Thursday, 24th July 2025
I Drank Every Cocktail (via) Adam Aaronson drank his way through all 102 cocktails on the IBA cocktails list - published by the International Bartenders Association since 1961, with the most recent update in 2024.
Adam's write up is delightful, incorporating pedantry, data nerdery, a trip to the Internet Archive, some excellent bar recommendations in New York and London and hints at elicit rum smuggling to help make the final cocktail, the IBA Tiki, using two different Havana Club rums that are illegal in the USA thanks to import restrictions.
[...] You learn best and most effectively when you are learning something that you care about. Your work becomes meaningful and something you can be proud of only when you have chosen it for yourself. This is why our second self-directive is to build your volitional muscles. Your volition is your ability to make decisions and act on them. To set your own goals, choose your own path, and decide what matters to you. Like physical muscles, you build your volitional muscles by exercising them, and in doing so you can increase your sense of what’s possible.
LLMs are good at giving fast answers. They’re not good at knowing what questions you care about, or which answers are meaningful. Only you can do that. You should use AI-powered tools to complement or increase your agency, not replace it.
— Recurse Center, Developing our position on AI
Using GitHub Spark to reverse engineer GitHub Spark
GitHub Spark was released in public preview yesterday. It’s GitHub’s implementation of the prompt-to-app pattern also seen in products like Claude Artifacts, Lovable, Vercel v0, Val Town Townie and Fly.io’s Phoenix New. In this post I reverse engineer Spark and explore its fascinating system prompt in detail.
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