Housekeeping note
Starting on Jan 1, 2026, I’m switching to a single file “catchall” journal file like I used to have from 2014 to 2022.
I am also going to be using ^53cb8f to make this one place to capture, comment, reflect on things I read, observe etc. “Single Handling”. I have assigned
Cmd-Shift-Lto capture stuff into this file.
January
Jan 1, 2026
BestOf x/visakanv from Nov 2020.
The core thing about good reply game is attention. You have to be attentive to other people, discern what they’re trying to do, how they’d like to be interacted with. Attention is also how you cultivate taste. Attention then is the most precious, valuable resource there is.
real ambition is something far beyond mere prestige and accolades. real ambition is about serving your deepest values at the highest level possible. it is certainly dangerous if it isn’t intertwined with a genuine love for humanity
I plan to do more of Have a public body of work, which is like a spiderweb that catches the attention of people looking for you in 2026.
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Career Advice in AI by Lawrence Maroney hosted by Andrew Ng at Stanford CS230, Dec 2025.
ANg: “The length of tasks AI can do is doubling every 7 months - (METR) study. For AI coding the period is ~70 days (~2.5 months).”
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“You don’t need to be right often. You need to be right big.” — Stan Druckenmiller
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I believe AGI shifts us from a labor-bound to an information-bound society. It gives us compute-bounded leverage to act, producing exponentially more information until public knowledge becomes worthless and private information priceless. Capital, talent, and power flow to information asymmetry. — Surya Dantuluri, creator of vmux. His projects section is inspiring.
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The experience of passive consumption (cable TV, tiktok, etc, pointed out in another comment here) is essentially the experience of psychological obliteration. When you get sucked into reels, you go from “here” to “there,” and in the process, while you are “there,” your entire whole self is destroyed. The same psychological phenomena happens to gambling addicts, alcoholics, or users of heroin. It has fewer physiological downsides and side-effects as those things; the only material loss you have is the loss of time. But far more remarkable than that it’s simply a waste of time, and rarely articulated, is this psychological loss. The destruction of the self. That echoes through a person’s life, to their relationships, their self-construction, etc. It is those echoes that we are now dealing with on a mass sociological scale. By the way. “There” has a lot of upsides too. People can be creative, productive, expressive while they are “there” too. Creating, being funny, being social, etc. That’s why this is so hard. — hn/mlsu
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Have the courage to start with a clean slate.
In 2025, I deleted my entire design portfolio after 15 years and started over from scratch. I created work and attracted clients that align with my values. You can too. — Kyle Miller
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Charlie Munger on improving your life:
“Personal discipline, personal morality, good colleagues, good ideas. All of that simple stuff.” “If you want to carry one message from Charlie Munger, it’s this — if it’s trite, it’s right. All of those old virtues, they all work.”
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With new AI Coding tools, we should be trying to recreate some of the older, beloved tools that were extremely popular because they were “mission-focussed”, fast, just did “what was needed and nothing more” etc.,. Many of these tools were spoiled because of acquistions, continued bloat, or businesses going bust. I thought of this while recalling some of the nostalgia people have/had for ICQ, Skype..
Jan 2, 2026
I cleared the Azure AI-102 certification exam today, becoming “Microsoft Certified: Azure AI Engineer Associate”
I took the exam at Ivy Tech Noblesville campus. The campus was empty likely because it is the winter break. Finished with 20+ minutes remaining. Scored 708; pass marks 700.
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Watched Marty Supreme at Flix Brew House after ramen dinner at Kotoyama. Interesting movie, unusual for a Hollywood movie. 2 hours is too long. Probably won’t watch it again.
MiniMax-M2.1 and GLM-4.7 are the first local models I would pick over sonnet — x/0xSero
Would need a pretty chunky setup to run MiniMax-M2.1 (229B params) work locally — “64GB RAM, 16+ core CPU, 500GB SSD storage (~460GB model download). For GPU acceleration, need at least 32GB VRAM (e.g., RTX 5090), but full performance often requires multiple high-end GPUs like 4x A100/H100 for quantized versions.”
Pruned/quantized models might be able to run on smaller hardware.
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How the creator of Claude Code, Boris Cherny uses it:
- run parallel Claudes in terminal
- use opus 4.5 with thinking for everything.
- team uses a shared
CLAUDE.md - tag
@claudeon PRs to updateCLAUDE.mdas you go. - sessions start in plan mode, and once the plan is acceptable, switch to using auto-accept edits mode. A Good plan is imporant!
- put commands in
.claude/commandsand use them for inner loop workflows. - use sub-agents
- use
PostToolUsehook to format code - do NOT use
--dangeroulsy-skip-permissions; instead use/permissionsto pre-allow common bash commands that are safe. - configure MCPServers to run the tools for you. “Slack (via the MCP server), runs BigQuery queries to answer analytics questions (using bq CLI), grabs error logs from Sentry, etc. The Slack MCP configuration is checked into our .mcp.json and shared with the team.”
- for long-running tasks, tell Calude to verify its work with a background agent using the agent Stop hook.
- give Claude ways to verify its work. For example, use the claude chrome extension, which opens a browser, tests the UI, and iterates until the code works and the UX feels good. —
Signed for ManuAI after hearing about them via the acquisition news (they were acquired by Meta for upwards of $2B), haven’t had a chance to play with it yet.
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With Claude Code he was able to learn, build and code a hardware project he’s wanted to exist for years. This is truly personal software. We are still so early
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How people are using Claude Code with obsidian — X/kepano thread
Jan 3, 2026
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Jonathan Bi interviews Jim O’Shaguhnessy; “Humanities: The entrepreneur’s last edge”.
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How to think about software development in 2026:
- review bandwidth / ownership
- testing and validation
- release/rollback confidence
- security/compliance gates
- product decision latency (what to build next)
My own gut feeling is that product decision latency will be tested hard.
The disappearing middle of software work:
Turning intent into something real meant opening the codebase, booting up the environment, and writing the code. That middle absorbed most of the time, attention, and craft of software teams.
Pure coding agent workflows can now produce working code from goals, context, and tasks. They operate more independently, requiring you to touch the code less and rely on the IDE less. The IDE becomes more of a code viewer than a writing tool.
** What actually needs to be built is still the important question. Understanding the problem, gathering the right context from customers and internal teams, and shaping the work so it can be acted on effectively matters more because agents act directly on that input.**
Video of the swiss ski resort fire. Teach your kids to recognize danger and do the right thing — save themselves and those around them, and not give into being “cool”.
where good ideas come from for coding agents by Sunil Pai of cloudflare.
Jan 4, 2026
This is one bet
they think in portfolios from day one. not “this is my startup,” but “this is one bet.” apps, tools, experiments, accounts. they expect most to die and one to change their life.
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Interview with Viren Shetty of Narayana Health on Vital Signs. Cites the The Toyota way. Have one hospital in Cayman Islands apart from 19 in India.
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Show your kids greatness. NEVER dumb things down.
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One of my resolutions for 2026 is to eat more protein in a macro balanced way to augment my strength training and weight loss journey that started in 2025. I lost 15 pounds (196-181), and the hardest part is eating well. I have leaned heavily on protein poweders, eating eggs, and even Clear Whey Isolate drinks (Nurri from Costco). In 2026, I want to get better at meal prepping so that I can identify what I like, batch prepare them, and eat them without too much prep time. Ethan Chlebowski’s How to Eat High Protein without Wasting your Money is one pointer. Another really interesting video that would help me eat more greens, fibers and fresh vegetables is For Fast and Easy Meal Prep, Use This Restaurant Trick | Techniquely with Lan Lam.
Minimal Protein = 0.36g/lb at 175lb = 63g (232 kcal). Optimal = 0.73g/lb at 175lb = 127g
Shoot for 120g/day (0.7g/lb).. even 0.55g/lb might work for “normal” person.
First track how much protein you are eating per day.
Ethan’s video wasn’t very helpful with details, but i think this one is good — How to prep high-protein meals for the week in under an hour - YouTube
Colts finished their once promising 8-2 season with 8-9 mostly because of injuries to the QB Daniel Jones, and their defense players. Sigh!
Software is no longer the bottleneck.
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The disappearing middle of software work:
more pressure on the end of the work: reviewing, testing, and releasing code. The tooling or workflows need to improve and change to handle it, and potentially also blend in to the overall process, not be a stopgap at the very end
- Shape ambiguous problems into actionable intent
- Design the context architecture that makes good outcomes inevitable
- Judge what matters from what merely works, become a clarity merchant.
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You are not likely thinking big enough when it comes to using AI coding agents. (assuming this anecdote is true, ofc)
“The secret to life is easy because it’s so simple:”
“You don’t have a lot of envy or resentment. You don’t overspend your income. You stay cheerful in spite of your troubles. You deal with reliable people and you do what you’re supposed to do.” — Charlie Munger
Jan 5, 2026
Jan 6, 2026
This could be tongue-in-cheek, but totally believable. Waking up before 5 on gym days, and around 5 (I am working on making this a sure thing) is the best habit change I made in 2025.
It amazes me how many battles in the first two years of the Civil War were decided by which side woke up the earliest via
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Peeakboo: macOS automation that sees the screen and does the clicks. Peekaboo brings high‑fidelity screen capture, AI analysis, and end‑to‑end GUI automation to macOS — as a native CLI and an MCP server. brew install steipete/tap/peekaboo
Clawdbot Now when I chat with youself on Whatsapp, Clawd running on my MBP will run the commands etc and respond. this is really cool.
Lessons of So Good They Can’t Ignore by Cal Newport:
You need the combination of competency, autonomy, and growth to not get burnt out In simpler terms, you need:
- Upside
- To be good at the thing (or have the capacity to be good)
- And you need to feel like you have control. via
Jan 7, 2026
Reread 2025 letter by Zhengdong Wnag.
Interesting Sendcutsend marketplace item. Design, upload to SCS, and let people purchase the item directly from SCS. Other parts, and assembly required.
Jan 8, 2026
I have been vibecoding some silly thing using Claude Code, and i ran out of tokens at 8:50pm. Fortunately, the counter resets at 9pm.
Jan 9, 2026
If coding agents are frustrating you, try the planning mode.
IWC Technicians Manufacture the Rotor of the Calibre 82; apparently people are disappointed that a USD 42k watch isn’t “even touched by humans”. Nobody is paying for the labour costs of making an IWC, they are paying for the brand. Good video nonetheless. Seen in the video HEIDENHAIN control panel.
Tons of videos on how to eat more protein — something I care about since I’m doing weight training, but this one The 150g Protein Diet That Changed My Life! (all real food, no protein powder) - YouTube was really interesting for simplicity, using fish and veggies,
Jan 10, 2026
Another Ralph Wiggum story — Ralph Experiment - SQLite UI –Lochie.dev
After seeing my feed fill up with Ralph hype, I felt a bit of FOMO and started thinking about a project that was complex enough to be interesting, but still achievable.
A browser-based web app for interacting with a SQLite database felt like a good fit. Even better, if it worked well, I could actually use it myself in the future.
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“The amount of work you need to do is inversely related to your success.” — from “Soros on Soros”.
Jan 11, 2026
NFL Wildcard weekend. All very competitive games so far.
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“Don’t let your memories be bigger than your dreams” via.
No wonder jlang comes out being most token efficient programming language even over apl.