My daughter called me Amorzinho the other day. I know she knows the word amor (love) and she has used diminutives in the past -inho / -ão. But, this was the first time she assembled Amorzinho, which means "my little love". Diminutives are great—a perfect example where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Amor is love. Inho is small. But, Amorzinho, that's My Little Love.
I turned 37 in March.
I celebrated it at
Pâz e Amor, our favorite local restaurant. They have a table in
the street. Not a parklet or sidewalk. A table just in
the street with cars passing you three feet way. But,
the thrill of eating steak and drinking choppe brahma on
a warm Rio night in the street is unmatched. Gabi
brought a delicious cake and an aggressive sparking
candle. Our friends, Amaro and Loreno, made a funny sign
for the cake referencing my love for the
Guanabara
supermarket.
I talked a bit about my software development workflow in Now No. 1. This month, it's pretty much the same. The one update is that I've been feeling a bit of sus about how we've all become dependent on subscriptions to these large AI companies to build. Previously, if you had an idea about something to build, you would put on your headphones, pour a coffee, open your laptop, and just start writing code. Maybe even on an airplane without internet, writing ES5 javascript to dubstep. It was free and you could start and stop when inspired or tired. Now, because of the undeniable increases in productivity we have with agentic coding, it's almost not worthwhile to build something without LLMs. I know how much faster I could be! But, using LLMs costs money and has limits. So, if you want to build, you need to subscribe and pay Anthropic $20-$100 / month. And they can also control your limits of building. If you can't pay or if you've hit your limit, you stop building. I'm incredibly excited about what agentic coding allows us to do and I'm 100% in, but the je ne sais quoi has changed. There's also the fact that these companies are slurping up all of our code and IP and these companies themselves aren't able to secure their own source code. And then there's the Cognitive Dark Forest. I'm going to start experimenting with Opencode and open source LLMs this month via OpenRouter. Lastly, I hadn't listened to geohotz in a while and found his stream here pretty entertaining.
Ah, also, this article about The Ozempification of the Economy was a great read. It touched on a few thoughts I've had about the world today: everyone looking for a shortcut, lots of people betting on things etc. It's maybe a little too dark though.
I started watching The Bear again. Just started Season 3. Two episodes in this season were really really really good: Fishes and The Bear. Gabi will say I always fall asleep when watching TV, which may be true. But, I did not fall asleep during these two episodes.
The Slow Bakery has kimchi! And it's really good kimchi. This bakery does a bunch of stuff differently. For example, they have non-espresso espresso drinks. Non-espresso espresso drinks. Incredible.
Lastly, I have started a list called Max's YouTube Favorites. These are YouTube videos that I tend to want to show friends when YouTube is open and there's a pause long enough to say "Have you guys seen...". Check out my YouTube list.