Nabeel Hyatt retweeted
abdul el sayed and every muslim person around him has been called a radical islamic jihadist terrorist every single day by the entire political spectrum since he won the primary and i haven’t seen a single think piece or major media interview of an arab voter abt how this makes them feel. arab and muslim voters combined make up almost 4% of the electorate. jewish voters make up 1.4% & many of those jewish voters aren’t zionists or will let israel get in the way of preserving american democracy. so we’ve heard endlessly from a tiny group of potential spoiler voters who aren’t getting their way on a deeply unpopular issue- why?
If you're trying to understand why so many Michigan Jewish Democrats are defecting, I wrote in August about it. It's not, per se, about foreign policy. theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0…
It being a slow news day and such.. here's a few thousand words I wrote on how hard it is to recommend a board game programatically.
tabletoplibrary.com/news/mak…
It has been a fun side project specifically because it's an area of software engineering with deep academic research, where I'm a total neophyte. I wrote this to capture a little moment in time, and also so someone who actually knows these systems can chime in.
Nabeel Hyatt retweeted
"The reason I keep bringing up the Palestinians throwing rocks to protect Heidi is because, I mean, I can’t emphasize enough how much these young men are . . . Yesterday, they put their lives on the line. There were soldiers there, and soldiers will shoot when somebody is throwing rocks. These young men put their lives on the line to protect a sixty-three-year-old Jewish American journalist. And, I mean, these guys are heroes. If they were not doing that, so many villages would’ve been overtaken. They are literally the only defense. [On Saturday] I was in a village called Jalud, and the exact same thing happened. We got attacked by settlers, and it was these young men, whom we call the shabab, who fought them back with rocks. And the reason I just want to put a fine point on this is because, for me, just in terms of where things are going with Israel-Palestine politically, I think that a sort of discursive shift in how we talk about Palestinians’ right to defend themselves needs to happen." @infinite_jaz to @IChotiner
I love this so much.
Every so often something on the internet makes me think 1) I wish there was more of this and 2) how can I help in any small way?
GO EAST spoke to me straight away. Writers on a train from SF, thinking about what tech progress should be in service of. The kind of creative format I don’t come across as much as I’d like... even better when @JoBarrow felt the same!
Grateful to @majamediaco and team for turning an X post into reality and letting @meetgranola play a small part. Can’t wait to see what the fellows write on the way to Chicago! 🚂
I like the framing that vibe coding an app is about as cheap as getting a free puppy.
I don't want to build my own coding harness because maintaining it at the edge of capability is more than a full time job. I want to "hire" great people to do that.
This is what software is going to feel like ironically. You still pay monthly, but for the great updates. And for stuff that doesn't change much static (a personal todo app, etc) no reason not to build your own and very little value in paying others.
In the end it feels a lot more like sports than locked in network effects. You go with the software team at the top of their game - and "hire" another one if they slip.
I've found Claude and Chatgpt are knee-jerk skeptical of new products, I've done this hundreds of times now as I love trying new things.
"Hey should I use this new startup doing this cool thing that seems perfect for us"
Almost always comes back with "well, xyz incumbent handles most of that anyway, and we can just build the rest even more specific to you, and you haven't thought about x and y" or some version.
The secondary effects on the startup industry as people outsource their brainstorming to AIs is interesting.
one line of thinking:
first order implication is that it's harder for a startups to gain traction as the CEO/CTO of the adopting companies increasingly go to an LLM to get advice.
second order is that fellow founders who ignore the LLMs advice have an edge in adopting new things to get ahead. knowing when to ignore advice is perennially valuable.
Hey, so this Saturday you can come to the Grand Opening party for Tabletop Library in Berkeley all day and night. It'll be worth the drive over, you know, if you want.
@BerkeleyTTL is a side quest I've been on with @andrewmason, @tabletopgrl & david c to make a whimsical place that gets us off our phones, playing with each other, and holds board gaming up for the awesomeness that it has become recently. It's been a labor of love where we've also built a dewey decimal system for games, a board game recommender service, used a card catalog from UC Berkeley as the front desk, and a dozen other little details I'd love to show you.
tabletoplibrary.com/news/gra…
And after the visit you can go less than a block to the comic shop (escapist) and sci-fi bookstore (dark carnival) in what must now be the nerdiest single block anywhere.
also. three cheers for side quests.
here's another: i wrote on why we made a dewey decimal system for board games so we could optimize for in person browsing
tabletoplibrary.com/news/tlc…
As aesthetic fodder I love looking at these things. But I don't understand how it really helps anyone make sense of their codebase.
I've tried like 10+ abstractions of code I've been building and really struggle at finding any "high altitude" view of the work being done that is better than reading a doc. But perhaps I'm missing something others find great.
system-atlas: a skill that builds an explorable isometric map of your codebase / agent / pipeline from one data file
arranging the system visually does something for my brain that a wall of text doesn't
i've found it way more useful to build up understanding of a system or a large change through these progressive disclosure style atlases than through docs.
hover to read, click to pin, step inside a box to watch it run, click a packet to see the actual payload. chapters reveal the system a few boxes at a time instead of all at once. the md twin is generated from the same file so it can't drift
works from both sides.
- building a new architecture and moving pieces around visually before anything is written
- pointed it at a 67 pr stack (don't ask how i got there) and finally understood how the thing fit together
it also keeps track of every open question in the system. as you clarify or improve things the answers land in the atlas, so "wait did we decide that" has an answer instead of a scroll through slack.
Its 2026 and I'm trying to buy a movie ticket on the Internet.
They should really point Claude at this thing and tell it to fix it.
Everybody likes making.
It's the maintenance that gets ya.
I think this "everyone will build" makes sense for software that is mostly a one-time build or low maintenance product. But I have a lot of mothballed projects now that are a pain to maintain.
For things that are bleeding edge and move constantly, hard to imagine folks don't want to "hire" the best product (and co behind it) to do that for them unless it is truly core to them. Cloud agent orchestration? Very hard to stay on ahead.
like you have to want to do stuff like this every week for years and assume you are in it better than the folks who it's their main job vs a fun side project while you are trying to world class at your thing.
conductor.build/changelog
Built a mac app this week using the new Conductor API that just came out. If you use @conductor_build you may like it.
It's called Whistle, and it's for those quick ideas you have on a project.
It's a tray app, you click it, you start talking or typing an idea that just came to mind you want Conductor to work on for a bit. Then move on with your day, next time you open up Conductor it's done the research, prepped a doc, and you are ready to go.
Hope you like.
nabeelhyatt.com/experiments/…
Mostly made this for myself because I'm often running out of a meeting, or in mid email or something, and have an idea. Opening big boy Conductor can feel distracting ("ooh it got back to me on the thing") so I just wanted a way to stay in flow, throw an idea out there and have it research.
It's using apple native voice reco for now, nothing on my servers, and just pushes to conductor api with a template of instructions on what to do that you can edit.
Cloud is great, enabling multiplayer is better, enabling API calls into the agent from other workspaces, other colleagues, other agents, has felt magical.
Introducing Conductor Cloud!
Out with worktrees, in with multiplayer cloud workspaces.
Bring your subscriptions, invite your teammates, start your agents, and shut your laptop. Conduct from iPhone and API, too.
conductor.build
Man, the @meetgranola team has some kind of hall of fame ability to stare at the thing you've always stared at, and ship the obviously intuitive answer that no one did.
