There was a particular woman athelete on physical 100 mexico (possible spoiler) who survived a fire when she was young. The scars are still visible on her body. Each time she faced...

A playful thought experiment about simulated universes, time-skipped workflow tests, consciousness as a context window and the back door to God's admin panel.

Why simple ideas go untested: we all follow the same “hot path” and assume someone else already checked the obvious.

What do you do when you have no big material desires left? When you already have a monetary safety net that will serve you in case of an emergency? Your bank balance will grow, but most of it will…

Over time, I’ve come to appreciate silence more and more. Silence of the environment. Silence of thoughts. Silence of choice. Silent moments of love and friendship. Silence when you unload…

I’ve learned that the life of experience uses both gravities to shape us. We are carved in our humanness, the grooves of our wounds and joys holding a blood-ink that leaves a print of who we…

Autumn began almost a month ago, but where I live it doesn’t feel like the autumn I’m used to until about now (mid October). For the first time last night the cool winds blew in with…

Sovereignty is everywhere. But what the hell do we mean by it?

You don't have to look too far to find some advice. Advice for anything: how to eat, how to make your business successful, how to make more friends, how to dress more confidently, how to use AI…

There’s this sneaky kind of dopamine hit I feel every time I fill up my cart and make a new purchase. Even the research building up to that final click feels absolutely liberating. I have to admit; a…

Productivity is a theme I keep coming back to, despite it becoming an unpopular idea in recent times. The post The Point Of Personal Productivity appeared first on Fernando Gros.

A dispatch on the season's first fire in the soba, the smell of summer's dust burning off, and the screen humanity watched for a million years.

I’ve written before about Daniel Kahneman’s two systems of thinking: System 1 that is very fast, requires very little energy, and is often wrong, and then System 2 that is slower, far more energy…

When no one reads the code, Naur would say said project is dead. And yet businesses are building their future on dead code.

Software engineers could learn a lot from early 2000s studio photographers.

If you want to glimpse the unevenly distributed future, talk to people who are living on that frontier. Expect that to be uncomfortable.

When I write this, why do I write the word I am writing?

What is a writer? Someone who writes. In author Matt Gemmell’s video series on writing a novel, he sets out one of the fundamental roadblocks to becoming a writer: writing, and writing regularly.…

It is Friday. The French used to say “Le roi est mort, vive le roi!”. For those of us raised with less melodious languages, this means “The king is dead, long live the king!” And since we don’t use…

original post by jila. believe me, jila, i understand how arduous the journey towards great achievements can be. it would be really nice if success could just show up at our doorstep one night... but…

Every human achievement is first a coordination achievement. From command pyramids and gossip to markets and AI agent swarms, on the topologies that let separate minds build together, and the ceiling…

I loooove the questions which starts with “whys”, and simply could not just pass by one. So, shit has already starting to hit the fan.…

Please do not understand me too quickly. Came across this quote via an old interview with Richard Ayoade when he was asked what he would change in the world. “I suppose maybe, maybe a slight slowing…

Forgiving You For My Mistake I once noted that when someone takes away a false impression of you, and you can make them recognize their misunderstanding, they may correct their false impression, but…

The Math 1.0 and Math 2.0 transition in the terminology of Tao could also be seen as a distinction between a culture of “being” to to a culture of “having”. The dichotomy…

The Pleasure of Holiness / Thoughts On A Public Execution / Secretary Rubio and the crisis of our age / Can you sin against a chatbot? / Never to Be Cast Out / 6 Things to Know About Sex Before You…

I once asked a specialist in a particularly obscure mathematical subdiscipline how many people in the world could understand her work. “Maybe 20 or 30,” she said. I thought it sounded…

The command line comes from an earlier era of computing, yet it remains central to administration, programming, automation, and remote systems. Its longevity has less to do with nostalgia than with…

I will use the term “consoom”. It is not a typo for “consume”. You will understand what I mean.

What the list cannot see A clip went around this month: the holy trinity of male hotness is emotional intelligence, physical attractiveness, and money. Hotness is a word for what you can tell from…

One thing that many highly capable people have in common: A serious math arc. It’s a rite of passage in the journey to developing alien-level skills.

I’m sure this will age like fine wine, but the title is obviously an allusion to Epic’s statement “programming is hard”, with which they justified their decision to fully vibe…

The big news this week that other planets exist in the cosmos that could support life gives a person hope that Elon Musk will think beyond the moon and Mars and his SpaceX geniuses will build a…

As I mentioned before, it takes me way too long to edit a single video. So I am releasing it in chunks. If I never finish it, well then at least I'll have a few videos out. What is the video about?…

Reflecting on decades of fandom, chart obsession, and regret.

Ordinary responsibilities have a way of consuming the time we had hoped to spend differently. A quiet morning disappears into a problem that needs solving. An evening set aside for reading becomes an…

Imagine you are trying to build a city. You need to build the system that allows the city to evolve, whether that is by a planning committee or a guild of engineers. Whichever approach you take to…

Welcome to the era of hyperpersonalization, and custom-made software.

Chemical weapons were widely used in World War I, and the field of chemistry had to reckon with that after the war. Treaties were signed, and certain research was subjected to inspection and…

A conversation I've had several times this week is around untangling goals, improvements and fixes in digital work, and around understanding how the three get tangled. First of all, a definition:…

Marcus Aurelius wrote in his Meditations : "Consider that before long you will be nobody and nowhere, nor will any of the things exist which you now see, nor any of those who are now living. For all…

Twenty years ago, I participated in a ritual at a conference: giving a response to a just-presented, pre-written essay. Its topic was how programmers are no longer allowed to do good design. What…

On being haunted by the past.

To me the variety of languages in Europe is highly valuable, something to cherish. Even if in practice it also provides many hurdles, in order to bridge languages and be able to scale things across…

The most delicate threads on earth.

When Awareness Deepens I wear this t-shirt in public, and people ask me what it means. I tell them, “It means I make art to distract myself from the void, but I still have to pay taxes." I also need…

From where I sit, figuring out what to build, building it, and shipping it are all part of the art of making software. Many disciplines have emerged through the years to facilitate this work:…

"In the hands of someone with no knowledge, they can produce clumsy, ugly, barely functional output, but in the hands of a skilled craftsman, they can product works of utility, beauty, and…

I am fallible and see no reason to hide my minor flaws if they are part of my personality — no more than I feel the need to wear a wig when I have my picture taken or borrow someone else’s nose…

After spending a ridiculously long time on the very first activity for this year’s PKM workshop, I am both delighted to have a single question posed and a bit terrified by how lengthy my…