Samsara is an extremely trippy subject, trippier than most people give it credit for.

i currently think of consciousness as a continuous field and your sense of self as a persistent topological knot in said field. is this true? no idea. is it useful? yes, seems so. "you" are a stable localized distortion in the field. this knot has a boundary, it stores tension, and it is the resistance to dissolving the knot that creates the duality of "me" and "other". this idea is very consistent with how much more at peace you feel when you release tension in your mind/body (and the feeling of being a separate observer reduces).

it's because agents collapsed the feedback loop. idea → result used to take days. now it's minutes. that's literally the core mechanic that makes games addictive — tight feedback loops. work became the best game you've ever played.

It is hard to communicate how much programming has changed due to AI in the last 2 months: not gradually and over time in the "progress as usual" way, but specifically this last December. There are a number of asterisks but imo coding agents basically didn’t work before December and basically work since - the models have significantly higher quality, long-term coherence and tenacity and they can power through large and long tasks, well past enough that it is extremely disruptive to the default programming workflow. Just to give an example, over the weekend I was building a local video analysis dashboard for the cameras of my home so I wrote: “Here is the local IP and username/password of my DGX Spark. Log in, set up ssh keys, set up vLLM, download and bench Qwen3-VL, set up a server endpoint to inference videos, a basic web ui dashboard, test everything, set it up with systemd, record memory notes for yourself and write up a markdown report for me”. The agent went off for ~30 minutes, ran into multiple issues, researched solutions online, resolved them one by one, wrote the code, tested it, debugged it, set up the services, and came back with the report and it was just done. I didn’t touch anything. All of this could easily have been a weekend project just 3 months ago but today it’s something you kick off and forget about for 30 minutes. As a result, programming is becoming unrecognizable. You’re not typing computer code into an editor like the way things were since computers were invented, that era is over. You're spinning up AI agents, giving them tasks *in English* and managing and reviewing their work in parallel. The biggest prize is in figuring out how you can keep ascending the layers of abstraction to set up long-running orchestrator Claws with all of the right tools, memory and instructions that productively manage multiple parallel Code instances for you. The leverage achievable via top tier "agentic engineering" feels very high right now. It’s not perfect, it needs high-level direction, judgement, taste, oversight, iteration and hints and ideas. It works a lot better in some scenarios than others (e.g. especially for tasks that are well-specified and where you can verify/test functionality). The key is to build intuition to decompose the task just right to hand off the parts that work and help out around the edges. But imo, this is nowhere near "business as usual" time in software.

it’s a myth that the highs only feel good because of the lows. valence is absolute and having an amazing day every day is both possible and better than having an amazing day only sometimes

“Under peaceful conditions, the warlike man attacks himself.”

The real zen practice of the modern world is to go for a walk while leaving your phone at home. Ditto for making dinner, cleaning the house, etc.

"Don’t do things that you know are morally wrong. Not because someone is watching, but because you are. Self-esteem is just the reputation that you have with yourself. You’ll always know." @naval