The handwaves were soft and acceptable
Five fragments for the week of May 11, 2026
Hello from a return to San Francisco, though not for long. Yesterday, we went to Yutori (a mini-emporium, safe to say) and for a hike at The Dish nearby, then for a sushi dinner. The kids can both write now, so they both wrote me cards. Bentley actually wrote three.
Here are five fragments that stuck with me last week…
writing papers was cozy. the handwaves were soft and acceptable, the motivations section could tell its little story. the abstract mattered, but the footnotes were like walking through a rural field of dandelions where no one could see you because no one cared. now every dandelion has ten trillion precisely honed weights briefly staring into your soul. every sentence of the winding footnote on your pet theory, written just for you, is deconstructed by six orbital datacenters. its reasoning traces have sketched out papers killing each of your handwaves, none worth publishing. it knows the motivations section was bs and understands your real motivations in a way you don’t. by sentence two it is comparing your thesis’s core flaw and your core flaw as a person to a scientist-monk from 1042 who was wrong in the same way for the same reason
– Nick Cammarata on X, May 9, 2026. Starts as a statement, ends as something closer to speculative fiction. Right or wrong, I always get the sense that Nick writes by hand.
Surely a big part of the wow! of Claude Code was that it required a richer ceremony: downloading a program, inviting it into your digital home, launching an odd new interface. Yet even that is pretty thin gruel compared to the buildup and payoff of, e.g., a trek to the West Coast Computer Faire to behold the brand-new Apple II.
A bit of distance does wonders for an experience; a bit of waiting has never been a bad thing!
– Robin Sloan, “News travels too fast these days,” May 11, 2026. This was certainly my experience of getting started with OpenClaw: a majestic buildup that let me feel close to the metal. Even debugging it for hours yesterday morning (to get it back to a working state after overreaching my own understanding) had a feeling of supplication to it.
why girls are into horoscopes:
- gives permission to change (“tonight is your night to amp the romance!”)
- invites a rewriting of her life's narrative ("you are in your expansive, knowledge-seeking ninth house")
- connects her to Mother Nature and divine mysteries (“with mercury in retrograde and the sensitive moon floating through...”)
every successful product meets a fundamental human need!
– Julie Zhuo on X, May 8, 2026. Jobs-to-be-done as far as the eye can see.
Here’s my hot take: There are moments in software where the preview is more important than the feature following it. That’s because the preview making things faster isn’t just the difference between finishing something sooner or later. It’s a difference of doing something or not doing it at all. Would you even attempt to use curves if each adjustment took minutes or hours, especially in a land without undo?
– Marcin Wichary, “A preview of the future,” Unsung, May 10, 2026. The insight here about previews seems true to me…in fact, I think it’s a lot of the magic of Gamma. A well-generated deck is a preview of a presentation you’ll be able to give without heartache. Also, I’m just partial to the phrase “a land without undo.”
There are no rules with the game, but it is undoubtedly played in the usual manner, with the various hazards and penalties being listed in a booklet describing the various towns or places together with the rules.
– Object history of “The Panorama of Europe, a New Game,” published in 1815 by Wallis & Son, found in the Victoria & Albert Museum collection online. I was in it for the image but then this tucked-away description completely charmed me. Feels like a rogue cataloger trying to “check the box” of filling out a stock field pre-LLMs. It is undoubtedly played in the usual manner!
Until next time,
Diana
https://dianaberlin.com