blueyes

Thank you for saying this. I feel like your car hack comes down on the effort side of the equation (and I admire the hack!), and I also want to say that I respect what you're saying about memory and motivation. I'm struggling with my own limits and digging into this for those reasons...

B.J. Fogg makes this point in his book Tiny Habits. And his point *is* that you can form a habit in much less than 21 days, let alone 66.

This whole question revolves around the effort/reward ratio of a behavior. When people talk about ~21 days, they're talking about doing a hard thing until it's second nature and seems easy.

But there are other ways to make something seem easy, and there is another component in the ratio: reward. That is, even if effort stays the same, you can wire a habit by making the behavior more rewarding. (This is why people are able to get addicted to a substance after one dose -- because they can't forget the state they entered ... and it was so easy to get there.)

So the takeaway here is the you can wire habits by decreasing the amount of effort to do something that you think is good for you -- eg if you want to hydrate more, place a glass near the sink so you drink water when you get out of bed in the morning -- *and* by increasing the reward. The whole trick is getting the ratio right.

Cliche Silicon Valley example. I did an ice plunge, and it gave me a day long plunger's high. I didn't need to plunge for 21 days to get the habit. I started doing it 3 times a week after that, because I knew what I had to do to feel good.

This actually gets to something Huberman calls "duration-path-outcome". Getting clarity on what you have to do (path); how long it will take (duration); and what the payoff is (outcome), can do wonders for motivation. Confusion kills action (and for that matter, all deals, since habits are just deals we make with ourselves). If you can get clarity, reduce the effort, and increase the amount of reward and your confidence in it, I think you can get to new habits really quickly.

Fwiw, I wrote a little bit about forming habits here: https://vonnik.substack.com/p/state-changes-work-and-presenc...

One of the main advantages Anthropic currently has over Google is the tooling that comes with Claude Code. It may not generate better code, and it has a lower complexity ceiling, but it can automatically find and search files, and figure out how to fix a syntax error fast.

A better way to think of it is: you need to live in a host state that may be hostile to you (refugees fleeing conflict or natural catastrophe). You need to work and can do it remotely. A network state might possibly facilitate your work and payments regardless of the host state's laws.

We're in a Cold War with hot proxies. The original Cold War was also like that.

Now, China, Iran and North Korea are backing Russia without engaging in direct confrontation in Ukraine; the EU, NATO, and maybe still the US are backing Ukraine. If Trump realigns with Putin against Ukraine, then the axis of authoritarian countries will have won a major battle. Trump will ofc lose many of his old-guard GOP supporters if he does that.

personal theory: burnout is basically when you're expending more energy than than you're able to recover during rest -- over chronic timelines. that is, i think getting physical health right addresses many causes of burnout. getting your device and app use right addresses a set of others. finding ways to connect with your team, users, company mission addresses other potential problems; ie feeling alienated and on a futile or harmful mission is a great way to get burned out.

wrote about some of this here: https://vonnik.substack.com/p/state-changes-work-and-presenc...

more along these lines:

https://vonnik.substack.com/p/how-to-take-your-brain-back

ultimately, maintaining focus is tied to overall physical energy (because suppressing distractions consumes neurological energy), and that physical energy is dependent on both health and ultradian cycles. best to alternate between focus bouts and recovery periods.

Thank you for saying that. I learned something.

very true. this is just about controllable inputs tho.

in a sense, yes, because distraction and "success" are just different types of work. you're burning neurons either way.

the important thing is to latch onto the the independent variables, the knobs you can turn.

BJ Fogg's book Tiny Habits is great, particularly about the important of motivation vs ability in starting new routines. His main point is that ability relative to the task is much more important than motivation, because motivation is volatile. That is, it's much more likely that your ability to do something will remain stable long term than your motivation to do something. So if you choose really easy things to do to start a new habit (drink a glass of water in the morning), your motivation won't matter much, and the habit will stick.

https://www.amazon.com/Tiny-Habits-Changes-Change-Everything...

So I think Piers is skating over that very important part of the equation.

Another piece of it is, if you manage to get healthy somehow, sleep better etc, then your motivation changes; the base level is reset. You have more energy to spare which you can devote to goals.

But I think there is a simpler way to think about motivation, which comes down to the ratio of effort to reward. The smaller the effort-reward ratio of a given activity, the more likely one is to do it. That single idea seems to rule my own behavior and that of many people I see. But it's also something you can hack, partly by using Fogg's idea of starting small. To change a behavior (and ultimately, your life), you just need to find a small enough starting activity to trigger action. It's not about motivation at all, and all the "motivational speakers" out there are misleading people in some fundamental way about the path to change.

One of the traps in that dynamic is that as we decrease the magnitude of the activity (drink a glass of water as oppposed to "go to the gym once a week to get stacked"), our motivation decreases as it loses its grandiose visions of change. I don't think task size and motivation necessarily decrease at the same rate tho. And I do think that grandiose visions are sometimes a form of self-sabotage or psychological homeostasis; ie "i'm only motivated to do things that i can't follow through on."

This is true.

Focus = Energy - Distraction

and

Success = Focus x Time

The way you gain stamina is by doing things to increase your energy and decrease distraction. I wrote and talked about this here, fwiw.

https://vonnik.substack.com/p/state-changes-work-and-presenc...

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/stokedlive_focus-is-power-lea...

Sincere question - why doesn't RL-based fine-tuning on top of LLMs solve this or at least push accuracy above a minimum acceptable threshhold in many use cases? OAI has a team doing this for enterprise clients. Several startups rolling out of current YC batch are doing versions of this.

Some authors of this piece are deeply involved themselves in building robots and other hardware technology. They should be taken seriously. The US is moving into a trade war, however unwise, with the country that supplies components for everything we make and need. That country has expansionist ambitions and a superior manufacturing base, which is typically what wins wars.

Please keep in mind that Dan Hendrycks helped write the disastrous AI quashing bill SB 1047, which Newsom vetoed last year. If these people get their way, the US has no competitive AI strategy at all. He has moved on to pretending he's not a doomer. Nothing could be further from the truth. During his time at Cal, Dan was telling people to get their hazmat suits ready for the AI apocalypse. These are deeply unserious people whose work will have serious consequences if adopted by those in power.

Gary would know.

This book was truly excellent. Shows the precursor network triggering similar benefits and harms to its successors. Also a great narrative that recalibrated my sense of how significant technology develops. It took a long time, with many detours and many players.

The thing is we can't wholly give up our devices and apps, because so many peoples' professional and social lives depend on them. So we have to manage it. It's more like a food addiction than alcohol, since alcohol, you can live without.

I wrote about this here.

https://vonnik.substack.com/p/how-to-take-your-brain-back

I disagree with many of the current cuts, but other administrations did the work that got us the plane crashes.

https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-fa...

Equally important: the cats died days later.

Here's a good map of the bird flu breakouts.

https://investigatemidwest.org/2025/01/21/134m-poultry-and-c...

Most people are not paying enough attention to this.

Another real danger arises with the so-called "mixing vessel phenomenon," which occurs when different virus strains infect the same host simultaneously, particularly in the context of influenza viruses.

This primarily happens in animals like pigs, which can be infected by both avian and human influenza strains. When multiple virus strains infect the same cells, their genetic material can undergo reassortment - where segments of genetic material from different viruses combine to create new viral variants.

So a corona variant could mix with this fast-spreading avian flu and produce something that impacts humans more.

Viruses are like drunken teenagers -- they behave worse when they mix!

Cedric Chin has a great series on this and has done a deep dive into Deming:

https://commoncog.com/becoming-data-driven-first-principles/

For me, what this post illustrates most is the cost of information. By making hasty decisions, buyers are trading present time that might be spent shopping and comparing with future time spent struggling with the wrong product. They're discounting future time. But they're also doing something very rational -- they're making a decision to see what happens. That is, they're testing a hypothesis in the only way the market allows them to. Because people are bad at predicting their own future needs and behavior, and products are bundles of features whose importance is often unknown until you have to use them in high-dimensional futures. So buying is an empirical test.

Unfortunately, most consumers, recruiters and sometimes hiring managers are in a position of information assymetry vis a vis the people selling them something. That is, consumers rely on the self-reporting of vendors which purport to be experts.

https://vonnik.substack.com/p/the-expert-layman-problem

The missing clause in the headline is: AI poetry is indistinguishable from human poetry and is rated more favorably ... by people who don't read much poetry.

Robert Lustig has been preaching this for years:

https://www.amazon.com/Metabolical-Processed-Nutrition-Moder...

A good rule of thumb if you care about avoiding UPFs but don't want to overly limit your diet is to only buy foods with 5 ingredients in them (plus or minus 2 :).

Sorry, I should have specified he was the last in the Senate.

Montana is MAGA. It went from purple to red during the great self-sorting of COVID. So Tester was in a weak seat which he held onto in the last election because the libertarians split the right. This time, the GOP poured in many millions to sway the vote. And now Montana is governed by a bunch of Californians and Minnesotans.

In 1986-87, when Family Ties was at its peak, it had a rating of 32.7, which means almost a third of all US households watched the show every week.

That probably amounted to 60m+ people tuning in, which is close to Super Bowl numbers ... every week. The TV audience was concentrated then in a way it isn't now. Yellowstone gets less than 12 million viewers per episode today.

Maybe you think Meredith Baxter was better known, but I'll bet more people were paying attention to the teenager than the hippie mom. But let's say she was no 2, or no 5. She was galaxies more famous than the most famous people on TV today. And she has a CS degree. Which taken together is more astonishing than Ben Affleck opining on LLMs.

The US Congress lost its last farmer-representative when Jon Tester (D-MT) lost this month to Tim Sheehy, a Republican who parachuted in from Minnesota.

Fun fact: Justine Bateman of Family Ties, once the most famous TV actress in the world, holds a degree in computer science from UCLA.

Two people I know, one friend and one family member, landed jobs this year in a tough market due to the reputation they had built for themselves.

The friend is a programmer. He used to work in CGI, gained a reputation in animated film, and decided to leave it. People he had known for years convinced him to apply for a role in gaming. He wasn't a typical candidate, but the insiders he knew vouched for his skills and volunteered to onboard him, so he effectively switched industries.

The family member is a nurse. She holds an NP with a midwifery specialization. She was based in a large Western city and couldn't land a job for many months after she got her license. Every clinic wanted someone with 1-2 years one the job experienced.

When she finally applied for a role in the small mountain town where she had done her clinical training, the people she had interned for put their reputations on the line with the folks hiring at the clinic. The job offer documents were ready before she walked out of her interview.

These people are both conscientious and hard workers, but they were each making a leap of sorts. One to a new sector that also needed his skills, and another starting her career and in need of a couple years training post diploma. In both cases, people who had the ear of the hiring manager staked their repuations so that they would be hired.