Mar 31, 2025 7 min read Bakery

March 2025 bakery

I've become persuaded by the idea that we are the product on most social media apps. The thoughts and links that I would have shared on these hellsites, I now aggregate in a monthly post I call the "Bakery."

Half baked

Some written thoughts, but not enough for their own post.

I updated my Ergodox keyboard layout to use what's known as "home row modifiers." This means that when I hold a I get cmd, s gets me option, d is ctrl and f is shift. I mirror this on j k l ;. This is very normal.

People said that it couldn't be done. But, I've drawn a perfectly straight line on my volume chart in Strava. This was not the smartest thing I've ever done, but it was satisfying. By the end my body felt pretty haggard. I'm definitely taking a down week to close out March. After that the plan is to return to my three up, one down pattern. Although, my up week volume will probably hover between 40-50 miles per week.

I gave the Snipd AI podcast player after listening to an interesting interview with the founder. On paper, this podcast is for me. But, in practice I found the UI so unintuitive that I cancelled the subscription after a day. If they had a reasonable view somewhere in the app that at a glance answered the basic question, "Which of my podcast subscriptions has a new episode?" I'd give it a try again. But, until then back to Pocketcasts.

I'm noticing that my AI tools are starting to feel like different teammates that I go to for different problems. Windsurf is like the eager early career developer on the team. I'm happy to go to Windsurf when I more or less know what I want done. Cursor is more like a peer that I pair with.

It's funny because in my past comparison of Cursor vs. Windsurf I seemed to prefer Windsurf to Cursor. At the time, my experience with Windsurf last month was in zero to one scenarios and it blew my mind. But now that I'm using these agentic IDE's on non completely greenfield projects, I might be changing my mind.

With any coding agent, context is king. And as I use these tools more, I get better intuition about how to build and manage that context. It could be that I just have better intuition for Cursor's context right now.

Claude Code is like the SME that I go to when all other options have been exhausted and I'm totally stuck. It's also the most expensive of the coding agents on my team. For reference, the last thing I had it fix for me cost $4.44.

That might seem like a wild amount of money, but it kept me entertained for a long period of time. $4.44 to see a movie seems like a great deal.

Raw

Naked links.

An remarkable conversation about the Pandemic. We have a lot of unprocessed trauma as a society. Noteworthy how the hosts observe a hyper-individualistic turn since the Pandemic. I certainly feel that way.

I respect the high level of craft in everything Adam does. This video is a great example of really polishing a small part of a ui.

I saw this interview "cheating" app, but the story took a turn and the creator was kicked out of Columbia!

This podcast is so good. Below is McKenzie's closing remarks.

I want you to think of someone who sounds very sympathetic.

I'm going to indicatively say maybe she's a single mother. She has children at home. Her children are hungry. She goes to the grocery store and at this exact moment in time, she knows that she is behind on the rent. She knows that her income situation this month does not look great. The child support did not come through. She knows she is unlikely to be able to pay for the basket of groceries that she has today.

In the case where she pays by a check, having the knowledge at the time that she writes the check that she'll be unable to pay for the groceries, this user is committing a crime. The crime is called uttering in many states in the United States.

People go to jail for uttering. The cost of sending them to jail is ultimately borne by the taxpayer.

Of course, the true cost, the cost society must be most morally concerned with, is the cost to the mother, the cost to her children. But in terms of dollars and cents costs, even if you discounted the social value of her staying with her children to zero, there is a huge cost associated with arresting, investigating, prosecuting, and incarcerating her. And again, we investigate, arrest, prosecute, and incarcerate people for uttering every day across the United States.

If she uses a credit card to buy a hundred dollars of groceries that she ultimately can't afford, the cost to society is… a bank takes a minor hit to their credit losses budget. There are countermeasures against that and consequences for it. The bank will report to a credit reporting agency that she did not pay her bill. But she doesn't go to jail. Her kids don't lose their mother.

That seems like obviously a better equilibrium for society than the "Well, we are going to make checks good for use as money, by jailing some portion of the people who use checks."

So when you think: what does interchange pay for? Why do we charge grocery stores interchange? Why can't they just process check payments for 25 cents each? Why do they have to pay $1.50 to do a typical size grocery basket on a card that offers no rewards? One of the things that $1 and 25 cents pays for is for those children to be able to continue seeing their mother.

I think that's cheap at the price.