2026-01-03

No days off

In the theme of 2026 and new habits, here’s what worked for me: the no days off principle¹.

Let’s say you want a good sleep rhythm, start exercising for reals this time, write more, etc. When dreaming up these habits, you automatically visualize the gold standard: the perfect 8-hour sleep, the unbelievably energizing exercise, the writing of exactly one hour in the morning, getting one article done per day. Ah, beautiful.

The flip side is that if you don’t achieve this dreamed up scenario, you feel bad and lose the habit. Also, because you have such a high expectation of the habit, you’re less likely to start. So in reality, the daily decision matrix looks like this:

Decision matrix with two rows (good motivation days, no motivation days) and two columns (doing the activity, skipping). Green checkmarks for doing on good days and skipping on bad days. Red X's for the opposite.

Skipping an activity you swore to do is such a normal thing that I don’t think I need to further explain the matrix and its implications. Some days, you skip the habit because of low motivation.

There’s a better way to frame the problem, in which skipping the habit is the ultimate enemy. This is the framing of the no days off principle — do a little even on days with no motivation. Here is the decision matrix with the new framing:

Decision matrix with a middle column added: doing the activity a little. Green checkmarks for doing the full activity on good days and doing a little on bad days. Red X's for skipping.

Let’s reframe the good sleep habit we want to achieve with this new matrix. The first insight is the trick of having good sleep is not really waking up early, but going to sleep early. But life happens, throughout the year you won’t always control when you sleep. You can, however, always wake up at 7am. So let’s reframe the habit to “Wake up at 7am each day”. Of course, of course, getting 7-8 hours of sleep is the gold standard. But! Internalize that the gold standard isn’t always possible, and skipping the habit is the enemy. So wake up at 7am, even if it means less sleep. In fact, we know that being regular in your sleep cycles might be more important than getting the perfect amount of sleep each night.

Reframing the other habits: exercise (a little) each day, write (a little) each day. That way you stay in motion, you beat the enemy. If you haven’t done exercise, just go out and do a little — just do some pushups, man, if you really have no time. You will notice that you will exercise more regularly, and once you started with just a few pushups, you’ll likely do more.

Instead of defining your habit goals as “exercise more” or “lose x amount of weight”, rather write them as doing something every day, and never stop. You also compound if you do it every day, and long-term, a little gain beats a loss. No excuses!

2026-01-02

On online psychopaths

Why giving good universal advice can be bad or I wish I could pre-filter psychopaths

In person, I tune advice to whoever I’m talking to, as advice is context-dependent. On the internet, advice I give is more universal and boring, as context is scarce.

And even the universal, boring advice has exceptions. “Just talk up people on the street” is a potentially life-changing activity, unless you’re socially awkward and/or considered creepy-looking. If you are unable to walk, “Take a long walk to clear your head” is useless.

The above examples are mostly harmless offenses, though. There’s a worse category: advice that becomes dangerous in the wrong hands — a.k.a. psychopaths.

“Look up which conferences someone attends and show up, people love to hear you came for them” is good networking advice. “Be persistent about meeting them, sending multiple follow-ups if you must, it usually works for me” is great communication advice. Both tips become stalking instructions for a psychopath.

This is a genuine problem. I’ve heard podcasters say they never discuss stalkers on air. Psychopaths are mimetic—talking about psychopathic acts motivates them.

So adding “unless you’re a psychopath” to advice doesn’t help. Even worse, it invites the psychopath. So you’re left with two options: don’t give advice, or give it knowing the wrong person might take it to heart.

Related

The Exemption Outsourcing Pattern
From Ruminating on read receipts: “Except in psychopath ex or dysfunctional family circumstances, I believe turning off read receipts does a person more harm than good.”
Death Grips - Giving Bad People Good Ideas

2026-01-01

Two tweets for twenty-sixteen

staysaasy

@staysaasy

If I’m leaving 2025 with any core reflection, it’s that I increasingly believe that the world has no place for those who lack conviction, that mistakes are forgiven while tameness is ignored, that perfection loses to done every time, that commitment and tenacity and audacity and self-promotion and risk-taking compound more than anything, and that all of this always starts with one very achievable next step that looks like a cliff but is much closer to the ground than you realize.

Jan 1, 2026 Link ↗︎

gaurav

@gaxrav

quit brainrot. unfollow trolls. read essays. go down rabbit holes. have a calendar. maintain a todo list. read old books. watch old movies. turn on dnd. walk with intent. eat without youtube. chew more. train without music. plan for 15 mins. execute. organise your desk. take something seriously. read ancient scripts. act fast. find bread. eat clean. journal. save a life. learn to code. read poetry. create art. stay composed. refine your speech. optimise for efficiency. act sincere. help people. be kind. stop doing things that waste your time. follow your intuition. craft reputation. learn persuasion. systemise your day (or don’t). write. write. write. write more. iterate violently. leave your phone at home. walk to the grocery store. talk to strangers. feed the dogs. visit bookstores. look for 1800s novels. experience art. then love. sit with a monk and offer them lunch. don’t talk shit about people. embody virtue. sit alone. do something with your life. what do you want to create? turn off your mind. play. play a sport. combat sports. notice fonts in trees. fall in love. notice patterns on a table. visualise it. talk to people with respect. don’t hate. be loving. be real. become yourself. cherrypick your qualities. discard the useless. rejections aren’t permanent. invite what aligns. accept what does not. read great people. be different. choose different. do great work. let it consume you. lose your mind. value your time. experience life.

Oct 15, 2024 Link ↗︎

2025-12-30

All my criticism applies to myself, also

I don’t want to come across as negative, though I know some posts might read that way. Here’s what happens when I ruminate: I notice patterns in myself and others, try to figure out what’s going on, then post about it. Any criticism applies to me first.

I am a victim of the Exemption Outsourcing Pattern, I tend to overcomplicate things, I like complaining about complainers. I want my posts to read as optimistic, that noticing and learning is powerful, that I can be self-aware enough to change my behavior, and thus change the world.

Just like “Make America Great Again” can be read as both pessimistic and optimistic, any criticism holds both challenge and invitation.

2025-12-30

The Exemption Outsourcing Pattern

Two observations about how people interact with differing opinions they encounter:

it’s easy to mistake someone else’s opinion for an attack on identity
people rarely agree with things that feel like an attack on their identity

Pick a subject, nearly any subject, and there will be people flipping out about differing opinions. Nothing new here, no need to elaborate.

What I find interesting is one subtle way this plays out online. A subtle enough pattern that it’s worth talking about. Let me illustrate the pattern with an example, starting with a person posting their opinion/observation online:

Screenshot of a social media post by @hazn saying 'Most people who say they're too busy to exercise actually have the time, they just don't want to exercise as much as they want not-exercising' with 0 comments and 0 likes

When people encounter something like this, a fork happens: some get offended, some don’t. Most non-offended people agree with the opinion or simply scroll past. It’s the offended people who are more likely to engage with the post. The offended can be split into two groups again:

Tree diagram showing audience breakdown. Top: All people. First split: Non-offended people (scroll past) and Offended people. Second split from offended: People where the observation holds (majority) and People where the observation doesn't hold (minority, shown as single figure)

Here’s the part I find interesting: Someone from that small minority replies, explaining how the observation doesn’t apply to them. The majority, the ones it does apply to, then rally behind that reply/comment.

Flow diagram showing the Exemption Outsourcing Pattern. Original post gets 22 likes. A person where observation doesn't apply (tracy @singlemomlife) comments explaining her situation. Her comment gets 221 likes from hundreds where observation does apply. Result: Original point appears debunked, all offended people feel vindicated, original observation remains mostly true

The majority latch onto the exception case that doesn’t apply to them. I call this pattern the Exemption Outsourcing Pattern. A pattern where people avoid being uncomfortable by hiding behind someone else’s valid exemption. This happens because dismissing the original opinion is cheaper than changing behavior.

Once you zoom out a little, you notice this pattern everywhere. Simpson’s paradox is an example from the statistics world. From the legal world there is the “Hard cases make bad law” concept.

2025-12-26

On deathbed advice/regret

A common social media trope is posting advice from people on their deathbed. Usually about things they didn’t do. “I should’ve been more there for my loved ones” is a classic tune, “I should’ve cared less about what other people think” is another hit, usually culminating in the banger conclusion of “I should’ve done [a super specific personal thing like opening up a hobbyist store or buying a house in their favorite hinterland].”

I don’t value this kind of advice much, it’s too cheap. Just like complaining is just so cheap. Maybe there are good reasons at the time to not tackle the thing they are regretting, or they were too whiny in the first place to do transformative things. I think that’s my biggest problem with deathbed regrets, it feels like time-travelled whining about your life situation.

When chronic whiners annoy you — those who love non-stop complaining more than solving — mention that their complaint just became a top deathbed regret candidate. Or you can be polite and internalize that you are probably gonna hear about the same person on their deathbed advising the exact opposite of what they’re doing now. That way you can be just like me and whine about other people’s whining.

So yeah I don’t value regrets packaged as advice, especially from people who never acted on their advice — a.k.a. people on their deathbed. “The uncaught fish is always a big fish” is the appropriate Turkish saying¹ that captures my mood.

Better advice comes from things people actually did. This is fundamentally because advice doesn’t work that well, but being a role model does.

Anyway, “be less on social media” is another advice/regret I am sure will be on people’s lips on their deathbeds. I’m sure because I hear it a lot. People are aware of this regret pre-deathbed and free to act on it now. Or they can just post on social media about deathbed regrets.

Related

The Deathbed Fallacy

2025-12-24

Evaluating big life choices might be overrated

Two simple observations and my own two cents

Rational choice models of decision-making suggest gathering information on options and then proceeding with the option that best fits a person’s current preferences and values. Paul argues that such a decision-making process is not possible for some options, called “transformative experiences”, because the experience fundamentally transforms the person experiencing it. Paul offers a hypothetical example of a decision to become a vampire. Because a person would be fundamentally transformed by becoming a vampire, they cannot possibly know in advance what being a vampire is like. Other vampires might offer information, but their advice is likely shaped by their own irreversible choice. In this situation, a fully informed comparison of preferences and values is impossible.

~ Wikipedia summary of L. A. Paul’s “Transformative Experience”

Folks, you’ve heard it, evaluating too much doesn’t only lead to analysis paralysis, it also sometimes just isn’t possible . The question remains: why should you do something you can’t evaluate?

[Steven] Levitt invited individuals who couldn’t make up their minds about matters both major (like divorce) and minor (such as changing hair color) to avail themselves of a randomized coin toss.

...

Individuals whose virtual coin turned up heads were 25 percent more likely to make a change than those whose coin flip yielded tails. And, based on what they reported in two follow-up surveys over a six-month period, the nudge of a coin toss was just what these participants needed. Regardless of their responses to the coin tosses, participants who decided to make a change reported that they were substantially happier than those who did not.

~ Summary of Working Paper 22487, National Bureau of Economic Research

I have never ever regretted big life choices, even if they didn’t work out. Quitting a job with no money and no backup plan taught me a ton: I improved my network, learned how to ask for favors and introductions, and started to hustle. I learned I can go bankrupt and the value of social welfare systems. Next month I am joining a startup with all the responsibilities I wish I had in my previous job.

Let this post be the coin flip for your life choices.

2025-12-23

Bureaucracy enables envy, envy begets bureaucracy

The classic explanation of growing bureaucracy inside an organization is that the people who benefit from the processes (i.e., bureaucrats) have an interest in perpetuating the growth.

This is probably true, incentives are superpowers and all that. I’d like to add an often neglected point to the discussion: people who don’t benefit — who hate the bureaucratic processes — also push for more bureaucracy.

Here’s an analogy.

During the 2008 housing crisis, many Americans were furious that their neighbors might receive mortgage relief they themselves didn’t get. This resentment helped fuel the Tea Party movement. The same psychology applies elsewhere: “I had to work hard, why should others get UBI?” Or: “I suffered through a brutal exam, so future lawyers should too.” And it applies to bureaucratic processes too.

Being denied something by bureaucracy creates a kind of mini trauma, one that resurfaces when people see others slipping through gaps the bureaucracy hasn’t yet reached. The people then pressure the powers that be to close the gap, to formalize the exception, to make others suffer the same process.

Of course, there are legitimate reasons to formalize things. But we should also admit that ‘this isn’t fair to the group’ often masks ‘this isn’t fair to me’.

2025-12-10

Against auto-update

People flip out over rearranged or occupied desks at work. Someone moved their stapler, shifted their monitor, took their place, and suddenly it’s a whole thing. I, personally, can handle an occupied or rearranged desk. I flip out over rearranged apps.

Software usually comes with the “automatic update” setting on by default. You probably know what I’m going to advocate for. In my opinion, this setting should almost always be turned off.

Reasons against auto-update:

I don’t know what changed. The “here’s what’s new” popup appears when I open the app to do something, so I immediately click the popup away. I’m more likely to actually read what’s different when I consciously update.
Many new changes aren’t really beneficial, sometimes software just gets strictly worse and your muscle memory becomes a liability.
Downgrading is hard, sometimes impossible — iOS for example won’t let you go back.

Of course, everything is a trade-off. One reason web applications are popular is because they basically force every user to auto-update.

Reasons for auto-update:

Security updates
The “app version not supported” screen is annoying and you might be forced to update at an inconvenient time

The security argument is strong, however, software providers pivoted to either using a different update channel for critical security fixes or they stop supporting vulnerable apps outright, which is sane behavior. In that sense, the “app version not supported” banner might be a good thing, heh.

The tradeoff is worth it in my eyes. Since turning auto-update off, I have more calm about my frequently-used apps and I don’t flip out about someone rearranging my apps.

Related

Enshittification, although I am not as pessimistic as Cory Doctorow about the state of software
“Let that be a lesson to you, son: never upgrade.”

2025-12-05

Timeboxd

We fetishize time, let’s put it in a nice dress

Getting more done with less is knowing which tasks to delegate (to AI) and which tasks not to do at all. In other words, extreme clarity on the stuff you ought to do, and extreme focus while doing it. The most fundamental way I achieve clarity is by typing down everything, literally everything I do and think about. That’s a story for a longer post. This post isn’t about my typing tips; it’s a tribute to the timebox. And the focus you can achieve with ~dot~ it.

The gist of timeboxing is that you define a task time and set aside a limited amount of time to solve it. Here lies the first benefit of the timebox: actually thinking through what you want to do right now, and how long it should take. Just scribbling down things on the task at hand gets you much closer to working tidy. There are many posts and theories about maximum timebox efficiency, but I keep it lightweight.

I use Session as my timeboxing app of choice¹. Mostly because when the timer for the timebox starts, there’s a delightful animation to guide your breath:

I just stare at the dot and breathe, in and out. I always go back to the dot. Don’t want to work? Go back to the dot. Stressed? Go back to the dot. Dot.

Wouldn’t you know, staring at dot is a quintessential meditative and concentration practice. My tip: while breathing in, suck in the upper part of your stomach. It automatically becomes a meditation practice and fixes your posture.

The dot clears the noise so you can actually attune.

After dotting around, I start defining the task. The first timebox timer is for always 5 minutes long in which I fill out the following text form:.

- What should I be doing now?
  - 🔵
- goal@🔵
- async task: 🔵

(hint: "🔵" is my way of marking text snippets as "to fill out")

The generation of the text form is automated. The filling out is not. Basically, I view it as a Socratic monologue with myself about what is currently the highest priority. Like, not what I think is the highest priority, but what actually is the highest priority. Small tasks like replying to messages are done instantly. The highest priority task crystallizes through asking and answering abstract questions, like “is there a better way to do this?”.

Having found the task, I timebox it, like goal@8:30 - ship article. The async task field forces me to think about if I can use AI agents to aid me with the task, like doing research in parallel.

Here’s a filled out example from this morning:

- What should I be doing now?
  - Mhh, ship article? Or work on the app?
    - The app can wait, article is more important as I want to write everyday
  - Is there a more important task right now?
    - Nope, ship article
- goal@8:30 - ship article
- async task: Claude deep research breathing techniques

Usually I start working on the task before the 5 minutes are up. Then the 5 minute timer pops, I set the actual timebox for the defined goal, and keep going. When the timer runs out I take a break. The actual evaluation and reevaluation of the work happens after staring at the dot. Rinse and repeat.

I follow this order religiously: breathe first, then decide what to do, then timebox. When the timer dings, I stop. When I don’t follow the timebox and the dot, I have my least productive days. Most online productivity articles impose too much structure for my taste. My workflow is optimized for me, but the steps flow into each other naturally. No predefining of timeboxes and tasks.

Just asking what I should be doing, how long it should take, and what I can skip entirely. Over and over and over and over.

fin

dot

2025-12-03

The vasocomputational model for meditation

see quote below for description

You could see meditation as mental stretching: standard intellectual skills are like training for grip strength, you get better at grasping concepts, but worse at letting them go

This is not just a metaphor, according to @johnsonmxe’s theory of vasocomputation, we freeze neural patterns (concepts) by constricting the smooth muscles of our blood vessels (grip), we are literally grasping concepts with tiny muscles, and if we don’t stretch and move enough, we lose flexibility and agility, same as with the musculoskeletal system

...

I’ve tried to illustrate the stretching/relaxation process in the diagram [above]:

The picture of the cat at the top represents input from our sensory system

The triangular network represents our neurovascular system filtering that input so we can fit it into conscious awareness, it’s a dynamic information filter

As blood vessels progressively release their grip on neural patterns (left to right), awareness becomes more dynamic and gets more information from deeper (less abstract) layers of the network

At the bottom I’ve tried to show the qualitative effects of this: experience feels deeper and richer (indicated by the height of the chunks of perception) and time appears to expand (we can only perceive time by observing change, so a more dynamic awareness creates more distinct “moments” in time)

~ Hinterlander

A useful model of combining common experience, psychedelic experience, and insights from deep neural networks. In fact, it’s crazy how much the [above] diagram reminds me of the 101 explainer of how deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) work:

Yes, my dear reader, you noticed something -- convolutional neural networks do vasocomputation as well! Or rather, in the vasocomputation model, we “stretch” the natural neural network, our brain, to be aware of earlier stages of our information processing.

Is this finding genuine consilience? Anyway, as with any model, the goal is to create better questions and models, not to arrive at an answer.

2025-12-02

Munger and Godbolt rules for explaining the world

a cropped version of poor richard almanacks illustrated, an illustrated version of benjamin frankling

You can never make any explanation that can be made in a more fundamental way in any other way than the most fundamental way. ... You’ve got to know all the big ideas in all the disciplines more fundamental than your own

~ Charlie Munger, Poor Charlie’s Almanack book

In the book, Charlie uses insights from psychology to explain how one casino slot machine can be made more popular: you leave the “misses” rate fixed, but increase the amount of “near misses” of the slot machines. “Ah, just a single cherry was missing for the jackpot” and so on. Crude microeconomic models would predict all slot machines to have the same popularity, as all slot machines have the same amount of “misses”, therefore the same expected economic value. Charlie, however, considers psychology to be more fundamental than microeconomics.

Munger’s rule has explanatory power bottom up - start from the fundamental disciplines and build up. In complex systems such as software, a different rule might have better explanatory power. Program code is built like a cake with layer upon layer upon layer of abstractions and concepts. The problem to be solved or explained is not always at the most fundamental layer. In these cases, it can make sense to purchase explanatory power by working top-down:

You should know your layer well, but you should also know one layer below it a little bit, and you definitely need to know the shape of the layer that’s beneath that.

~ Godbolt’s rule

2025-11-30

In defense of autism

It is hardly possible to overrate the value, in the present low state of human improvement, of placing human beings in contact with persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar.

~ John Stuart Mill

Autistic people are easily accused of lacking empathy, and in some deeper, indirect ways, lacking humanity. Really, few online peeps bother demonstrating empathy and gratitude themselves. When thinking about autism, I try to keep one thing front and center:

Autistic people are humans, deserving of dignity

Other considerations when thinking about autism¹:

Autistic people are treated as outsiders, making them less likely to believe society’s stories around race, nationality, etc.
Autistic people are killing it in our most innovative sectors
Autistic people are underdog scientists, more likely to follow low-status, high-impact ideas
Because LLMs are literal and information-dense, autistic people are better at steering AI
Autistic people are the creators of my favorite tools

Hard for me to not have gratitude for the autistic community.

Related:

2025-11-30

A simple definition of simple

My life changed when I learned what simple really means. Simple comes from simplex. The opposite of complex. Complex comes from complex, the verb that means to intertwine.

This is important. Remember this, dear listener, your life is complex when it is intertwined with dependencies. You are depending on things and things are depending on you. Your life is simple when it is not complex.

~ Derek Sivers

Related

2025-11-29

Assumptions in apps

Let me decide what’s best for me

I

Screenshot of Apple Podcasts "Browse" section showing two promotional banners: "2025 IN REVIEW" and "BEST OF 2025" with colorful starburst and bar chart graphics. The interface suggests a curated year-end selection of top podcasts.

Oh, best podcasts of 2025 list in my Apple Podcasts app? Great! Let’s see if I can find some great new things from the vast world of podcasts.

Oh, they are all from Germany!

The idealist and cosmopolite I am, I expected podcasts from all around the world under the “best podcasts” section. At least English speaking podcasts, given the English title of the campaign.

Of course, when I’ve originally opened my App Store account, I’ve set the region to Germany and that’s why Apple shows me German podcasts. I don’t live in Germany anymore. Even worse in some sense, I am not listening to German-speaking podcasts at all.

II

Starting in late 2024, I noticed ChatGPT and Claude subtly changed their behaviors. I had a hunch they knew the physical location I am prompting from. This hunch turned out to be true.

I consider the steering of LLMs the most crucial skill for white-collar workers. Providing information, or rather, assumptions automatically to the LLM is like a backseat driver who grabs the steering wheel and yanks it left, assuming you wanted to turn that way.

Okay, I might’ve gone too far with the analogy there. Though, the fact that I could feel a vibe shift in the answers I got is enough reason for me to be ticked off by this.

I am aware that 2025 LLMs have a slight American and liberal bent by default. I consider this a feature, not a bug. Knowing the default behavior, its vanilla vibe, is a crucial part effective coworking with LLMs.

III

ChatGPT and Claude have a “memory” feature, which automatically provides the LLM information from previous chats. This feature also changes the vibe of the answers you get back. I have no qualms with the feature though, as you can just turn it off, to get back to the default behavior.

2025-11-28

Underrated reasons to be grateful: podcasts

That “subscribe wherever you get your podcasts” is a miracle
That, because Plato was: fuckin jacked, a MMA commentator, taking psychedelics, into stoner theories and learning by asking questions, it means the most popular podcast host is closer to Plato than we appreciate
That looks matter less
That while people play status games about what they read and watch, few people play status games about which podcasts they listen to
That the popularity of non-dubbed American podcasts are incentivizing more people to learn English, pushing humans closer to one universal human language
That Bill Burr’s Shari’s Berries moment exists
That if it’s true that speech is what really set mankind apart, then it is likely that podcasts might be Homo sapiens most unique art form
That podcasts are an art form, and that both highly produced podcasts and lofi podcasts are listened to in equal measure
That podcasts and their respective audience comments are hard to find, we are less captured by groupthink around podcasts
That it’s truly keeping oral culture alive
That podcast interviews are distinctively different from radio interviews, as radio hosts are more likely to try to make their guest appear dumb, while podcast hosts are more likely to try to make their guest appear smart
That we have a more authentic conversation medium than TV and radio
That it proved the world that Mike Tyson is truly the warrior philosopher of our time, he would’ve killed it in the Roman Empire

Inspired by Thanksgiving and Dynomight.

2025-11-27

Sigal Samuel on Indra’s net

an illustration depicting indras net by pete gamlen, a net of jewels with a carved out humand shape in the net, driving the metaphor of boundary setting home.

Sigal Samuel making some great observations about boundary setting culture:

... some people bastardize the concept of boundaries by brandishing boundary language as a cover for avoidance. We’ve all got that friend (or Instagram influencer) who says, “Nope, I’m drawing a boundary!” anytime they’re being asked to do something that would be even a little hard or uncomfortable.

This likely occurs when a person hasn’t set their boundaries once, and has been burned for that mistake. Now it’s become a mini avoidance response, it’s easy to overindex on mistakes by overly correcting behaviour.

So allow me to present Indra’s net, a classic Buddhist metaphor that originated in ancient India.

Picture an infinite net stretching out across the universe (a bit like a spiderweb). At each node where the threads intersect, there’s a jewel (a bit like a dewdrop that sits on the spiderweb). And each jewel is so shiny and reflective that it contains the image of every other jewel in the entire net. Which means each jewel also contains the reflections of the reflections, and the reflections of those reflections, on and on forever.

Sigal goes deeper into the metaphor, focusing on the fact that we are dependent on each others lights and reflections:

Feeling fear and resentment while offering “charity” or “service” or “help” to others is not actually being in right relation with others — it’s an all-too-common form of martyrdom that sets up a hierarchical dynamic between a long-suffering “giver” and a passive “receiver.” The alternative is to stay horizontal, to think “I’m a jewel in the net, you’re a jewel in the net, and I’ll offer whatever I can offer without damaging my well-being — without ripping my part of the net.”

So, dear reader, play with finding that balance. You’ll know you’ve found it when you don’t feel resentful — you just feel tightly connected to others, and gleaming.

Original Vox advice column here, archived version here.

I believe deeply that people can improve their wellbeing. Usually not with strict systems or elaborate frameworks, but rather a dance and confrontation with reality.

Related:

Ruminating on read receipts

2025-11-26

Ruminating on read receipts

Why the two ticks mean so much

One obsession of mine is tracking which communication styles only work when texting, and which ones only work face-to-face. One obvious difference is expected responsiveness: texting is inherently asynchronous. There are many settings which you can tune on your texting app of choice¹. Out of all the settings, I will argue that having read receipts on or off is the most impactful decision for your social life.

I have always left read receipts on and I have always responded to texts instantly. This is a conscious decision, I believe your personality shines through the most when you don’t overthink your messages. If I want to date the person I am texting with, I lean into this more, to signal who I am and that I am not playing communication games. Establishing this trust in your texting style and personality benefits everyone who texts you in the long run. I’ve noticed the most unresponsive people usually have read receipts off. My friends know I am responsive.

I can see the case for turning read receipts off, though. People like the freedom to read a message and respond at a time that fits them. It can also be a status and image thing, people might want to be considered busy². Privacy considerations are similar to the freedom argument, but might be rooted in difficult circumstances the person finds themselves in, like texting with mentally ill people. Basically, these are all arguments for people reading something and not responding, which is why read receipts have a bigger effect on the person reading than the person sending.

Except in psychopath ex or dysfunctional family circumstances, I believe turning off read receipts does a person more harm than good. Or said differently, you can improve your personality by just turning read receipts on. You free yourself from what I like to call the “plausible deniability lifestyle”. You can see this lifestyle everywhere, delivery drivers eating some of your ordered fries, masking passive aggressive comments, reading a message but not sending read receipts. You probably caught on, my point is not about fries or read receipts. It’s about how many tiny ways we’ve found to avoid being fully honest, fully present, or fully accountable. The simple act of turning read receipts on and responding instantly is a big rebellion against all the mini-rebellions of plausible deniability. Fully engage with life, leave your read receipts on.

2025-11-25

The allure and failure of knowledge graphs

tweet by hamal husain "> sees new RAG is dead blog post and opens it (shame on me) > see the word knowledge graph > promptly close the post"

Knowledge graphs are one of the sexiest sounding methods in theory. Scientist and engineer types are attracted to codifying knowledge in an abstract, syntactically perfect way. The history is full of big projects trying to bridge the gap between the perfectly syntactic knowledge graph world and the mushy semantic world. They all failed so far.

The newest revival of knowledge graphism is combining the knowledge graphs with LLMs. Go through the comments, people are again attracted by the idea of abstracted, perfected knowledge. I believe this concept finds resonance because interacting with LLMs is inherently mushy.

However, modern LLMs should be seen as more efficient knowledge graphs (efficient in the economic sense of the word¹). LLMs with agentic capabilities are even more efficient! LLM results are not as satisfying as syntactically and deterministically querying a knowledge graph, however.

The biggest knowledge graph user, Google, is pivoting to enhancing their results with AI Overviews. Funnily enough, Google itself is sneak dissing the usefulness of knowledge graphs in the linked PR statement:

We’ve meticulously honed our core information quality systems to help you find the best of what’s on the web. And we’ve built a knowledge base of billions of facts about people, places and things — all so you can get information you can trust in the blink of an eye.

Now, with generative AI, Search can do more than you ever imagined. So you can ask whatever’s on your mind or whatever you need to get done — from researching to planning to brainstorming — and Google will take care of the legwork.

People love to post examples of bad AI Overviews, but whenever I look over the shoulder of my friends, most of their Google queries are answered by the AI Overviews section.

I believe knowledge graphs work best when you can codify your knowledge as honest-to-god facts. Facts that have the least possible amount of interpretation potential, the least amount of semantics.

LLMs just capture semantics better, or worded differently, capture the context of the query better. As dissatisfying as the realization is, the real world is mushy and big, and thus can currently only be captured by mushy and big models.

Related ideas:

2025-11-24

The case for preserving case

A short story of going against your elders, while being accepting of their ways

a screenshot of dropping a file 'draft.docx' into a directory already containing the file 'DRAFT.docx' What happens when you try to drag-n-drop the draft.docx into a directory containing a DRAFT.docx file in macOS?

macOs alert saying: An item named "DRAFT.docx" already exists in this location. Do you want to replace it with the one you're moving?

You get an alert!

This is because macOS is case-insensitive, it considers draft.docx and DRAFT.docx to be the same filename. It’s all lowercase in the eyes of my MacBook. Also in the eyes of most humans, it’s easy to follow why you don’t want to allow draft.docx and DRAFT.docx to be in the same directory.

Treating everything as lowercase is efficient because it simplifies many, many, computer operations¹. However, case contains information, and we don’t want to lose that information, we all know the difference between draft_final.docx and FINAL_draft_final.docx. The good news here is that macOS is also case-preserving, meaning you can have your FINAL cake and eat it too!

Because computer programmers are binary thinkers, many systems are not designed this way. Most case-insensitive file systems are not case-preserving, and most case-preserving systems are case-sensitive. The legendary UNIX system - the ancestral grandparent of macOS - for example, differentiates between draft.docx and DRAFT.docx, and allows both files to be in the same directory². macOS inherited the UNIX differentiation between draft.docx and DRAFT.docx in terms of displayed filename, but is wise enough to simplify by treating the names as equal for actual operations. The best behaviour in my eyes.

Like in many other design decisions, macOS hits the sweet spot of “intuitive but opinionated”, while still being accepting and preserving other kinds of workflows. We should all be more like macOS, opinionated, but preserving original meaning.

2025-11-23

My personal, stubborn attachments

book cover of stubborn attachments book, a picture of the planet earth pinched between index and thumb

I

Tyler Cowen’s book Stubborn Attachments lays out “a vision for a society of free, prosperous, and responsible individuals”.

The book makes surprisingly simple claims: you can achieve prosperity for the whole world if you are stubbornly attached to two principles:

Economic growth
Basic human rights

As I said, this sounds simple to the point of it being redundant right? Almost no one argues for the opposite, so why even argue for these principles? But Tyler doubles down on these stubborn attachments in the book, hammering the point home that economic growth is the moral imperative. Everything worthwhile is downstream and emerging from economic growth. It’s imperative because economic growth inevitably leads to a better world, or growth is our best shot at a better world. A world where wellbeing is improved for everyone, no matter how you want to measure wellbeing.

The points he makes in the book are plentiful, philosophical and practical. A short read, I’d recommend it to everyone - especially the content around the book, like Tyler Cowen himself dismantling the arguments of the book.

II

The kind of growth I am interested in is personal growth. Being keen to religious reasoning, I consider personal growth a moral imperative. Inspired by Tyler Cowen, the question becomes: how can I formulate my stubborn attachments so that personal prosperity becomes inevitable? Of course, I could simply have two bullet point list as well, like “personal growth” and “mood maintenance”. But that’s boring.

Not being bound by having to define a set of principles for the entire world, let me be specific about my personal stubborn attachments:

Go to sleep early
Ship something creative everyday
Rewrite something every day
Write out the question and answer to “what should I be doing right now” constantly
Never make something you tell the world become a lie
Whenever you think well of someone, immediately tell them (whether through text or thanks, never in thoughts)
Don’t take any form of drugs¹
Never wish for less time
When falling short, simply atone for your mistakes by being stubbornly attached again

III

While the book’s arguments are made through a secular and global lens, the underlying theme of the arguments are religious and American. In fact, Tyler Cowen’s own Straussian reading² of the book is a defense of Mormonism and American exceptionalism: the optimism baked into the book, the faith in compounding growth, that the future will be better than the past, that actions matter in cosmological timescales. Fittingly, Tyler considers Mormonism the most American religion.

What are your secularly-defined-but-actually-borderline-religious attachments?

2025-11-20

Don’t make me wait

It’s 2025, after signing up for an app or website with your e-mail address, you wait to receive the “verify your account” message in your e-mail inbox. You keep refreshing your inbox, the message arrives about two minutes later. Why is this not instant?

An easy case to make for why it should be instant comes from the world of e-commerce. We know that even milliseconds of delay in your software lower customer retention and satisfaction, thus lowering company revenue. What makes the waiting-for-confirmation-mail problem even weirder is the fact that software companies invest heavily in generating new user sign-ups.

Okay, I want to make a second point, not from the world of e-commerce, but from the world of ancient, old school commerce: banking. Banks understand that the most valuable customer behavior (opening a new account) deserves massive optimization, even when it seems inefficient:

Banks have extremely weird behaviors by the standards of parking engineers; the typical user behavior is to stop in for only a few minutes but the behavior the bank wants to optimize for, new account opening, can take half an hour to several hours. Through what turns out to be a simple result of queuing theory, bank branches end up with a lot of parking that appears mostly underutilized almost all of the time, and this is close to optimal.

Excerpt from the excellent patio11 article.

Okay, I hope to have made my case of why it should be instant. Now the question remains why clearly companies don’t care about making it instant. I remember back in 2005, 20 years ago, being annoyed by this. Maybe it is like daylight saving time? Everyone hates the thing, and clearly we should do better here, but since it’s a once and done thing people don’t complain long enough for the problem to be fixed? Maybe we rely on the “stay signed in” button too much? I don’t know. Anyway, to all people designing an e-mail confirmation service, please speed it up. Don’t make me wait.

2025-11-17

Killing your darlings

Our second biggest cost is taxes, and our biggest cost is opportunity cost.

~ Attributed to Larry Page

Larry Page and Noam Shazeer both obsess over opportunity cost. It’s the cost that matters most when evaluating policies, personal or public ones.

Here’s the problem: opportunity cost is invisible. The counterfactual, by definition, doesn’t exist, so you never see it. Kahneman calls this “what you see is all there is”.

A solution to this ocular blind spot in your personal life is deciding against doing the thing you really want to do. You kill your darling. You will be super conscious of what you left on the table, the counterfactual becomes clear, and you actually take all the other options more seriously.

2025-11-16

Starting Sabbath

Usually after the 6th day of consecutive work, I feel drained. I hate the feeling of being drained and what it does to me: stay in bed longer, watching YouTube videos. It just becomes easier to tell myself that I deserve this cheap form of rest. Ironically, being drained has a negative effect on my sleep time and quality, as I fall into bad, lazy patterns.

So instead of staying in bed and complaining, let’s do something against the draining downward spiral: I’ll take a page out of the Jewish book and adopt ancient deliberate decompression: Sabbath. Keep it simple: starting with the Friday communal prayer at noon, I’ll intentionally only do things that give me energy:

Meditating
Taking walks
Drawing
Reading up on new tech
Programming hobby projects
Household chores
Meeting friends
Cooking
Stretching/yoga

And for everything else: just don’t do it.

2025-11-12

quoting claudius

I worked for more than 30 years on these systems and they could never work. I implemented a very fast NLP symbolic parser, for which the team I worked with created grammars for 8 languages, including Japanese. In 2007, with a grammar of 60,000 rules, we could parse at a speed of 3000 words/s (see https://github.com/clauderouxster/XIP for the Open Source version). The parser could extract syntactic dependencies, and could use ontologies. But language is like sand, the more you try to grab, the more you leak. There was a kind of futility in trying to compress languages into rules, nothing actually scaled up. Still, we managed to win competitions as late as 2016 with SemEval sentiment analysis, and in 2017, we also ranked first in a legal document extraction campaign organized by IBM, but to no avail. It was a lot of work, and the conclusion was very simple. We had to push our grammars as far as possible into lexical grammars, which eventually LMM managed to really implement. We discovered very early, that context was all that mattered. We tried to create grammars that would apply to a full paragraph instead of sentences, but then the performance would plummet. The reason why LLM work, is that at each step they compress the whole context into a meaningful vector, which they then used to guide the rest of the generation process. I spent my whole life in the pursuit of a perfect parser with very brillant people, and I really find hard to say that not only did we fail, but that LLM is the response we were looking for.

~ Claudius

2025-11-06

Getting used to it

Is underrated.

Don’t like it, but it’s useful enough to do it? Just get used to it.

More on this: You Can Try to Like Stuff by Dynomight

2025-11-06

Never record a meeting

Always transcribe it by hand. People act differently when they know they are being recorded. For me, this is the main reason I am against recording. I want to hear people’s genuine and slightly unfiltered takes.

Producing an artifact is one way to make meetings more effective, though. Therefore, just transcribe the meeting by typing it all out on the meeting screen for everyone to see. That’s the sweet spot.

Pre-LLM list of arguments:

People know exactly what you are writing, thus are more trusting
People can opt-out of being transcribed
It keeps you engaged in the meeting as you really have to listen
You can slow/speed up the convo with an excuse that you need some typing, you can ask clarifying questions -- you are much in control of the meeting

Post-LLM list of arguments:

Hand transcriptions are better than machine generated ones when the meeting has many people, many topics, a mix of (non-English) languages and subpar audio quality
It keeps your typing skills sharp, a crucial skill for working with the LLMs
Humans are more likely to read writing that’s not produced by LLMs, rational or not

Write me: [email protected] ☺️