Sarah Friend

@isthisa.com

2802 Followers 179 Following

dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good

Title card for the essay 'What Kind of Clock is an LLM?' over a close-up photo of a CNC milling machine spindle
Screenshot of dark-mode text with a highlighted passage reading: "A small app will become as disposable as an instagram post. Software will become content, and the vibe coder may look more and more like an influencer."
Screenshot of a CNBC headline from December 21, 2017, under the "Bitcoin" category, reading: "$24 million iced tea company says it's pivoting to the blockchain, and its stock jumps 200%."
Screenshot of a paragraph from "Death of a Software Developer," with most of the text highlighted. It reads: "As this split develops, there will need to evolve new terms to distinguish between these modalities, because there will be jobs specifically for the vibe coder approach, but I doubt 'Vibecoder' will make it into a job post. A euphemism will probably be required. It may be 'Junior Developer', but that doesn't seem right either. The vibe coder does not aspire to become a Senior Developer. These are not different tiers of the same skill tree."
The back of a dark Toyota RAV4 with a spare tire cover, covered in white handwritten text and drawings. The rear window reads: "LLMs aren't conscious but you should still nice to them. them. Kant was right. Being mean to anything ruins your soul!" The spare tire cover reads "THE Kant Car" with a drawing of an octopus or squid below it. A small cephalopod is also drawn near the Toyota logo. The Connecticut license plate reads "SQUIDS." The car is stopped at a red light in traffic.
A screenshot of a tweet by user "sui" (@birdabo) on a black background. The tweet text in large white caps reads: "SOMEONE MADE A DIGITAL WHIP TO MAKE CLAUDE WORK FASTER" followed by a skull emoji. Below is a screenshot showing a computer desktop with folders labeled "biscuit" and "partyhat" and zip files "belly.zip" and "biscuit.zip". A terminal window titled "Read and execute Task.txt file" shows Claude Code attempting several web searches (about AI pins, consumer hardware retention, voice assistant limitations), each followed by "Interrupted · What should Claude do instead?" After each interruption, the user has typed abusive variations like "FASTERFASTERGO FASTERWork FASTERFASTERFaster CLANKER" and "Speed it up clanker". Claude replies "I'll write the research document directly from my knowledge:" before being interrupted again. Near the bottom, Claude is shown "Ruminating… (thought for 1s)" and then outputs "Work FASTER / Faster CLANKER" — apparently having given up and started repeating the abuse back. A hand-drawn illustration of a whip is overlaid on the right side of the terminal.
White serif text on dark background reads: "Jevons paradox tells us technological improvements that improve the efficiency of a resource's use lead to a rise, rather than a fall, in the consumption of that resource. The coming software renaissance will lead to more genuine creativity in cultural areas that have been underserved by the software developer, possibly for demographic reasons. The popularity of Charlota Blunarova's vibecoded multiplayer embroidery simulator, Common Thread is a great early example. The software developer is white or asian, male, and youngish. There will be a rise in shipped software for everyone else."
Cover image for "Death of a Software Developer" on isthisanart.substack.com. Dark green-tinted composite of two images: the upper half shows what appears to be a detail of a figurative oil painting, the lower half shows multiple monitors displaying code — looks like Solidity smart contract output and Python terminal errors. The title is set in large white serif type.
picture of the interface of a Brother CX70PEs computerized sewing machine. It's pink and has an overwhelming amount of buttons
A close up of the mirror in Van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait, in which you can see the depicted couple reflected from behind and even a very tiny rendering of the painter himself
Two hands holding a phone in a dark blue lit room. On the screen is a drawing app called Sigil Pro. Text is imposed on the image with the title of the article, Protective Rituals for Posthumans, and the substack url, isthisanart.substack.com
A photo of a woman's stomach wearing an insulin pump and cgm sensor. Both are small devices stuck to her skin with adhesive, one on each side of the belly button. She has visible tattoos and is wearing a black crop top and jeans
A photo of a dog, maybe a Shiba Inu, sitting in the driver's seat of a car so that it looks like he is driving
celebrity wearing a pink crop top that has been edited to say "They don't build statues of internet researchers"
An extremely muscular two headed cow dressed as wrestler standing in front of a Ferris wheel in the dystopian wasteland
The sculpture appears as a pinkish/reddish square face up on the floor of a large exhibition hall. You can see that its surface is striped, but not much else. Behind it are sculptures and video artworks mounted on a large scaffold
A screenshot of the abstract from the linked paper, the title is "Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread brain connectivity: a high-density EEG study with implications for the classroom"
a post from vitalik buterin that says, So apparently the new vocabulary alpha is that these days "games" just means "gambling", and so if you want to talk about actually interesting games you say "e-sports"