Nate Meyvis

A catch-all post (and: why have catch-all posts?)

"Catch-all" or "quick hits" posts are useful in ways I didn't realize. Here's my current list:

  1. They give you a place to share items without either writing at length about them or making very short posts.1
  2. They force you to practice shorter-form writing.
  3. They let you shorten your queue of things to write about; this makes it easier to find good longer-form subjects...
  4. ...and reduces the bad feeling of seeing a bunch of half-baked notes in your queue...
  5. ...while still enforcing a bit of "am I thinking anything meaningful or just dumping a note in a queue?" discipline. (I maintain the contrarian2 view that quick capture is a bit overrated.)

And here are today's quick notes:

  1. Here is John Gruber making a useful AppleScript extension and, most interestingly, contemplating human motivation: "When something in your workflow is bugging you, you should figure out a way to address it. Why I didn’t write (and share) this script years ago is a mystery for the ages." As AI tools get better and better, this ability to overcome inertia gets more and more important.
  2. Here is a brief portrait of Riley Walz, an amusing case study in having extremely little motivational friction or inertia.
  3. Approximately everything Owain Evans publishes is interesting. Here is a LinkedIn3 post about out-of-context reasoning.
  4. ...and here is Owain Evans et al. on "weird generalization." It's an important lesson, and I've never seen a more entertaining abstract of an LLM paper.

  1. Short posts are fine, but too many of them clutter up a feed, or at least the kind of feed I want to make.↩

  2. Contrarian in the productivity blogosphere, that is. This view is extremely orthodox in the wider world, where relatively few people worry about optimizing systems for quick capture.↩

  3. LinkedIn is very much not my preferred source for AI explainers, but Owain just has a "make things interesting" force field. We overlapped a bit in the Columbia philosophy department, and things he said make up a hugely disproportionate number of my conversation memories from those years.↩

#catch-all #meta #software