FT: “Why humans should be more like hedgehogs…People used to seek sun, fresh air and respite — but we have forgotten the lost art of convalescence at our peril.”
Andrej Karpathy: “I’ve never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between. I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become available over the last ~year and a failure to claim the boost feels decidedly like skill issue. There’s a new programmable layer of abstraction to master (in addition to the usual layers below) involving agents, subagents, their prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, IDE integrations, and a need to build an all-encompassing mental model for strengths and pitfalls of fundamentally stochastic, fallible, unintelligible and changing entities suddenly intermingled with what used to be good old fashioned engineering. Clearly some powerful alien tool was handed around except it comes with no manual and everyone has to figure out how to hold it and operate it, while the resulting magnitude 9 earthquake is rocking the profession. Roll up your sleeves to not fall behind.”
India Dispatch: “For the last two years, generative AI was going to kill Indian IT. The argument seemed almost self-evident — if machines can write code, a $250 billion industry built on getting humans to write it cheaper has nowhere left to go. Investors acted accordingly, and the sector has since underperformed the broader market by 30% or more. The industry has spent this year pushing back. It cut margins, restructured workforces, built platforms, and told clients that AI has not transformed their enterprises because their enterprises are a 30-year accumulation of SAP, Oracle, Workday and middleware that was never designed to talk to anything. And finally, Indian IT is who you call when systems need to talk to each other.”
NYTimes: Questions to ask yourself for a happier New Year. Among them: “When did you feel the most joyful and carefree? What gave you energy — and what drained it? What seemed impossible — but you did it anyway? What habit, if you did it more consistently, would have a positive effect on your life?”
