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quicklywilliam

76 karma · joined March 3, 2023

Hacker, maker, serial founder. My personal website is at slowlywilliam.com.
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quicklywilliam··on Making beautiful work is getting harder
I wrote a thing about why the current direction of AI tends to produce such terrible work — and what I think we could be doing with AI instead.
quicklywilliam··on Tesla Cybertruck sales inflated: SpaceX bought 1,279 units
The real question is who bought the other 5,742 of them
quicklywilliam··on Are the costs of AI agents also rising exponentially? (2025)
Interesting read. I don't know if I quite buy the evidence, but it's definitely enough to warrant further investigation. It also matches up with my personal experience, which is that tools like Claude Code are burning through more and more tokens as we push them to do bigger and bigger work. But we all know the frontier model companies are burning through money in an unsustainable race to get you and your company hooked on their tools.

So: I buy that the cost of frontier performance is going up exponentially, but that doesn't mean there is a fundamental link. We also know that benchmark performance of much smaller/cheaper models has been increasing (as far as I know METR only looks at frontier models), so that makes me wonder if the exponential cost/time horizon relationship is only for the frontier models.

quicklywilliam··on Show HN: PanicLock – Close your MacBook lid disable TouchID –> password unlock
Great idea and implementation! If you are hesitant to install this for any reason, you can accomplish the same thing with this one liner:

  sudo bioutil -ws -u 0; sleep 1; sudo bioutil -ws -u 1
Edit: here's a shortcut to run the above and then lock your screen. You can give it a global keyboard shortcut in the Shortcuts app. https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/9362945d839140dbbf987e5bce9...
quicklywilliam··on Leaving Gas Town – What Happens When the AI Bubble Bursts?
There's been a ton of debate about whether we are in an AI bubble, but I've read a lot less about what will happen when the bubble bursts. I took it for granted that this is a bubble, and in particular that frontier AI companies are heavily distorting the market by subsidizing inference costs. Here's what might happen if those subsidies suddenly go away.
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