mieubrisse

Reading Factfulness was an epiphany for me: our brains are wired to pay attention to the superdramatic in a way that is now harmful to it - the same way that preferences for sugar and fat are now harmful.

Factfulness helped to show me that, despite our brain's bias, the world is actually consistently getting better.

Do you have any recommendations for literature you like? (My experience in eye science matches yours - the literature is WAY ahead of what people believe)

Having a good prompt-engineering skill is the highest-leverage thing IMO, so I burnt 2 Max 20x usage windows to help Fable help me refactor mine. With its partnership we:

- Went deep on "what types of guidance even are there? what does giving good guidance mean?"

- Sampled my existing Claude guidance (CLAUDE.md, skills, hooks, etc.) and broke their guidance into "atoms"

- Categorized them by clustering, the same way Big Five was generated

- Generated a new candidate

- Then used independent agents to compare it against my existing corpus assuming that the new one would be worse

Working with it felt like working with a supersmart entity capable of generating very plausible-sounding but not-necessarily-true statements. The outcome certainly felt like an alien artifact, like nothing I'd make myself.

Only time'll tell if it holds up, but it sure had some interesting ideas.

I see this with my dad as he approaches retirement. I try to remind him that if he doesn't pay with money, he's going to pay with his time... and right now he's saving money he doesn't need for time he doesn't have.

This invisible cyberwar is already happening; it's just that the brains powering it is getting smarter.

Try this

1. put your thumbs on your ears

2. rotate your hands so your index fingers are on the base of your skull, middle fingers just above

3. now put your index fingers on your middle fingers and "snap" them down on the muscle at the base of your skull some 10-15 times

4. if your tinnitus goes away or reduces, it's caused by muscle tension instead of nerves

This blew my mind when I first tried it, but looked into it and it makes total sense: we all work on computers all day, necks get fatigued, and the impact forces the muscles to contract until they force-release, alleviating the tension-caused tinnitus.

I'm building an agent orchestrator (plug: https://github.com/mieubrisse/agenc) and asked Claude what prior art exists.

It pulled back Plan 9, and I was shocked: this is exactly what we need today, as I'm convinced we need to think about minimizing agent permissions the exact same way companies do. Plan 9 was just too early.

I've been wondering this too: for us, UUIDs are super opaque. But for an agent, two UUIDs are distinct as day and night. Is the best filesystem just blob storage S3 style with good indexes, and a bit of context on where everything lives?

One thing directories solve: they're great grouping mechanisms. "All the Q3 stuff lives in this directory"

I bet we move towards a world where files are just UUIDs, then directory structures get created on demand, like tags.

The guy to watch here is https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone . He's rewritten SQLite in Rust with fixes, written his own Rust async engine with fixes that Tokio doesn't have, generated an insane number of tools for agentic orchestration (indexing of all sessions across all harnesses, on-demand skill storage, agent mail), and is currently building out agent orchestration terminal multiplexer stuff.

Source: been watching both these guys closely, as I've been building my own agent factory focused on security + learning: https://github.com/mieubrisse/agenc

I'm working on this! https://github.com/mieubrisse/agenc

I think Gastown is truly special, but I wanted something more focused on learning as I think that's the real bottleneck. So I built AgenC to make it trivial to roll learnings back into your Claude.

Yep, and I've been doing this already! So far no response (understandable; I'm just a random guy), which is why I figured I'd expand my search by posting here on HN.

Re. what apps can run in the background - have you checked out the "allow background battery usage"? This has worked so far for me.

Yes, exactly! We generally treat spaces with the benefit of the doubt, which I think is smart for mental health. A conference center which doesn't have the bathrooms close to where you'd expect probably is just badly designed rather than actively trying to mess with you. But this breaks down for certain spaces: shopping malls, airports, etc.

I appreciated this comment. I really dislike Trump, but I try to steelman the opposing side to not fall into the "other party bad!" nonsense. But his recent actions have made it very hard to find a steelman, and it's been hard to resist feeling "the dude is a power-hungry narcissist". Your explanation makes a lot of sense as a steelman; thank you!

In case you want that same functionality now, I use the following three extensions to tame Youtube dark patterns:

- https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/df-utube-distractio...

- https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/clickbait-remover-f...

- https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/blocktube/bbeaicapb...

I had an epiphany that faulting myself, and my self-control, is exactly what these sites want you to do. "Oh, it's just your bad self-discipline"

No, this is full-on war for control of your mind. And the adversary spends millions to hire teams of the world's best psychologists and engineers to deploy technology that never sleeps with the sole purpose of grabbing and keeping your attention.

Once I realized this, I started treating doomscrolling and Youtube rabbit holes not as personal insufficiencies, but as systemic failures in my psychological defense system. I started installing my own tech to keep me safe, and I am much, much happier.

Predictably, companies like Google try to disable the defenses (e.g. with Manifest v3, which was a garbage excuse to disable many defensive extensions). And so the war goes.

I also use DFInstagram. You can keep stories; I have mine configured to kill the feed & cancerous search page grid but allow me to see stories. Works great.

A similar thing happened to me.

I once took a timed test with a section that had me translating a string of symbols to letters using a cipher, response being multiple choice. If you read the string left to right, there were multiple answer options that started with the same sequence of letters (so ostensibly you had to translate the entire string).

But if you read the string right to left, there was often only one answer option that matched (the right one). So I got away with translating only the last ~4 symbols, regardless of how long the string was. I blew through the section, and surely scored high.

I always wondered: did they realize this? Or did it artificially inflate my results?

And looking at the highest-entropy section felt natural to me, but only because of countless hours as a software engineer where the highest-entropy bit is at the end (filepaths, certain IDs, etc).

Is it really accurate to say I'm "more intelligent" because I've seen that pattern a ton before, whereas someone who hasn't isn't? I suspect not.

I think you're looking for this: https://nabeelqu.substack.com/p/reflections-on-palantir

I worked there for 7y, and can confirm Nabeel's post is very accurate.

The general public thinks Palantir's a bunch of moral-less folks grinning over godlike power & privacy violations but in actuality it's a mashup of smart Silicon Valley + military folks trying to make data pipelines & analysis work around the globe, often in achingly bureaucratic organizations.

The reason they pair it with consulting is because:

1. The products are powerful but complex, and were designed by smart, technical people for smart, technical people. They lack some random-person usability.

2. The average client employee isn't that technical.

Source: worked there for 7 years (my views are my own, of course)

Reminds me of a quote from the Projection Lab success story that got posted a few weeks ago: https://projectionlab.com/blog/we-reached-1m-arr-with-zero-f...

But luckily, success indexes less on IQ and more on consistency. The willingness to doggedly show up every single day can take you to some really suprising and amazing places.

This is me too! Everything about writing code, running it, messing with Github, tinkering with my dotfiles, automations... even as a preschooler, I was always dissatisfied that my drawings didn't do anything. I feel astoundingly lucky to have a job I was born to do.

I'm super into this idea. Programmers (us) used to be gatekeepers... and that's less true now. It means my salary goes down, but also means that the world is going to build more, cooler stuff quicker.

Wild - I hit the same "no financial software meets my needs" around the same time as you guys (late 2020 in my case), and started building for myself as well: https://github.com/mieubrisse/wealthdraft

Only, I never had the courage to make the leap to building an actual product out of it. Huge congrats to you guys; going to take a look at Projection and see if I can finally retire my homegrown stuff!

I understand the confusion! cmdk is complementary, not competitive, to the built-in fzf shortcuts (I use both cmdk and built-in fzf shortcuts in my day-to-day).

The concrete value-adds of cmdk (what fzf doesn't do out of the box):

1. Smart previews. You have to write the fzf preview command to preview text files, directories, images, PDFs, etc. cmdk gives you this out of the box.

2. Choose the command for you. If you rely on the fzf Ctrl-T shortcut, you have to type the `cd`, the `vim`, the `open`, etc. I find that most of the time the command is predictable based on the filetype, so cmdk allows you to skip this. When cmdk doesn't have a command for the filetype though, I supplement with fzf's Ctrl-T.

3. Be smart about which files you're searching to be performant. E.g. very likely users aren't going to jump to files in the "~/Library/Application Support", or certain system directories under "/", so give users the option to go to the parent directory without crawling the subdirectories.

Yep! ⌘-K clears the current terminal window. I chose ⌘-K because it maps to the standard in web apps (Discord, Notion, etc.) and I use `clear` whenever I want to clear my terminal, but you can choose whatever keybinding you want with cmdk.

Whoa thank you, this is amazing! I didn't even know this was possible; my life has gotten a little better.

Hey 0points, author here! I'd be keen to hear why binding the Cmd-K hotkey makes it feel like cmdk doesn't add value!

Good question! This is complementary, not competitive, to the built-in fzf shortcuts. I use both cmdk and built-in fzf shortcuts in my day-to-day.

The concrete value-adds of cmdk (what fzf doesn't do out of the box):

1. Smart previews. You have to write the fzf preview command to preview text files, directories, images, PDFs, etc. cmdk gives you this out of the box (see https://github.com/mieubrisse/cmdk/blob/main/preview.sh ).

2. Choose the command for you. If you rely on the fzf Ctrl-T shortcut, you have to type the `cd`, the `vim`, the `open`, etc. I find that most of the time the command is predictable based on the filetype, so cmdk allows you to skip this (see https://github.com/mieubrisse/cmdk/blob/9d742112dab0475d7420... ). When cmdk doesn't have a command for the filetype though, I supplement with fzf's Ctrl-T.

3. Be smart about which files you're searching to be performant. E.g. very likely users aren't going to jump to files in the "~/Library/Application Support", or certain system directories under "/", so give users the option to go to the parent directory without crawling the subdirectories (see https://github.com/mieubrisse/cmdk/blob/main/list-files.sh ).

YES! I'm experiencing a separate-but-related problem to do with myopia, and my eyes perpetually getting longer (likely due to the long hours of computer use).

I wish I could go back to completely undistracted building, but I realize now that I was a bit addicted and that level of intensity was hurting me.

Now what occupies my waking hours is, "How can I debug this failing system?"