2026-02-18 02:21:00
At a conference once, I vividly recall my supervisor—a brilliant mathematician—listening intently as a colleague presented his research, using every polished, TED-style public speaking technique imaginable. He leaned over and muttered to me: “We’re not in a theater.”
The impressive public speaking techniques that were meant to captivate the audience had the opposite effect on him. He could see right through them and suspected they might serve to obfuscate the true substance of the research being presented. I’ll admit, my own skepticism was rising as well. “Just show me the model, the assumptions, and the theorems,” I thought.
It’s a curious and sometimes jarring phenomenon that in mathematics departments, it’s often the least charismatic talks that get the most respect. If your research has merit, it’ll stand on its own, without the need for rhetorical flourishes or slick presentations. System 1 Jedi tricks will get you nowhere; mathematicians are trained in the dark arts of System 2.
Meanwhile, outside the math department, our social media feeds are overrun by System 1 masters who, for the first time in history, have quick and direct access to millions of minds. And it makes me wonder whether it’s a good thing that some of our best academics are ill-equipped to engage on a battlefield they haven’t been trained for. The quiet, unadorned pursuit of truth is noble, but in a world where the loudest voices often win, I can’t help but feel a twinge of unease. What happens when the guardians of reason can’t—or won’t—compete in a game where style often trumps substance?
2026-02-18 02:05:00
I often forget my anxiety isn’t caused by a lack of answers to my swirl of questions, but the swirl itself. I frequently operate as if one more Google search will solve everything, circling around and around the internet, mercifully sedated by information I probably don’t need and will forget next week. Sometimes, I really do find the answer I’m looking for, and then I’ll stop, smug and satisfied. The problem with feeding the beast is it’s not the same as killing it. Soon enough, I’m hungry again.
In addition to being a great resource on how to feel like you've got enough, this article taught me a new term:
In Lauren Oyler’s essay about anxiety last week, she referenced a late 19th century diagnosis known as Americanitis, which described “the high-strung, nervous, active temperament of the American people.” Whether incited by advances in technology (causing loss of sleep, excessive worry) or capitalism (causing long work days, fast pace of life), the result was, according to experts of the time, a rattled population unable to relax. A black mirror of the American dream, Americanitis took the same ideas favored by patriots and recast them as depressing. Here is the land of possibilities—so vast in scale you’ll forever be unsatisfied!
Are we all suffering from Americanitis?
2026-02-18 01:52:00
You ask yourself: What would have made me jump off my chair if I had read it six months ago (or a week ago, or however fast you write)? If you have figured out something that made you ecstatic, this is what you should write. And you do not dumb it down, because you were not stupid six months ago, you just knew less. You also write with as much useful detail and beauty as you can muster, because that is what you would have wanted.
I’m not saying [what I wrote] was a great essay; I’m saying I would have loved it. The essay would have answered most of the questions I had, and it would have given me a new more complex understanding of language models that I could have used to get excited by even more obscure things. And because the internet is big, there were a few thousand people who felt the same way—and I felt really deeply for these people.
A search query doesn’t have to be a 5000-word effort post to work (though the internet does reward that amply). Anything that would have been useful to you sometime in the past will do. Alexey Guzey makes lists, half of which are made up of quotes, and they are incredibly useful and have been instrumental in reshaping his network so that he could start New Science. Most good Twitter accounts can be viewed in the same way.
Life's too short to spend your time worrying about how other people are gonna perceive your work.
Just go do the thing. Make your six-months-ago self proud.
2026-02-17 21:03:32
So I guess what I’m trying to say is, the new workday should be three to four hours. For everyone. It may involve 8 hours of hanging out with people. But not doing this crazy vampire thing the whole time. That will kill people.
As an individual developer, you need to fight the vampire yourself, when you’re all alone, with nobody pushing you but the AI itself. I think every single one of us needs to go touch grass, every day. Do something without AI. Close the computer. Go be a human.
I’m convinced that 3 to 4 hours is going to be the sweet spot for the new workday. Give people unlimited tokens, but only let people stare at reports and make decisions for short stretches. Assume that exhaustion is the norm. Building things with AI takes a lot of human energy.
I’m so glad somebody is saying this out loud.
2026-02-16 12:17:56
But by weeks 7 or 8, one team hit a wall. They could no longer make even simple changes without breaking something unexpected. When I met with them, the team initially blamed technical debt: messy code, poor architecture, hurried implementations. But as we dug deeper, the real problem emerged: no one on the team could explain why certain design decisions had been made or how different parts of the system were supposed to work together. The code might have been messy, but the bigger issue was that the theory of the system, their shared understanding, had fragmented or disappeared entirely. They had accumulated cognitive debt faster than technical debt, and it paralyzed them.
A very appropriate piece for me right now (thanks for sharing it, Simon!).
I set off earlier this week to build an iOS music player. It seemed like an ambitious-enough project that would help me become a better agentic programmer, using an idea that interests me deeply yet I’d realistically never be able to tackle this on by myself.
What I learned was that the glitz and glamour of seeing tokens fly by and then seeing code materialize into existence is addicting. It feels like a slot machine: perhaps this spin will be the thing that eliminates the UI lag! … ope, nope, just ran completely out of tokens. Better upgrade to Max!
I also learned that I’ve been missing something in my life: the joy of making something. I remember seeing my Plex library show up on my iPhone inside the app for the first time. It reminded me of how it felt when I figured out how to change the Windows 95 “It is now safe to power off your computer.” screen back in the day. I made the computer do that!
But yeah, cognitive debt.
I got the MVP up and working, but then attempted a refactor that left the whole codebase a giant goop of spaghetti. I wasn’t paying any attention to the architecture of the app, and pretty soon, I found myself with three different queues for storing media. Completely untenable slop.
So I’m gonna wipe the repo clean and start fresh. This time, I will be armed with a better plan. One that allows me to be more close to the action, one that keeps me focused and engaged with the architecture.
Let’s see how this goes.
2026-02-12 11:19:00
11 year old Tim would've killed for something like this. Instead, 11 year old Tim spent weeks understanding how keyframes work in Photoshop 3.0. 🤦♂️
