Max Countryman
I put off rebuilding my personal site because I wasn’t sure what to do with the longer articles I’d written over the years. Some may still be relevant; others, perhaps not.
I wanted a place to capture shorter thoughts. In doing so, I happened upon a pattern I like even better: small notes can live in the feed, while larger ideas can become standalone pages—like my Tides appearance study.
Not every idea needs to fit the same shape.
I built an interactive study while designing a light and dark mode toggle for my site. It let me compare the sun and crescent across sizes and inspect their transition frame by frame. The study became a fun artifact of the process itself.
I think some of the disagreement about AI comes down to what we want from programming.
There’s the intricate puzzle, and the satisfaction when the pieces finally fit. Then there’s the thing you wanted to build.
I want the thing to exist. The puzzle can be satisfying, but I don’t need to solve it myself for the result to matter.
A recent Hacker News thread about managing skills became a debate about whether they’re useful at all, especially as models improve.
I wonder if the name gets in the way. Some “skills” seem closer to descriptions of desired behavior. A model may already know how to do something; we still have preferences about how it goes about it.
A skill can be useful without making a model smarter. Sometimes it just makes our expectations explicit.
Cuckoo hashing feels almost like a vacancy chain in reverse. With hermit crabs, an empty shell starts a chain of moves.
In cuckoo hashing, each key has two possible slots. A new arrival can displace an occupant into its alternate slot, which may displace another, until one finds an empty slot.
A vacancy pulls a chain of moves; an arrival pushes one.
Nice attends to how something feels in the moment. Kind considers what it means for someone over time.
Urgent tells us how soon something needs attention. Important tells us how much it matters.
Smart finds a way to accomplish something. Wise considers whether it’s worth doing and what might follow.
Nice, urgent, and smart are often immediately apparent. Kind, important, and wise can take longer to recognize. We risk mistaking what’s easiest to notice for what matters most.
I’m fascinated by how vacancy chains unfold in nature.
Wikipedia describes both synchronous and asynchronous vacancy chains in hermit crabs. During a group exchange, crabs form a queue from biggest to smallest around an empty shell. When a crab of the right size takes that shell, its former home becomes available to the next crab:
… the crabs then all rapidly exchange shells, in sequence, until they all have a larger shell, allowing them to grow without restriction.
I’m putting together a dev environment in a VM with ChatGPT and Codex. As part of that work, I’m using Codex to develop a small set of skills for use throughout the environment.
The goal is to make improving the environment part of working in it. Time spent refining how it approaches a task should carry forward into better results on future work.
Full development automation requires production context to become part of the agent’s working context. An agent needs to understand what happens after it deploys to decide what to change next. That changes what the development loop has to include.
I’ve started using VMs to contain Codex.
One useful side effect is that my development environment is moving wholesale into the VM. Tart has been particularly impressive.
I’m rebuilding my personal site as a small, text-first microblog.
It’s deliberately simple: a chronological feed, permanent links, and an archive I own.