I worked in a mattress factory for a while, doing the same repetitive task day in and out.
I remember feeling like the days passed painfully slowly, but the years flew by.
1,940 karma · joined May 21, 2012
- I blog here: https://notesbylex.com
- I LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lextoumbourou
- I code here: http://github.com/lextoumbourou
- I ML here: https://www.kaggle.com/lextoumbourou
<3
I remember feeling like the days passed painfully slowly, but the years flew by.
LinkedIn is pretty much the only social network out there where the average person has a shot at a little reach for their posts.
Even if it’s just past and present colleagues and various acquaintances, I actually have an audience of people who are sometimes interested in what I have to say. I can't say that for any other social network.
Previously, it was an API with a weird stateful standard; now it is essentially a bog-standard stateless JSON-RPC API with conventions for tool discovery, long-running tasks and multi-round-trip requests
If you wrote your own JSON-RPC API for an LLM, you would probably eventually end up with something that looks very much like the standard they're describing.
> Within the next three years, robotics should be completely solved, AI should solve a long-standing unproven theorem, programming competitions should be won consistently by AIs, and there should be convincing chatbots.
There was a viral YouTube video from 2014 called Humans Need Not Apply [1], which made a very strong argument that mass unemployment was right around the corner.
I actually think people from the past would be surprised at how slow AI has progressed in the end. Although the domains where it's turned out to be most effective - code, images, videos, music, etc. - would probably surprise them.
That said, we did collaborate on it - at the very least I needed to learn his address before sending.
Neither of us have ever sent or received a package in Uganda. It was a learning experience for both of us.
However, there's definitely a sunk cost aspect to the operation. After the first failure to send it through Australia Post, I became determined that Django was going to have that MacBook.
Just as many people leading sedentary lifestyles have to make a deliberate effort to exercise, because inactivity is really bad for our bodies, I think we're going to realise that a similar process is necessary for our minds.
You really want to be spending a bit of time every day operating at your cognitive limits - trying to fully engage your System 2 - if you want to avoid brain atrophy. Coding used to kind of give you this exercise for free, but you can go really far with just your System 1 nowadays - literally get things done while scrolling Reddit.
I'm trying to allocate 30-60 minutes a day to doing something difficult, like writing code by hand for an unfamiliar problem or reading and summarising difficult papers without AI.
I just use it as a Markdown viewer/editor, and it handles updating links across notes when a file is renamed. There are some handy conventions that Obsidian encourages, like Daily Notes, templates and linking across notes, enough to call it an Obsidian project, but yeah - it's just markdown. I don't even use the [[Wiki-links]] style that it uses by default.
Opus was by far the best at the job, but Codex with GPT 5.4 is decent.
My OpenClaw instance uses an Obsidian project as its memory. Mainly, it's just my main day-to-day LLM that I access via WhatsApp, but instead of the memory being locked away with a specific vendor, it's stored in version control that I can read and edit. That reason alone makes it compelling to me. When a better LLM comes along, I can just switch, and my memory and system prompts come with it.
However, I also use it for calorie/weight/workout tracking, to-do lists (bill, birthday, event reminders), and to support my various life admin tasks. I don't give it access to much at all, except a few skills that give it read-only access to some data.
Hasn't given me a 10x productivity boost or anything. It's just handy.
I wrote an article on it, if anyone is interested: https://notesbylex.com/openclaw-the-missing-piece-for-obsidi...
Which is partially how we found ourselves in the midst of an obesity epidemic.
The tech people are the ones that have the strongest opinions one way or the other.
Back wrote the white paper with input from Hal and Nick Szabo. Sassaman did the coding work on the client. Sassaman had the keys to the Satoshi wallet, hence it never moving since his passing.
Since Satoshi is a collective, it means that each of them individually can claim, without lying, that they're not Satoshi.
That's my uninformed guess.
As with every new tech there's a hell of a lot of noise (plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP - to quote Kaparthy) but most of it can just be disregarded. No one is "behind" - it's all very easy to use.
This is the start of the end of generative AI music.
Without the entire music catalog, they are just not going to be able get the diversity and quality of outputs they once had, and the labels are always going to have their hands out wanting more.
Udio and Suno have demonstrated that okay-quality new music can be created by training on vast collections of pirated music, and, as expected, the music labels shut them down.