Notes

Why are the AI capabilities discussions so polarizing? People either see current AI as a net negative or net positive. But the gap is a chasm. Well ok maybe there are people who are uncertain too. Okay maybe it is task specific. But the edges are extremes. Why? I suspect the split aligns, along whether believe in planning. On the one hand, yes there are many AI aided workflows that produce very stable reliable outcomes. And that side is growing. But some people see the billion dollar single person start up around the corner. ...

Thinking this brilliant Balaji Srinivasan ism is that merging is hard . I think he meqnt it broadly, including with a merge in traffic patterns and companies and ideas. I wonder if he had code in mind. Linus Torvalds decided to build a version control system that made it easier to fork and code but if not used cautiously, you will spend an afternoon resolving merge conflicts. Maybe blindly merging and letting tests save you is like trusting an LLM tool to write code for you? But kind of that’s the thing, trusting an LLM’s diff is accepting a merge in a way and merging is hard. ...

While I was reviewing my git lfs based logseq markdown backup, I noticed a git lfs inconsistency. So git lfs fsck reported 339 .PNG files as pointer: unexpectedGitObject: "assets/IMG_4942.PNG" (treeish 53f01b6616262c6e9bcb6eabb3cc11cb298fab1c) should have been a pointer but was not, even though when I looked at my .gitattributes I did see *.PNG filter=lfs diff=lfs merge=lfs -text. The numbers suggested my .PNG however was not on my git-lfs. $ git lfs ls-files |wc -l 1715 and ...

Settling on Procrastination Having options and constraints is good in moderation. Sort of a twist on explore and exploit here. I fall in line with the thinking behind Tim Urban’s Monkey Mind TED talk [2]. Hold out until we know [1] just the right amount of information to proceed, not a second less or longer. Feels chaotic though! I remember I had a coworker who was all about “scope creep man, watch out for that!” His preference was for seeking comfort-in-constraints. Like business, as usual. ...

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. ...