Augment

Something Big Is Happening

A personal note for non-tech friends and family on what AI is starting to change.

Essays

Personal website of Gwern Branwen (writer, self-experimenter, and programmer): topics: psychology, statistics, technology, deep learning, anime. This index page is a categorized list of Gwern.net pages.

Guardian Angels: LLM Personalization for Productivity and Security

I propose an approach for highly personalized LLMs, for near-future productivity gains and personal info/cybersecurity against increasingly powerful LLMs: they should, in the spirit of uploading, try to emulate the user’s values and preferences in order to amplify the principal—not replace them. I discuss a package of techniques and proposals to accomplish such ‘guardian angels’; dynamic evaluation of LLMs combined with active learning and elicitation and heavy inner-monologue search/data-augmentation.

Desktop Neo – rethinking the desktop interface for productivity.

The desktop computer hasn’t changed much in the last 30 years. It’s still built on windows, folders and mouse input. But we have changed. We now use smartphones and tablets most of the time, since they are much easier to use.The traditional desktop computer is struggling to adapt the simple interfaces of mobile devices while also keeping its focus on productivity. With people switching to mobile devices for mundane tasks, we have the opportunity to rethink the desktop computer with a focus on getting professional work done.

What Even Is An OS Now?

Computers now work the way I thought they did when I was 8. What does computing look like when most applications have an audience of 1-2 people? I'm leaving Fly.io to build a phone for that world.

Lexicon Service Docs - at:// pizza thoughts

Riffing on some ways to make network services more legible to humans and machines

Atmospheric Computing

Cloud computing has been extremely successful, but it lost the values that drove personal computing. We can solve this by evolving forward.

AI, I tried to love you – Writings and rehearsals by Nathan Schneider

Among my peers who study the cultures and economies surrounding technology, I often find myself more tech-positive than most. On the whole I like computers, like the internet, and like in general the emergent human creativity that these things have enabled and revealed. A source of my appreciation is that I expend a lot of effort on the practice of “slow computing,” which is to say, choosing tools and technical communities that I can feel in right relationship with. I tend to approach new socio-technologies (like gig economies, blockchains, and social media) not from a perspective of why is this so bad? so much as asking how could we do this right?

Don’t just Build a Second Brain: share (part of) it

I’m exploring how MyHub.ai could become a unique hybrid of personal publishing and productivity tools by launching a newsletter powered by…

Octothorpes: Jailbreaking hashtags to connect websites together

My friend Nik and I share a lot of interests, and we like to write about them on our own websites. We’d hang out and talk about printmaking or building websites or the complexity of planning creative work, only to discover later that one or both of us had

LettaBot - Your personal AI that remembers

Your personal AI with living memory. Remembers everything. Runs on your computer. Grows with you.

On AI and building your own GIS software

Of the thousands of essays over the past two years surrounding AI and its implications are some very thought provoking ones with enormous implications for GIS. Some of the essays are around the the…

Reading

Carl Kolon's favorite articles about programming.

The Future Is Not Tech-Forward

On artificial intelligence, data centers, technological politics, and who gets to build the future.

Clan 2025 Wrap-Up: From Infrastructure to a New Computing Paradigm

A look back at what we built in 2025 and where Clan is heading next