Ramadan Mubarak

Ramadan Mubarak, y'all!

I have the app "Pillars" on my phone. Which today presented this (to me) bewildering offer to automate my Laylatul Qadr.

Here's all the different religious apps on my phone right now:

• Echo: a (Christian I think?) prayer app.
• Pillars: a Muslim prayer app (with cool features like a compass that points you to the Qibala).
• Hallow: a Catholic prayer app.
• Sefaria: a Jewish holy text reader.
• Quran: a Koran reader, with a mode where Mishray Al-Afasy will sing the verses to you.
• Bible: unfortunately doesn't sing aloud, but has a mode for making inspirational-poster style images with a verse on a stock photo background.

Firmware Liberation Party

 At the playground this evening, I saw a mom who looked marginally cooler than me, but she was wearing a t-shirt that said "Austin, Texas". Which is uncool, right? Wearing the band's t-shirt to their show.

As I was considering berating myself for not doing my part to keep Austin weird, I wondered what t-shirt I ought to be wearing. What would be cool? And my brain provided: "firmware". Lower-case, cryptic. As a band name, cool. Like "Floating Points". But somebody might think it's a startup. Uncool. So maybe make it punk? Firmware Liberation Now!

2025 in Preview

 I love that Blogspot is still here. Assuming that I find the time / motivation / focus, here's a list of things I'd like to write about in 2025.

• LLMs broadly, but particularly:
• tool use,
• chain-of-thought / inference-time-compute,
• organizational and business structures that include LLM agents,
• Tyler Cowen's "writing for the LLM" idea.
• AGI + society, as in:
• unemployment,
• decoupling of labor and capital,
• meaning and purpose,
• acceleration of robotics,
• what percentage of Americans will be a streamer or influencer in 30 years.
• Optimism
• the era of flash mobs, what was that all about,
• lucid dreams and Linklater,
• children's books,
• bespoke detritus,
• ceramic tiles,
• lifestyle prototyping,
• spaghetti noodles for throples
• water tower passport stamps,
• etc.