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.
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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.
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:
Other considerations when thinking about autism1:
Hard for me to not have gratitude for the autistic community.
Related:
Footnotes:
Let me decide what’s best for me
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.
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.
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.
Inspired by Thanksgiving and Dynomight.
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:
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.
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:
A short story of going against your elders, while being accepting of their ways
What happens when you try to drag-n-drop the draft.docx into a directory containing a DRAFT.docx file in macOS?
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.
Footnotes:
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:
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.
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:
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?
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.
Our second biggest cost is taxes, and our biggest cost is opportunity cost.
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.
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:
And for everything else: just don’t do it.
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
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:
Post-LLM list of arguments:
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