Notes

Drowning in information. Is this a low hanging fruit for LLMs that is close to being solved? When I first encountered How to Take Smart Notes [3], offering up Luhmann’s lost art of the slip box, I thought this was the way. Luhmann created notes on primary sources he read like books or papers, but added links to them from topics as the connections seemed to make sense. He did it all on index cards filed in drawers that were hyperlynked manually but this made him a prolific writer still. ...

Riffing off of , https://michal.piekarczyk.xyz/note/2026-03-04-prompt-driven-development/ , and the famous Do Learn Show Loop , and also the ODSC conference I just attended and also squarely on a few topics Nate B Jones has been covrring lately on career visibility , much extending what I think Steve Huynh has introduced me to with his brag docs a few years ago, because work iterates and becauase everyone loves a story, especially interviewers, we should extend the STAR and brag doc styles to be more punctuated, more colorful, still as accurate as possible. ...

I just finished a trip to attend the ODSC conference in Boston, leaving without really understanding where we are on the hype cycle of Agentic AI . I attended hoping to sample from the unknown like you usually do at big conferences, but there was no aha moment. I don’t think our industry is ready for an aha moment yet. On the flight back, I read on article2 where Rogé Karma was walking back a stance he had about the AI bubble given new revenue data he was observing. The conference gave me a lot of confidence that regardless of what benefit agent AI will ultimately have, there was now no doubt that companies and individuals who do not upskill will fall behind in one way or another. But the article put down some numbers about the new revenue that Anthropic, Open AI cursor and the data center companies they rely on, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Core weave, were now recently experiencing, taking them perhaps, out of bubble territory. ...

An micro planning anecdote On a trip to Boston, for the ODSC east [1], earlier this morning, on the lasy day of the conference, I experienced a brief perhaps common Boston weather decision tree phenomenon. It was raining so I was trying to figure out whether to walk to the ODSC convention center, a mile away, or take rideshare. I have really been enjoying the clean fresh Boston air so I wanted to get as much outdoor time here before going back to my polluted NYC home. And I wanted to grab a Starbucks coffee too because the convention center coffee was terrible yesterday and I got a withdrawal headache all day yesterday because I had no access to coffee. I realized by looking outside my hotel window the rain was yea really coming down hard. And I didnt want to be walking around in sloshing wet shoes all day at the conference. I thought hmm , I wish I had packed my REI rain pants. A thought materialized, hmm maybe I could walk to the nearest starbucks and then take rideshare from there. At least I packed the REI rain jacket. It is a true Impermeable! Also, I realized I packed my huaraches, so I could wear those instead and pack my shoes into my day pack. Then pants would probably dry and I will be with dry socks at least! ...

I had written about my chaos earlier1, mentioning HBO’s take on ED triage in The Pitt as well. But havijg watched Marty Supreme recently , here is a thought on chaos when it has purpose. Marty says in a especially chaotic scene, about a dog, to Rachel, who likely bears his child, that he has a purpose and he does not know whether she does, and he has to see it through. ...

Seedling of a thought, inspired by the AI Snake Oil Book [1], the Andy Galpin interview with Dr Herman Pontzer I noted [2] as well as some recent conversations , as well as the Mercenary post from earlier, there is an N of 1 idea brewing in my mind. The majority of per person data science is not highly accurate but it is good enough for aggregate population level stats. Maybe we can get the aggregate lift here, which is related to lift of a better model say but not quite the same thing. It would be more like an aggregate financial benefit like population level insurance risk mitigation, say. A dollar lift perhaps. ...

Every once in a while Ill work with old fashionsd project managers, in data/software projects, who pair deliverables with deadlines, instead of working iteratively in an “agile” way. But I realize that as much as PI Planning is a kind of rebranded waterfall plan , it is likely a good answer to the real world where “old fashioned " is still just “how the world works”. What happens Per my observations so far, on this planet, every and any project will always be renegotiated w.r.t. the iron triangle, that is, with more time , less scope, lower quality or more resources. (Unless of course you already built the solution and no time required for updates). ...

I had a note [1] from Andy Galpin talking to Dr Herman Pontzer on population variation, but Pontzer’s area of expertise and his study of energy expenditure lack of variation was also really fascinating. Note , cqn expand later, my recollection of how in his 5 month daily marathon experiment, peoples daily energy expenditures stabolized , adapting, to just above their baseline . And this was just one among many studies he noted about how our energy expenditures are quite so similar. ...

placeholder, inspired by conversation with a friend on a instagram post linking to a study [1] on visceral fat differences among two populations. Decent n, between “South East Asian” and , “white European origin”, n=677 vs n=2394 for liver fat comparison and n=697 vs n=2271 for subcutaneous and visceral fat comparisons . ( Using CT , and or MRI ). They measured more liver fat and more visceral fat at lower BMI . ...

Today I scratched an itch I have had for many years. I discovered this artist on sound cloud, Hot Sugar, some time ago. Their music spoke to me. In particular I recall around 2017-2018 listening to this simple song about a telephone call. I didnt remember the lyrics, but I had an impression about how a simple phone call is a very beautiful way to connect with people which my generation sadly avoids. its all about text messaging these days. ...