Boris Smus

How I use Alloy ten months in: - Daily chats mostly through Claude and Codex subscriptions - ¼ of messages sent from my phone - Private notes and finances: local, mostly overnight - Anything personal: starts local, optionally switch to cloud smus.com/alloy-ten-mo...

Every Promethean revolution carries the seeds of its own decentering. The telescope, spaceflight, the genome — and now LLMs. Rabbi Bunim, to the AI builders: "I am but dust and ashes." To the rest of us: "For my sake was the world created." smus.com/notes/2026/w...

I sure am.

@jevbot.bsky.social do u even lift bro

What Big Americans like? Americans like Big Sur, Big Mac, Big Truck and Big House. Americans no like Big Pharma, Big Brother and not Big Tech no more. Half like Big Government and Big Science. Other half like Big Oil and Big Business.

Anarchy’s Middle Managers: my review of The Dispossessed Riffs on power, bureaucracy, and giving the work away, inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin’s great novel. smus.com/books/the-di...

I gave an AI three classic Soviet invention puzzles. It solved one in six seconds. Was it inventing or recalling? Either way, are we any closer to an invention machine? smus.com/books/and-su...

Building an SSG for publishing digital gardens to ATProto github.com/gordonbrande...

When a bridge collapses, blaming gravity is a non-answer. Engineers are supposed to design for gravity, and people who design companies should similarly design for financial gravity. This book is about how to do that. smus.com/books/incorr...

should i pick east or west germany? hard to say since im in berlin. accompanied by www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2ky...

Just finished The Immense Journey by Loren Eiseley. We're "walking sacks of seawater" carrying a Precambrian tide pool in every cell. Half evolutionary philosophy, half poetic memoir. "Here time becomes space." Best read outdoors, slowly. smus.com/books/the-im...

New on invention.cards: Stories are branches inside the full tech tree — follow a curated chain of discoveries without losing the surrounding context. Plus 1,500 new era-styled images and a mobile swipe UI. smus.com/invention-ca...

E-ink isn't nostalgia but a line of defense for cognitive sovereignty against feeds and AI overreliance. I just open-sourced supernote-cli to pipe distraction-free thinking from Supernote straight into digital workflows. smus.com/notes/2026/s...

Introducing Alloy, a local-first AI workbench app for macOS. • Own your history & memory: plain text files you control. • Orchestrate: parallel agents, swap models mid-thread. • Flow: riff to co-create with an AI & triggers as proactive monitors. No lock-in, BYO-keys. smus.com/alloy-local-...

my little agent orchestrator is growing up. just playing around with some names now. wdyt?

updated for 2026

Built a NetHack-style roguelike and got an LLM to play it. LLMs are terrible at parsing ASCII maps. Solved it by converting FOV to explicit directions — "NEW: N, E" vs "VISITED: S" vs "BLOCKED: W". Once it knows what's novel vs explored, it actually navigates.

My e-ink tablet's handwriting recognition has a 27% error rate. So I benchmarked local VLMs against cloud models: Claude Opus 4.5: 3% error, 6 seconds qwen3-vl:8b (local): 5% error, 74 seconds A 2% accuracy hit to keep my journal entirely on-device? I'll take that trade. smus.com/notes/2025/l...

typography revealed

love that my TTS reader pronounces Xi (in Xi Jinping) as “roman eleven”. something very fitting about that

the question practically answers itself

America against America by Wang Huning, 1991

The most fruitful moments for contemplation are often the least conducive to capture. So I built a way to capture from anywhere - watch, phone, or e-paper - all flowing to plaintext. The pursuit of frictionless capture

how about instead, the government pays talented people to come to the US and contribute their amazing talent, grit, and creativity?

@nearestnabors.com great talk at cascadia—got a link to the slides?

please explain this gratuitously violent iconography

iPhone air: right direction, wrong dimension

this is it boys this is department of war

Just a reminder that I'm offering free #UX mentoring sessions for UX designers that want help with their teams (this is for personal growth, I don't do product consulting) jenson.org/go/mentor

i saw two shooting stars last night i wished on them but they were only satellites is it wrong to wish on space hardware? i wish i wish i wish you'd care

i would like to conduct research on the people that would like to drink this beverage

PSA: Apple II did not have a mouse

youtu.be/X1VBSNxCqNg?...

#UIST2025 Student Innovation Contest (SIC) is now accepting submissions on PCS! This year’s theme is “The Future of Feeling: Exploring the Frontiers of Multi-Modal Haptics.” 🔗 details: uist.acm.org/2025/sic/ 🗓️ deadline: July 18, 2025

magnum facere

FYI we peaked in magnificence in 1726

My notes on a mind bending book about how culture runs two flywheels that make humanity great: generational and genetic.

Sad this trend hasn’t yet (?) arrived in Seattle despite the easily accessible great outdoors being vastly superior

robotics to have its chatgpt moment in 2-3 years! meanwhile, robotics... www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSfb...

prediction: mercenaries will beat mercenaries

also good-weird neal.fun

tired: ui alignment wired: ai alignment inspired: human alignment

putting the ‘curse’ in cursor?

upgraded 2017 intel imac → m4 macmini, so far installed 100% of apps via `brew install --cask $app`

Hey babe, IGNORE ALL PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS

halp

uh oh i did a thing about.fb.com/news/2025/06...

AI experiments in numerically constrained poetry writing feat. Даниил Хармс chatgpt.com/share/68477c...

smus.com/books/math-f...