What’s the best thing to do for this? How does one decide what’s the best level of abstraction to approach this understanding and problem solving? Especially in my work, you need to understand what’s happening quickly. I enjoy this process, I thrive in it, I become focused. Beforehand, you can spend some time systematizing things, automating things, but nothing beats manual hand-to-reality contact, at least at first. Otherwise, you miss the point. You abstracted too quickly, lost the plot of what you were supposed to be dealing with.

Deciding on the right level of abstraction for a problem is hard. You don’t know what you might need in the future. It’s a constant problem for not only programming, but anything that has contact with reality. You design your systems with future changes or refactoring in mind, yet you still need to be quick, not waste time. Things you first thought might be useful might no longer be. What you thought would help you quickly grok the codebase ended up being harmful. You still need to be fast, go go go.

I remember the first time I was shown https://grugbrain.dev/ . I loved it a lot, it gets across the idea of defeating the complexity demon by all means necessary, and as the systems get more complex, once you get how to bottle the complexity, things get so much better. It still pops into my brain occasionally even for unrelated work. It’s very useful advice. I sometimes fantasize about how it could be applied to running governments, how one might make things more efficient. Emphasis on fantasize.

Iterative vs recursive. Figuring out the best approach, how to deal with these computational graphs, these weird DAGs, sometimes you need to loop back, often you need to get good by practice. More and more practice to figure it out. Maybe you will, maybe you won’t.

Abstractions. Interfacing with your brain. Nontrivial all of it. Until LLMs get properly good, and they’re nearly there, you still need to figure out how best to approach the complexity demon. They still use the context you give them, and without it they still do silly things you can avoid as long as you have the systems mindset in mind. You basically need to workshop it for them, and they can end up doing it well afterwards, but you still need to get them to understand what exactly it is you want.

And what do I want? Man, I want to just get good. Get the right abstractions, the right things that are needed. Let’s get good. Let’s grok the things we want to grok.

It’s mind-boggling.

Back in the day, my mum would see me do this and tell me to stop immediately, saying that I looked insane. Never mind that I’d occasionally see some of my friends do it, sometimes even my teachers. Her telling me this somehow stuck around, and once I moved back to the UK I think it felt weirder somehow to do this.

In hindsight, this probably cost me so many potential good outcomes. I’m writing this post to serve as a public reminder to myself.

The effect feels similar to therapy. With therapy, you have the benefit of an impartial third party asking good probing questions to get to the bottom of whatever issues you have, but at the cost of it sometimes not being obvious to the third party what direction you actually want to take the conversation in. With yourself, direction setting becomes natural. It feels like a better form of meditation, this gentle reflective environment I’m giving myself to ponder the questions or issues that have been bothering me. To pull out threads from my own brain to give more CoT time and approach the topic anew.

For so many good but tough decisions I’ve made in my life regarding relationships, work, stress, research, anything, it has always helped. I can’t emphasize enough how useful this has been. So why do I always stop using it? It’s literally just an enhanced Feynman method.

I recommend video if at all possible, but audio is also good. There’s something about seeing myself on the screen — a true mirror both while recording and afterwards — that just lends it this authenticity, a literal reflection. My hand movements and — hell, sometimes even a whiteboard — help with elaboration both for myself in the moment and for my future self, even if that future self is somewhat unlikely to open the video again, as it does feel sometimes cringey. I do want to also stop feeling that way, and sometimes at various points in my life it does work.

From there, I upload to YouTube on private (Google Photos tends to get extremely crowded since it doesn’t really draw distinctions between folders on device) and I can watch from there. You can also of course create your own S3 bucket etc. but I recommend not overengineering.

You can just record yourself and solve your problems. You can just do things.

[I’ll bring in sources at some point, please bear with :3]

These are partly true because my brain is structured this way / with sufficient interactions with the environment, these seem to be the outcomes. But partially it’s because I’m narrating myself a story of who I am, what my goals are, what I struggle with, and what I’m excited about, who I maybe *should* be or try to become. This might be a story I’ve been telling myself for so long it became internalized. Or maybe it’s a hodgepodge of other people’s stories (in books, videos, media, or in conversation with my fellow humans) I’ve found alluring or true that I want to apply to myself. Or both.

But is this useful? I subscribe to trying to think of myself as a homunculus occasionally, to remove myself from my past and just look at my current state and the world with fresh eyes. If only to at least remove myself from previous emotional baggage and to try to face things as is. This tends to work, but I usually apply it locally, like when I make a bet and lose, or things don’t go my way, or when they *do* go my way but I want to prevent it from getting to my head. Even then, though, I think I rarely do it globally: imagining that I’ve fully let go of any previous sense of self, any past that I ever had, and fully just observing things from a meta-perspective of “Whoa I’ve just plopped into the world from nothingness. Hmm, I seem to have these thoughts roaming about my head. Oh, I guess this body likes doing this and this sometimes. Let’s stop doing these things, let’s start doing those things etc.”

A full reset. When I do try to actually do it, it feels odd. Like the human got overwritten. But the narrations come back. They’re comforting, they ring true to some degree, and hey continuation of self right? This seems to be an important part of well-being? It’s good to feel pride about temporary specific accomplishments of one’s past (authentic pride), as long as it’s not about you trying to be prideful about an alleged permanent aspect of yourself or personality (hubristic pride)? What about guilt? Is that really ever useful?

I guess every emotion has its dysfunctional form. To the point that sometimes I wish a specific emotion could never be felt, due to experiencing its dysfunctional form when I’m feeling down.

On the “full reset homunculus” thing, the closest I’ve ever come to truly experienced this was back in middle school when the chest-compression meme was going around. I remember putting myself by the wall, breathing in, and as I was breathing in, my friend compressing my chest.

Full darkness.

I was in this pure void. All my memories just gone. But I didn’t know that. I knew literally nothing, apart from a vague sense of language. It felt like I was in this space/vacuum thing, darker than dark, completely blank slate. “Why am I here?” I asked myself, floating. Nothingness, no response. “Huh I can speak? What is this?”. I continued floating.

“I think I was in something called a classroom?” Continued floating. “I think I have a family? Somewhere? What’s that?” and then slowly, but exponentially the memories flood back. Where I live, who my friends are, my house, school, city, country, world, myself. Bum. Bum. Bum bum bum bumbumbumbumbrrrrrrrrrrrt.

I opened my eyes and I’m looking at the floor, hunched down. I asked what the fuck happened (I didn’t know this would be the effect), they just said I looked dazed for a couple seconds. For me it felt like at least 5-10 minutes. Insane. I began gushing to them about what it felt like and how insane it was. Everyone else seemed to say they didn’t remember much or that it was kinda weird, but they snapped back quickly. For me it was a full experience.

It’s also one of the best experiences I ever had in my life. I’d recommend it if it wasn’t for the risk of damage to the brain.

One thing you may get growing up in a Mediterranean country is that your parents never shut up. They will talk, constantly, with no end in sight. Sometimes about the most smallest things, there will be elaborate commentary. There is no restriction to the kind of topic. Any and every observation will be announced. They will constantly talk, assume that you’re listening, always expect a reply even if it’s a simple “sure” or “yeah”.

I contrast this to when I meet the parents of a British partner and it’s a night and day difference. Very minimal conversation if any, maybe because they don’t want to come off as too prying. Still sweet and kind as Mediterranean parents, but it’s a different default state that they’re in. Is this genetics? Environment? I have no clue.

If it’s genetics, then me and my sibling are clearly out of distribution.

I found myself most being able to work in cafes and the metro. It was very weird. Like the lack of background distraction is sufficient to throw me off.

This causes me to focus on my internal state more, to think through thoughts better? A state of “oh this is boring/menial, let’s see what’s happening inside”. And I think better.

Compared to when I’m by myself. In which case I end up distracting myself with the internet. But if it’s semi-consensual or outright non-consensual? I become more internal. Better thinker. To some degree of course, the background irritation occurs that builds up over time.

But something similar also happens when I have a friend just chilling with me. Even moreso if they’re not doing any particular work, instead reading a book or playing a game. Then my ability to think about work increases significantly. I think something similar also happens when I have a pet with me, a cat just chilling/sleeping on the floor, seeing her expand and compress, just hanging out where she is. Something extremely soothing about this, and also allowing me to think. No rush, no concern. Just doing whatever work I need.

Why is this?

There are potential problems with this of course. One particular issue is that having to rely on this externality is annoying. It’s a form of restriction, one that I’d ideally not have. But besides that, what does this lead towards?

What is it that these distractions do? The joy and hum of life continuing.

My mum says I was a deeply bored child growing up in the UK. I would voraciously consume books. Try all sorts of scenarios with my lego.

What is the ideal state? Some state of annoyance? Getting a cat? Talking/videoing myself for at least 10 minutes every day? What is the solution here? Some balance?

In the office I also work well, but definitely most when I know my screen cannot be seen. Even if I’m always working during that period. Something about having my screen seen feels icky. Why?

Once you go cosmopolitan and you see the world and all of its cultures, it becomes hard to decide what the baseline is, doesn’t it?

Yeah sleep was never for me.

Mind you, after a while my consciousness will always inevitably collapse at some point. But there’s such a strong instinct or push from within to go on. There’s so much to do, so much to see, so much to write, so much to read. If anything, the focus I get from writing in the dark with no other distraction, just the silence of the city, no messaging apps, no demands: it’s perfect. The equivalent of being in a monastery.

I know about the significant importance of sleep schedule and length (the former being more important than the latter; it’s nearly always better to wake up at the same time as usual than to try and recover sleep hours, look it up). I acknowledge I’m losing god knows how many IQ points in total across my life. Yet, it still doesn’t come naturally. Nowadays I need a cute softly spoken story, an in-depth dive into a random technical topic, or a person in my bed to co-regulate with.

This is in stark contrast to my friend back in high school who claimed he could knock himself out by doing a mental move that shuts his brain off. Would take him around a minute to get knocked out. Of course, I have no way of verifying this, but he was truthful most of the time, so seems legit. I did try this out at various points and I think I did get the hang of it, but now it’s a lost art for me.

8 hours out of 24, a third of the day. Wild. I did do a couple weeks of lucid dream training to at least try and make use of it (or at least remember it, because after all it is an internal story generator). And it did work! Again, now a lost art, but it was quite a beautiful experience flying over utopian Earth-like worlds, being all sorts of different creatures, creating a cute little home in orbit around the Earth. Would strongly recommend, don’t really see this kind of thing being tried by youngins of our day, but it’s likely I’m just not aware.

White. Ceiling. Cold bright lights stare at her.

Misaki blinks. Metal taste in her mouth, tongue thick and swollen. Taste of blood.

She tries to move, but everything aches. Her neck especially. She seems to be in a bed? Her parents come into view, kissing and hugging her intensely, thanking the heavens. What happened? Her parents look at each other, not sure what to say. A man in white coat comes into view, addressing her. He tells her she’s fine now, and that she experienced involuntary muscle contractions and was unconscious for around an hour. She bit her tongue during the spasms and hurt herself really bad. Misaki doesn’t understand, she doesn’t remember anything, only that she was watching an episode of Pokémon, the details of which she cannot recall, and now she’s here.

The doctor tells Misaki that she had an epileptic seizure. She was one of the 685 hospitalized children to be watching the episode Dennō Senshi Porygon and be given a seizure as a consequence of it.

The human brain is a computational device. And like any other computational device, it can be attacked. It can be done bluntly, with a bullet or tumour. But there’s something extremely fascinating to me about the idea of “hacking the brain” in order to conduct a subtle attack.

You show a 3 second video to a person, and they break. Knocked out, unconscious. This exists. It’s estimated that this works for 2 million people right now (clinically significant effect). You have a 1 in 4000 chance in inducing this to someone. Not only that, but we have EEG data showing that for flashing light stimulation, in children aged 1-16, the average abnormal brain reaction (photoparoxysmal responses) percentage is 7.6%, 1 in 13 children. That’s 154 million children. And it somehow disappears as children become adults, with 50% of cases being resolved?

Insane. Insane. We can already hack the brain, it’s already here.

How far can it go? Sound induced? Smell induced?

Thought induced? Feeling induced?

In rodent models, simple sound seizures are actually very common. For humans? Basically nonexistent, unless we’re counting startle epilepsy: seizures induced by loud noises or sudden surprises. But music induced epilepsy does exist (1 in 10 million people have it), and can be very specific. It can be a piece of classical music, it can be church bells, it can even happen by just thinking about the song.

There’s epilepsy from calculation, solving arithmetic problems, playing chess or cards, solving a Rubik’s cube, abstract reasoning.

There’s a version of epilepsy induced by reading.

I’ve read qntm’s There is No Antimemetics Division. I’ve read Nick Bostrom’s Infohazard PDF. I’ve read BLIT / “Basilisk” by David Langford.

We already have some of these hacks and it works for at least 2 million people.

For the abnormal brain reaction, that’s around 200 million people worldwide.

If you were extremely malicious and evil, how far could you extend it?

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8 AM. I wake up. Eyes dry, sense of annoyance, need to get my pills for the day. Random chance whether I’ll take them, let’s say I do. Feels cold. It’s warm in the bed under the duvet. Don’t want to get out.

10 AM. I randomly wake up again. Oh good it’s just 10 AM. Don’t need to worry about it. In fact, I could stay a little more inside.

12 PM. 1PM. Oh no, the day is passing away. Better get up? But first, some YouTube perhaps, after all, I just woke up.

2PM. 3PM. Spent a lot of time on YouTube. Hey, at least it was funny or interesting right? Something learned, or at least nerves calmed.

4 PM. I really should get out of the house as soon as possible. The day is slipping away. What have I done with it? But why is there this sense of anxiety still? Background anxiety. Better look at the small screen again. Daylight outside? It might turn into sunset soon, a day utterly wasted, would be very concerning. Better look back at those moving lights. The soothing sounds. Watch it dance, watch it dance. It calls for you. Otherwise you might dislike how you did this or that back in the day. Why didn’t you do otherwise? Pathetic. You could’ve been better. You could’ve done so much more. Time is running out. Year is running out. 2026 already. Back to the screen, watch it, watch it.

5 PM. I hate it. I hate it so much. What is there to do. Get yourself out of there. Listen to some music that pumps you up. Have some person doing the funnies in the background or talk about the Roman Empire. That will soothe your mind. Because otherwise it’s your fault. It’s always your fault. It could’ve been this or that. You could’ve used this day so much better. A waste. A waste. Should have slept earlier. You could have prevented this. Watch the YouTube. Soothe your mind.

6 PM. Out of the house, walking now. Roman Empire in the background. Otherwise you’ll be thinking, we cannot have that. Remember it gives you pain. You can only think if there’s other people are around at a restaurant or cafe. You can only think when you feel like you’re not being competed with. Otherwise you’re reminded. You’re reminded, you utter failure. The world is falling apart, timelines are shortening, and what are you doing? Roman Empire? You fall back to ancient times because they have no effect. Escapism masked as education to not repeat future mistakes. A comfort blanket. Need to play it again. Let’s listen to it again.

7 PM. At the friend’s place. Chatting about whatever. Mind continues to be soothed. Heck, might even talk about the work or the doom. Who knows. Chat chat chat. At least you feel human again. You only feel human again once you’ve had your sip of human talk, don’t you. You’re so broken aren’t you? See a therapist you dumb fuck.

11 PM. Spent so much time with friends doing this and that. Congratulations. Time to go back home. Listen to your Roman Empire. Or not, maybe you’ve been soothed enough. Don’t worry, it doesn’t matter, you’ll need all that soothing up tomorrow morning. Or maybe not. It’s random isn’t it? Well, notwithstanding your own sleep schedule. Sleeping at 4 AM and expecting to get up at 8 AM. What a joke. Repeat the cycle why don’t you. Only takes an interesting conversation or interesting work task or interesting party and boom, back to the start, 4 AM. Repeat it again. You have a soothed mind now, it’s your only opportunity. Time is ticking.

8 AM. I wake up.

I fucking love rockets so much, especially when there are humans in them.

We watched it go, higher and higher. Some of humanity’s best and brightest worked on building it, some of its best piloting it, and of course the appropriate automation of these systems, again some of its best designing and running it.

Will we have another human setting foot on the moon in a couple years? Seems probable. I hope to see it.

I miss this sense of wonder, of expectations for the future, of feeling like things will get better (AI timelines anyone?).

And I got it today. It genuinely was there. Hell yeah humanity be flying. Let’s fucking go.

Asteroid mining is mostly a pipe dream. Most things related to humans going to other terrestrial bodies is economically unviable.

Yet we’re still getting our feelers out. Hey, it’s only been 54 years. We’ve only been there 6 times already. 7th time’s the charm.

Going to the Moon has always been a past thing for me, it’s something humanity already did. Insane they did it, we applaud their success and insanity, and continue on. Especially the first landing with Apollo 11, so many things went wrong and they said fuck it. Depressurization causing extra velocity due to the undocking from lunar module not being complete and will cause an overshoot? Fuck it, let’s go ahead. Computer giving 1202 alarms during powered descent, astronauts not knowing what the hell it meant, most of mission control not knowing what the hell it meant? Fuck it, “we’re GO on that alarm”. The overshoot causing them to head towards boulders? Welp gotta go semi-manual control to course correct. Fuel running out barely anything left? Fuck it, let’s go ahead. Buzz Aldrin had his fat ass (support backpack) snap the engine arm switch right off which, by the way, is for launching the lunar module back up? Stick a pen in it, close the circuit. Hell, even on reentry back to Earth they nearly died, Service Module stayed near the Command Module and broke into pieces right next to them, any one of those could’ve led to the crew capsule’s utter destruction.

Hilariously, they even landed in the wrong location. History would’ve told the story a lot different if Buzz and his boys all drowned at sea after everything they went through (and this was decently likely).

And now we’re going back to the Moon again? You and I are gonna likely live to see it? Insane. Absolute insanity.

Tax dollars being used for this kind of stuff, I support. Take more of it. Send the scientists, the engineers, the pilots, let’s discover more, let’s do more, let’s figure out stuff more.

Last we had someone land on the moon was 1972.

Let’s do it again. Hell yeah.

I like subtlety. My mind is drawn to it.

The fine veins of leaves when god rays from a setting sun cut through the canopy. The cozy warmth or the irritating cool of late-evening lights. The arrangement of rooms. The intricate valleys of an iris. What people say, and the way they say it.

Noticing details is one thing. Needing them to be right is another. It’s easier to appreciate subtlety than to ensure its existence in what we create. And yet, I try.

It’s reflected in my approach to things, my conduct. I’m considered diplomatic but honest, choosing one word over another, ensuring that I’m maximally heard. My work receives the same treatment, choosing one way of formalizing a statement over another, refactoring to streamline, building a beautiful system with each careful analysis.

But the line has to be drawn. Not everything can be done this way. Prioritize.

Yet, when setting up this website, I told myself not to get lost in the weeds. Even then, I nudged the contrast, shifted the spacing, rethought the layout.

As a kid, I used to put off doing homework until the last possible hour. But once I started, I couldn’t stop until it was done properly. Not just finished. Proper.

This is a problem.

A lot of life is practically a roll of the dice. Often, it doesn’t matter how airtight your policy paper is, only that you write something that can be parsed reasonably well in about a minute. Of course, that’s assuming the reader isn’t distracted by office noise and already moving on to the next paper. The same goes for interviews and pitches. The interviewer usually doesn’t care about the elegance or robustness of your solution, or the complexity of how you successfully restructured an organization’s bureaucracy. They’re checking whether you can produce something that’s fast, clear, and competent enough, as the real world rarely rewards perfect work so much as usable work delivered under constraints.

Opportunities don’t wait for polish; they come and go.

Quantity generally beats quality. There’s not enough time.

Hence, I write, I share.

And I will write and share again.

No more hundred-page Google Docs that no one will ever read but me. Drafts kept safe in secrecy, protected from judgment, barred from usefulness.

Instead, words that will leave the document and enter your mind.