Me: entering Japanese cat café.
employee stops me immediately.
Employee: One rule.
Me: Okay.
Employee: Orange cat bites people from France.
Me: I’m not French.
Employee: Good.
I sit down, cats everywhere, peaceful, adorable, therapeutic.
then gigantic orange cat jumps onto table, built like retired wrestler.
Cat staring at me aggressively.
Employee watching nervously from distance.
Me: I thought he only hated French people.
Employee: He improvises.
cat slowly pushes my drink off table while maintaining eye contact.
Me: THIS IS TARGETED.
small child nearby points at cat.
Child: That one evil.
Employee: No no, He just passionate.
cat suddenly climbs onto my lap, starts purring violently.
Me: …wait he likes me?
Employee shocked.
Employee: Impossible.
another worker comes over, then another, entire staff now observing me like chosen prophet.
Manager arrives.
Manager: He has never trusted customer before.
Me: What does that mean.
Manager bows slightly.
Manager: You must take him.
Me: TAKE HIM WHERE.
orange cat already asleep on me.
Employee quietly bringing adoption papers.
Me: I CAME HERE FOR COFFEE.
this is true and part of why ADHD is so tiring. if you dont take advantage of your 'flow' to the utmost you wont get anything done after. so you have to overexert yourself because you dont know when the brief clarity will end. im tired.
You can now run a full Linux operating system inside a 6mb PDF.
Someone embedded a RISC-V emulator inside a standard document. You don't need a virtual machine, just a PDF reader.
→ Runs interactively inside the file.
→ Powered by a tiny RISC-V emulator.
→ The entire OS fits in just 6MB.
> be cow
> cow, but online
> IoT? IoC
> Internet of Cow
> no security
> cows compromised
> cow botnet
> use cows for ddos attacks
> critical infrastructure taken down by cows
> hijack cow sensor
> tell cows to attack at dawn
> open front door
> 1000 cows pooping outside house
Simplification is a literal neural signature of mastery, not a communication preference.
Your prefrontal cortex can hold about 4 items in working memory at any given moment. That's the biological ceiling. Doesn't matter how smart you are. The constraint is fixed.
What changes with expertise is compression. Your brain learns to "chunk" multiple pieces of information into single units. A chess grandmaster doesn't see 32 pieces on a board. They see 5-6 familiar patterns. A senior engineer doesn't see 40 variables in a system. They see 3 forces interacting.
The prefrontal cortex and basal ganglia run a gating system that decides what gets into working memory and what gets filtered out. Dopamine modulates those gates. When someone builds deep expertise in a domain, their basal ganglia learns which information to compress and which to discard, freeing up slots for higher-order reasoning.
The person who can explain something simply has built enough mental chunks that the complex version collapses into a small number of organized patterns. The person who overcomplicates things is often still holding each variable separately, maxing out their working memory, and spilling the cognitive overflow into their explanation.
This is why Feynman could explain quantum mechanics to freshmen. His compression ratio was so high that concepts taking 4 working memory slots for a grad student took 1 slot for him. The remaining 3 slots were free for analogy, storytelling, and reading the room.
Simplicity is what happens when your brain has run enough reps to compress the pattern. Complexity is what happens when it hasn't.
Huge shout to my friend from an undergraduate philosophy program who started working out every single day, not for health benefits or to become conventionally attractive or whatever, but because -- and this is a direct quote -- he was concerned that otherwise he might "become lost in the world of signs and forget the things they signify". I have thought about this every single time that I've worked out since.