [Photo: courtesy Field Notes]
“The thing about the subscription model is, first of all, people are paying us
now for a product we haven’t made yet,” Coudal says. “That’s really good for
cash flow for a small company. But more important than that, having these four
projects every year that people are funding ahead of time gives us a really
great way to make a relationship with our customers and our retailers.”
Each one also fulfills Coudal’s third tenet for projects—he has an opportunity
to explore an entirely new subject through the work. 
[09-91352784-field-notes-at-20]Emmy Star Brown, Flora [Photo: courtesy Field
Notes]
THE DRAPLIN FACTOR 
Of course, as Field Notes has risen in notoriety over the years, Draplin has
been on a parallel path. He embodies the brand at design conferences like Adobe
MAX and in his merch pop-ups, where he is treated like a rock star.
I ask about the impact of Draplin’s industry celebrity, and Coudal jumps in. 
“I can answer that because Aaron’s going to be humble about it. I think it’s
made a lot of difference. I think that Aaron has brought a lot of people to the
brand, and he’s also like our gospel preacher out on the road, telling the
story—the gospel of Field Notes.”
Before the brand had an advertising budget, Coudal says that was critical. And
for Draplin, those talks aren’t to simply shill. “It’s a reminder: You can go
make your own stuff, too,” he says. 
With Draplin on the West Coast, Field Notes’ core team of around 10 is anchored
in Chicago. While Draplin says he used to be far more involved in the
day-to-day around seven years ago, these days he regards his role as a bit of a
mercenary. He drops in with ideas; Coudal will, say, assign him to “go make
something weird.” He’s also pissed the team off, on occasion, by going rogue
with an idea. 
[04-91352784-field-notes-at-20][Photo: courtesy Field Notes]
Ultimately, “I’m along for the ride at that point, because there’s a den mother
watching over us,” Draplin says. As a result of being removed from the daily
routine, he adds, “I get to experience the buzz of what the customer gets.”
Which is, in all likelihood, a valuable temp check. 
[i-2-91352784-field-notes-at-20]A sample of Aaron Draplin’s collection of
vintage farmer’s memo books. Explore the digitized collection [38]here. [[39]
Screenshot: courtesy Field Notes, Eric Lovejoy, Leigh McKolay and Joe Dawson
Jr. (site credits)]
“Aaron’s wisdom and inspiration are a constant good thing for the brand,”
Coudal says. “And while he’s not checking the layouts anymore, he’s certainly a
big part of the general direction that the ship sails.”
Looking to the future, Coudal says his goals are straightforward enough:
Generate more interest, tell interesting stories, get wider distribution. 
Draplin, meanwhile, still seems a bit incredulous that the company exists in
the first place. “The biggest, funnest part about this thing—number one, we
didn’t lose any money. Isn’t that cool? I would have been okay if we did,” he
says. But, “This can exist. This happened. [We’ve done] it for almost 20 years.
It’s fucking amazing. I’ll tell you what . . . it exceeded my dreams.”
The advance-rate deadline for Fast Company’s [40]Innovation Festival is Friday,
July 11, at 11:59 p.m. PT. [41] Claim your pass today!
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
[42]Zachary Petit is a contributing writer for Fast Company and an independent
journalist who covers design, the arts, and travel. His words have appeared in 
Smithsonian, National Geographic, Eye on Design, McSweeney’s, Mental Floss and 
Print, where he served as editor-in-chief of the National Magazine
Award–winning publication [43]More
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