Orbital Salvage is gathering thoughts and opinions in an ongoing project to predict what comes next, one word at a time.
… The ideal, of course, is to be a mix of both.
If you don’t tinker, you don’t have taste
My tinkering habits picked up very late, and now I cannot go by without picking up new things in one form or another. It’s how I learn. I wish I did it sooner. It’s a major part of my learning process now, and I would never be the programmer person I am today.
“11 things only left-handers know.”
Ezra Klein on the podcast Blocks with Neal Brennan
Garry Newman, creator of the sandbox game “Garry’s Mod” (Wikipedia) (Steam), answers a faq in How do I get into the Game Industry
There is some great discussion around Garry’s blog on Hacker News.
What the Skibidi?
When asked (relentlessly, I’m sure) whether he’d sue over Skibidi Toilet’s appearance in Fortnite, he explained that it uses assets associated with but not created for his game, and finished with:
“Plus I’m lazy af, he could be using a photo of me on the toilet and it wouldn’t outweigh how much I can’t be bothered” (Twitter)
I’ve never felt comfortable saying I read a book if I only listened to the audiobook version. It’s a valid way to engage with a text (and the only way I can get through some dry nonfiction without spontaneously napping) so no shade, but retention and engagement isn’t always the same. So I like Kevin Kelley’s casual use of “auditing” as a verb for audiobooks.
I’ll read anything Kevin Kelley writes. Recently, he wrote about self-publishing: “Everything I Know about Self-Publishing.
I think there is some survivorship bias at play here, so approach his advice aware of the audience he’s already cultivated.
I heard Lauren Goode talk about her article “Why Did a $10 Billion Startup Let Me Vibe-Code for Them—and Why Did I Love It?” on Wired’s “Uncanny Valley” podcast this week. It’s fascinating and both are worth your time.
Jason Kottke wrote about the article in his post “Much Ado About Vibe Coding” and he shared 16 links to other articles about LLMs and coding that are all worth checking out, as you’d expect, and shared more still in the comments.
You can draw your own conclusions from the comments section, but it’s great to see so many non-developers vibe coding solutions to problems and whole projects into existence.
In the comments section, NickBLT expresses a concern I’ve been having: when this stabilizes as a product, I really hope we can have the same low cost access to the service. I’m running some local LLMs and they’re a positive indicator, but also a long way from the speed and depth of the commercial products.
In his essay (ok, Substack) “The defense against slop and brainrot“, Paul Jun describes a writing exercise lifted from Hunter S. Thompson: He’d grind away through writer’s block, typing The Great Gatzby word-for-word until,
By the final page, something had shifted—I could sense how clean sentences snap into place, the way a pianist’s fingers know where middle C lives without looking.
He continues on this path, comparing cognitive workload to resistance training:
When friction disappears, so does a hidden form of conditioning. Consider what happens when you remove resistance from any training: your muscles atrophy. The same principle applies to mental capabilities. Every hard task you delegate is a rep you didn’t do, a pattern your neurons didn’t carve deeper.
His thesis is that a barely literate country To borrow from Chat: He’s not just writing—he’s dropping knowledge bombs. Highlights:
Anyone can look capable; fewer people can be capable.
When everyone else’s focus fragments, mine compounds.
If you can think well, AI becomes a multiplier. If you can’t, AI just amplifies your mistakes.
The people who skipped the fundamentals become dependent on tools they don’t understand, producing work they can’t evaluate, making decisions based on outputs they can’t verify.
Absolutely worth reading, and maybe transcribing, whenever you’re tempted to take the path of least resistance.
A context curator, in this sense, is a technical writer who is able to orchestrate and execute a content strategy around both human and AI needs, or even focused on AI alone
AI must RTFM: Why technical writers are becoming context curators