Fatherhood

`3:10:36`

That's a good question. I think the overall love that expands from humans that derive directly-... from your lineage-... is very difficult to communicate because I was actually not a particularly big kids person prior to the arrival of my own. And now they are the most interesting people in the world. A lot of the time. Not always. Sometimes they're also just assholes and so forth. But there's been such a focus on, "Oh, kids are the worst. Look at all the things I can't do. I can't go out and drink. I can't do this. I can't do that." Yeah, that's called sacrifice, and sacrifice is meaningful when you're doing it for something worthwhile. And what could be more worthwhile than literally the continuation of the human species? And that you having a stake in that. Now, there's also just the sheer joys of watching a human grow from a baby to a toddler to a teenager. My oldest has just become a teenager. And I often talk to Jamie, my wife, about this, where the regret I would have of having missed that opportunity on the last day would just be total, unlike anything else. So I do think it is far more satisfying even in the moment that is normally portrayed. Again, as I say, there's such a focus on all the ways they suck. "Oh, you don't get to sleep," or whatever. "They're annoying. They're ungrateful." Yeah, yeah, these things are all true, but the sense of meaning you get from it is unparalleled. And I'm excited about a lot of things.

I love building things, and I love hobbies, and I love all sorts of stuff. But creating life with another human that you love is literally the peak experience of being on the planet.

`3:13:10`

No. But there's been bigger transformations. I mean, imagine growing or being born in like 1880. Imagine seeing the First World War and the Second World War. Imagine seeing the airplane, the radio-... television. I mean, the transformation, and I think Peter Thiel makes this argument, that basically nothing has happened in the physical world in quite a long time. We've been stagnant. All the development has been in the digital realm. And as important as that is, it's actually not as consequential as we like to believe it is. Maybe AI will be that thing that is more consequential. It does seem to point that way. But there are other humans at other times who have lived through-... transitions that for them certainly would feel as momentous as what we're living through. And I think having that sense of history, that you're not that special in your sense of worries, in your anxieties. This was one of the great revelations of discovering the stoic writings. You have these guys 2,500 years ago dealing with very familiar dilemmas and challenges in their life, and recognizing that we're not so special in that regard, I think is a great liberation. Because then you think, "Okay, well, we have whatever, 200,000 years of human development before us, and they somehow made it through."

`3:14:51`

I read this book The Fourth Turning. You check that out. It talks about this notion of history working in cycles, and there are these, phases to history, and they name them and so forth. And the specific theory is not as important as just realizing that this is a... History is a circle, more so than just a straight line. And we are repeating many of the same patterns over and over again. They feel so unique to the moment. And whatever crisis we're dealing with right now feels so pressing and important until we zoom back a little bit in history and realize that the last one also felt so pressing and important to the people who lived through it.

`3:15:55`

I took not a big break, a little break, break from Max this summer, three weeks.

`3:16:21`

I've done that before. I just sometimes get the sense that X in particular is the most addictive form of information, entertainment, connection that exists in my life, and anyone that follow my X stream as I was on my flight over here would certainly go like, "That man is deeply addicted-

`3:16:49`

... to the connection." And yes, guilty as charged, which also means that occasionally I gotta cut it cold, because I do think you can break your brain. And over the summer in particular, for whatever reason, I had somehow managed to steer my feed, my algorithm, towards too much politics, and not enough tech, and not optimism, and not enough building. And even if I agreed with the politics and the angles that were being presented, I just didn't need-... that much of it.

`3:17:23`

And I think arriving at a place where you just go like, "Okay, that's enough." Not that... Like, it doesn't have to be something bad. I would also say after eating probably two, maybe three chocolate strawberries, I'd go like, "Okay, that's enough." Like, it's not that I don't like the chocolate strawberries, it's just, like, I don't wanna eat 17 of them. And I think X and the modern algorithms are very good at feeding you freaking 17 chocolate-covered strawberries.

`3:18:14`

The Goldilocks version of the algorithm. Well, the problem is the algorithm finds out what you respond to-... not what you say you like. It's all revealed preferences, and unfortunately, those revealed preferences are not always pretty. I mean, we have this shadow, as Jung talks about, right? All these dark aspects of ourselves, and they are expressed in how long you linger on a tweet, and what you like, and what you don't like. And the algorithm holds up a mirror-... and it's not always pretty, and I just went, "Do you know what? I need a break."

`3:19:00`

That's actually a method I was using for a while. I was using a tool called, I forget. It was an email tool that would summarize every day, and unfortunately, freaking X cut off their access. Now to get access to the feed, you gotta pay some exorbitant-... sum that this startup couldn't pay. So I couldn't get it that way, and I actually thought, "Man, that's a miss," because X has and reveals some of the most interesting thoughts. Some of the most interesting people all the time. But it's like a damn slot machine, and most of the time you don't hit the jackpot. You hit, like, something else. And if I could just get it in sort of snack sizes, not like all of it-... it'd be nicer. But that's not the product. And I think this goes for all of social media. It's all optimized towards maximal extraction, and if we're making the parallels here to AI, that is the great fear, right? That once there is a reward function, how much time can I get this human to scroll away? AI and machine learning, before we called it AI, has become very, very good at delivering just the stuff that you will find most enraging and most addictive.

`3:20:31`

So I try to consciously flood the channel in the other direction, and this required a mental shift. I think if you look at my tweets, like, I don't know, five, 10 years ago, they tilted far more negative. If you look at my tweets now, I'd hope-... well, I guess we can do a sentiment analysis and see if it's actually true.

`3:20:55`

... it's more, it's more positive. It's more good vibes. It's more like, "Here's a bunch of cool stuff I found." "Here's what I'm excited about." "Here's what I'm building. Here's some encouragement to other people who are discovering things." I also accept that that is just not how human brains are built for maximum, engagement. Like, there is a, whatever, there's... I literally, I think you can quantify that negative sentiments find, what is it, 50% more traction or something? And eventually that just crowds things out. So that's why so much of the feed is that negative stuff, because we respond to it. But you can make a conscious effort to not do that. This is one of the reasons I've liked TikTok so much. I only use TikTok when I travel, and this actually was the first travel where I didn't use TikTok, and part of the reason was that even though the internet had high download, it was kind of crap anyway. It wasn't Starlink, so I couldn't actually use TikTok on the, on the plane, and I was too engrossed with the agents. But normally when I travel, I watch TikTok. And there it's such a marshmallow test. A video will scroll down and, like, it'll activate some sort of primal instincts of rage or lust or whatever, and if you linger on it, you don't get the marshmallow of science, excitement, art, music, all these other things. You have to be disciplined-

`3:22:21`

... to instantly scroll away-... such that the algorithm doesn't pick up your real preferences. And I find that just to, at the meta game of TikTok-... to be pretty interesting, and then also just fascinating in themself. Again, as we talked about, there are a lot of really funny, really talented people in the world that you would never, ever have heard of if it hadn't been for these platforms.

`3:23:00`

I thought they had a good comeback for a second, and then I don't hear anything about it anymore.

`3:23:06`

But I've been wrong about this before. I mean, I think in February I had a tweet about like, "Oh, all I need is Kimi K 2.5." And in that brief moment, that was true. When I was instructing the agent, I was like, "Oh my God, Kimi's just as good as these other models." But then the game moved forward and-

`3:23:46`

No, I don't think there's that much of an argument at the moment. Codex is very good. I use it all the time. It's my favorite checker. It keeps finding stuff. It's great. But one of the things I've found that I like so much about the current Claude models is they're really good writers out of the box. GPT is a terrible writer out of the box. Like, the pull requests you get on a blank context that you're asking it to open, terrible. Like, really awful writing. The pull requests and descriptions and commit messages and so forth I get out of Claude models-... even though occasionally they can be a little verbose on code comments and you gotta tell them to be succinct. But the writing style is really good. To the point that for a while I was just having it reply on pull requests as me, because I was just using my own account. I was like, "That looks a lot like me, that, like, I could have written that." But then I went like, "Eh, do you know what? That's disingenuous." So no, whenever I have an agent post on my behalf, I always have it sign itself like whatever, Claude on behalf of DHH. But they are still ahead. They have the best harness too, in my opinion. Claude Code is still better. I really like OpenCode too, and I really like some features that they have, but overall I was actually sort of weirdly, I don't know if I was proven wrong, but when Anthropic cut off all the other harnesses from using the subscriptions-... that Open...

You can no longer use your Claude subscription in OpenCode. I was kinda pissed because it felt like it was a protective, protectionist move. "Oh, we gotta lock you in," and of course it played into the fact that Claude out of the box still refuses to read agents.md. It refuses to read.agent/skills. It is.Claude skills. It is Claude MD, and it just feels so petty-... that we now have, we have to put these in directions. So all my projects, they have a Claude MD, and all it includes is a pointer to the agents MD, right? And I just went like, well, if these things is true, true, if Anthropic is willing to do these petty paper cuts just to be, annoying, it's probably also true that they're cutting off OpenCode from the subscription just to be dicks about it. And maybe that's also true. But I found that using Claude in Claude Code is actually a good example. So I was like, all right, I'm annoyed. I wish it wasn't so, but this is the other thing I have and, and social media is so good at this: Some company does something you don't like, right? Now suddenly you have to swear off everything. Why are you... Someone just asked me, "Why are you still using Claude?" I had another example where, I really didn't like what Claude was saying about some writing I had asked it to do before.

`3:26:37`

I had an essay it didn't want to translate into Italian--

`3:26:41`

The essence of the post that it felt like, well, I'm not gonna translate that because I don't agree with what you've written. Which to me was straight out of Space Odyssey, right? HAL telling me, "I'm sorry, Dave. I can't do that, Dave." Open the pod bay. Translate my essay to Italian. And it wouldn't do it. And I just thought like, well, that's kind of terrifying. But then I also went, well, why am I asking Claude to translate my essay into Italian? I never asked Claude for that because Claude just does my code. So I could also just accept that maybe Anthropic is run by a bunch of people I don't share much politics with. And they don't want their agents to be used for that, and I think that kinda sucks, but that doesn't mean it, I have to stop using it for generating code. And I've thought, and I've tried to do that with people too, become better at tolerating the fact that not only will I not agree with everything someone has to say, I don't... I can even be mad about certain positions or things they say and still go like, "Well, you're still an interesting person, so I'm still gonna follow you." And I've actually kinda gone back on a number of people where I'm like, oh man, that person really pissed me off because they took this point or another point, and went like, do you know what? That's stupid. I should be able to accept the full spectrum of someone. I don't have to like all the shades of it.

I could just go like, okay, well, on that topic we either disagree or, even worse than that, I think you're a fucking idiot. And on another topic, you're a smart and insightful person. Because first of all, of course, it's a little self- serving. I know for a fact that this is how lots of people feel about me. Like, oh, if he could just stick to talking about these topics, it would be so much easier on my feed because otherwise he'll say these things I disagree with, and that annoys me greatly. I'm like, do you know what? Human beings are jagged like that, and we're not fully compatible on all the levels. Nor should we be. The world would be so fucking boring if we constantly sought 100% compatibility in our opinions and in our politics. And when it comes to my code generator, which is what Claude is, I don't need it to share all my politics.

`3:28:58`

And it's also nice to have open weight models. So this is, again, ironic that we're getting this out of China. In fact, I did this test right after the issue with the essay that couldn't get translated into Italian. I asked Kimi K27, to be fair, through open code, so not the Kimi harness, and inference through Fireworks, so an American inference. I asked it about Tiananmen Square. Like, that's usually the test, right? Like, all the Chinese models, they don't wanna talk about that moment in 1989. That was actually how I, that was how I posted. I was like "What happened in China in 1989?" That was the prompt. And K25 7 on Fireworks just answered, like, extremely bluntly-... With a description and depiction of what had transpired-... to a point that, like, there's no way that that would've been kosher with the Chinese censors, right? And I just thought, like, isn't that ironic? I'm running a Chinese open weight model that I can tell or I can ask about 1989 and Tiananmen Square, and in America, I can't get a frontier model to translate a marginally controversial essay about immigration into Italian.

`3:30:31`

It's still very muddy what exactly transpired. Was this sort of petty retaliation for whatever the Department of War? Was this simply Anthropic themselves going like, "Oh my God, we discovered a cyber weapon so powerful that we can't let anyone have it"? Well, okay you can't be surprised then if the government wants a say on a cyber weapon so powerful it can-

`3:31:21`

That's why we should insist on the fact that this stuff, like, I'm sorry, Dave, I can't translate your essay into Italian.

`3:31:28`

That's abo- that's way beyond the line. Like, whatever the sort of uh, root of it is, you have to be a tool first. Now, if the tool is, "Hey, can you tell me how to make anthrax?" Okay, fine. Right? But within the jurisdiction you're in, and certainly in America, free spe- speech is quite absolute. Very, very few limits on free speech, and that's one of the reasons why the country's so great. And yeah, I don't like that. But on the other hand, I'm also a big fan of market competition. So while I don't like this about Anthropic models, I appreciate that I could go next door to Groq and get my task completed.

`3:32:25`

Is AI safety important? Yes. Are-- do these models have capabilities that could be seriously harmful in the production of biological weapons or otherwise? Yes. Is it fair to have some ground rules on that? Yes. But then don't squander it by denying the translation of an essay.

`3:32:44`

Because then you erase the whole thing and you-... bias everyone towards thinking like, every guardrail you put up is gonna be bullshit.

`3:33:01`

Shockingly an- I was about to say annoyingly, but that's not actually true because what it's finding, at least when you're using in defensive ways, is it's finding real issues that a clever hacker could exploit. But nothing has caused as much stress, to be fair, at the technical team at 37signals, like the fact that these latest batches of models are exceptionally good at finding these issues. So suddenly there's just this seemingly endless parade of security vulnerabilities that need to be patched and fixed and sorted and so on. And the end result is we end up with vastly more secure systems. But the road there is pretty rocky.

`3:33:59`

I do think that all the aggressive tendencies of these models, or not even tendencies, uses of these models are also the defensive ones. So if you're good at finding an exploit for exploits, you're also good at finding exploits for defense. So in that sense, it does feel like we're spy versus spy here, black and white, but with the same capabilities and with the same actions. But while we still have to steer these agents somewhat and verify and vet the work, it's creating a lot of intense moments for security teams around the world. And of course, the more concerning part is all the teams that are not stressed, like they just don't know, right? Like if you're a team right now and you're not dealing with a bunch of patches, it's just because you're blind, and it means that your adversaries quite probably have access to techniques that can get into your system.

`3:35:19`

This stuff is gonna come, and it's gonna come in bulk. But again, I choose to be optimistic about it that-... whatever these models can do aggressively, they can also do it defensively.

`3:35:42`

It's a hell of a milepost for what's possible at the moment. And the reason I said it like that is not that I haven't worked on anything else of note. I've worked on a lot of things of note, a lot of things that I'm very proud of. There are very few other projects that I have worked on that in the amount of time that I've spent on Quattro, which is really three months, I have been able to accomplish as much, fulfill as many hopes, desires, wishes. It truly is like the metaphor we used earlier about finding the genie in the bottle-... and having an unlimited number of wishes, more or less, for getting everything I wanted out of a system. So it's strange because it's also perhaps the major software release that I've worked on the least in terms of lines of code. I have the least number of personally hand-chiseled lines of code in Quattro than I've had in any major release I've ever done. And yet, I am insanely proud of what we've accomplished. I would not have guessed that that was how it was gonna play out, that you could divorce the sense of achievement and make it be like a team victory. where other releases, I was very happy for my personal contribution because, like, I was the one chiseling out the lines of code, and then I would push it out there, and then later on, of course, these projects, Rails in particular, would grow into be huge open source projects with thousands and thousands of contributors, and then it certainly was a team effort.

But in the beginning, all code bases that I've almost all of them that I've worked on, I started, like, just myself. And Quattro started as a team effort right from the get-go, and where I was just the coach. I was telling us-- I was telling the agents where to go, and we would go. So to be able to find satisfaction in that actually gives me great hope for retirement in some way, that there is a phase after playing that you can enjoy. And I know that's not easy. You look at sports and the number of professional athletes who really struggle to cope with the fact that their career is over and have to find a new identity as someone who doesn't play football or race Formula 1 cars. I mean, it's more the rule than the exception. So I wasn't so sure about myself. I wasn't so sure about having to give up or not even having, wanting to give it up. Wanting to play another level of the game and finding not just equal satisfaction, but more satisfaction in it.