Mini Posts 6: Learn AI, ACX Reviews, Broomy 1.1, and Various Thoughts
Learn AI Updates, Astral Codex Ten book review contest, Broomy reaches 1.1, Is gaming the future of humanity? The Evil is where you aren't looking. Non-Awful dating advice.
Following in my mini-posts tradition (1,2,3,4,5), this post is a random mix of updates and things I’ve been thinking about. This is how I share things that seem worth saying but don’t seem worthy of a full post.
Learn AI gets a Glossary and More
Four weeks ago I released Learn AI Layer by Layer, an interactive tutorial on AI.
One slightly unusual thing I do in this tutorial is that there is a feedback form at the bottom of each chapter where people can privately message me about anything they found confusing or would like to see improved. A lot of people sent me requests for things to improve and I’ve tried to address as many as I can..
Two notable changes since launch are that there is now a glossary and each chapter ends with a quiz.
I’ve had multiple college professors express interest in using this course for their teaching. While that isn’t the use case I had in mind when I started writing the tutorial, I think it’s great if colleges use this. Please let me know if you are interested in using the course in your teaching and have suggestions of how I could change it to make it work better for you.
Astral Codex Ten Book Review Contest
Each year the blog Astral Codex Ten holds a book review contest. This is a lot more exciting than it sounds because most of the reviews aren’t “book reviews” in the conventional sense, but use a book as a starting point to explore an interesting intellectual topic. The top voted entries in the contest get published on the Astral Codex Ten blog, which is widely read by influential people, and so the contest has become one of the main ways that interesting thinkers who don’t otherwise have an online presence get their ideas heard.
This year I’ve been helping Scott run the contest. And I’ve created a fun little site that lets you read, vote for, listen to, and kindle-read all the entries. As always with the contest, entries vary in quality, but the best are truly excellent. Voting for finalists closes on June 15th.
Broomy Reaches 1.1
Broomy is an Open Source tool I wrote to make it easier to code with lots of parallel coding agents. Since I wrote Broomy this space has become a lot more crowded. Warp has become open source and switched to a UI more like Broomy, and CMux and Conductor have continued to mature. I still think Broomy is the best, but then I’m biased. I encourage you to try out the different options and see what you like. I like it if you use Broomy, but it’s not as if I’m making money from it.
Anyway, Broomy has a new 1.1 release out that fixes a load of bugs (particularly around terminal glitches in Claude Code) and improves the custom command UI. Try it out if you haven’t already.
Is Gaming the Future of Humanity?
One hot topic of conversation right now is “What are all the humans going to do when AI plus humanoid robotics becomes better at everything?”.
As William Gibson famously said “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed”. So it’s worth looking at what activities are already taking up excess human time, allowing humans to form status hierarchies, and satisfying the human need to feel like they are accomplishing something.
One of those activities is video games, which continue to take up an increasing fraction of people’s time. But many other human activities can in some senses be seen as being forms of gaming - in the sense that they are activities that lead to dubious material benefits, but allow people to gain status and feel accomplished. This includes a large fraction of academia (definitely not all), the art world, sports, and yes, blogging.
Some people believe superintelligence actually happened a long time ago, and what we experience now is actually a simulated video game reality, designed to keep us entertained.
The Evil is where you aren’t looking
We have a tendency to judge past societies more harshly than our own. That is partly because we tend to focus on the evils of past societies that many people at the time either weren’t aware of, or didn’t spend much time thinking about.
Most Germans claimed to be unaware of the extent of Nazi war crimes until they were revealed after the war ended. Few Britons were aware of the brutality of the slave trade until Thomas Clarkson’s anti slavery investigations of the 18th century. During the colonial period, most Europeans were unaware of the extent of the abuses inflicted on indigenous people. Few people were aware of the abuses that took place in large scale psychiatric institutions in the 1950s.
Some people argue that our current society will be judged harshly by future generations for the way it treats factory farmed animals - which is something that a lot of people are somewhat aware of but spend little time thinking about.
I suspect that our society, like all past societies, will be judged more harshly than we expect, and that much of what future generations will condemn us for will either be things we are unaware of, or spend little time thinking about. While we shouldn’t ignore the evils of the past, we should do so with humility, because we are probably messing up more than we realize too.
Non-Awful Dating Advice
Noah Smith wrote an excellent piece on dating advice for men. Like most men who have been happily married for 13 years, I spend approximately zero percent of my life thinking about dating. Noah argues that a lot of online writing about dating is bad (e.g. incels), and that it’s useful for normal people who mostly don’t write about dating to occasionally do so, so that people get a better sense of what normal people think is good advice.
With that in mind, and with the disclaimer that this is not a blog about dating, and I’ll likely never write about this topic again, here are some of my quick thoughts:
Make yourself easy to approach - The easiest way to start a conversation with a stranger is to have them start the conversation instead, and the easiest way to do that is to give them an obvious thing to say to you. Wear a T-shirt that is an obvious conversation starter (a joke, a band you like, an activity you did, whatever). Carry an interesting object with you. Wear an interesting item of clothing. Read a real book rather than a kindle or phone, so people can see what you are reading.
Don’t just talk to attractive women. Talk to everyone - Going to a party and sequentially hitting on all the women is weird and creepy. Talk to everyone with no regard to whether they are young, old, male, female, ugly, beautiful etc. Don’t decide whether to “hit on someone” until you’ve been talking to them for at least 5 minutes. Don’t forget that a lot of people meet their spouse through their social network. That awkward-looking guy might introduce you to your future partner.
Have something to invite people to - Asking someone on a date who you only just met can be intense - both for you, and them. But if you don’t invite them to something then you might never see them again. So invite them to a group thing that isn’t a date. Invite them to the party you are throwing, to join a group going out for lunch, to go to your standup comedy show, to go listen to your band, to join your debate club, etc.
Do things for people - “Would you like a cookie” is a great way to start a conversation. So is “would you like to play my accordion”, and “would you like help with that”. Look for ways to do things for people. It will help start conversation and people will want to do things for you in return, including introducing you to their friends.