24 Linus Lee - Engineering for Aliveness

Linus Lee
They want to be power users. Like power, there’s a, maybe I’m grossly oversimplifying, but a lot of people, including myself, that really like thinking about these tools want to be power users and think that the World would be better if there were more power users of all these tools. And I spent a few years kind of building tools with that assumption. And I think one of the ways in which I’ve grown as a person who thinks a lot about building tools is that like, actually, Ivan at Notion at one point in like a company, All Hands said this Thing, which is like, Notion’s all about democratizing the ability to build tools for yourself, which is like, oh, that’s like such a me idea like i love that but then he also he also said This thing that was like normal people don’t wake up in the morning wanting to build software like they just want to do have fun they want to like help somebody they want to solve some problem In their life and and building software is this like incidental thing that they sometimes have to do to like make that a little bit easier and i think one of the ways i’ve grown concretely Is for most people include it like this is partly a function of people partly a function of what they do like even for me there are certain things in my life where like i really don’t care How it’s done i don’t care to like like interface deeply with the texture of the task or whatever people say it’s like i just want something delivered to my home i want to like end up somewhere Where i get in a ride chair i just want

Linus Lee
Where i get in a ride chair i just want the result and so the taxonomy that I make when I’m thinking about building tools these days is sometimes for certain people, for certain goals, The way that you want to get there is just by like describing what you want and then getting the result and doing that as cheaply and as quickly and as effortlessly and predictably and Reliably as possible. And that is like an instrumental point of view of tools. The tools are there to like take some specification of goal and deliver the result as quickly and cheaply as possible and reliably as possible. But then obviously, there is this other kind of tool whose job is to like get you as deeply engaged with whatever you’re doing and like musical instruments are a great example of this I think maps are a great example of this which we’ll talk about in a moment i think like lots of crafty tools like ide’s are another great example of this their job is to like put you face To face with all of the requisite complexity of whatever you’re dealing with. And like the complexity is actually good in that case, because whatever you’re doing requires you to contend with that complexity. Like if you were trying to perform a sonata, it would suck if you like had to just press a button and then like listen to whatever was generated. Like you actually want to perform to your fullest like with as much nuance and detail as you can put into this thing and it’s great to have an instrument that lets you express and like very Concretely if you’re buying a more expensive piano the the one of the reasons that better pianos can be better is is that they let you express more deeply but then you also have to think More about like what you’re doing yeah more mastery required More mastery required. It’s not just like a Guitar Hero thing where you do the thing and there’s a ceiling to how good you can be at it. Maps and GPS, I think, are the most canonical example of this that I use, where sometimes GPS is totally the right thing. If you want to just get in a car and end up somewhere, you’re just in a rush. GPS, great. Self-driving car, even better. Right. But sometimes I went to, where did I go? I went to Catalina Island recently. It was like a very spur of the moment trip. And I went there and there was this like tour guide station thing. And I went in and I bought a physical map. And I had a phone, but I like bought a physical map because it had some hiking trails. And I used that map to run around. And I felt like it gave me such a… It was fun to… Maybe this is a tried example, but it was fun to learn about the physical space around me by actually working with this physical object. And I wouldn’t have… The point of me being at the island was roam around and learn about what was there and not to get somewhere. And so in those cases, when you’re composing music, when you’re like, sometimes when you’re writing programs, which maybe we should talk about. But there are lots of areas and lots of different domains where it’s good for the tool to force you to contender the complexity. And in those cases, I call those engaging interfaces or engaging tools. And it’s not that, like a common fallacy that I sometimes have fallen into the past is to say that like either that some people want instrumental tools and some people want engagement, Like that there are these power users versus not power users.
Jackson Dahl
Some people are lazy and some people aren’t. Yeah.
Linus Lee
Like that’s, I’ve fallen into that fallacy at times. I’ve also fallen into another kind of fallacy at times, which is to say certain tasks require mastery and certain tasks don’t, which I think is also not true. I think it’s really a function of all of these things. For some people, at some moments, you just want the result. And it may be for the same people in other

Linus Lee
Yeah, before you even realize you thought it. Yeah. The thing that I’m concerned about is that the kind of things that engineers and people who build things build is partly a function of what they think should exist but there are also lots Of other factors that influence what people build like other things that influence what people build include like is it cool to build this type of thing and like is it easy and all these Things and the thing that i’m concerned about is that because agents feel very sexy right now and it feels novel, and it is in some ways, I think, the easy way out to build a new type of thing That gives you new power, that because of these reasons, problems that may be better solved by forcing the user to contend with the complexity of something are going to instead be solved By these instrumental tools that take away agency of the user.

Linus Lee
Yeah, before you even realize you thought it. Yeah. The thing that I’m concerned about is that the kind of things that engineers and people who build things build is partly a function of what they think should exist but there are also lots Of other factors that influence what people build like other things that influence what people build include like is it cool to build this type of thing and like is it easy and all these Things and the thing that i’m concerned about is that because agents feel very sexy right now and it feels novel, and it is in some ways, I think, the easy way out to build a new type of thing That gives you new power, that because of these reasons, problems that may be better solved by forcing the user to contend with the complexity of something are going to instead be solved By these instrumental tools that take away agency of the user. One example of this might be like, actually, software is a good example where

Jackson Dahl
And the way that that balancing between those two things can give or take away agency. You’ve said we need diverse and accessible representations, but then you’ve also talked about actually introducing complexity as almost being a way to like take the user seriously, Or you think about the musical instrument, the more complexity, the more you can do.
Linus Lee
I love that, take the user seriously.
Jackson Dahl
Yeah, forcing the user to contend with complexity in your words. You also said though, on the note of constraint, reducing the number of choices the user has and contextualizing the input UI to shape the behavior. I think that’s me paraphrasing you, but talking about interfaces. From you where you’re talking about video games that I think captures this tension. You say, a video game, for example, can sometimes be better by being more realistic and easier to learn, but this isn’t always true. Sometimes the fun of a game comes from the challenge of learning its mechanics

Linus Lee
But if you’re a person whose job is to like think about what software to build and how to build robust, resilient like software systems in the world, then actually Python is a huge advancement Because at the same level of complexity of software, it lets you build it much more easily. And conversely, at the same level of ease of use of software, it lets you handle much more complexity. And so it’s, I think, a notational innovation or maybe an innovation in how we represent and model software. It’s an innovation and abstraction that pushes this like frontier trade-off between kind of simplicity and complexity forward so that you can, I mean, in a way, it goes back to like The

Linus Lee
When I was in the depth of latent space stuff in 2022, I would tell everyone I could about this idea of like, imagine that in the future, the way that you read a book is not by opening a bunch Of pieces of dead trees, but instead you like walk into a room and against all the walls, it’s a huge room against the walls are these like sculptures. And each sculpture is like a big idea. And different ideas have different shapes that you can tell from a distance. And as you get closer, you see more and more of the detail of the shapes. And that detail corresponds to the details in the claims. And maybe you in your head have your own sculpture that corresponds to kind of your belief in the world. And it’s like very obvious visually where they’re incompatible because they look like things that wouldn’t fit together if you like try to match them together as puzzle pieces or something. This like reification of not just like the words, because the words are just like, they’re like what we sound like when they come out of our mouths, but like something structural about Thoughts, how can you express it visually? And it felt like embeddings could capture a lot of that, where similar ideas are physically closer together, and maybe you could turn them into shapes in some way.