Helsinki sending kids free comics to spark love of reading

The gift subscription is part of a research project led by the University of Jyväskylä that examines how regular access to printed reading material at home affects children's motivation to read.

My love affair with reading was similarly forged over reading full comic book sets during the summer holiday months I was in my village in Bihar. That was the only source of entertainment for us.

We would get a full set of 10-12 comic books and be done in a day. This seems like a good initiative. Get the kids away from the dam screens.

First impressions of Claude Cowork, Anthropic’s general agent by Simon Willison

New from Anthropic today is Claude Cowork, a "research preview" that they describe as "Claude Code for the rest of your work". It's currently available only to Max subscribers ($100 or $200 per month plans) as part of the updated Claude Desktop macOS application. […]

The announcement video is cool too. I saw it on LinkedIn. This makes CC accessible to the masses. I like Anthropic’s product sensibilities. They are building things which are interesting to me - more in the automation space. OpenAI seems to be throwing everything against the wall and seeing what works.

I have not tried it yet.

Be Wary of Digital Deskilling - Cal Newport

In his 1974 book, ​Labor and Monopoly Capital​, the influential Marxist political economist Harry Braverman argued that the expanding “science-technical revolution” was being exploited by companies to increasingly “deskill” workers; to leave them in “ignorance, incapacity, and thus in fitness for machine servitude.” The more employees outsource skilled activity to machines, the more controllable they become. […]

Boris Cherny is a senior technical lead at Anthropic who manages a large team and likely owns a significant amount of stock options in the company. Of course, he’s excited about the idea of agents replacing programmers, but that doesn’t mean we have to share his enthusiasm.

A Software Library with No Code by Drew Breunig

the whenwords library contains no code. Instead, whenwords contains specs and tests, specifically:

• SPEC.md: A detailed description of how the library should behave and how it should be implemented.
• tests.yaml: A list of language-agnostic test cases, defined as input/output pairs, that any implementation must pass.
• INSTALL.md: Instructions for building whenwords, for you, the human.

Drew goes on to list a bunch of scenarios when this will not be useful. But it’s an interesting way to look at libraries.

What’s on your desk, Stevie Bonifield?

I just got that when I moved last month, and it’s one of my favorite additions to my desk setup. It’s a double-decker laptop mount I got for around $30 on Amazon and just clamps onto the side of my desk (no screws necessary!).

I love reading these desk setups. This one has a nice clip on thing you can put your laptop in among other things.