Betterment

Find out why treating your to-do list like a never-emptying bucket can be counterproductive. Learn how to manage your tasks and reduce stress for a more balanced approach to productivity.

The best writing advice I’ve received doesn’t cost anything, and sometimes doesn’t even involve writing.

Combine building with developing people, replacing the manager whose value was mostly routing

There is a company in Japan that makes the seasoning in your instant ramen and the insulating film inside almost every advanced AI chip on the planet. It is the same company. Ajinomoto is best known for inventing monosodium glutamate, a little pot of which lives next to my cooker. (My father-in-law mistook it for […]

A health crisis can make you think about a lot of things.

After 25 years with TDD, we are now parting ways. The incremental TDD steps were great for human cognition, but didn't survive the transition to agentic coding.

From a personal Obsidian vault to an enterprise company brain: how agents write context on versioned branches, typed graphs keep it consistent, and merge.

Are you really struggling in life? You can’t keep a job, can’t make friends, can’t find a significant other. You might be contemptible person.

What would you do with a billion dollars? I am occasionally asked by young people for my life advice. Could I counsel them as they decide what to do? They are thinking of going into something new. Or thinking about … Continue reading →

“And it is so simple… You will instantly find how to live.”

“The happy man needs friends,” or so says Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle divides friendships into three kinds: friendships of utility, of ple...

Thoughts on continuing to build on principles that have been refined for years even before LLMs gained popularity.

Looking for answers — and finding hope —in the cyberpunk of the past, present, and future.

When I started using Obsidian, it was a niche tool for people that were into Zettelkasten and Dark Mode. The Obsidianmaxxing scene seems to have migrated from Second Brainers to the AI technorati, …

I’ve been trying to connect with a journalist who reached out a few days ago. He’s working on a story from way back in my career – the early days of Wired, circa 1995. It’s …

Speak to a doctor about longevity protocols and prescriptions.

We risk replacing genuine knowledge with ‘work slop’.

The cardinal rule of meetings with your direct reports is that you are always on the same side of the table. From the moment you walk in to the moment you leave, every single thing that your team does is a reflection and extension of you.

A guest article from Alex Koutmos on using Livebook as a learning tool for Elixir

Why your best improvement might be a deletion

9 eye-scanning patterns, 10 ways to adapt the text for max readability.

As traditional handwriting is progressively being replaced by digital devices, it is essential to investigate the implications for the human brain. Brain ele...

As I’m writing this, we’re in the middle of an AI-induced mass psychosis. People are literally token-maxxing themselves into hospital beds, scrambling to capture some of that market value before everything is automated away. I can’t blame them. Models keep getting better, programmers are being laid off left and right. We’ve been repeatedly told that AI will write 100% of the code by the end of the year. Whether that’s true or not, this may not be the best time to sit back.

Long thinking means sustained, deliberate thought aimed at real new insight. Cal Newport’s Notebook Method assumes that externalizing that thinking is trivial. It isn’t. Here is how the Zettelkasten Method closes the gap.

Our ability to focus is under attack. Remove the harmful stimuli, introduce beneficial ones. Daily deep reading is has a high return on the time invested, and it doubles as the front end of the Zettelkasten Method.

Building real knowledge takes a straining effort. Once external pressure disappears we avoid it by instinct. The way out is to condition ourselves to love the strain, and the Zettelkasten Method is built to be that gym for the mind for you.

The rise of AI threatens to erode our thinking skills. Just as fitness training replaced everyday movement to stay healthy, deliberate mind training keeps the mind sharp, like working a Zettelkasten.

Most people take notes by merely pointing at ideas rather than engaging with them, which produces storage instead of knowledge. The cure is a genuine struggle to capture the complete essence of a single idea, written the way an essayist tries to find their way from A to B. The struggle is not a flaw in the process; it is the process.