Links: October 2025
Recent reading and watching over the past few months.
- By me:
- Flying a drone into a tornado is as awesome as it sounds. (Video)
- In praise of Midjourney: These are pretty cool images. (Link)
- Same guy, Andy Masley, on how to learn more effectively. He inspired me to pick up the book The Science of Accelerated Learning by Peter Hollins. Some tidbits: If you actually want to internalize information in a lasting way, you have to engage with it often. Simple as that. It's also more effective to learn the abstractions of a subject before atomic facts. Having a mental model of a domain before you learn its particular syntax lets you connect disparate items into a cohesive narrative, which is how humans hold onto things longer-term. (Link)
- Masley also recommended Andy Matuschak and now my pal Andrew and I are obsessed with implementing his concept of "Evergreen notes." It makes me want to bring entry linking into Lucive soon. (Link)
- In the vein of my piece above on building software with LLMs, here's an interesting (if not a bit heavy) CLI tool from GitHub that formalizes the spec-driven development process with Claude Code and other tools. While I think this is awesome, I'm still evolving my own homegrown system that's more lightweight and so haven't been using it much lately. Another writeup to follow on that. (Link)
- One of the reasons I've used the Specify prompts less lately is that I find Sonnet 4.5 to be extremely capable without all of that overhead. Well done to Anthropic, yet again. (Link)
- Another related work on getting more out of coding agents. (Link)
- Make decent music with AI. (Link)
- Naval Ravikant (who I've followed for a long time) always plugs David Deutsch, but also recently, Arthur Schopenhauer. It's because these authors write in high-density. High-density material respects the reader's time. This line of thinking inspired me to pick up Essays and Aphorisms. I've been attempting to process very short passages before bed, Marcus Aurelius-style. Here's Naval on the topic of density. (Link)
- One of the most raw and honest accounts of going to war in Ukraine that I've read. From the perspective of an American volunteer. (Link)
- A kickass variant on Cacio E Pepe. (Link)
- Where does Iran go from here? (Link)
