flâneur

Sidney Nimako

2 followers · 8 following · 1257 views

on the atlas — 117

highlights — 156

  • Here the technologist stands, choosing what kind of future, out of the infinite possibilities, that will actually materialize based on our scientific understanding of the present world. A piece of technology prioritizes some low-resistance path to achieve an end, and its essential nature involves instrumentality and free will. It must inherently be purposive.
    What is Technology? — Letters to a Young Technologist
  • It is the extremely particular result of someone's will, based on rationalizing through the concrete and contingent circumstances of the world.
    What is Technology? — Letters to a Young Technologist
  • Making technology involves an ongoing attempt to bring the world closer to the way one wishes it to be. The technologist actively participates in determining what that wish is, rather than having clearly defined problems handed to them.
    What is Technology? — Letters to a Young Technologist
  • We’ll see the rise of “internal development teams,” as companies replace single-purpose bloated SaaS products with their own apps that collapse functions in magical ways.
    12 Outlooks for the Future: 2026+
  • start to see humans (often aided by tech) deployed in more creative ways to make us feel more welcome and special across every shopping experience we have
    12 Outlooks for the Future: 2026+
  • AI privately running on your device. As (1) open-source models that you can download, change, and run “locally” on your device become more capable, and (2) consumer hardware (Apple and Android phones, whatever OpenAI is brewing, and our computers)
    12 Outlooks for the Future: 2026+
  • more projects trying to make personalization portable for consumers
    12 Outlooks for the Future: 2026+
  • Hardware becomes a more popular moat (amid a surge of hardware startups). In a world where everyone can make their own software
    12 Outlooks for the Future: 2026+
  • rocess will become part of the end product
    12 Outlooks for the Future: 2026+
  • If school is a constant stream of stimulation, friendship as an adult is more like tending a garden. You water it regularly and gradually see something emergent in the earth.
    192 Weeks
  • It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things into what you’re doing.” Steve Jobs, Apple
    Developing Taste
  • Expose yourself to great work, this way you’ll learn how greatness looks and feels like.
    Developing Taste
  • What makes a product stand out is the brand, design, how intuitive it is, the overall experience. Taste is what matters.
    Developing Taste
  • He argued that when a society is at the crossroads of choosing the direction of further development, an individual can play a dramatic role and even become an independent power on whom the choice of the historical pathway depends.
    Sidney Hook - Wikipedia
  • A non-ordinary life requires you to live non-ordinarily.
    25
  • A writing app that searches the web for the topic you’re writing about, then composes a “suggested reading” list based on what it thinks might be helpful for you to read. (Writing apps should never write for you.)
    The 28 AI tools I wish existed
  • A massive component library designed to be rendered within the context of a chat interface. Most existing component libraries have primitives that are too low-level. Less customization, more high level widgets.
    The 28 AI tools I wish existed
  • An agent that can create a detailed curriculum for very niche topics. I should be able to say something like “I want to learn everything we know about the science of progress” and it would search the web for people, blog posts, YouTube videos, essays, and textbooks. Then it should read through all the content, and give me a guided curriculum that will take me from beginner to expert.
    The 28 AI tools I wish existed
  • A local screen recording app but it uses local models to create detailed semantic summaries of what I’m doing each day on my computer. This should then be provided as context for a chat app. I want to ask things like “Who did I forget to respond to yesterday?” I've been using Rewind for a year now, and it's nowhere near as useful as it should be.
    The 28 AI tools I wish existed
  • A Deep Research agent that can reason for multiple days. I want to give it very complex queries and let it know it can spawn hundreds of sub-agents and reason for 3 days before it needs to return a response.
    The 28 AI tools I wish existed
  • A recommendation engine that looks at my browsing history, sees what blog posts or articles I spent the most time on, then searches the web every night for things I should be reading that I’m not. In the morning I should get a digest of links. I also want to be able to give feedback on which were good suggestions and which weren’t to improve the next day’s digest.
    The 28 AI tools I wish existed
  • Make sure you’ve got employees that feel very comfortable talking about, hey, I might have screwed this up; can we go back and look at the data and make sure that I didn’t screw this up on the rocket or the spaceship.
    Gwynne Shotwell on Aiming High and Taking Big Risks | Stanford Graduate School of Business
  • figure out what the big moments where you can bring your teams together. It cures a lot of ills. It really helps with morale, and it’s incredible for team building. So launches are easy. It’s an easy spectacle to do that with. But I think it’s really important to find those kinds of moments in the development for your future businesses.
    Gwynne Shotwell on Aiming High and Taking Big Risks | Stanford Graduate School of Business
  • s soon as you get an idea you try to defeat it. You'll be able to generate more ideas because you freed up mental space. Furthermore, your existing ideas will even be stronger because they survived heavy scrutiny.
    John Carmack on Idea Generation
  • So you're telling me that all my "You are an industry leading expert at X" prompts to LLMs actually work on humans as well? :)
    How to instantly be better at things - by Cate Hall
  • Throughout most of history, it seemed impossible that someone could run a 10-second 100m, climb Everest, or land a 900 on a skateboard. But once someone did, they were followed in relatively quick succession by many others. At a certain point in history, physiologists believed that the human lung would collapse under water pressure at a depth around 30m, making deeper free diving impossible. This was proven false by Jacques Mayol, who in 1968 hit a 70m free dive. Since then, the record has been surpassed many times, and currently stands at 214m — over 7x what was once deemed physically impossi…
    How to instantly be better at things - by Cate Hall
  • It helps us put tomorrow into people’s hands today.
    How I approach my core work
  • In my work, this means bouncing between the academic nature of research: exploring unanswered questions, culling down to the strongest potential answers, and designing experiments for those hypotheses; and the applied nature of creating and publishing software: testing ideas with customers, finding out what really matters, and learning the many unknown unknowns that elude the strict academic.
    How I approach my core work
  • The researcher and the practitioner work in different ways, and think with different perspectives. In my experience, the greatest joy and the deepest insights come from working as both — exploring in abstract and application.
    How I approach my core work
  • Many mediums appreciate over time — books, film, and so forth. My grandkids will watch Toy Story, but will never use iPhoneOS — the first version of iOS. Both were core work, at different times, in Steve Jobs’ life. But only one will live on in its own right, simply appreciating, while the other is rebuilt year-round by thousands of developers in order to stay current.
    How I approach my core work
  • How can software improve people’s daily lives? What concepts might open up our thinking and elevate what we’re capable of producing? Who should be in charge of the future of personal computing, and how should they be charged with its direction?
    How I approach my core work
  • One perhaps self-serving observation. I’m happy to say I feel better about the second half of my life than the first. My advice: Don’t beat yourself up over past mistakes – learn at least a little from them and move on. It is never too late to improve. Get the right heroes and copy them. You can start with Tom Murphy ; he was the best . Remember Alfred Nobel, later of Nobel Prize fame, who – reportedly – read his own obituary that was mistakenly printed when his brother died and a newspaper got mixed up. He was horrified at what he read and realized he should change his behavior. Don’t count o…
    Microsoft Word - Gift_Press_Release_11-10-25.docx
  • I have assured my children that they do not need to perform miracles nor fear failures or disappointments. These are inevitable, and I have made my share. They simply need to improve somewhat upon what generally is achieved by government activities and/or private philanthropy,
    Microsoft Word - Gift_Press_Release_11-10-25.docx
  • And I think it’s because the thing most of them would do if they could retire tomorrow would be whatever they’re doing now at Cursor.
    Inside Cursor - Colossus
  • progress is bottlenecked on our ability to build excellent software.
    Inside Cursor - Colossus
  • “What is the ceiling-raising version of this?” It generally leads to much more ambitious thinking.
    Inside Cursor - Colossus
  • The vicissitudes of the creative process are on full display, and what’s so beautiful about the whole thing is we’re reminded that, when it comes to making something wonderful, the magic is in the mundane. Greatness is created through the collision of little sparks, ignited by people at the peak of the craft who care a lot and won’t stop working until it gets there. There’s not much talk or strategy, there’s just feeling your way through it—fingers are on instruments the whole time, playing until it works.
    Inside Cursor - Colossus
  • people at Cursor study the world as they move through it, rather than rely exclusively on their own personal experience for all their context and idea-generation (a typical pitfall of “young” people). It makes the team particularly good at finding elegant solutions to many shapes of problems.
    Inside Cursor - Colossus
  • “haven for self-motivated individual contributors.” And so far, it is. In the House of ICs (individual contributors), people generally just make things happen through their own enthusiasm and force of will rather than rely on managers to do their bidding.
    Inside Cursor - Colossus
  • “May you live all the days of your life,” someone once said, as if living were distinct from time passing.
    anhedonia | writing
  • splitting out the minimum amount of work needed to do something useful for the user and doing the rest of the work in the background
    Everything I know about good system design
  • ne service that knows about the state - i.e. it talks to a database - and other services that do stateless things. Avoid having five different services all write to the same table. Instead, have four of them send API requests (or emit events) to the first service, and keep the writing logic in that one service.
    Everything I know about good system design
  • You should try and minimize the amount of stateful components in any system.
    Everything I know about good system design
  • From Thinking Machines Lab.
    The Only Important Technology Is The Internet — Kevin Lu
  • the meeting between what you desire from your world and what the world desires of you
    What's going on here, with this human? - Graham Duncan Blog
  • how do you see someone, including yourself, clearly?
    What's going on here, with this human? - Graham Duncan Blog
  • Never think their heroes are better than yours. You’ll hear a lot about the greats, but whatever you love is great, too.
    6 things I wish I knew the day I started Berklee | Derek Sivers
  • But nobody will teach you anything. You have to teach yourself.
    6 things I wish I knew the day I started Berklee | Derek Sivers
  • You need to identify a target experience goal (”I want a smartwatch with an always-on daylight readable display that lasts for 30 days”), then break that down into features/specifications (”e-paper display”, “Bluetooth LE”, “water resistant”, “$150 retail price”) and then create a design with hardware and software components (”Sharp Memory LCD”, “150mAh lipoly battery”, “FreeRTOS” etc) that meet your specifications and fulfill your goal.
    How To Build A Smartwatch: Picking A Chip
  • this is who i am. or at least who i’m trying to be.
    you are what you launch: how software became a lifestyle brand | Omer