Reading is when you take your brain for a walk.

“Falling Behind” & The Benefits of Slow, Intentional Learning in AI, it’s easy to feel like you’re falling behind with new “discoveries” and content published every day unfortunately I think today this manifests in short-term optimizations or “shallow learning” at the expense of life/learning that compound over time. this includes behaviors like: - skimming every cool article on X without engaging with a subset of topics deeply afterwards - foregoing all vacations with friends/family because you have to always be “locked-in” - giving up reading (or listening) to books (I’m bad with this one, but trying to be better). good books are some of the best intentional and timeless artifacts of knowledge. it’s also more long term and intentional in how we approach information - consuming everything but producing little. it feels good to read and feel like you’re in the know, but true learning and discovery happens when you break things yourself and tinker at the frontier in moderation all this stuff is fine, it’s actually great to obsessively sprint at something for a week or get a launch over the line but effective learning in a rapidly evolving field like ai is a healthy mix of short term optimizations mixed with deep, intentional long-term focus on hard problems that you actually care about my brain at least just needs some time to mull over ideas for a while to really let competing notions play around things like reading, going on walks, playing sports, hanging out with friends, help our minds find connections between concepts we’ve been intentionally engaging with for a while there’s many PhD/research stories breakthroughs coming from walks or sleep. the two sides of this are deeply intentional, prolonged focus on a topic mixed with stepping away from the topic and living life you’re not falling behind if you’re working towards something you care about even if grind culture says you are lock-in for a bit, step away, read a book, chill out, and run it back again. pretty hard to lose if you keep at this

Hello @rajat404 ! Looking forward for your blog post man :) - the post on your local Hermes setup - the detailed things you had in your claude.md that you had shown.

This makes so much sense ! "You don’t build trust with your users by writing a 2,000 word privacy policy. You build trust by not needing one to begin with." unix.foo/posts/local-ai-need…

Metrics Types - When to use what ? akshayd.dev/2026/04/30/metri…

Dostoevsky wrote this after nearly being executed: “When I look back at my life, I feel pain not because of suffering, but because of wasted time. I see how carelessly I lived, how often I ignored the quiet voice of my soul, how rarely I understood the value of a single moment. Only when death stood before me did I realize that life is not merely existence—it is a miracle. Every minute is a treasure, and in every breath, there is the possibility of happiness.”

Looking forward to it.

Had a friend tell me once: "When you're feeling overwhelmed, there are only two things you should do––get organized and get to work. The rest is just noise. Peace is found in progress." Some of the best advice I've ever received.

Joining the Omarchy club!

When you trade your ambition for comfort, you actually end up living your whole life with the very uncomfortable idea that you betrayed yourself.

This is some most practical ways for management of time. Relevant for anyone who is NOT a manager. Managers firefight, and there is no right way for them. Very relevant for Staff Engineers. youtube.com/watch?v=uhI78AuD…

These two are the most imp metrics. All the 101-alerts to my systems are based on these. System Resource exhaustion, Bad code deployment, Broken infra, Network failure or anything.. They can all be caught in the above two models.

The best of the best Engineers that I have seen have a sense of urgency. Anything slow irritates them. And they would never work for a "process based" large companies. Pace builds momentum.

Agree to most of it. I read somewhere that "Once is never enough". That's especially true for difficult subjects. The churns produce the juice.

More people = less progress.

DDIA should be a part of the curriculum in colleges.