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Explore hmm.fyi
Public posts from across hmm.fyi. Sort by newest or by the hmms! they collected.
life
Grief of Adult Friendship
From a piece at the India Times on adult friendships:
“A willingness to waste time together magnificently.”
I love this quote about what friendship is. What this essay does well is describe something most of us feel but rarely articulate: friendship loss in adulthood doesn’t really happen, it accumulates over time.
There’s no fight, no ending, just postponed calls and different sleep schedules until one day the person who used to know your inner life only knows what you post on social media. And because nothing technically went wrong, we don’t let ourselves grieve it.
What stuck with me is the idea that friendship is the one thing in adult life that still asks you to waste time on purpose. Everything else in modern life gets justified: work earns money, the gym earns health, even rest gets framed as recovery for more work.
But a friend calling at night about nothing fits nowhere in that logic. That’s the whole point.
Read the essay, then call the person you’ve been meaning to call for awhile.
You know who.
technology
Ratty Term
A GPU-rendered terminal emulator with inline 3D graphics 🧀
You know what the terminal needed? A large 3D rendered rat. I love it.
ai
The mouse pointer for the AI era
From Google’s DeepMind announcement today:
…because a typical AI tool lives in its own window, users need to drag their world into it. We want the opposite.
Okay so. Google has spent two years getting beaten up about losing the AI race, and the framing has always been the same: OpenAI took Google’s own famous research paper and beat them to the punch.
And so far all AI products are basically a chat window you go to in one form or another.
Google’s pitch from the post is that the AI should come to you. Baked into Chrome, into the OS, into the cursor itself.
It’s confidently saying: the version of AI that wins is the one that’s already where you are. And, by total coincidence, the company that’s already where you are is Google.
I don’t know if they’re right. Maybe people genuinely prefer the destination model. There’s something to I am now Doing AI as a discrete activity, in the same way Google search remained a destination for twenty-five years even as search-as-a-feature kept getting bolted into everything else.
But if you take the post seriously, the implication is sort of unkind to a lot of companies whose entire product is the chat window. If the chat window is a phase, then the chat window companies are a phase.
The word I keep coming back to from their post is detour. They’re calling the dominant interaction pattern of the current AI generation a detour. In a research blog post. That is not a neutral word choice. That is the company that owns the road telling you the place you’ve been driving to is out of the way.
technology
The Last Quiet Thing
“You’re not bad with technology. Technology got bad at being finished.”
Terry always writes lovely visual essays that are thought provoking. This one has continued to live rent-free in my head for awhile now. I aspire to build the type of software which his essay explores. You can see it in my projects like The Brutalist Report or even this very site.
Software that does its one job and then shuts up. No engagement loops. No notifications. No perpetual relationship. A reliable tool you reach for, use, and forget about.
I find there’s a beauty to it and is increasingly rare in the modern world.
But there’s a paradox about this: Quiet software can’t shout about itself.
The very qualities that make it worth having are exactly the qualities that render it invisible in a world wired for noise. So the alternatives to the attention hungry software will always be the underdog, passed hand to hand, one quiet recommendation at a time.
I think I’m okay with that. Let’s go find the quiet things in our life and hold onto them. And when you can’t find them, build them.
travel
Tourist Traps
My best piece of travel advice is to avoid doing what the locals do.
Even in locations and societies that are not as degenerate as Anytown, USA, even in places like Finland where people are (or claim to be) happy all of the time, the average day for the average local is not very interesting. They probably haven’t visited their world-famous local museum in ten years.
I liked this spin on the usual take. On a personal level, I lived a few blocks away from the iconic Seattle Space Needle for about 4 years and never once visited it. It wasn’t until I moved further up north from downtown that I ended up visiting and really enjoyed the view.
It’s a good reminder to actually look at your own city through the eyes of a tourist. It led me to find this delightful side project from someone that helps you find interesting local things to visit by pulling data from Wikipedia: Izeria.
ai
Local AI needs to be the norm
An essay of mine made it to the front page of HN today to spur an interesting discussion. I genuinely believe the puck is heading to an increased amount of local AI usage.
What I’m particularly excited by is that in a few years, local hardware will be even more capable of running highly intelligent and efficient models that are more powerful than we think possible right now.
I still believe frontier cloud hosted models will always be better from an intelligence point of view pound-for-pound, but the underlying point I was trying to make in my essay is not everything needs that level of intelligence.
In fact, most things don’t.