Slow Like Whisky

Author: robert.adlington

  • How Did Cartographers Create World Maps before Airplanes and Satellites? An Introduction | Open Culture

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    Unlike inno­va­tions today, which we expect to solve prob­lems near-imme­di­ate­ly, the inno­va­tions in map­ping tech­nol­o­gy took many cen­turies and required the work of thou­sands of trav­el­ers, geo­g­ra­phers, car­tog­ra­phers, math­e­mati­cians, his­to­ri­ans, and oth­er schol­ars who built upon the work that came before. It start­ed with spec­u­la­tion, myth, and pure fan­ta­sy, which is what we find in…

  • Daring Fireball: The Obvious, the Easy, and the Possible

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    Shouldn’t everything be obvious? Unless you’re making a product that just does one thing — like a paperclip, for example — everything won’t be obvious. You have to make tough calls about what needs to be obvious, what should be easy, and what should be possible. The more things something (a product, a feature, a screen, etc) does, the…

  • Ralph Wiggum Loops

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    This inverts the usual AI coding workflow. Instead of carefully reviewing each step, you define success criteria upfront and let the agent iterate toward them. Failures become data. Each iteration refines the approach based on what broke. The skill shifts from “directing Claude step by step” to “writing prompts that converge toward correct solutions.” https://paddo.dev/blog/ralph-wiggum-autonomous-loops

  • AGI is here (and I feel fine)

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    The key word in Arti­fi­cial Gen­eral Intel­li­gence is Gen­eral. That’s the word that makes this AI unlike every other AI: because every other AI was trained for a par­tic­ular purpose. Consider land­mark models across the decades: the Mark I Perceptron, LeNet, AlexNet, AlphaGo, AlphaFold … these sys­tems were all dif­ferent, but all alike in this way. Lan­guage models were trained…

  • The Score by C Thi Nguyen review – a brilliant warning about the gamification of everyday life

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    For Nguyen, wonder, absorption and play are central to human flourishing. Metrics are a kind of invasive species threatening to replace our weird, delicate joys with the dumbed-down epistemic fundamentalism of league tables and graphs. — Read on www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jan/06/the-score-by-c-thi-nguyen-review-a-brilliant-warning-about-the-gamification-of-everyday-life

  • Stories Beyond Demographics – seeing stories in ourselves

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    The archetypal model, however, shifts our way of thinking. Instead of needing to adapt the story of Little Red-Cap (Red Riding Hood) to my own social and cultural norms so that I can see myself in the story, I am tasked with seeing the story play out in myself. How am I Riding Hood? How…

  • Programming With Claude – The First Week

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    I am not a programmer. I have made multiple attempts to learn programming, from Ruby on Rails back in the day to Python a year or two ago. While I understand the basic concepts – variables and types and loops and functions and classes, I find that the complexity mounts quickly and at a certain…

  • Links Summary 2026:1

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    Links this week: 4 A thin batch over this holiday week, but quite representative of the topics I’m interested in:

  • The Goon Squad, by Daniel Kolitz

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    From these companies’ perspective, the ideal consumer would do literally nothing but goon, lose at gambling, and maybe watch other people play video games. You can try to fight this. You can read a book, pet a dog, buy a stupid box to lock away your phone. You can make a joke about the box,…

  • SPACE TYPE GENERATOR

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    Had a lot of fun with this, inspired by Kottke.— Read on spacetypegenerator.com/