Adam Cimpeanu

NYC engineer distracted by books and art. Occasionally Romanian.
Building a tiny digital home at

[Adam Cimpeanu @AdamCimpeanu]

@jeremydenk Never

[Joshwelt @weltszzn]

when i accidentally close my 45 tabs it's like the burning of the library of alexandria, but worse and much more dire

[Adam Cimpeanu @AdamCimpeanu]

There’s always enough time to make the right choice

[taoki @justalexoki]

can't believe i spent my whole life becoming Good At Computer only for Computer to become Better At Computer

[Adam Cimpeanu @AdamCimpeanu]

“The slower road is the faster one.”

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.

Her name is Audrey van der Meer.

She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth.

The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time.

Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen.

Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task.

When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once.

The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected.

When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely.

Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG.

Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events.

The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem.

Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.

Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve.

Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews.

Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad.

Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page.

A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched.

The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall.

The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down.

The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page.

That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.

Two studies. Two countries. Same answer.

Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast.

Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth.

You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick.

The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew.

Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

[Adam Cimpeanu @AdamCimpeanu]

I’m such an avid water studier

[blue @bluewmist]

A mistake that cost me 5 years: Thinking preparation was progress. Reading every book. Taking every course. Planning every detail. Meanwhile, someone dumber than me started badly and figured it out. Preparation feels productive but it's often just fear dressed up as strategy. You learn to swim by getting in the water, not by studying water.

[Michael Warburton @For_Film_Fans]

The first known aerial photo of New York — taken by James A. Hart (from a hot air balloon) in 1906.

[Manosai @manosaie]

Beautiful essay on adult friendship

[Adam Cimpeanu @AdamCimpeanu]

Happy Belated Mother’s Day

[Nix 🕊 @startingfromnix]

oh to write about a city the way E.B White writes about New York

"There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was bom here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter — the city that is devoured by locusts each day. and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was bom somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. Of these three trembling cities the greatest is the last —

The city of final destination, the city that is a goal. It is this third city that accounts for New York’s highstrung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements. Commuters give the city its tidal resdessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion."

[Lammie_Art @Lammie_Art01]

If you’re running late in NYC, the city will sense it & make you even later

[Adam Cimpeanu @AdamCimpeanu]

We live in the stimulation

[Adam Cimpeanu @AdamCimpeanu]

One easy mnemonic for remembering futures month codes 😉

Fanuary
Gebruary
Harch
Japril
Kay
Mune
Nuly
Qaugust
Uptember
Voctober
Xovember
Zecember

[Adam Cimpeanu @AdamCimpeanu]

Cal Newport of “Deep Work” firing some warning shots in the NYT

[blue @bluewmist]

i remembered “to be considered” is the highest form of love, so I started “considering my future self” to help with procrastination and managing tasks.

what task can I delegate to my present self to make sure my future self (tomorrow, next month, next year etc.) is set up for ease?

how can I make her life easier by doing something today instead of stacking everything on her plate for tomorrow?

[GitHub Projects Community @GithubProjects]

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[Adam Cimpeanu @AdamCimpeanu]

Guys, gibber is a verb! And gibbering produces gibberish!

[Adam Cimpeanu @AdamCimpeanu]

This has been pretty clear for those with eyes to tea

[Pubity @pubity]

Scientists have discovered that tea bags are a massive source of microplastics.

Steeping one tea bag in water can release literal billions of plastic particles into your drink.

[Jay @JayMile96]

this already happens in the communist republic of mamdanistan every summer

[Adele Bloch @adele_bloch]

everyone wants a village, but no one wants to be a villager

> drive your friends to the airport
> go to their party even when you're tired
> stop cancelling last minute
> host at your place
> support the wins & losses

it's worth every ounce of effort