I was kind of waiting for Apple to ship something like this and using speechify in the meantime, so I was pleasantly surprised to stumble across Kokoro in a thread on HN a few days ago. The voices are better than the cloud provider IMO.
I'm using it in an open source tool I built for listening to coding agents instead of watching them work, and it's been great. Local, private, free to run, and enough voices that I can actually use a different one for each agent.
I thought it was a great post tying a lot of things I’ve been reading and thinking about together. Could care less if you used AI if it helps my brain expand and or make connections I wouldn’t have otherwise.
Thanks for mentioning this, a coworker also pointed me to that feature after reading my post. I've since updated the top of the post with two things that stood out to me in the feedback here and on lobste.rs
Yeah, they've got it backwards. I tried to sum it up in thisistheway.to/ai but what's been working for us is that every agent miss is a learning opportunity:
1. Capture the miss — What did the agent do? What did reality say?
2. Diagnose — What didn't it see? Missing data, constraint, feedback, or boundaries?
3. Choose a primitive — Observability, instructions, tooling, guardrails, or verification?
4. Encode as artifact — Version-controlled, repeatable, not just memory.
5. Promote to gate — When it's worth enforcing, make it a gate.
Every harness I setup includes this process in the primary set of agent instructions.
"Rugo is a small language with a big personality. It borrows Ruby's elegance, Go's compilation speed, and Bash's street smarts — then welds them together into something that feels natural for scripting, tooling, and quick prototypes that compile to native binaries."
I really liked this piece, and I share the concern, but I think “outsourcing thinking” is slightly the wrong frame.
In my own work, I found the real failure mode wasn’t using AI, it was automating the wrong parts. When I let AI generate summaries or reflections for me, I lost the value of the task. Not because thinking disappeared, but because the meaning-making did.
The distinction that’s helped me is:
- If a task’s value comes from doing the thinking (reflection, synthesis, judgment), design AI as a collaborator, asking questions, prompting, pushing back.
- If the task is execution or recall, automate it aggressively.
So the problem isn’t that we outsource thinking, it’s that we sometimes bypass the cognitive loops that actually matter. The design choice is whether AI replaces those loops or helps surface them.
Great post. Re: frameworks, I tried a number of them and then found Pocketflow and haven’t found a reason to try anything else since. It’s now been ported to half a dozen or more languages (including my port to Ruby). The simple api and mental model makes it easy for everyone on my team to jump into, extend, and compose. Highly recommend for anyone frustrated with the larger SDKs.
I haven’t read the whole thread but thought I’d share my experience having been homeschooled 12 grades.
My parents started homeschooling me because the public schools near where they lived then were supposedly subpar (Miami in the mid 80s, I have no idea if what they believed is true). When they moved to Michigan in 89 they continued homeschooling me and later my younger sister because they’d gotten used to it and a big court case had just been won (or was shortly after we moved) making it officially legal there.
I never complained because I did have a good social group through church, the neighborhood, and a strong homeschool group in the area that organized weekly park days, some coop classes with professional teachers, but more than any of that it gave me so much freedom.
My mom did a good job teaching me by 4th or 5th grade how to teach myself given course material, the library, and her or my dad when I needed more. She did standardized testing for us every year and I was able to complete 12th grade just before turning 17. They pushed me to use the local community college for math and science by 14 because they didn’t feel equipped with more advanced topics. They got me into summer science camps at the college I ended up attending and getting my undergrad at.
Every family I knew in the group were doing it for different reasons and did things differently but shared tips, curriculum, and really their lives with us. It was a very tight knit community despite spanning over 600 square miles. Some probably got stronger educations and more opportunities, for many different reasons, socioeconomic and others. As I remember most were well adjusted and successful as adults.
I mentioned freedom above and I’ll end on that. Once I’d been taught how to teach myself the sky was the limit. I had the opportunity to focus 4 hours straight on school work and then to work with my dad at construction sites, swinging a hammer, eventually part of a crew of 4 every afternoon building houses or whatever. That started at age 12. By 14 I wrote my first business plan with a friend, raised $10k from family and private investors, and started my first business (VRcade in Jackson MI, summer of 96). By 16 I had an IT consultancy. I don’t think I’d have had as many opportunities like that if I’d been at the local highschool from 7:30-2:30pm every day. I had friends at the school and a few of them worked service jobs after school but that was pretty rare.
So what did I do for my two kids? We chose public (charter) school for them but we got super involved. My wife and I volunteer there a few hours a week, teaching gardening and helping where needed. Neither of us felt we had the patience or skills to be full time educators and Covid proved that out when the kids were home for 6 months. I’m still not sure what magic my mom used to teach me how to teach myself. The important thing is we found our community at the school and amazing teachers, many of whom have been there 1-3 decades.
I am trying to instill the values and initiative my parents (both entrepreneurs) empowered me with. We’ve been paying for instruction for our 11yo at a (unofficial) trade school for a few years and now the same school pays them to help with instruction when they have big beginner classes. My youngest is leaning more towards tech like me and is super into games so I’m going to try and stretch my generalist programming skills to empower them in that arena.
All this to say I think it’s ok to have many ways to do things and find the way that fits your family. I really appreciate public schools because many wouldn’t have the opportunity for an education otherwise and I try to contribute back to that as much as I can even though it wasn’t my experience. And I support those who have chosen homeschooling and figured out how to make it work. Private schools I’m a little more meh on but I’ll do my best not to judge, lol.
All I do now is use now is a piece of kinesthetic tape to make sure my mouth stays closed and that somehow works. I’d just done another sleep study to see if I had options other than the bipap because it’s been filling me with air since I was intubated and put on life support overnight a few years ago. I’ve been miserable the past few years and doctors couldn’t figure out how to fix it. Bipap helped a bit but not completely.
I’d even turned down the cpap and then bipap to the lowest settings, which was enough to help me have a great night of sleep, but still the balloon effect. Then I was chatting with a family member and they mentioned trying and liking taping, something they saw on TikTok, and I told them it was a terrible idea. They assured me it was helping them avoid the snore and they woke up less dehydrated and better rested.
So I gave it a go. I wear my Apple Watch when I sleep and have been able to confirm on at least 3 occasions before I started taping that the sleep apnea stats always lined up with when I was experiencing the effects of apnea. The first night I taped but still used the mask and was fine the next day albeit filled up with air. Then I tried a night taping without my cpap and someone to monitor me and make sure I didn’t die and I couldn’t believe when I woke up in the morning completely rested and not feeling awful from the balloon effect.
I’m not suggesting what worked for me will work for anyone else, but thought I’d share as my quality of life has gone way up the past few months.
My friend Christian Metts and I, 15 and 14 at the time, decided to start a virtual reality arcade in Jackson Crossing mall in Jackson Michigan in 1996.
We wrote a business plan, got $10k in investment from friends and family, rented space in the mall, bought the best PC at the time, two VFX1 3d headsets, licensed Descent for our use case by snail mailing the company with our idea and receiving a contract back from them which we signed and sent with a check, and my dad helped us design, build and weld a custom desk with arms to hold the headsets when they weren’t in use. It was designed as a standing desk so you could just walk up underneath, reach up and put the headset on, and play. I think we had Nintendo style controllers for the hands.
Unfortunately we were terrible salesmen (sales boys?) and then the Quake demo came out and we just played that non stop for 2 months without charging for it because we’d run out of budget for licensing.
Thankfully by August we were able to get construction jobs and managed to pay off our loans a few months ahead of the original plan (I think the terms were 10% over 12 months).
Great game, great learning experience, and a lot of fun. Haven’t failed at a business venture since. Ended up being an entrepreneur for the next 14 years before taking a more standard day job as a software engineer.
I’ve wondered if the memory issues are actually side effects of the medication. I spent 6 months on max dosage of one medication and memory was crap and ability to communicate with humans (vs computers for the day job) was greatly diminished. I’m now down to about half the dosage of that medication but we’ve added a small dose of a second medication and I’m remembering more and social interactions aren’t as stressful as they were.
“aura” rings very true for me, I can feel it coming on 5-30 seconds before it hits hard.
I especially struggle, not necessarily to the point of seizure but at least increased brain activity, with social situations with too many inputs when I can’t decide which input to focus on.
https://jonmagic.com