Henri Salo

No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown friends will come and seek you.

[Tapio Ylipuranen 🇫🇮🇺🇸🇺🇦✝️ @TapioYlipuranen]

Minä arvostan BW todella korkealle

[daedalus @BasedDaedalus]

just met a cute girl at the wedding i’m at

like unreal. face card so crazy my frontal lobe clocked out. i’m talking generational. if symmetry was a startup she just closed series b.

we’re vibing. she’s laughing. eye contact locked. i’m farming aura like it’s a full-time job.

then coding comes up.

she goes “yeah i code”

my soul did a hard restart

i’m like oh word “what do you build?”

she says

“mostly vibe-coding rn”

and that’s where a normal man would say “that’s fire” and get her number

but unfortunately i was built in a lab

i go:

“ok define vibe-coding”
“claude code or codex”
“cursor agent mode or raw dogging prompts”
“you got git or just vibes”
“tests?”
“types?”
“deploy?”
“rollback?”
“you read diffs or click accept like a casino addict”

she starts laughing like i’m joking

i was entering forensic mode.

she says “i just use chatgpt and claude and keep asking until it kinda works”

i say “works where”

she says “like… on my laptop”

i say “so localhost cosplay”

bro.

and i swear to God the violinist in the corner sounded like a system alarm

the vibe died instantly

DIED

flatline. kernel panic. social segfault. full emotional 500 in prod.

i try one last save. i go “ok but do you at least push to github”

she says “sometimes, i mostly keep stuff on desktop folders”

DESKTOP FOLDERS

i started dissociating. i could see my ancestors. i could hear linus torvalds screaming in the distance.

her friend walks over like “omg are y’all talking tech”

and i accidentally say

“she said she’s a developer but her stack is claude code, codex, and divine intervention”

she goes “wait no i made a website”

i said “a figma screenshot with a typeform link is not a website, it is a cry for help”

SILENCE.

like biblical silence.

they walked away. she did not look back.

my friend comes over like “bro she was INTO you what happened”

i said “she called herself a coder and then described generating a landing page and praying over it”

he said “so?”

SO???

i’m supposed to build a future with someone whose incident response plan is ‘refresh and re-prompt’???

she had a heavenly face card but an apocalyptic workflow

zero tests
zero repos
zero shame
infinite vibes

could’ve had her number

but she now knows i respect source control

and honestly that’s worth more

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

A few random notes from claude coding quite a bit last few weeks.

Coding workflow. Given the latest lift in LLM coding capability, like many others I rapidly went from about 80% manual+autocomplete coding and 20% agents in November to 80% agent coding and 20% edits+touchups in December. i.e. I really am mostly programming in English now, a bit sheepishly telling the LLM what code to write... in words. It hurts the ego a bit but the power to operate over software in large "code actions" is just too net useful, especially once you adapt to it, configure it, learn to use it, and wrap your head around what it can and cannot do. This is easily the biggest change to my basic coding workflow in ~2 decades of programming and it happened over the course of a few weeks. I'd expect something similar to be happening to well into double digit percent of engineers out there, while the awareness of it in the general population feels well into low single digit percent.

IDEs/agent swarms/fallability. Both the "no need for IDE anymore" hype and the "agent swarm" hype is imo too much for right now. The models definitely still make mistakes and if you have any code you actually care about I would watch them like a hawk, in a nice large IDE on the side. The mistakes have changed a lot - they are not simple syntax errors anymore, they are subtle conceptual errors that a slightly sloppy, hasty junior dev might do. The most common category is that the models make wrong assumptions on your behalf and just run along with them without checking. They also don't manage their confusion, they don't seek clarifications, they don't surface inconsistencies, they don't present tradeoffs, they don't push back when they should, and they are still a little too sycophantic. Things get better in plan mode, but there is some need for a lightweight inline plan mode. They also really like to overcomplicate code and APIs, they bloat abstractions, they don't clean up dead code after themselves, etc. They will implement an inefficient, bloated, brittle construction over 1000 lines of code and it's up to you to be like "umm couldn't you just do this instead?" and they will be like "of course!" and immediately cut it down to 100 lines. They still sometimes change/remove comments and code they don't like or don't sufficiently understand as side effects, even if it is orthogonal to the task at hand. All of this happens despite a few simple attempts to fix it via instructions in CLAUDE . md. Despite all these issues, it is still a net huge improvement and it's very difficult to imagine going back to manual coding. TLDR everyone has their developing flow, my current is a small few CC sessions on the left in ghostty windows/tabs and an IDE on the right for viewing the code + manual edits.

Tenacity. It's so interesting to watch an agent relentlessly work at something. They never get tired, they never get demoralized, they just keep going and trying things where a person would have given up long ago to fight another day. It's a "feel the AGI" moment to watch it struggle with something for a long time just to come out victorious 30 minutes later. You realize that stamina is a core bottleneck to work and that with LLMs in hand it has been dramatically increased.

Speedups. It's not clear how to measure the "speedup" of LLM assistance. Certainly I feel net way faster at what I was going to do, but the main effect is that I do a lot more than I was going to do because 1) I can code up all kinds of things that just wouldn't have been worth coding before and 2) I can approach code that I couldn't work on before because of knowledge/skill issue. So certainly it's speedup, but it's possibly a lot more an expansion.

Leverage. LLMs are exceptionally good at looping until they meet specific goals and this is where most of the "feel the AGI" magic is to be found. Don't tell it what to do, give it success criteria and watch it go. Get it to write tests first and then pass them. Put it in the loop with a browser MCP. Write the naive algorithm that is very likely correct first, then ask it to optimize it while preserving correctness. Change your approach from imperative to declarative to get the agents looping longer and gain leverage.

Fun. I didn't anticipate that with agents programming feels *more* fun because a lot of the fill in the blanks drudgery is removed and what remains is the creative part. I also feel less blocked/stuck (which is not fun) and I experience a lot more courage because there's almost always a way to work hand in hand with it to make some positive progress. I have seen the opposite sentiment from other people too; LLM coding will split up engineers based on those who primarily liked coding and those who primarily liked building.

Atrophy. I've already noticed that I am slowly starting to atrophy my ability to write code manually. Generation (writing code) and discrimination (reading code) are different capabilities in the brain. Largely due to all the little mostly syntactic details involved in programming, you can review code just fine even if you struggle to write it.

Slopacolypse. I am bracing for 2026 as the year of the slopacolypse across all of github, substack, arxiv, X/instagram, and generally all digital media. We're also going to see a lot more AI hype productivity theater (is that even possible?), on the side of actual, real improvements.

Questions. A few of the questions on my mind:
- What happens to the "10X engineer" - the ratio of productivity between the mean and the max engineer? It's quite possible that this grows *a lot*.
- Armed with LLMs, do generalists increasingly outperform specialists? LLMs are a lot better at fill in the blanks (the micro) than grand strategy (the macro).
- What does LLM coding feel like in the future? Is it like playing StarCraft? Playing Factorio? Playing music?
- How much of society is bottlenecked by digital knowledge work?

TLDR Where does this leave us? LLM agent capabilities (Claude & Codex especially) have crossed some kind of threshold of coherence around December 2025 and caused a phase shift in software engineering and closely related. The intelligence part suddenly feels quite a bit ahead of all the rest of it - integrations (tools, knowledge), the necessity for new organizational workflows, processes, diffusion more generally. 2026 is going to be a high energy year as the industry metabolizes the new capability.

[Secret Diary @SecretDiary]

Censorship in our era doesn’t burn books; it audits platforms, captures the levers of “trust,” and calls it “safety” while it quietly nationalises the public conversation.

Modern censorship doesn’t kick your door in; it codes “Digital Safety Acts,” weaponises “transparency,” and turns your feed into a monitored corridor. “Deceptive design,” “ad transparency,” “researcher access”: not oversight. Annexation with paperwork.

YOU DIDN’T FINE “FOR TRANSPARENCY”

You fined the last major platform that stopped letting Brussels ghost-write its speech code.

“Deceptive design” = you want custody of the badge of legitimacy.

“Ad transparency” = you want a live dashboard of persuasion.

“Researcher access” = you want god-mode over the hive mind.

This isn’t about safety.

It’s about custody of narrative, jurisdiction over credibility, and bureaucrats claiming veto power over the public square.

You’re not regulating a product.

You’re probing how far you can regulate permission to speak.

Yes, X should fix what’s broken, but it must not kneel to a regime where “transparency” is the costume and censorship is the job.

When power demands “transparency,” ask one question: are they opening windows so citizens can see them, or prying open doors so they can walk into everyone else’s mind?

[Dr. Dominic Ng @DrDominicNg]

As a neuroscientist, here are 7 ways to trick your brain into doing difficult things:

1. Shrink the task to just two minutes.
Your brain resists big commitments. So don't make one.
- "Work out" → do one exercise.
- "Clean the house" → pick up three items.

[Henri Salo @hemisalo]

She always thought men are stupid. Her 1st husband was a genius. Her 2nd husband was really, really smart. Her 3rd, beyond intelligent.

[Henri Salo @hemisalo]

At 86, she stopped withholding sex from him.

At 87, he died.

At 91, she remarried.

[vittorio @IterIntellectus]

Bret is 80% right, which is the most dangerous level of right. partial truth sticks harder than full error.

few thoughts
1/

[Robinho @deolarepublic]

1. Upskill. Upskill at every given opportunity. Be insanely valuable, even when it means you need the forgo pay, do it. Learn maths, law, psychology, trading, software, know a lot(not a little) about everything. Learn how to speak fluently, learn how to write, learn how to sell. You'll be unstoppable with all three.

2. Women. They're not necessarily a distraction, you're the one that lacks a direction for your life. When you find purpose and pursue it, the right woman will come along. Stop wasting your sperm, you're killing yourself. You're not cool for having plenty body counts, it makes you an idiot instead.

3. Enjoy yourself fgs! Laugh, make friends, attend parties, you're still early to the wealth and finance game, breathe please. There's a lot of responsibilities on the third floor, I can't even remember when last I watched a Chelsea game. Ogbeni, enjoy yourself!

4. Network like a mad man. Play long-term games with long term people. Make friends with people who share your value system and grow with them.

5. Learn detachment. The quality of your detachment game precedes the quality of your life. Detach from women(read people), detach from money, detach from outcomes. Live life as it comes, if it happens, good. If it doesn't, still good.

6. Make friends with rock bottom. It's the most important phase of your life. If it comes early, thank God and build in the storm. Grow a thick skin in the middle of it. Life is hard. Learn stoicism. Prepare for the worst. Make peace with the possibility of failure but work your way out of it like a beast.

7. Find God.

[DHH @dhh]

There'll always be more emails in need of reply, more meetings to attend, and more updates to read. A person can fill the entire workweek with these tasks over and over again. But to stay sane and sharp, you must pay yourself first by doing the work that actually means something to you.

I feel this acutely as someone responsible to employees, customers, followers, and readers. I could do nothing all day but check up on projects, people, and posts, but my brain would quickly check out if it was just doing that.

So quite frequently, I just don't. Don't check in, don't check up, and instead dive into the work that checks my own intellectual boxes. Programming for the love of it. Experimenting for the hell of it. Researching for the fun of it.

In another age, I might have been tempted to apologize for such privilege, but screw that. Privilege is wonderful. You should do your best to earn more of it. Even if you have to carve it out of the bare rocks around you.

Ironically, the best way to do that is also to choose to always pay yourself first, however little at first. By solving your own problems, tickling your own interests, chasing your own curiosity. That's where you'll find the motivation to elevate your talent. To turn interest into competency.

And once you've developed some competency, you'll be rewarded with more privilege to build it further. This is the virtuous circle of merit.There'll always be an endless list of work that could be done.

You'll never get through it all and onto your own priorities, if you continue to put them at the bottom.

[Jay Alto @theJayAlto]

there are essays, and then there are "violently shift your entire perception of reality" essays

[positivity moon @arrtnem]

Late replies do not bother me. Most of life is not urgent. Text me when the kettle has cooled and the day stops shouting your name.

I have learned the shape of waiting that is not personal. The phone sleeps face down. The little dots come and go like fish. I load the dishwasher. I fold a shirt that will wrinkle again in ten minutes. The world does not burn because a bubble did not pop on my screen.

Take your time if we are not in love and you do not owe me money. Walk your dog. Miss your stop and laugh. Close your laptop and remember your own temperature. Answer me tomorrow or next week, with crumbs on your sleeve and a screenshot that makes sense of nothing. We are people with spines and errands. I am not a court. You are not on trial.

There are two places where silence grows teeth. Love. And debt.

If we are in love, delay is a weather report. I listen for thunder in the gap. My chest reads your absence like a map with a torn corner. Text me when you can, and if you cannot, let me know you are alive. A single word will do. Here. Breathing. Later. Lovers live inside each other’s nervous systems. Small pauses are not small there. The body counts.

If you owe me money, time is respect with numbers on it. You do not have to write a poem. You do not have to explain your childhood. Tell me a date. Tell me an amount. Keep it. Or ask for a plan that will not bruise you. Ghosting is expensive. It charges interest in distrust. Pay with words first if you cannot pay with cash.

For everyone else, I vote for mercy. I answer when I can and I forgive when you cannot. At 09:14 I am in a queue with a loaf that still remembers the oven. At 12:31 I am in the sun outside a pharmacy, counting my breaths to eight so the day will let me back in slowly. At 23:06 I am a person with a book and a lamp and a face that does not belong to a screen. Your blue bubble can wait. Mine can too.

Late replies are proof that a life is being lived off camera. A seat on a bus. A spill wiped with the good towel by mistake. A kid calling from the other room. A pan that needs two more minutes. It is not neglect, it is oxygen. We are not notifications. We are weather that changes without asking for applause.

When I finally reply, I want to bring a real minute back with me. Not an apology written to impress. A plain sentence that carries heat from a stove or wind from a street. Sorry, I was making soup. Sorry, I was not sorry to be away. Here I am now. What did I miss. Where does it hurt. Where do we begin again.

If we are not braided by love, if we are not tied by debt, take your time. Take it fully. Give it back clean. I will meet you where the day lets us both breathe.

[Vivid Void @vividvoid]

Jung said loneliness isn't about solitude, it's about not being able to share your deepest self with others. But I don't think that's quite right either. It's 2025, we can all bring our authentic selves everywhere we go, and everyone's lonelier than ever.

I think the loneliness of this age is feeling like what's important to you is not important to others - that no one truly cares about you beyond their self-interest, and no one needs you beyond the therapeutically correct amount of dependence. Everyone sovereign, everyone an emperor, totally existentially responsible for one's self and no one else.

[Nick @nickcammarata]

I think insight (research, meditation insight, self-understanding etc) is less like climbing a mountain and more like there’s a lot of doors and if you open the right one you’ve solved it. instant if you choose the right door the first time, over time you can improve your taste

[Henri Salo @hemisalo]

@velli2000 @MichaelAArouet spot on 😂

[Henri Salo @hemisalo]

1) What
#MyXAnniversary

[Arman Alizad @armanalizad]

Kiitos Jari tästä. Tämän selkeämmin ei voi sanoa miksi Suomessa on liian vähän varakkaita ihmisiä ja miksi tänne tarvitaan tuhansia miljönäärejä enemmän.

@SarasvuoJari

(Toki haters gonna say äärioikeiston propaganda)

[Roni Arvonen @RoniArvonen]

Miettikää:

Suomeen ei koskaan voida saada hallitusta, joka lakkauttaisi kehitysavun.

Suomalaisen työssäkäyvän yh-äidin koko tuloverokertymä lähetetään siis tästä ikuisuuteen Afrikkaan diktaattorien lentokerosiinikuluihin, eikä tälle voi tehdä yhtään mitään

[Libriscent @libriscent]

There's a Turkish saying, "If you truly love someone, you love them twice." The first time, it's all about attraction—their smile, voice, presence. But slowly, the curtain lifts. You see their scars, insecurities, mood swings, trauma, and moral differences. It's no longer perfect; it's real. And you can still love them without filters, without expectations—that's not infatuation. That's the love of understanding, the kind that stays, the kind that grows.

[Henri Salo @hemisalo]

@Gari_Ferret @Dorizzdt @PirateSoftware Soo.. You're saying he literally one shot the secret ending of Animal Well, the ending that took the whole community more than a week to collaborate to solve?

Wait a minute...