One bad message in a Kafka queue and guess what? The entire queue is down because it kills your workers over and over. To fix it? You have to resize the queue to zero, which means losing requests. This KILLS me. Jay Kreps says there is no reason it can't be fixed, but it never had been and this infuriates me because it happens so often :)
You need a sales / product cofounder to be CEO. Create a compelling demo of it doing amazing things, then put all your energy into finding a cofounder. Startups are a team sport and you need help with customer development.
This is not a surprise to anyone that has engaged in prolonged meditation, especially across more than one day. It makes shortcuts like psychedelics look foolish. During a ten day Vipassana retreat time slowed down to such a great extent it changed my entire perception of time thereafter. The space provided by the mental quiet created by Anapana is so profound.
TLDR Anapana: Sit comfortably and monitor the sensation of the breath exiting the nose and return to it as your thoughts wander. Don't get mad when you wander, it's part of the process. Just return and try to maintain equanimity, to not react. If you get frustrated at first, you can increase your exhale slighlty to make it more noticeable.
That's about all there is to it. After you do this for a while your thoughts become less and less frequent and... you only have important, creative thoughts :) It turns out conscious thought is just a refection of a deeper process and most of it is garbage: worries, self doubt, fears.
I have just inspired myself to take up daily Anapana by writing this...
Psychedelics arent foolish, not everybody can or wants to arrange their lives around yet another (albeit important) item in semi-endless list of items of our lives, tripple that when having various responsibilities adults tend to have.
I've done similar techniques, maybe not long enough, the only thing they achieved is lowering my heart rate so dramatically I become cold. I do a lot of sports so my heart rate is already low in calm environment. I can clean my head fully in 1s and keep it that way, so this aspect of meditations is not interesting to me.
Overall, there are use cases and room for psychedelics, as there is also for various meditations and breathing. No reason they can't coexist, there is no good / bad side.
Here's a trick I've used: After I breathe in I don't breathe out intentionally, I just observe and enjoy the breath going out on its own. It is an enjoyable sensation not unlike what you experience diving under water and coming back to surface to breathe again. Same after I breathe out, I feel the natural desire to breathe in again and I just let it happen.
Not really pausing between changing the direciton of breath, but just observing how it feels good to breath in and out naturally, automatically. This means I am actually being aware that I enjoy breathing. And when you enjoy something, you don't need to think too much. Just enjoy it. It is also a great realization that I can enjoy life as long as I'm not in pain and I can breathe, and have enough time that I can focus on and experience that.
Sleepiness is a very common challenge. A common mitigation is to find a way to sit comfortably without a chair back, forcing you to stay upright. I find it uncomfortable to sit cross legged for long stretches so I usually kneel with a large cushion under me like, kinda like a saddle.
Try stuff, see what works for you. Once you find a relaxed but upright position you may find you can sit for quite a while without dozing off.
I think many different states can arise. In deep meditation you’re epistemically open and experientially vulnerable. You're softening your priors so much that both your way of knowing and your way of experiencing can manifest in manifold ways.
Workers in denial are like lemmings, headed for the cliff... not putting myself above that. A moderate view indicates great disruption before new jobs replace the current round being lost.
As a writer, this is deeply comforting. The book is total shit. It sounds like an AI, not like something a person would connect with for even a moment. Not even in the opening lines.
When you've read it in its entirety, could you indicate on a scale from 1 to 10 what score it would get compared to published books you've read (including of course all the best and the worst ones)?
If you flip through something claiming to be a "book" and immediately see that a majority of pages just contain nonsensical bulleted lists, and furthermore see that chapter titles are printed overlapping with the book title on each page, you can correctly conclude the entire thing is a zero-effort pile of shit without wasting any further time to read it.
I read through a bit of it and it really wasn't all that bad. The only thing that I found to be really problematic were the made up experiences. Clearly hallucinations are still a big problem for LLMs, but if we manage to get rid of those a book like this can really be quite serviceable (a lot of human-written books are badly written so the bar isn't incredibly high, imho).
The creator should really tweak the prompt/process to include automatic review explicitly intended to remove hallucinations. It clearly is already the intent: "Future iterations of this experiment will include AI-powered fact-checking of the content."
I'm looking forward to what the improved version will look like.
Flip through the middle of the book. Nearly every page has either a bulleted list or a numbered list. In several cases, a single list spans multiple pages.
That’s the format of an outline, not a legitimate book.
Is it? Or are 'legitimate' books just too often not concise and structured enough?
I do a lot of personal knowledge management and I use a shit ton of sections and lists in that. Books evolved from the art of telling stories, not from efficiently conveying knowledge. Perhaps we're just way too used for books etc. to an approach that is suboptimal. I know I personally despise news articles and blogs that start with "setting the scene" and are incredibly and needlessly verbose, using thousands of words to say what could be made clear in a single paragraph.
Viewed from another angle: Reading text is inherently serial in nature even though a lot of things are related to each other in a graph. A document with sections with bulleted lists is actually a way to represent a tree, which is closer to a fully unconstrained graph. I would argue that trees like that are much easier to parse than classically written texts.
There is irony here in that I only used some whitespace to add structure, but never used any bulleted lists in this comment.
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I did generate an alternative with Google Gemini 2.5 Pro, but the formatting doesn't work here on HN. It was decent, though!
> I do a lot of personal knowledge management and I use a shit ton of sections and lists in that.
That's because these are notes, not a book. A list-heavy outline format makes sense for notes, as these are summaries that supplement your own memory and knowledge you've already taken in. They're not a sole/primary source of conveying knowledge to others on their own.
> Perhaps we're just way too used for books etc. to an approach that is suboptimal.
If you truly believe books are "suboptimal", I can only suggest that you consider looking inward and do some reflection:
Is the "problem" really with books and long-form writing, which is the dominant form of knowledge transfer across several thousand years of human civilization?
Or is the problem with people's attention spans in the past decade, due to dopamine-fueling social media doom scrolling and AI usage?
When AI is cheap, why use juniors, regular software engineers or off-shore labor at all? AI replaces these things. Why not use the best available talent to oversee and guarantee the work of coding agents? To define requirements and translate them into maintainable code? This is the trend. It takes mastery to produce good, maintainable code from vague requirements using coding agents. This seems like value add a human will continue to provide.
I also see the blending of engineers and data scientists with product managers.
When AI is cheap, why use off-shore labor at all? AI replaces it. Why not use the best available talent to oversee and guarantee the work of coding agents? To define requirements and translate them into maintainable code? This is the trend.
I am building a knowledge graph using BAML [baml-py] to extract documents [it's opinionated towards docs] and then PySpark to ETL the data into a node / edge list. GPT4o got few relations... Gemini 2.5 got so many it was nuts, all accurate but not all from the article! I had to reign it in and instruct it not to build so vast a graph. Really cool, it knows a LOT about semiconductors :)
