Japanese toilets often have an exhortation about cleanliness but this one is the hardest I’ve ever seen. <Keep Clean This Restroom>

A shoutout to whomever at the Japanese supermarket thought to put up a sign saying “Turtle Line: for customers who prefer to not be rushed and take their time.”

LLM tried to convince me, after I asked a question about monetization of a gambling-adjacent game at an arcade, that perhaps I should consider it time well spent due to the possibility of getting a BAM issue out of it. Tsk, tsk.

I increasingly think the skill cap for LLM-assisted engineering is probably about as high as for engineering generally. (It’s certainly deeper than e.g. Excel, and there are OOMs in Excel proficiency.)

I don’t know to what extent this is “Get off my lawn” but a bookstore with cashierless checkout just feels to me like Amazon But We Made Everything Worse.

This week on Complex Systems, Cate Hall and I talk about agency, cultivating it in oneself, environments/orgs which seem to suppress or encourage it. Also a bit about walking roads less travelled. 00:00 Intro 02:38 Exploring the concept of agency 03:08 Selection effects in different fields 03:45 The changing demographics in tech and startups 06:52 The rise of systematization in poker and startups 17:27 The role of mental habits in developing agency 22:25 The value of feedback and continuous improvement 25:33 The power of admitting ignorance 27:29 Growth mindset and personal improvement 28:18 Using AI for creative pursuits 31:25 The value of human interaction 34:22 The unique traits of professional gamblers 39:40 Understanding and developing agency 43:41 Triggers for increased agency 51:02 Wrap

Today's encounter with the Answer Anything Oracle: Me: "So I'm looking to add a citation link to a European couple who paint miniatures, but I am blanking on their names. How about I give you a vague inexpert impression of their style? *does so* LLM: ~"Well that could be anyone"

After I actually get something shippable using LLMs as a coding assistant I pre-commit to writing something about workflow, because this is definitely benefiting from patterns that I don't use when I am the only intelligence working on a project.

This week on Complex Systems: Ricki Heicklen and I discuss the trader mindset, adverse selection, pedagogy, and a bit of the art of making decisions with partial information under time pressure.

Went to dinner in Tokyo with a work buddy and got caught out in the rain. Felt a bit of civic pride at how well the Meguro River waterworks was putting up with it then watched the water level rise about 160 cm in the ten minutes it took me to walk from station to home.