Repeating the phrase "taste is the differentiator" will not benefit you

AI has a new fool’s trap each year.

In 2022, the critique was that it was just a glorified autocomplete. In 2023, that it hallucinated too much. In 2024 and 2025, that LLMs weren’t truly intelligent, just stochastic parrots. This year, the year of the Lord 2026, the fool’s trap is: “AI lacks human judgment, taste is the differentiator”.

Don’t buy into this year’s fool’s trap. As Nadia Asparouhova wrote in The tyranny of ideas, “Ideas ride us into battle like warhorses.” The people who repeated the previous critiques were tyrannized by their ideas of incompetent AI and rode to war with a foolish strategy.

In hindsight, it was cope. Some criticism was warranted, but it was cope nonetheless. Cope against accepting the ruthlessly inevitable forward march of this transformative technology.

As Tyler Cowen says, solve for the equilibrium! Don’t drag this year’s cope into your thinking. Even the most profound truth too cheaply repeated is LinkedIn-level insight.

The better question is: where does AI have better taste than me? Which areas should I completely delegate to AI, so far as to accept everything the AI does in those areas, even when it overrules my taste?

Just stop using these

phrases that never achieve anything, ever

• if everybody would just: “If your solution to some problem relies on If everyone would just… then you do not have a solution. Everyone is not going to just. At not time in the history of the universe has everyone just, and they’re not going to start now.”¹
• can't you just: Belittling, either shows you disrespect the person or disrespect the problem they are dealing with, replace it with “is ... possible?” or 100 other phrases
• i just find it funny: The passive aggressive classic, I just find it funny how everyone hates hearing this phrase, but loves repeating it

Yes, you probably got it, these are all unjustified usages of just.

On snobbery

I’m a MacBook snob, I have declined attractive job offers because they only allowed Windows machines for work. That admitted, I am very afraid and cautious about becoming a snob in other arenas.

When it comes to coffee, I can enjoy third-wave, we-paid-5k-for-the-coffee-machine-and-grinder-each coffee, and I can also enjoy microwaved water infused with cheapo instant coffee. Same with music: I lovingly bop my head to the most mind-blowing live concert setups, then bop just as happily to a 360p YouTube recording of the same concert.

Arguably, I enjoy coffee and music more than the coffee and audio snobs do. Or more precisely, I have a wider range: snobs have fenced themselves into enjoying only the crème de la crème.

instant coffee fukn slaps.

roon on historic times

roon

@tszzl

the thing about living through history is, they don’t prepare you for how cringe it’ll all be

Apr 22, 2026 Link ↗︎

Smoking is ass-backwards meditation

You take a hit, you focus on your breath, you let your mind run, the coffee tastes better, the cigarette burns up your throat in just the perfect way. With a heavy heart, I have to say, that the practice of smoking is close to the practice of mindfulness.

While the in-the-moment peak of smoking can reach unbelievable highs, especially combined with liquids, there’s a hole left in you once the cigarette is done. The craving for the next cigarette only increases. The wheel of samsara keeps spinning.

During the act, smoking and meditation have similar mechanics. In the long term though, smoking is destructive, while meditation is deconstructive.

Smoking is ass-backwards meditation.

Office zazen

Zen’s minimalist aesthetic is timeless.

Just the word itself is perfect, and everything surrounding the zen cosmos, like zen gardens and zazen posture, has this beautiful, all-encompassing void, black and white feel to it.

Just look at this diagram, ay:

You know I love looking at a dot on my laptop screen. And you know I love making seemingly boring habits of mine fun and spiritual.

I couldn’t help myself to make even the staring-at-dot work habit of mine spiritual. During dotting, I try to think of nothing, or as Sasha Chapin puts it, practice nothing. And, through no effort of my own, I envision a frog zen monk with a stick behind me correcting my posture while I stare at dot.

Jensen on loser mindset

The premise that even if we competed in China, that we’re going to lose that market anyways… You’re not talking to somebody who woke up a loser. That loser attitude, that loser premise makes no sense to me.

~ Jensen Huang, Dwarkesh Podcast

Genuinely the most energized I felt in weeks hearing this. I adore the argumentation rhetoric of the rationality community and Western liberalism proper. Although sometimes the argumentation gets too technical, winning the clever small points while missing the big one. And sometimes it’s just too long.

Back in my childhood, in the gutters, you could just end arguments by telling people to grow up. Actually, we didn’t say “grow up”, we said “man up”. It’s stupid, but sometimes I wish I could go back to telling people to man up, to compete, and to stop whining. A return to tradition, if you will.

Cold hearts on heated floors

Or: What do you do, spiritually, with a psychopath roommate?

Our culture assumes people can change. Be it therapy, moral appeals, punishment, we believe in personal growth and development. Psychopaths break every assumption and belief, we have no protocol for them.

Living with a dysfunctional roommate hurt me spiritually. I fished ungodly nasty stuff out of the kitchen sink regularly, had to clean on both weekend days to have some resemblance of an intact apartment. The one time a small piece of furniture broke off when I sat, I heard about it every single day.

No matter how much warmth and patience I provided, I was forever the perpetrator and she was forever the victim. No matter what I said, my own admitted character mistakes were the only relevant talking point. Arguing was wasted time, and that’s what hurt me most.

Was I not tactful, not wise enough? Before talking to her, I meditated for half an hour. Or are some souls truly unredeemable? I couldn’t look into her eyes anymore, I saw how her lies became her truth, how she rewrote reality.

And when it is said to them, ‘Do not cause corruption on the earth,’ they say, ‘We are but reformers.’ Unquestionably, it is they who are the corrupters, but they perceive not. And when it is said to them, ‘Believe as the people have believed,’ they say, ‘Should we believe as the foolish have believed?’ Unquestionably, it is they who are the foolish, but they know not.

~ Surah Al-Baqarah

On a society level, I don’t know what to do with psychopaths.

Some hearts are sealed. Not clouded, not in need of more warmth. Sealed.

God has set a seal upon their hearts and upon their hearing, and over their vision is a veil.

~ Surah Al-Baqarah

On a personal level, I now learned what to do with sealed people. Almost always, my answer is reciprocation, with physical and spiritual grace. In cases like her, the only smart move is not to play.

Move out. Close your mind. Seal your heart to them, like theirs is sealed. Some souls are unredeemable by you. There is no advice, no words, no key you will find.

Whenever you leave what hurts you, the gain has immediately begun

~ Turkish proverb

One step at a time

I just ran a marathon without real training. Finished 5 minutes under the disqualification limit (5:30:00), but that was exactly my goal 🙃.

My whole body hurt, but I genuinely had a great time. Friends and even random spectators commented on how good and happy I looked. Some thoughts I had during the race:

• Endurance is scarce
• Each step is one step closer to finishing the bucket list
• Gratefulness will make you/life run better
• I don’t know if I have a higher pain tolerance, or if I just feel less pain to begin with when compared to other people¹
• Always be movin’ theory is real, folks

Sub 4 is the goal for next year!

Feet don’t fail me now, take me to the finish line

Oh, my heart, it breaks every step that I take

But I’m hoping at the gates, they’ll tell me that you’re mine

Walking through the city streets, is it by mistake or design?

~ Lana Del Rey

Jane Austen

To be fond of dancing was a certain step towards falling in love

~ Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

The always-be-moving-forward trick for getting out of bed and getting good grades

My trick for getting out of the bed is to keep moving. One leg out of the blanket, then one arm, then the other leg. And so on. You will be out of the bed before you know it. Same trick works for studying super boring topics at university. Sit down, start making progress. Don’t evaluate if you feel like it.

The subtle part: just like in soccer penalties¹, you never stop moving. No matter how slow, you keep going.

This is related to the no days off principle. If something feels expensive to do, you will do it less. That’s demand and utilization. Make it cheap, and it can even be fun if you talk yourself into it.

Also, put the phone far away from you.

On intelligence

Knowledge is knowing your discarded toenails contain keratin, which in turn, contains nitrogen. And that your living room plants need nitrogen.

Wisdom is not putting your toenails in the plant pot.

Intelligence is making the leap from knowledge to wisdom. Or rather, it’s having the sensibility to put the toenails there, but having the wisdom to bury them deep in the pot, so people don’t see what you did. And intelligence is still not doing this in front of your friends, or talk about this in front of your friends. Maybe intelligence is hard-to-define, but it for sure entails the skill to not talk about this publicly. “Intelligence is what AI is not able to do,” they say ... but even AI will tell you to not talk about your toenails in your plant pot, so ... on a second thought, if you have hippie friends they might see what you do as resourceful, and it might be genuinely status increasing and inspiring that you put your toenails into plant pots. Ah well, this isn’t the neat conclusion I wanted to reach. Probably intelligence is heavily context dependent, and path dependent. And dependent on if you actually put your toenails into that pot or not, and if you behaved wisely while doing it. I guess intelligence is more of a verb?

ruminous fee

i have tried prudent planning long enough
from now on
insane

far away from home
once a city;
i turned into ruin

though
my essence flourished
by paying this ruinous fee