Steve Newman: belief

Transcript context

…I like that phrase, and I love the idea that you had a very practical and experiential sense of what you were trying to accomplish. For me, it's less time in the chair, more time exercising, and more time outside. But also, I need to sort of square that with not losing track of what I'm doing as well, so I think that's really helpful to try to get concrete in envisioning, like, how is my life going to be different if this project is successful, lest we fall into the optimizing the agent setup for the agent setup's sake, which I think is obviously very alluring for-- Well. I've forgotten because this was weeks ago, or probably a couple of months ago, but there was a period where I was spending a lot of time on Yeah, like Claude code skills. And that, somewhat to my surprise, has settled down. And I'm sure it will unsettle again. But I'll also say, like, I was probably three quarters of the way building this attention firewall thing before I understood what I was building. You know, I was very much fumbling in the direction of something and, like, had to do a lot of iteration before I was able to crystallize it. And I think that's a lot of what we're all collectively-- we're all fumbling. There's no playbooks here, right? I think you said something about this a minute ago. We're in the middle of a Cambrian-- we're all doing our individual components of the Cambrian explosion and making things up as we go along and only understanding in hindsight or mid-sight what we're doing. I would say that won't settle down for a long time, except, of course, actually it will never settle down because by the time it would, there will have been the five new inputs and we'll be in the next round of chaos. One big question I have on both of those projects is how are you handling context? With the newsletters, there's sort of a question, I guess, of like any individual newsletter, you could say, Will this be of interest to me? Here's my interests, scoring on that basis. So how are you handling context? And there's obviously multiple dimensions or layers to that, but at least two that jump to mind are like, how do you make sure that the information is being filtered effectively against like what it is you care about, want to learn about, et cetera. And the other is sort of when you have so many things coming in and there's so much duplication, How are you managing to cross-reference these things against each other to try to tease out like what is genuinely new from each bit?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.