A thinking partner is a medium, not a source
A thinking partner's value is in what it pulls out of you, not the text it writes. Five things stock Claude gets wrong, and the 800 words of instructions that fix them.
Learning and self
Learning, attention, habits, and understanding myself — lately with AI in the loop.
Agentic UX ruins the coaching
One more thing that's annoying when using AI as a coach: any amount of reasoning tokens will make me switch away. Latency actually matters here. Two seconds is okay; twenty ruins the flow. There is also something more subtle. I don't take as much responsibility for my thoughts, am not as critical. I don't
AI coach
Can you build an AI coach? The obvious answer is yes: AI is great at spotting patterns in what you say, and you can ask it to use any style of coaching, any framework. An exec coach I used to work with thinks you can't build an AI coach, because true change happens in relation to another human.
Will AI take us towards refinement of the self?
In Would You Rather Have Married Young?, Lillian Fishman writes about the "fundamental ethos that had long governed the young secular woman" in the last 50 years: Experience, we hoped, would broaden us. The new object seems to be the inverse: the contraction and refinement of the self, within and against the overwhelming flood of external information with
Half AI, half random curiosities
I rarely look at the search analytics for my blog, but today I did. I am really amused by the most common search queries that bring people to this website, which definitely show the variety of content I post here. Here are the top ones in the past month, with similar ones grouped: 1. are LLMs deterministic (Are LLMs deterministic?
Writing on mobile is different
Whenever I write here, I do it on my laptop, almost never on the phone. I do have a Bluetooth keyboard that connects to my phone, but it's rare that I remember to bring it with me, and have a moment to take it out of the bag. Plus it's un-ergonomic. But I also almost
Strive for off-grid discipline
We lost a floorball game yesterday. I can't stop thinking about it. Maybe because it felt like a pointless loss, like we lost because of something fully within our grasp. What happened? Two periods into the game, we were ahead 3:1. We had kept our defence intact, our game decent. But then in the third period we
Non-judgemental awareness is curative
Rather than try to fix things, all you have to do is notice, non-judgementally, that you’re doing them. Even while you’re involved in this non-judgemental noticing, you will notice a barrage of impulses to try different things, to intervene, to try, to fix. That’s fine, just notice them non-judgementally, too. Source: "The Inner
Curiosity arises from lack of feed
Here's a hypothesis: I think I'll always find something I am curious about. I am a naturally curious person, and I would actually guess that everyone is? It seems impossible that there would ever be a moment where nothing could interest me. But I think curiosity arises from lack of Dopamine. Basically, boredom. If you never
Diffuse mode: thinking by relaxing
I recently started drinking coffee again. Caffeine has always had the effect of narrowing my focus and reducing mind-wandering. The downside is, caffeine makes me less likely to get into diffuse mode, the other main mode of thinking. Focused mode means taking a direct, head-on approach to work: writing an email on your laptop, reading an article, or