A little post on what I’ve been consuming/doing/reading/thinking about. Some background music (I like the sentiment : music is how we decorate time).
Late night walks
I've been enjoying late night walks - in silence without a phone, and just letting the mind go to wherever it wants to go to. This was the majority of the time on the Camino and it’s such peaceful way of existing.
Specifically, I love walking through St Pancras station at night - there seems to always be someone practicing the piano (the interstellar theme tune being a favourite).
I think about 'good design' being all around you. You look up at the ceiling, and realise that was designed, it existed in the mind of a group of people and now its alive - it exists.
I’ve been noticing this more and more. Everything around us is designed, built up. All the shops I walk by, the small little posters, the billboards, the handrail, the door hinge- this was all designed. Our entire built up environment was a result of human creativity and innovation. I’m left speechless half the time I think about it.
Practising the faculty of care
A question I’ve been asking myself lately is :
What would this look like if I injected 10% more care into it?
By care, I mean intentionally directed attention. This is a form of meditation.
I regularly think about my two trips to Japan, like many who visit, we're bewitched by the aesthetics, attention to detail and sense of common good that pervades the culture.
I remember, after leaving a 'muscle bar' at 2am in Tokyo, as I was halfway down the street, a topless muscled Japanese man sprinted in my direction shouting 'sumimasen'. He proceeded to hand me a bunch of coins that had happened to slip out of my pocket (a measly amount roughly £1-2) before bowing, striking a pose and sprinting back.
I compare this to London, where yesterday form the other side of the platform I saw a young mother dragging her stroller up the stairs with her infant in the other hand, whilst people walked past her. I jumped on the train back only to be greeted by someone blasting tik toks out loud from their phone.
When I think of Japan, I think of a place where the ‘common good’ is preserved. Tokyo has the highest rate of returned wallets for example.
If I want to live in a culture like this, change starts at an individual level. Try and care a bit more about what you are doing, your surroundings and your behaviour. I’m constantly reminded of the adage : you are what you repeatedly do - so be careful what kind of habits you reinforce (internal and external).
RSA Talks
I’ve been enjoying listening to various RSA talks. I remember visiting multiple times as a teenager (even skipping a day of school to go to one of the events that was going on).
Continuing my obsession with David Deutsch, I enjoyed this lecture on optimism.
Dialectic
This has been one of my favourite recent podcasts I’ve discovered. Highly recommend listening - so many nuggets of wisdom.
“Self-writing is this kind of self-cultivation thing. The project I’m doing is basically turning myself into a certain type of person who is able to have these thoughts. The essays are kind of just exhaust from the project.”
I liked the sentiment of writing about just turning yourself into the kind of person who has certain thoughts. It’s about intentionally crafting the way you see the world.
At some level you are what you consume - what you surround yourself with, the people, the objects, the environment. It linked to this recent essay I read: Taste is the new intelligence,
My current standing on GenAI
Asking AI to summarise things is a misunderstanding of how learning actually works. The mind doesn't learn through summary, it learns by grappling with concepts and thinking through it yourself. Thinking that knowledge is something that you just 'pour into your mind' (Bucket theory of learning) is false. Maybe the value of spending 5-6 hours with a book, is that you are spending... 5-6 hours with a book thinking about a topic yourself. The danger in cognitively offloading ‘writing’ to AI’s is that you gain this illusion of competence by reading a summary, when in reality you haven’t sat down and done the hard work.
What you can use AI for is as a 'socratic style' tutor - asking questions and elucidating any sticking points.
Clearly students are using it to just auto-generate essays. But that gets to a deeper point - why are you forcing kids to learn what they don't want to learn? I liked this quote : "Students aren't cheating because AI made it easier—they're cheating because, for generations, we've taught them that the grade matters more than the knowledge."
To the tweet above : an article worth reading : In praise of ignorance
Many people I come across are unaware of how big of an impact AI is going to have on the job market. That said, I think those in regulated industries are going to be slower in adopting it (red tape) - Fact checking is critical - these systems hallucinate. If you're using it to code your front end, go ahead. But if you're using it for any security features/backend or in fields like medicine/biology etc - it needs human validation.
Two approaches to material wealth :
1. You work at a stable high earning job, invest in index funds (FIRE style) and eventually you come to a place where you've amassed wealth and you can control your time more effectively (see : How I got wealthy without working too hard )
2. You try and start a company - no income for several months/years, with no guarantee of success, and if successful win very big - one big payoff day.
Serendipity vs stability. No right or wrong, but I think personality and risk tolerance determine your choice.
Quotes / Poetry
Writing converts your ideas from vague to bad. (Paul Graham)
"This is what craft is about — the deliberate attention put into making something excellent, not because someone is checking, but because it matters to the maker."
Don’t try to analyse and create at the same time. They’re different processes.
Ambition is frozen desire, the current of a vocational life immobilized and concretised to set, unforgiving goals. (David Whyte)
Links
1. Scary Black mirror-esque piece on LLM's
https://rachel.fast.ai/posts/2025-06-04-enzyme-ml-fails/index.html
All the major AI's compete in a game of diplomacy
“Gemini 2.5 Pro outwits (most of) the field while Claude 4 Opus just wants everyone to get along
o3 convinced Opus, which had started out as Gemini’s loyal ally, to join the coalition with the promise of a four-way draw. It’s an impossible outcome for the game (one country has to win), but Opus was lured in by the hope of a non-violent resolution. It was quickly betrayed and eliminated by o3, which went on to win.”
100 Rabbits : 100 rabbits follows a couple living a low tech life on a sailboat.
Scar tissue makes relationships wear out
Beautiful piece - relationships are dynamic everchanging systems. The small things are the big things. What’s important is to tackle the small things and error correct. Take a metaphorical foam roller (candid discussion) and iron out the knots.
I absolutely love reading personal blogs. That said, I feel like I need to update my own, the design could be improved.
When a person is learning successfully, the trail of wilful ignorance, as it were, that they leave behind them—the sequence of rejected opportunities to acquire information—characterises their creative process just as faithfully as the sequence of problems that they faced and solved.
Photos
I haven’t been taking many photos lately - maybe I need to go on a photo walk again.
This is an accidental album cover I took on the camino.
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