Play with Putty, and a Quiet Summer
Hi!
We had a great summer. Having both indoor and outdoor pools within walking distance from our home meant a lot of swimming, mostly in the kids' pool with our (now two year old!) daughter.
It's been another year where we spend the hottest months at home. The summer is pretty nice here, and most days already feel almost like vacation. We travel during the grey and cold months instead, since we don't have to worry about the school year yet.
My time was split purely between work and family, so there's not much to report, other than publishing Play with Putty at Google Labs ↗ — a research prototype exploring collaborative vibe-coding:
There's a lot more about this that's not covered by the video and I hope to share more soon. For now, you can sign up for the waitlist ↗.
Worth Checking Out
What I've been reading lately:
- Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens ↗ — history of Frank Oppenheimer and his Exploratorium, great read, highly recommended
- Experiences In Visual Thinking ↗ — awesome walk through what it means to think visually, and exercises to get better at it
- Thirty Years that Shook Physics ↗ — a historical view of development of quantum theory
- The Character of Physical Law ↗ — a couple of very dense lectures from Richard Feynman about generic principles of (and about) physical laws
- Thinking About Mathematics ↗ — only just started this one but seems great so far, overview of philosophy of mathematics
On the web:
- Aphex Twin logo generator ↗
- some cool prototypes around using LLMs for design explorations ↗
- Andrew Blinn ↗ has been on a roll: 1 ↗, 2 ↗, 3 ↗, and a short talk ↗
- Zach Lieberman on 10 years of daily sketching ↗
- some great posts from Jamie about AI ↗, curious to see what he'll get up to at Anthropic