bits and bobs

One of my favourite people, Alex Komoroske writes and publishes his insights from the week in something he calls bits and bobs. I’ve begun to interview him on our fav bits and bobs from the week. Released weekly.

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week of 3/24/2025

  • Systems should have a mix of squishy and hard things

  • Squishy things allow adaptability, hard things allow dependability

  • LLMs are fundamentally more squishy than traditional programming

  • The moving bullseye metaphor for adaptability

  • Noise as the raw material for adaptability

  • Efficiency and adaptability are in tension

  • The world shifting from Physics Envy to Biology Envy

  • “Jailbreak your data”

  • Wikipedia as the lone public park in an internet of shopping malls

  • Trust conflict between advertising and personal assistants

  • Personal vs commercial software

  • The closer you look, the more convincing it becomes (definition of rigor)

  • The compounding domino model of human interaction

  • Every action with irreversible side effects must be initiated by humans

  • Tacit knowledge and ambient computing challenges

  • Prosocial software that's optimistic, human-centered, and collaborative

  • Data-first vs UI-first approaches

week of 3/17/2025

  • Documents being alive versus chats being mostly dead

  • Google Docs as multiplayer conversation spaces

  • Emergent social conventions in shared documents

  • The distinction between tools vs. apps

  • Hermetically sealed apps vs. general purpose tools

  • The "exoskeleton-horse-butler" spectrum of agency

  • Tools serving user agency vs. tools serving company goals

  • "Just right" tools that align with human aspirations

  • Vibe coding as fun but having a low ceiling

  • Vibe coding on personal data as a powerful unlock

  • App-based vs. data-centric security models

  • Information Flow Control for tracking sensitive data flows

  • Computers starting as "pianos" and becoming "CD players"

  • Participatory democracy requiring "mental muscle"

  • The decline of user agency in modern computing

  • The "runaway engine of human society" accelerating with technology

  • Evolutionary search through idea-space accelerating with technology

  • The tension between "what people want" vs. "what people want to want"

  • Algorithm optimization for engagement vs. human wellbeing

  • The Unix philosophy of small, composable tools

  • Combinatorial potential of small tools vs. monolithic applications

  • The mathematics of security enabling combinatorial software

week of 3/10/2025

  • Soulful computing

  • Software bending to humans vs. humans bending to software

  • "Oozification"

  • Software as primarily social, not technical

  • "Vibe coding"

  • Security model limitations

  • New security paradigms

  • "Pipes"

  • LLMs as "human-level reasoning at the speed of light"

  • The disappearance of file systems

  • Cozy digital spaces

  • Context collapse

  • Organization size and coordination costs

  • "Tyranny of the rocket equation" applied to organizations

  • Mechanistic emergence in digital ecosystems

  • Email as "our most precious data stream"

  • Trust and alignment in personal AI