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AaronAPUon It's getting harder to focus every day

I think its unfortunate people wear headphones while walking/running/biking. If you don’t, that’s however many minutes or hours of nothing but daydreaming (and hearing nature).

AaronAPUon The human-in-the-loop is tired

I’m finding you can still get into flow state, but you need to find that sweet spot where the context switching is pushing you right up to your limits but not too far.

If one of your agents is working with you on something which requires deep focus, that naturally requires more of your mental resources. So it’s all a dynamic scheduling problem. It exercises your ability to recall contexts very rapidly and I’m enjoying growing that capacity.

AaronAPUon Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality risk than sleep duration (2023)

Yes.

AaronAPUon Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality risk than sleep duration (2023)

I had that my entire life, and then one day started having the strangest medical condition where it is literally impossible to sleep past ~6:30am.

It sounds unbelievable but you’d have to experience it to understand. But the end result is it “fixed” the delayed sleep issue.

I’d give just about anything to be able to just sleep and keep sleeping, but on the up side now I’m an early bird with extreme regularity and quite like it.

AaronAPUon MacKenzie Scott's giving, in quality-adjusted life years

> Every avoided pregnancy is economically that woman being productive back in the workforce or managing the family on a lower overhead

The child who would’ve been born is assumed to have had zero economic value? lol

AaronAPUon How to read more books

I think audio books are to reading as e-bikes are to biking. Yes, in some sense they are the same. But in some important ways they aren’t.

I have probably upset two groups of people and sorry for that. I don’t want to yuck your yum, I just think the differentiation between these categories matters.

AaronAPUon Ask HN: What was the last task where only a frontier model could do it?

it seems we should be storing chains of prompts instead of code, and then replay them when a new model is released.

AaronAPUon ChatGPT Work

If it’s any comfort, whoever did this made more money in a month than I’ll make in 10 years.

Wait that’s not a comfort at all. Now I’m more upset.

AaronAPUon AI content is everywhere on social media, especially LinkedIn

It’s so bad I can’t even believe they allow it. It’s just slop everywhere, even the posts complaining about AI slop are also AI slop which is pretty incredible.

AaronAPUon GPT‑Live

Every second of the interaction is uncomfortable to me, but I also have extreme difficulty with video calls with humans. The latency completely breaks my mind.

AaronAPUon GPT‑Live

I could see it relating to tools having unpredictable latency but if they already do background hand off to 5.5 then it seems like they could just enable it within that context.

AaronAPUon Fable created novel 4D splat format

But that’s exactly where we’re at. Disappointment is fine, attention is all you need.

AaronAPUon Can you build a recognizable World Map in under 500 bytes?

Is there a good known algorithm which performs general purpose compression where the target is a given turing complete instruction set? Rather than relying on a fixed general purpose decoder and the associated compressed data.

I’m asking here instead of asking an LLM because that’s what humans used to do and it was pleasant.

AaronAPUon Please stop the AI confidence theater

It’s part of my identity? Nobody is going to see those letters, google them, find my products, figure out wtf they even are and buy them. To call it marketing is stretching the definition to the point of absurdity.

The idea that you can’t even in passing mention something you spend all day every day working on, because then it’s “marketing” is exactly the sort of consequence which leads to so many of us loathing marketing as an industry.

AaronAPUon Show HN: Updated my landing page with Fable (retro pixel style)

Is this what HN is going to become? Prompt an AI and then post its output?

AaronAPUon Please stop the AI confidence theater

I literally do own a business and my profits are held back by the mere fact that I don’t actively try to manipulate people into giving me their money.

AaronAPUon Markets are competitive if and only if P != NP

That seems to stretch the meaning of market inefficiency. Is the lack of unlimited free energy an inefficiency in a market? Because an entrepreneur who achieves that is going to do pretty well. I’d say that would be creating value not optimizing market efficiency.

AaronAPUon Please stop the AI confidence theater

I’ve long considered marketing to be one of the purest forms of evil in existence. It truly does envelop and destroy everything good.

AaronAPUon Job seekers giving up: Labor force participation falls to lowest in 50 years

Word of mouth isn’t even a way in anymore because HR demands you be plugged into the dysfunctional rube goldberg hiring machine.

AaronAPUon Job seekers giving up: Labor force participation falls to lowest in 50 years

I consider myself to have retired at age 41 in hindsight, because a job never materialized and I also found that apparently I didn’t really need one.

AaronAPUon Exercise intensity influences body composition in healthy older adults (2025)

The best way to increase endurance for long distance running is to run for long distances.

AaronAPUon AI in mathematics is forcing big questions

I’m playing devil’s advocate here, so go easy on me. But how completely do we know lean is perfectly true in all cases?

AaronAPUon OpenAI to Stagger Release of GPT 5.6 at Request of U.S. Government

I’m fine with this as long as they immediately approve me in particular.

AaronAPUon Early adversity leaves lasting molecular imprint across the body: primate study

lol, you might change your mind when reparations end up going out to a very different set of people than you expected.

AaronAPUon I built an offline tool to stabilize TV audio because nothing else worked

https://apu.software/compressor/

It’s based on LUFS (or ECMA-418) instead of RMS/Peak, which is more perceptually in line with “loudness.”

AaronAPUon The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

I wonder how much talent is out there who, like me, simply isn’t interested in debasing themselves to go through the interview process so just nopes out of employment. It’s all such an absurd joke at this point.

AaronAPUon Slow breathing modulates brain function and risk behavior

Slowed breathing with longer exhales makes a noticeable (5-10 bpm) decrease in HR during endurance bike rides. It’s interesting seeing it happen when the power output is the same.

AaronAPUon AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

I wonder, is there a form of analysis which lets you quantify how ambiguous a set of symbols is? Maybe related to entropy?

Obviously one symbol can mean literally anything, but you could also have very long strings of symbols with many different meanings.

AaronAPUon The AirPods Effect

I’ve noticed the age gradient as well. It’s hard to miss.