Highlights of the Week
Maybe You’re Not Actually Trying
https://usefulfictions.substack.com/p/maybe-youre-not-actually-trying
One of the interesting things about all of this is that there was nothing particularly inventive about the strategies my husband deployed. They were more or less exactly the strategies I would have come up with if I’d been put in charge of a similar situation in someone else’s life. Why did it take another person getting involved for me to realize I wasn’t Actually Trying? I think what happened is this: When the stalker entered my life, I was at a low point in personal capacity — broke, alone, addled, etc. My approach towards him at that point (ignore, hoping he’d stop) was the only one that seemed available given my spiritual and psychological resources at the time. But my orientation to the problem became fixed in time at that point of low agency, and it never occurred to me to revisit it as my capacity for action increased. I think we are all like this. People are not just high-agency or low-agency in a global sense, across their entire lives. Instead, people are selectively agentic.
Let’s say that life is divided up into three theaters: work, relationships with others (all kinds) and relationship to self (physical health, introspection, emotional development, all of it). I think it’s the rule, rather than the exception, that people are stuck at an earlier stage of development in at least one area. There is one theater of life where they’re not Actually Trying — where they’re approaching serious problems with the resourcefulness of a teenager, though they are now capable adults.
I’d recommend assuming there’s some area of your life where you are, without realizing it, frozen in time, and that locating it matters quite a bit. Look across the three theaters of your life: work, relationships, and self-relationship, and take note of the biggest issues you face. Know that you might be looking for something that doesn’t feel like an issue — it might just feel like sadness or anger*,* like the sadness of not being seen, or the frustration of not feeling like your work is meaningful. Once you’ve surfaced something, ask yourself: Have I done my best to come up with a set of potential solutions, using all the resources I have? Am I doing as well by myself as I would by any friend who came to me with the same problem? How do I know I’m Actually Trying?
Agency is in vogue at the minute but that is not to say it is not useful. Often just asking “what would a really competent person do here” will unlock enormous potential for change. I feel AI tools can help with brainstorming especially here when you feel trapped and feel like there’s nobody to ask.
AI 101: What Is a Token (And Why It Runs AI)?
https://www.turingpost.com/p/token
English is often tokenized into words and subword pieces, because spaces clearly separate words and longer terms can be broken into reusable chunks. Chinese works differently: words are not separated by spaces, and single characters often already carry meaning, so tokenization tends to stay closer to the character level. That is one reason the same sentence can produce a very different token count in English and Chinese.
I’d never thought about it this way that different languages will have different token use and so different AI characteristics but it is obvious in retrospect. Code languages are the same
Good and Bad Harness Engineering
https://danielmiessler.com/blog/good-and-bad-harness-engineering
Bitter Lesson Engineering comes from Richard Sutton’s “Bitter Lesson” essay, and it means ensuring that you’re not trying to outsmart your own AI. It means not trying to micromanage how your AI does things, but rather specifying what you want done. Plainly stated: 1. Bad Harness Engineering is a whole bunch of prescriptive instructions on exactly how to do things. First copy this file, then load this, then do this, then do that. Etc. 2. Good Harness Engineering is about providing tons of context about who you are, what you’re about, what you’re working on, what you’re trying to accomplish, and what good (and bad) look like to you. I’m an engineer focused on personal productivity, I like simple designs with lots of whitespace and great typography, here are my previous projects, here are some tools you can use, etc.
This new field of harness engineering is what is in vogue at the minute but it fits better to a lot of things I think and does help me reason about the capabilities of AI models
You Slipped Up. Here’s How to Get Back on Track
https://ryanholiday.net/you-slipped-up-heres-how-to-get-back-on-track/
In one of my favorite passages in Meditations, Marcus Aurelius writes, “When jarred, unavoidably, by circumstances, revert at once to yourself, and don’t lose the rhythm more than you can help.” I think that word “unavoidably” is key. Slipping up, getting knocked off course, falling off the wagon—it happens.
Wake up early. No one likes getting up early in the winter. Because it’s cold. It’s dark. That’s the famous passage from Meditations: he knows he has to get out of bed, but so desperately wants to remain under the warm covers. “Is this what I was created for?” he asks himself. “To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?” No, it’s not what we were created for. We were made to be up and “doing things and experiencing them.” So we must reclaim the morning hours, the most productive hours in the day. Hemingway would talk about how he’d get up early because early, there was, “no one to disturb you.” Toni Morrison found she was just more confident in the morning, before the day had exacted its toll and the mind was fresh. Like most of us, she realized she was just “not very bright or very witty or very inventive after the sun goes down.” Who can be? After a day of banal conversations, frustrations, mistakes, and exhaustion. If you want to get back on track, if you want to start executing at a higher level, then you have to get in the habit of waking up early.
Protect the best part of your day. Waking up early is critical, but even more so is what we do in those early hours. Waking up early just to get straight into scrolling social media, checking email, watching the news—this is not a reset. You’ve handed the best part of your day to other people’s emergencies, other people’s opinions, other people’s agendas. The novelist Philipp Meyer (whose book The Son is an incredible read) told me on the Daily Stoic podcast, “You have to be very careful about to what (and to whom) you’re giving the best part of your day.” Well-intentioned plans fall apart as the day progresses. Our willpower evaporates. The world makes its demands. So it’s key that we prioritize the important things and that we habitualize doing them early
Just make a little progress every day. For a long time, my writing habit was all-or-nothing—either I wrote a lot of words or I didn’t. Over time, I’ve lowered the stakes: now the question is simply, “Did I make a positive contribution to my writing today?” Sometimes that means writing, sometimes editing, adding, deleting. Sometimes I’m home and it’s in my office, sometimes I’m on the road and it’s on a plane or in a hotel room. Sometimes it’s a big contribution, sometimes it’s a little contribution. “Well-being is realized by small steps,” Zeno would say looking back on his life, “but is truly no small thing.” Focus on that—just making a little progress each day.
Do hard things. Making a life change, adopting new habits, doing anything challenging requires courage. As I write about in Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors The Brave, we can’t just hope to be brave when it counts. Courage has to be cultivated. To do the big things that scare you, start with smaller things—start with developing the ability to push yourself to do stuff you’re reluctant to do. To be able to endure the cold reception of a bold idea, start with enduring a cold shower. To be able to step forward when the stakes are high, regularly do that when the stakes are low. To be able to embrace the discomfort of a major life change, accustom yourself to minor discomforts. We treat the body rigorously, Seneca said, so that it may not be disobedient to the mind. We push ourselves in little ways so the big ways stop seeming quite so big, quite so out of character.
Nothing ground breaking with this but sometimes you need to see it in front of you to see it making sense and get it. The trouble is remembering to do it, or even that you can do it, once you’ve fallen out of routine and everything gets interrupted.
How NASA Built Artemis II’s Fault-Tolerant Computer
https://cacm.acm.org/news/how-nasa-built-artemis-iis-fault-tolerant-computer/
While the four-FCM primary system is robust, NASA must still account for common mode failures—software bugs or catastrophic events that could theoretically impact all primary channels simultaneously. To mitigate this, Orion carries a completely independent Backup Flight Software (BFS) system. This is a prime example of dissimilar redundancy. It is implemented on different hardware, runs a different operating system, and utilizes independently developed, simplified flight software.
Riley emphasized that while fail-silent logic is critical, it must be paired with active monitoring to avoid catastrophic gaps. “If a software component fails silently, the failure may go undetected unless monitored by another component or watchdog timer,” he said. For mission assurance, he said, error detection and recovery mechanisms must be explicitly designed and correlated across multiple layers of the codebase to ensure consistent behavior.
“A faulty computer will fail silent, rather than transmit the ‘wrong answer,’” Uitenbroek explained. This approach simplifies the complex task of the triplex “voting” mechanism that compares results. Instead of comparing three answers to find a majority, the system uses a priority-ordered source selection algorithm among healthy channels that haven’t failed-silent. It picks the output from the first available FCM in the priority list; if that module has gone silent due to a fault, it moves to the second, third, or fourth.
Real software engineering I guess, nothing compared to what we do with our systems day to day.
Why Isn’t Everything Different Yet?
https://davegriffith.substack.com/p/why-isnt-everything-different-yet
The internet became “commercially available” around 1991. Most people consider it to have genuinely transformed commerce sometime around 1999–2001. That’s a decade, and the internet didn’t require nearly as much retraining for every knowledge worker (and there were a lot fewer of them back then), didn’t require building much physical infrastructure beyond laying some fiber, and didn’t require resolving novel questions about who is responsible when the internet makes a mistake about your medical situation.
It will take time for AI for us to really see what it can do. I’ve written before about how electricity taking over from steam was the same situation. Right now we’re a the stage of slapping AI onto things to keep up, but the real transformation will be when workflows get moulded around AI to take better advantage of what it can do.
“Conviction Collapse” and the End of Software as We Know It
https://www.oreilly.com/radar/conviction-collapse-and-the-end-of-software-as-we-know-it/
He’s genuinely excited. But he described what he’s feeling as “conviction collapse.” As he put it, in the old world, you raise money, and nine months later you come back with a product. In that intervening time, you’ve talked to hundreds of customers. You’ve honed your worldview, and you’ve had time to build and defend your conviction. Now? “You invest in my company today, on Thursday I’m going to come with the same amount of stuff that would have come with nine months in the prior times. It’s just so fast. And so you don’t have the time to fall in love the same way. You just don’t have the time to enjoy and define and defend your conviction around your product.” That’s an eye-opening insight. Quintessential Harper. The result is that they build an entire product, complete with landing pages, show it to someone, get feedback, and then just build another entire product. Harper said, “Every time we hit a wall, we are like, ’Okay, what do we get from that?’ And then we just roll that learning into the next iteration.”
Good and bad from this. There’s a lot to be said for the friction in between of building and selling, of really thinking about the project and if it will work and be proper. Now we’re more prone to picking low hanging fruit that is good for AI to solve but not necessarily real solutions to real things.
5 Years of Lessons From Running My Own Bookstore
https://ryanholiday.net/5-years-of-lessons-from-running-my-own-bookstore
Doing interesting things usually pays off. When I was starting out as a writer, an author gave me a piece of advice I’ve never forgotten: If you want to be a great writer, go live an interesting life. He was right. Great art is fueled by great experiences—or, if not “great” experiences, at least interesting ones. That was in the back of my mind with the bookstore. Even if it failed, I knew the experience of trying to open a small business in rural Texas during a pandemic would be filled with stories. And it has been. I’ve drawn on it constantly—in my writing, my talks, in conversations with people on the podcast. So when you have the choice between the safe, boring path and the interesting one, take the interesting one. It always pays off.
The Second Wave of the API-first Economy
https://brandur.org/second-wave-api-first
Fifteen years ago, us API maximalists thought that APIs were going to eat the world, ushering in a new paradigm of interoperability that would vastly expand our capabilities as users, and even change the world for the better. What we got instead was an API winter. As useful as APIs were in some situations, that usefulness was outweighed by concerns around revenue, privacy, and abuse. But as scary of a thought as it was that this might be the end, it wasn’t. We’re at the beginning of a new spring of APIs that’ll appear to support use by agents acting on behalf of people. As this mode of operation gets more popular, expect the availability of an API to be a competitive edge that differentiates a service from its competitors. The result will be a global proliferation of APIs and expanding product capability like never before seen.
Apple at 50: How Asia Fuelled Its Rise to the Top
https://www.ft.com/content/95fda471-0694-4445-8222-30e09b03887b
This tactic was repeated again and again: Ive’s industrial design group would find a Japanese supplier and talk up design, the significance of their work, and promise lots of business. But when operations, the division tasked with scaling at minimal cost, would inherit the relationship, they often found the Japanese to be expensive and risk-averse. Result: Apple would copy the craftsmanship, reverse-engineer it, and scale it elsewhere.
China and Taiwan, this person says, were great at building “good-enough machines”, whereas Japanese vendors often made machines that were “too good” — in that they couldn’t scale quickly enough to please Apple’s volume-focused operations team. Some former SMEs admit feeling bad about the practice. “I felt horrible about it,” says one. “We’d screw over the original IP owner. I did this over and over.”
In other words Apple did not merely outsource manufacturing to China, it played a starring role in building up its industrial capacity. The contrast with Japan is stark. Over the past quarter century Apple has extracted critical knowhow from Japan’s best minds, turning the country’s famous electronics brands, like Sharp and Sony, into invisible subcontractors inside Apple products. In China, invisible subcontractors, such as BYD, scaled the value chain and evolved into China’s world-leading brands.
I’ve been meaning to read “Apple in China” to see all this but this article does a good intro to it all. Amazing for Apple and China as well as consumers, but not for the Japanese who’ve had their knowledge extracted and have been discarded with nothing to show for it.
The Center Has a Bias
https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/4/11/the-center-has-a-bias/
You do not get an informed view by trying something for 15 minutes, getting annoyed once, and returning to your previous tools. You also do not get it by admiring demos, listening to podcasts or discussing on social media. You have to use it enough to get past both the first disappointment and the honeymoon phase. Seemingly with AI tools, true understanding is not a matter of hours but weeks of investment.
You have to use these things, you just have to go deep and see what they can do or else you’ll not realise what you’re working with. And it changes so fast that you need to keep going with it and not just try it once and drop it forever again.