Evangelos Kostopoulos

Senior+ AI Software Engineer @MotoSolutions
10+ YoE.
Chess CM.
Solving for self-actualization.

[Evangelos Kostopoulos @VagKos]

@lucasmeijer Wispr flow is the best followed by fluidVoice.

[Evangelos Kostopoulos @VagKos]

@Polymarket I guess they will also cut the equivalent amount in taxes? Or people will pay the same amount to get fewer/worse services??

[Evangelos Kostopoulos @VagKos]

@GergelyOrosz Same with when we have an important issue and go to the doctor. Can we trust the first one? Or would we ask e.g. 3 and see if they agree 😁

[Evangelos Kostopoulos @VagKos]

@GergelyOrosz Thanks for sharing. I guess LLMs can only solve for "stochastic truth", not absolute truth. Meaning that, due to their non-deterministic nature, we need to run a query through multiple (ideally different?) LLMs and extract our reasoning from the aggregate of the responses?!

[Evangelos Kostopoulos @VagKos]

@thinkwithmark How will someone be able to export their own data?

[Evangelos Kostopoulos @VagKos]

@nxhaaa19 yeah, I like how simple it is :) Let's hope I don't bloat it too much!

[Evangelos Kostopoulos @VagKos]

This is the self-accountability tool I built for myself - my Promise Bank.
I use it mostly for health-tracking now, with writing and reading slowly creeping in.

Every Sunday I plan some commitments for the week. Each day I close out what I did or didn't do. End of the week I do a small retro.

It's also super easy to see what promises I missed.
Since I started, I follow through with my own commitments way more consistently.

[Evangelos Kostopoulos @VagKos]

@nxhaaa19 Yeah. We feel it's normal to have a "cap" for ambition. "This level of success is for someone else".

[Evangelos Kostopoulos @VagKos]

Writing every day delivers what's described here, and I do it because I find real value in it. Even so, there's a ceiling because the way we think now is a direct consequence of what shaped us before. As is the case in almost all physics (well maybe apart from quantum physics where this is still debated i guess), every event has a cause; every event happens because something else pushed, pulled, or acted upon it through a force or field.

Same is true for our thinking lens - we very often establish and reinforce patterns of thinking and behaving as a response to traumas we came in contact with at a younger age. And these causes, these traumas, exert a lasting effect in how we think, and thus it is important to "revisit" our childhood and try to shed some light on those causes. This light that we shed will help us understand our patterns and ourselves and make it easier for us to forge new ways forward, if that's what we want. So we need to keep asking "why", until we reach a deeper understanding of the causes of the patterns that we associate with ourselves - and therapy can be very helpful in that regard; at least it is for me.

Vienna Pharaon's framework in her book "The Origins of You" names 5 wounds that bend the lens before we even pick up the pen.

[gomi @parveen__tyagi]

writing will genuinely change your life more than motivation ever will. not in some cringe “manifest your dream life” way. i mean in a very real, practical way. most people never actually stop long enough to understand what’s going on inside their own head. they just react to life all day. scroll when they feel uncomfortable. distract themselves when things get quiet. jump from one dopamine hit to the next. but writing forces you to slow down for a second and actually look at your thoughts instead of running from them. and the weird part is you usually don’t even realize what you truly think until you start writing it down.

writing doesn’t just record your thoughts it creates them. ideas start flowing that you didn’t even know were there. patterns start showing up. emotions start making sense. problems become easier to solve because they’re no longer this giant fog floating around in your head. writing organizes your mind. every high performer, every sharp thinker, every person who just gets it, they all write. It keeps showing up as the common thread. not the expensive stuff. not the complex stuff. Just pen and paper. they write because feelings are vague but words are precise. every time they sit down and search for the exact word to describe what’s inside them, they become a sharper, more powerful communicator.

“people follow the person who can say what they mean and mean what they say. writing every day is how you build that muscle until it becomes second nature.”

over time, all that accumulated writing becomes a resource you can draw from forever. the more you write, the more material you have to solve problems, connect dots and think bigger.

the better you get at putting thoughts into words, the better you get at communicating in general. and honestly, communication controls a huge part of your life. like relationships, opportunities, business, confidence, influence, all of it comes down to how clearly you can express yourself. and no, you don’t need to be some amazing writer either. your grammar doesn’t need to be perfect. nobody cares. half the benefit comes from simply getting thoughts out of your head and onto paper.

some of the best writing advice i’ve ever heard was:

“write badly. just write.”

because the moment you stop trying to sound smart or perfect, your real thoughts finally start coming out.

even 30 minutes a day changes something in you. you become calmer because your mind isn’t carrying around a thousand unprocessed thoughts anymore. you become more self aware because you start noticing your own habits and emotional patterns. you become more articulate because you’re practicing turning feelings into language every single day.

if you write every day, your future self gets to sit down and read exactly how far you’ve come. i think that’s more valuable than any photo album.

who knows maybe one day all that writing becomes a book, a course, something you give your children. at the very least, it becomes proof that you were here, that you grew, that you tried.

that’s one of the coolest parts about it. writing lets you watch yourself evolve with time.

seriously. start writing. doesn’t matter if it’s in a notebook, your notes app, twitter wherever. just sit, think about your thoughts and write.

just sit down for 30 minutes and let your mind speak for once. and watch yourself becoming unstoppable.

[Evangelos Kostopoulos @VagKos]

So writing is, indeed, very helpful because we expose our thinking to ourselves and force ourselves to put order to our thinking by expressing it. And if we also engage in therapy, there is higher chance we identify the why behind our patterns. And, alongside the daily writing, something new can emerge, with grace to ourselves and patience and trial and error!

[Evangelos Kostopoulos @VagKos]

Worthiness wound. Maybe we were constantly talked down to or worse. The lens defaults to "I'm probably not allowed to want this," and it shows up in many small ways. Maybe we developed self-destructive habits because our minds are well accustomed to operating in such an unhealthy space. Maybe we bury our ambition because we don't think we deserve it.

[Evangelos Kostopoulos @VagKos]

@arthurbrooks Figuring out which direction to have is a big part of figuring out life though.

[Evangelos Kostopoulos @VagKos]

@garrytan This! We may not be able to follow all the low-level details the AI is implementing, but we can (have to?!) fight for high level alignment and understanding with an info-dense approach like ASCII diagrams. I wonder whether you have such diagram-specific skills you use for that.

[Evangelos Kostopoulos @VagKos]

@signulll chaos out, coherence in

[Evangelos Kostopoulos @VagKos]

Chaos Out, Coherence in

I've been reading Getting Things Done while I build my own Promise Bank these last few weeks. I'd always treated a personal organisation system as a doing-more, optimisation-type tool. I had never fully realised so clearly, until now, how much productivity and stress are inversely related. Stress thrives on chaos and confusion whereas productivity thrives on clarity and coherence.

Once I started capturing (all the) things and properly closing the loops, real bandwidth came back online because it was freed from caring about what's next across so many domains. Doing more and being calmer at the same time sounds like a paradox, but in a way it's the same skill seen from different angles.

The whole thing comes down to "chaos out, coherence in". Especially right now, when our X bookmarks fill up faster than we can read them and every other day brings a new AI tool or breakthrough we'd want to actually try, building personal systems that help us digest all of it is more important than ever and only getting more so.

[Evangelos Kostopoulos @VagKos]

@AlexLaterre @IneffableLabs no salary range? :D