Hi, I'm Allen Pike. I’m currently building Forestwalk Labs, hosting It Shipped That Way, and writing monthly about what I’m learning.
Spending Too Much Money on a Coding Agent
On making use of large thinking models.
Figma Slides is a Beautiful Disaster
Some highlights and lowlights.
Post-Chat UI
How LLMs are making traditional apps feel broken.
Link: Canada Votes
Advance voting is now open for Canada’s federal election.
The last federal election was boring – but a lot has changed. The two largest parties have new leaders, and Canada’s largest trading partner has, uh, put new issues on voters’ minds.
While defense, energy independence, international relations, and democracy itself have hardly been core election issues of late, they’re now in play. You can check out CBC’s Election platform overview or Vote Compass, or the CTV’s Party Platform Tracker to get a recap of the parties’ platforms.
In terms of what to expect, there has been a fairly dramatic polling shift since Justin Trudeau’s resignation and the new US administration coming to power. According to polls, many voters who planned to vote for other parties – whether it was Conservatives, the progressive NDP, or the more obscure parties – are now planning to back the centre-left Liberals. Of course, only those who show up actually decide.
You can use 338Canada to see some guesses about what this might mean for your riding, or any strategic voting. Given the very large error bars on these projections though, it’s worth remembering that at the end of the day, you’re electing an MP to represent you – not the Prime Minister directly.
Making a plan to vote
- Sun April 20, Sat April 21: Remaining advance voting days
- Mon, Apr 28: Voting Day. Polls will be open until 9:30 for Eastern Time ridings, but only 7pm in Pacific time areas. Make a plan if you’re not advance voting.
A Score for Snacks
The Nutri-Score, and a calculator for it.
JavaScript Fatigue Strikes Back
The new frameworks will continue until morale improves.
The Era of Tab Continuation
Press tab to complete your work.
An Unreasonable Amount of Time
A method for magic.
Link: The Talk Show, Ep. 415
On the most recent episode of The Talk Show, “A Good Duck Butt”, John Gruber and I discussed Apple Intelligence, Pixelmator, ChatGPT and Siri, the latest LLMs, and cursed faces.
Two developments since we recorded:
- iOS 18.2 was released, which added image generation and web search to Siri’s ChatGPT integration.
- Llama 3.3 70B was released, a new high-water mark for local models – if you have 64GB of memory.
It's Good for Apple, and Okay for You
Apple Intelligence, so far.
Link: Final Fact
After 82 episodes, the Fun Fact podcast has reached Final Fact – at least, for now. Good things don’t always get a satisfying ending, but this one turned out.
Fans of the show may enjoy It Shipped That Way, where I’ve been interviewing leaders from companies like Slack, Superhuman, and Shopify about how they’ve built great products and teams. More recently I’ve also been interviewing more founders, like this episode with Charity Majors, co-founder of Honeycomb.
Testing the Untestable
The four phases of automated evals for LLM-powered features.