Steve Newman: uncertainty

Transcript context

…have never in a million years bothered to implement a pretty printed backup viewer. But that was one sentence in one of my prompts. And this helps me be reassured that the backups are really working. And yeah, this was like a bunch of machinery for importing all of my Substack subscriptions, which involved vibe coding, bookmarklet to like rip apart my Substack subscriptions page HTML, because there wasn't another good way to get the list of, you know, my Substacks. You know, the just there's all these like the feature set is much longer than I would have bothered to implement myself, you know, which is one of the interesting things I found. But basically, you know, this is the whole tool. And then The one thing I'm gonna show you, screenshots, instead of the live thing, 'cause the live thing can be sensitive, is the... ng things I found. But basically, you know, this is the whole tool. And then The one thing I'm gonna show you, screenshots, instead of the live thing, 'cause the live thing can be sensitive, is the... This is basically the attention firewall. I named it Radar for the old MASH character, Radar O'Reilly, who, you know, was just always there the moment you needed him with the information you needed before you needed it. So this is the three... This is what is on... Can you see my mouse? Yep. Yeah, so this is what's on my second monitor, so it's a three-hour view of my calendar. And another theme here is you can just customize everything. So this is not actually my entire calendar. I've given it rules about... There'll be things on my calendar that are just to block off time. It's not a thing I'm gonna do, it's a warning to others not to book that time or things like that. Or it's like my wife's calendar that will show up in my Google Calendar view. So this is the... idiosyncratically distilled, filtered version of my calendar with a bunch of shortcuts. Like if I wasn't missing this call to do the podcast, you know, I can go right here. And without even opening the calendar entry, that's the button to join the Google Meet. That's the button to open my private notes of what I would discuss in this meeting. And that's the button to open the shared document and the team we would all be in during that meeting. So these are all just little vibe-coded rules, like it knows if the calendar entry has this title, subject line, that's a recurring meeting we have internally, and this is the doc I always want to have in front of me when we're on that call. So just lots of little idiosyncratic things like that. And then the other half of it is the attention firewall. So these are the classifications of events. A lot of them-- like urgent and midday are zero because it's easy for me to stay on top of those now. And so for each one, it's kind of like the inbox view, but with a summary on each one. And if I click on one of them, I get this ugly little toolbar that's full of keyboard shortcuts. And again, idiosyncratic, like forward means forward to my wife. Because we're on a lot of shared, like, you know, Amazon and PayPal accounts and stuff, and I'll get, you know, notices that actually she would care about. So one button, like, no, you know, forward and archive. And one other theme here-- I'm pretty fast and loose in the way I develop this stuff. Like, everything-- I have no staging environment, everything-- like, whatever automated tests my exhortations have caused Claude to build, which I don't know. It says it has a lot of tests and it says it runs them, and I kind of believe it, but I just push to production all the time because I keep the stakes low on all this stuff. Like, all my messages really live-- they're where they've always been in Gmail and WhatsApp and Slack. This button-- like, if I want to reply-- I can do lightweight replies here, but if I want rich text formatted reply, or anything even slightly complicated, this means move it to my Gmail inbox. But it's always been in Gmail. This is just a label change in Gmail. replies here, but if I want rich text formatted reply, or anything even slightly complicated, this means move it to my Gmail inbox. But it's always been in Gmail. This is just a label change in Gmail. So if this totally falls down, if Claude has the bright idea to delete my production database or whatever, Everything is still where it's always been. I just lose the nice interface to it. And by the way, that's never happened yet. In the couple of months I've been working this way, it feels much longer.…

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