Simon Willison’s Weblog

What could I do with a universal function — a tool for turning just about any X into just about any Y with plain language instructions?

— Robin Sloan # 10th March 2023, 6:02 pm

When you start a creative project but don’t finish, the experience drags you down. Worst of all is when you never decisively abandon a project, instead allowing it to fade into forgetfulness. The fades add up; they become a gloomy haze that whispers, you’re not the kind of person who DOES things. When you start and finish, by contrast — and it can be a project of any scope: a 24-hour comic, a one-page short story, truly anything — it is powerful fuel that goes straight back into the tank. When a project is finished, it exits the realm of “this is gonna be great” and becomes instead something you (and perhaps others) can actually evaluate. Even if that evaluation is disastrous, it is also, I will insist, thrilling and productive. A project finished is the pump of a piston, preparing the engine for the next one.

— Robin Sloan # 5th February 2023, 5:59 pm

Many Web3 boost­ers see them­selves as disruptors, but “tokenize all the things” is noth­ing if not an obe­di­ent con­tin­u­a­tion of “market-ize all the things”, the cam­paign started in the 1970s, hugely suc­cessful, ongoing. I think the World Wide Web was the real rupture — “Where … is the money?”—which Web 2.0 smoothed over and Web3 now attempts to seal totally.

— Robin Sloan # 18th November 2021, 9:55 pm