Perfection is a security blanket
Five fragments for the week of April 20, 2026
Hello from late April. A week from now, I’ll be back in London.
Here are five fragments that stuck with me last week…
I’ve come to think that the traits we used to call slow advantages, like being well-read, having a strong reference set, and really knowing the history of your craft, were always valuable but never urgent. They compounded quietly over years. But in a world where anyone can produce the obvious thing instantly, they become the only thing that can pull your output away from the model’s defaults, which makes them the difference between work that reads as cared-for and work that reads as whatever the computer handed you.
– Hilary Gridley, “you are not in the race against slop cannons,” writerbuilder, April 20, 2026. It’s felt almost indulgent to realize that “having a strong reference set” may be urgent at last. Be still my heart!
The new language models are children of the reasoning revolution, and they stream out these long, circuitous thinking traces. They are said to be applying more compute to our questions and challenges.
This is subtle, but that “more” isn’t particularly about thinking harder. Rather, it’s about thinking in the right direction. It is not the gas pedal, but the steering wheel — better yet, the GPS map in the dashboard.
The reasoning revolution depends, in part, on the unreasonable effectiveness of specific words: twists like “but wait” and “actually”, which operate as powerfully as magic spells. (The English department NEEDS to get into the game with this stuff.) Is the phrase “but wait” really a white-hot kernel of intellectual effort? No. It’s a sign planted in the ground, pointing THAT-A-WAY, towards a particular kind of document that humans find useful.
– Robin Sloan, “Reasoning models don’t think so much as navigate,” April 10, 2026. It strikes me that I am really ridiculously lucky that some of my favorite thinkers are now more or less full-time writers: Hilary, Robin, Marcin. (Plus or minus some olive oil harvesting.) When I go to catch up on their blogs or blog equivalents now, there’s more to read than when blogs were in their heyday. Separately, I also like Robin‘s follow-up aside: “I’m not dismissively saying, these are just documents; I am plainly observing, these are documents. If you don’t think documents are cool, even sometimes cosmic, that’s on you!”
Sometimes it’s nice to see a computer working when there’s a good reason; some apps like banking apps even insert artificial, visible delays after crucial operations, just so that the users feel comfortable knowing their important transaction went through.
But sometimes it’s nice to see a computer working for no reason at all.
– Marcin Wichary, “Area connected to a given node in a multi-dimensional array with some matching attribute,” Unsung, April 18, 2026. Speaking of Marcin! Featuring the sudden dopamine / nostalgia delivery mechanism of a looping Minesweeper video. When does instant feel flimsy? When does delay mean business?
What is story? It's not so obvious. We all recognize stories. But I've found it hard to explain to myself what a story is, much less a good story. I enjoy Douglas Adams' quip that a story is "80,000 words in a cunning order". It's both a good joke and a striking insight. But I suspect Adams said it partly to dodge the question of what a story is. But an idea I enjoy playing with is that a story is a premise that makes you strongly desire to know what happens next, and which continues until that feeling is satisfied.
– Michael Nielsen, “Developing creative identity,” March 25, 2026. Recommended by Celine. “A story is a premise that makes you strongly desire to know what happens next”: I’ve never thought of it that way.
Guilt means we’re making tradeoffs. Perfection is a security blanket.
– Moose Paksoy, a dear colleague of mine, after a team retro last week.
Until next time,
Diana
https://dianaberlin.com