On Scaling Mental Models

Don’t just Build a Second Brain: share (part of) it

I’m exploring how MyHub.ai could become a unique hybrid of personal publishing and productivity tools by launching a newsletter powered by…

Disquiet – Listening to culture. Playing with audio. Sounding out technology. Composing in code.

At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I tag on what books I may have finished reading. Knowing I’ll revisit my social media posts, I’ve found, serves as a positive and mellowing influence on my online activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.

Guardian Angels: LLM Personalization for Productivity and Security

I propose an approach for highly personalized LLMs, for near-future productivity gains and personal info/cybersecurity against increasingly powerful LLMs: they should, in the spirit of uploading, try to emulate the user’s values and preferences in order to amplify the principal—not replace them. I discuss a package of techniques and proposals to accomplish such ‘guardian angels’; dynamic evaluation of LLMs combined with active learning and elicitation and heavy inner-monologue search/data-augmentation.

Why Are We Still Doing This?

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My Software North Star

Loris Cro's Blog

Vim anti-patterns | Arabesque

The benefits of getting to grips with Vim are immense in terms of editing speed and maintaining your “flow” when you’re on a roll, whether writing code, poetry, or prose, but because the learning curve is so steep for a text editor, it’s very easy to retain habits from your time learning the editor that stick with you well into mastery. Because Vim makes you so fast and fluent, it’s especially hard to root these out because you might not even notice them, but it’s worth it. Here I’ll list some of the more common ones.

Oh God, It's Raining Newsletters

On the rise of newsletter production, consumption, and monetization, and how email is one of the most powerful and resilient publishing platforms.

Unbundling Tools for Thought

Disparate thoughts on personal information management after traversing the hype cycle.

Instant LLM Updates with Doc-to-LoRA and Text-to-LoRA

Recent LLM agents have shown impressive capabilities on complex computer use and long-horizon tasks. Yet, they still struggle with long-term memory and adaptation--two of the most important cognitive capabilities that still limit LLMs today. Without long-term memory, users have to provide LLMs with relevant content at the start of every new session, creating friction, discontinuity, and longer time-to-response. Additionally, due to the lack of adaptation, they do not learn from mistakes or user preferences from previous sessions, making each interaction as cumbersome as the first. Traditionally, these two problems are tackled by "updating" the model.

TISM

Social media as it should be. Find your community among millions of users, unleash your creativity, and have some fun again.

Reality Check

Like this newsletter? Why not listen to the podcast version on Better Offline? Part 1 is out now (here're other links), and Part 2 comes out Friday May 2nd! I'm sick and god-damn tired of this! I have written tens of thousands of words about this and still, to this

I automated my job (and it made me a better leader)

Explore how my day as a senior leader looks now that I use 40 automations to help, and learn more about some of my favorites.

Your Guide to Better Days

Introducing a newsletter course from The Atlantic

Tread carefully, because you tread on my fucks.

This newsletter is free to read, and it’ll stay that way. But if you want more - extra posts each month, access to the community, and a direct line to ask me things - paid subscriptions are $2.50/month. A lot of people have told me it’s

Growing a Profitable Podcast on Software Engineering

Hello! What's your background, and what are you working on? I'm Jeff Meyerson, the host of Software Engineering Daily. I grew up playing poker competiti...