The internet is not some other thing, separate from life, it is an abstraction that is very real.

Fundamentally, I can inspect and see the packets and bits between my computer and the network. I can manipulate the pixels I see in the browser using code. These days more atoms are controlled by bits.

I can also make a life from the internet. I can read information. I can communicate with people and machines. I’ve made my livelihood from it by arranging bits just so.

If the internet is real life, how should our relationship with it change? I think we should care a lot more about living a rich digital life in the same manner we think about health, fitness, and gardening. Investing in quality of life ought to include being thoughtful about our digital skills, interests, and safety.

(Based on a conversation I had with Jake Stein)

The most reliable way to stop procrastinating is to get started. Not with the intention of completing the task at hand, but doing just a little bit.

By doing just a little bit to get started, the task you’re dreading becomes approachable. From there, it’s highly likely you’ll complete the whole darn thing.

The activation energy needed to get going always seems higher if you stare at the mountain ahead of you rather than the next step.

Even though I know the trick, it still amazes me that it works.

Asteroid City, Wes Anderson’s latest movie, is a movie about a play where the plot never quite make sense. There is a scene where the playwright is asking a room of actors to be asleep. The movie returns to this moment a few times. On the final time, the director, after telling the lead actor there are no answers for why he burned his hand on purpose, tells everyone “you can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep.”

I think this is the whole point of the movie. The story is not the point, but a plot device to articulate the moment of “waking up”. The juxtaposition of sleep or dreaming (or watching a meandering Wes Anderson film), helps us realize reality and wake up. I caught myself noticing reality a little more clearly as that scene was happening.

Maybe not profound, but artful and interesting!

See also:

• Wakefulness is a form of determinate negation defined by the ceasation of asleep
• Mindfulness helps you notice these moments awareness is key to being present

It’s difficult to work with someone who always seems to be aggrieved. It’s a sign they will blame others rather than take responsibility themselves. It’s also a sign that they won’t be interested in improving their performance or making adjustments to collaborate better with you or the team.

If someone is perpetually aggrieved, it’s just a matter of time before they start blaming you for treating them unfairly. If that someone is particularly persuasive (it’s easy to get sucked into), it can have a far reaching, negative pull on everyone.

See also:

• Default optimism is rational
• This is usually a sign of narcissism so you can use the Narcissist’s Prayer to identify them

I used to feel like asking a list of discovery questions to qualify a prospect during a call was awkward and not useful. Now I realize it’s actually a key part to a consultative sales experience and should feel conversational.

Discovery questions should be asked because you genuinely want to know how to help them. It would be a disservice not to ask in the same way you would be wary of a doctor that jumped directly into treatment merely because you showed up in their office!

When you genuinely want to know how to help, it’s easy to make the whole exchange feel more conversational. When it’s conversational, everyone can put their guard down and be more forthcoming about their needs and whether your solution is a fit.

See also:

• Sending follow-up emails is worth billions per year so don’t forget to follow-up afterwards
• Getting comfortable with this process makes for more effective founder-led sales too
• A third of sales comes from doing nothing at all so stay out of the way when someone is ready to buy

Imagine a busy executive trying to work with multiple people. They’re coming in and out of meetings and working on several projects all day long. They have maybe 15 minutes to concentrate on a thing to try and keep things moving or prevent holding things up. Every time there is a broken link, spelling error, obviously incorrect statement, or something that needs to be double checked, it creates delays and more work.

A culture of sloppyness and lack of attention to detail multiplies the delays and increases the amount of work across everyone in the organization. Ostensibly small details become very important when multiplied by a large number of people.

See also:

• An organizational linter might automate away some issues rather than rely on training
• The Ringelmann effect shows groups become less productive as they grow
• If slowness begets more slowness, sloppyness begets more sloppyness because it was accidentally made okay

What you intend to do with your notes is the thing that motivates you to take notes in the first place. The act of taking notes can be enough when getting started, there needs to be something more to keep going year after year.

Sometimes I struggle with motivation to write notes. It takes effort. The gratification is delayed. It’s not that I don’t find it valuable (writing is enormously valuable), but that I can lose sight of why I do it in the first place.

The best way to remind myself of why I should take notes is by producing works using my notes. For example, writing an essay or a brief from notes surprisingly fast (maybe I shouldn’t be surprised at this point) and reveals new ideas and questions to explore. My notes are a treasure map with caches stashed all along the digital garden.

This chart, adapted from xkcd, tells you the amount of time saved over 5 years based on how much time you are able to shave off of the task. For example, a task that you do daily that you are able to reduce by 30 minutes will save 5 weeks of time over 5 years. This chart can also tell you how much time you should spend on trying to optimize so you don’t spend more time than it’s worth.

See also:

• Time saved using keyboard shortcuts is pretty high not because of the amount of time shaved off but because of how frequently I use them
• There’s a knock-on effect that’s not quantified here which is that automation reduces marginal cost of nonautomated tasks
• The second time, write it down because documentation is automation

OpenAI GPT models (GPT 4 at time of writing) do not accurately or consistently parse or manipulate dates.

For example:

• Giving wrong year: when converting 2023-12-13 to a Unix timestamp and it returns the wrong year (2022 instead of 2023)
• Wrong timezone: when converting an ISO date, it randomly adds on hours of time even if instructed to use UTC midnight
• Giving current date: when asked to convert 2023-12-13 into a timestamp and it sometimes gives today’s date

Self querying by date using LangChain doesn’t work well. The default schema used for parsing natural language into the internal representation of langchain for querying a vector store does not work with dates because it uses the wrong type (it tries to use a dict but you can only filter using integers or strings).

To fix that, create your own “structured request” schema for use with a vector DB (like ChromaDB).

TASK_METADATA = [
    AttributeInfo(
        name="title",
        description="The title of the task, meeting, or heading",
        type="string",
    ),
    AttributeInfo(
        name="created_date",
        description="The timestamp the task or meeting was created formatted as an integer",
        type="int",
    ),
]

TASKS_SCHEMA = """\
<< Structured Request Schema >>
When responding use a markdown code snippet with a JSON object formatted in the following schema:

```json
{{{{
    "query": string \\ text string to compare to document contents
    "filter": string \\ logical condition statement for filtering documents
}}}}
```

The query string should contain only text that is expected to match the contents of documents. Any conditions in the filter should not be mentioned in the query as well.

A logical condition statement is composed of one or more comparison and logical operation statements.

A comparison statement takes the form: `comp(attr, val)`:
- `comp` ({allowed_comparators}): comparator
- `attr` (string):  name of attribute to apply the comparison to
- `val` (string): is the comparison value

A logical operation statement takes the form `op(statement1, statement2, ...)`:
- `op` ({allowed_operators}): logical operator
- `statement1`, `statement2`, ... (comparison statements or logical operation statements): one or more statements to apply the operation to

Make sure that you only use the comparators and logical operators listed above and no others.
Make sure that filters only refer to attributes that exist in the data source.
Make sure that filters only use the attributed names with its function names if there are functions applied on them.
Make sure that filters only use timestamp in seconds as an integer when handling date data typed values. If you need to convert them, translate the date into a unix epoch timstamp with UTC timezone and double check that it is the correct year. NEVER use the `eq` operator for timestamps, if the requested date is a single day, use the `gte` operator for the requested date AND a `lte` operator for the requested date plus one day. Be very careful with dates.
Make sure that filters take into account the descriptions of attributes and only make comparisons that are feasible given the type of data being stored.
Make sure that filters are only used as needed. If there are no filters that should be applied return "NO_FILTER" for the filter value.\
"""
TASKS_SCHEMA_PROMPT = PromptTemplate.from_template(TASKS_SCHEMA)

prompt = get_query_constructor_prompt(
    document_contents="My tasks",
    attribute_info=TASK_METADATA,
    schema_prompt=TASKS_SCHEMA_PROMPT,
)
output_parser = StructuredQueryOutputParser.from_components()
query_constructor = prompt | TASKS_LLM | output_parser

Unfortunately, this only works for a very limited number of cases because OpenAI doesn’t handle dates well.

The Lorca Model 1 is a romantic watch. It blends elements of several iconic watches that remind me of a time I never lived through. It’s a thoughtful combination of specs and details that make the watch charming and unique.

The dial is fantastic. The sword hands end in a fine point that gives the precise feeling to telling the time, which adds to the legibility. The GMT hand stands out nicely with its diamond head that matches the 12 o’clock marker on the bezel. The sector lines bisect the dial in a subtle way. The indices play a neat trick in the light where they appear darker than the hands and give off a slightly grayish-brown color that makes it match nicely with a leather band. The minute track markers add contrast to the indices, which further highlights the different color tones on the dial.

About the minute track—the longer I wear the watch, the more it’s clear to me that this is the most important element of the dial. In some lights, where you can’t see it as well, the dial looks plain, but in daylight, it pops out beautifully and brings the other elements together. The minute track is also why it’s impossible to place your finger on the exact combination of 1950s inspiration.

While some complain about the typeface chosen for the 24-hour fixed bezel, I think it suits the watch just fine. It appears like a superscript Garamond to my eyes, which I find pleasing and gives the watch a bookish vibe. The typeface and use of a diamond at the 12 o’clock and GMT hand also reminds me of a deck of cards.

The finishing is very good but not excellent. The applied index at 12 o’clock is ever so slightly off dead center with the vertical sector line. The date wheel comes across flat and paper-like (maybe the white needs some sort of texture to it?).

The lume needs some charging to be visible at night. This is probably a weird “me” thing, but I like to check the time when I wake up in the middle of the night. The Sinn U50 doesn’t need any special charging to last the entire night though there’s a lot more lume to work there.

Wearing the Lorca Model 1 fits almost any situation. The beads-of-rice bracelet dresses it up a bit (though not as much as the Cartier Tank), but putting it on a strap makes it look more casual. I prefer it on the bracelet, which also happens to be extremely comfortable.

Now that I’ve traveled with the watch, I can say that having a GMT complication is not that useful in practice. Converting 24-hour time to 12-hour time is still slow (for me). It’s easy to misread the hour when it’s late in the hour and there isn’t much space between ticks. The best way to read the GMT hand on the Lorca is to focus on the tip of the diamond shape, not the large plot of white lume.

The Lorca Model 1 deserves more attention. Of all the vintage-inspired modern watches, this one stands out to me. You can tell how agonizing the design process must have been when you inspect the tiny details all over the watch. By my favorite definition of good taste, the sum of all these details works beautifully together.

Making the most of practical applications of large language models requires creativity. It’s a blank canvas to be filled in the same way that early mobile application developers faced when a new set of APIs unlocked new possibilities.

I think it will take several years of creative exploration to find the best ways to integrate LLMs. A chat interface will feel competitively lazy.

See also:

• LLMs aren’t quite universal objects like computers but maybe they will be eventually or another API in the core operating system
• Chatbots lack affordances
• AI is the next great interop layer and I can see a world where it becomes more like python, gluing systems together

A recent analysis of 20 million research articles and 4 million patent applications found that distributed teams are less likely to have a breakthrough discovery than their on-site counterparts. They found that collaboration for remote teams was more likely to happen at later stages where technical tasks are more discreet rather than earlier during the ideation stage. The authors believe that this means remote teams fail to benefit from the shared knowledge of the team and therefore have less new, disruptive ideas.

Read Remote collaboration fuses fewer breakthrough ideas.

See also:

• Remote work creates fewer weak ties which is important for chance encounters and sharing knowledge
• Working in person matters at the beginning of a project
• Organizational support of remote work correlates with reported productivity

Here’s how to write permanent notes based on How to Take Smart Notes.

1. Write out the main idea succinctly and in your own words
2. Look for connections between this note and other notes
3. Ask questions about your understanding of the note:
   • What does this mean?
   • Why is it important?
   • What is missing?
   • What question does this raise?
   • What would disprove it?
   • What other possibilities could there be? If the same or similar note exists, how is it different? (Write a note about the difference).
4. Write a list of related notes and summarize the connection in a sentence (I try to link to the note inline or in a section “See Also”)
5. Review existing areas of inquiry and link them to the index of that note (structure note about a topic or question)

See also:

• Writing is thinking and linking the information is the difference between rote memorization and knowledge creation
• Writing down ideas can be the difference between emulation and replication because human knowledge is meme replication
• Writing notes and linking them together is accretive

If your investments are good only because of future optimism, you will have surprises in the downside case. If your investments are good without optimism required then you will be surprised in the upside case.

One way to avoid being surprised by the downside case is to avoid losers rather than pick winners. However, it might be just as important to protect against the downside by enjoying every bit of the upside.

From Howard Marks at Oaktree.

See also:

• Venture capital is different, you can only lose 1x your money but missing out on fund-returning gains is the real loss
• Startup investing is investing in options
• Consensus macro forecasts provide no value
• Investment strategies that only work in a bull market
• Skepticism and optimism in markets
• Zero interest rate policy (ZIRP)

Worrying about being sick seems to increase your risk of death. A recent study published in JAMA Psychiatry found that people with hypochondriasis (a psychiatric disorder characterized by a pre-occupation about having a serious illness) have an increased risk of death compared to those who do not have hypochondriasis.

See also:

• Everything arises in consciousness
• Stress and anxiety are cumulative

A business can get kicked off of their PEO or unable to use a PEO if even a single employee “overutilizes” insurance benefits. When it comes to health insurance this can mean one person has a severe illness or medical condition.

Why is that?

Since PEOs are an underwriting business that pools together multiple businesses to negotiate better rates from insurance carriers, a business within a pool can effectively raise the premiums of everyone else. PEOs make money by marking up insurance premiums so if premiums go up, they lose margin proportionally.

See also:

• PEOs offer better healthcare for small businesses…as long as employees don’t actually need it
• PEOs taking care of everything is a myth
• PEO was made up to dress up the image of employee-leasing

Most runaway successes we hear about often have some mythology of the moment the founding team unlocked exponential growth. Examples include Slack, Facebook, and HubSpot. The only problem is, most of these growth stories are not actually exponential but closer to “an initial period of quadratic growth followed by linear growth”.

In The myth of exponential hypergrowth from A Smart Bear, the author argues that this distinction is important because we need better mental models for how to achieve high growth. To do that, consider successful products and marketing campaigns follow an elephant curve (steap rise, followed by a drawn out decline) and the idea is to stack these over time. Only then can you create multiple activities that sustain high growth.

See also:

• The initial part of the elephant compounds, but compounding is unintuitive because the initial curve feels flat
• Stripe’s business applies an interesting strategy for growing with the elephant curve of startups
• The elephant curve also exhibits a power law in that most of the growth happens at the head of the curve

In business strategy you’ll often hear a competitive advantage described as a moat, but most moats are more like a long bridge. The moat is the thing that prevents others from easily replicating another business. A long bridge takes a time build and is effectively a moat if it’s impractical to catch up or simply makes it a schlep.

In a sense, generative AI is a bridge shortening technology opening up many businesses to greater competition. Of course, replication does not a business make, but what happens when a motivated group of smart people uses better tools to build a competitive offering in a short-bridge amount of time?

See also:

• The book 7 Powers shows that building large durable business has more to it than building
• Time is still the hardest to replicate advantage since advantages accrue to the leader and incumbants have been the leader for much longer
• Maybe managerial capitalism is the true moat destroying technology?

Sometimes the person that reaches out for a demo is not the decision maker. They may be a user of the product with a vested interest in solving the problem. They may be gathering information for others.

If your sales process typically involves multiple parties, some who you haven’t met yet, send a follow-up email that is easy to forward to the other people involved in the decision. This equips them with what they need to represent your product internally (at least initially) because you already wrote up what they need.

See also:

• Make it easy to say yes to making an introduction
• How to write a sales narrative
• Founder-led sales

If you do something more than once, write down the steps taken to complete the task. Chances are, if you have to do something twice, you’ll need to repeat it more times later.

Having a rule that everyone at the company writes things down when repeated has several advantages. The knowledge needed to perform the task or process doesn’t need to be rediscovered by the next person. Documentation is automation and opens up the possibility to fully automate it with software.

From The Great CEO Within.

See also:

• Automation reduces marginal cost of nonautomated tasks
• A list of tasks describes multi-party processes poorly

A simple way to deliver effective feedback to an employee is the use the like/wish framework. Say the specific actions you liked about their employees performance and then say which specific actions you wish they would have done differently (emphasis on specific actions!). This leads to productive conversations about how to adjust performance and clear up any misunderstandings.

From The Great CEO Within.

By far the best installation and running experience for using a large language model locally is llamafile. The entire model, weights, and a server are packaged into a single binary that can be run across multiple runtime environments.

It turns a complicated set of steps for compiling, fine tuning, and running into a single download and command sh -c ./path/to/llamafile.

This is ideal if you just want to try out a model to see how it performs. For me, it was interesting to see that my Macbook M1 laptop can get ~11 tokens per second out of the box and the llava model is good enough for basic tasks.

I hope they make more models available to try!

See also:

• This might make it easier for personal infrastructure applications where you want to avoid sending sensitive data over the wire but can provide the context for an LLM application locally
• Convenience is king, even for developers that might be used to yak shaving

If you’ve ever accidentally deleted something from a file and want to recover it using git you can search the full history for a string.

This will return any commit that includes the string in the diff:

git log -i -p -S "my search term here"

I’ve used this several times now to recover some previous code and prose I had written many commits ago.

See also

• This is especially useful not that I use git as the backend for org-roam mobile
• Working Copy is surprisingly useful for bringing git workflows to iOS