SELF AWARENESS · PSYCHOLOGY · SYSTEMS
Borrowed Tears: How a Suppressed Emotion Finds Another Body to Cry In
My therapist teared up mid-session and asked whose tears they were. Sixty years of research says they were mine.
All Notes
Every published note, newest first. 21 entries.
2026
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AI · SYSTEMS · DECISIONS
The Literature Already Knew: Why 4-Bit Quants Tie and Thinking Budgets Bite
The research on LLM quantization and test-time compute makes two clear predictions. A 67-hour, 4,800-task benchmark of Qwen3.8-27B just confirmed both.
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SELF AWARENESS · PSYCHOLOGY · DECISIONS · MATHEMATICS
Life Has No Goal. It Has a Gradient.
You get one path through time, not an ensemble of parallel selves. The only question that survives that fact is what compounds along the path.
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PSYCHOLOGY · BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS · SYSTEMS · DECISIONS
The Sandbox Behind Your Eyes: Why No Two People See the Same Reality
Your brain does not record the world. It simulates one. And the smartest people are not the ones running the truest simulation.
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PSYCHOLOGY · SELF AWARENESS · SYSTEMS
You Are Not Focused. You Are Overfit.
The two ways to raise signal over noise look identical inside the room. They diverge violently the moment you leave it.
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PSYCHOLOGY · SYSTEMS · AI
Your Past Self Has Nothing to Teach You
Life is neither optimization nor noise. What transfers across life's non-repeating cycles is not the policy but the learner.
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BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS · FINTECH · PRODUCT · DECISIONS · SYSTEMS
Hyperbolic Discounting Is Why Fintech Apps Are Designed Against Their Users
Present bias as the operating model of buy-now-pay-later, credit cards, and trading apps.
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ATTENTION · MEETINGS · SYSTEMS
Channel Capacity Is the Real Reason Your Org Is Slow
Shannon's limit applied to standups, Slack, and review cycles. The bit-rate of management.
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DECISIONS · NETWORKS · SYSTEMS
Phantom Traffic Jams Are Not About Traffic. They're About Delay.
Why a fractional second of unnecessary braking can collapse a highway, and why the same physics governs supply chains and packet networks.
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DECISIONS · MATHEMATICS · ECONOMICS
The Ergodicity Trap: Why a 90% Failure Rate Looks Different from the Inside
Population statistics work for venture funds. They will ruin you. Why ensemble averages and time averages diverge in careers, and what to do about it.
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INFORMATION THEORY · COGNITION
Your Mind Is a Codec, Not a Camera
The hard math of lossy compression explains memory, trauma, product design, storytelling, education, and AI.
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PRODUCT · DECISIONS
Dating App Algorithms Are Not About Love. They Are About Market Design
Why Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge feel different - and how their algorithms, product choices, and consumer psychology create three different dating markets.
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ALGORITHMS · MATHEMATICS
The Algorithm Maze: Why Checking an Answer Is Easier Than Finding It
A human-friendly journey into P vs NP, the million-dollar question behind cryptography, AI, biology, and the limits of discovery.
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AI · SYSTEMS · DECISIONS · NOTE
AI Execution Trap: The Rise of the Third Kind of Work
AI collapses Russell's two kinds of work into a third. The bottleneck shifts from execution to judgment, and the value of pure execution falls toward zero.
2025
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PRODUCT · SYSTEMS · DECISIONS · NOTE
Playing to Win: Game Theory for Product Managers
A PM primer on game theory - payoff matrices, the Prisoner's Dilemma, coordination, signaling, and mechanism design, with examples from PayPal, Uber, and Slack.
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PRODUCT · AI · SYSTEMS · NOTE
From Data-Driven to Data-Native: A Practical Roadmap for Product Leaders
Ten pain points product managers hit on the way to data-native thinking, with case studies from Netflix, Uber, Stripe, Spotify, and others.
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SELF AWARENESS · PSYCHOLOGY · PRODUCTIVITY · SELF IMPROVEMENT · CRITICAL THINKING
How Work Becomes Our Coping Mechanism for Loneliness
How dedication, productivity, and hard work become a quiet refuge from loneliness, and why the coping mechanism deepens the isolation it tries to solve.
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PSYCHOLOGY · PRODUCTIVITY · SLEEP SCIENCE · CHRONOBIOLOGY · WELLNESS
Beyond the 5 AM Myth: Rethinking Morning Routines
Why one-size-fits-all morning routines clash with chronobiology, individual differences, and the realities of who actually has time for a 5 AM wake-up.
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PSYCHOLOGY · BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS · PSYCHOLOGY OF MONEY · ECONOMICS · CONSUMER BEHAVIOR
The Bomb Sandwich Effect: How Economic Psychology Explains Tehran's Monster Sandwich Phenomenon
When facing inflation and financial uncertainty, humans don't just change their spending habits - they transform their relationship with consumption itself.
2024
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PRODUCT · DECISIONS · SYSTEMS
The Ripple Effect in Products
How small product choices trigger monumental shifts in design: psychology, math, and UX of the ripple effect.
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PHILOSOPHY · SELF DISCOVERY · PRESENCE
Navigating the Void: Finding Direction in a Present-Focused Life
From temporal paralysis to present-focused living — and the surprising challenge of rediscovering direction once the fog lifts.