There's a whole water experimentation world for coffee that most people never enter. The science is a bit hard, and there aren't really tools that make it approachable.
agua.cafe is a small tool for that middle ground. Plug in supermarket bottled water from the label, see how it scores against SCA guidelines and what that means for flavor (body, acidity, sweetness...), then blend it with other waters to get closer to what you want in the cup.
The growing fear that your thoughtful work will be mistaken for AI slop
Engineering is full of self-expression: the problems you choose, the way you decompose them, what you optimize for, what you find elegant, what you refuse to tolerate.
What engineering lacks is legibility. Most people can't read its expressiveness, they just see something that works.
The difference between having a spiritual framework and having a spiritual practice is significant and easy to blur
Some of the TPOT discourse around meditation is distorted. Meditation won't bring you lasting, unshakable happiness independent of conditions (that was never the promise). There is no bliss on demand.
All of this is real and very special, but it is not lasting happiness independent of conditions. Be careful about what people are trying to sell you, even if they are well intentioned.
I did the online Jhana Jhourney retreat in July 2024. This is a reflection on what actually stayed with me about a year and a half later.
Meditation plus journaling created a feedback loop that made these patterns easier to notice.
One of the most useful heuristics I learned during a recent meditation retreat is simple.
Discipline alone is rarely enough over long periods. Some intrinsic reward needs to be present.
Something I have not seen discussed here is how AI coding could create massive inequality for developers outside the US, especially in countries with weaker currencies (crying in Brazilian reais).
At the same time, if models reduce the need for large engineering teams, small groups anywhere might ship competitive products faster than before. That is exactly the kind of scenario when individuals need access to risk capital to build things independently.
A functional artifact can be driven primarily by play, curiosity, or aesthetic exploration. The requirement that something works does not determine the motivation behind how it is made.
The more you stay true to your vision and build from intuition, play, and the urge to express, the more this holds.
Design and engineering get treated as separate disciplines. But the best product decisions happen while doing engineering, in the what if / play moments when you're actually building.
You can't just hand off a design. The underlying implementation always leaks through to the user, so the person (or AI) touching the code is the final arbiter of the experience.
A generation of 90s kids inspired to be engineers by the magic of wholesome game boy tech, only to grow up and inherit this absolute mess.
The type of health that really matters for the mind is good sleep, time in nature, eating with friends for fun... not vo2max and all this bryan johnson distorted stuff
I'd rather be a beaten-up toyota driving through a beautiful canyon with friends than a tuned ferrari that can't even fit them in the car
I think a good way to reason about where AI coding is headed, is to look at things we build where the tools are so capable that we can focus almost entirely on the creative aspects.
And experience is the one thing we likely want to keep authored by those who actually undergo it, at least in software where experience itself is the value being created.
AI can write the loop. It can even suggest different ways to model your data, as a graph, a timeline, or a spatial hierarchy. But each of those models commits you to a different future.
Game engines make this easier to see, but the same is true for any complex software system.
Devs fear AI because they see themselves as bricklayers, just translating requirements into code. In Brazil, developers are often dismissively called "pedreiros" (bricklayers), as if we just stack code according to someone else's blueprint.
The Law of Leaky Abstractions: Famous explanation of why you can't just "hand off" a design.
A Brazilian Wordle, but for prices (adivinheopreco.com.br). Every day the same five Amazon BR products for everyone. Five guesses each.
I've been working through a thought experiment after a meditation / jhana sit:
If a human brain were kept alive with zero sensory or bodily input/output (a floating brain) could it still feel emotions, or would it only have thoughts?
If the floating brain thought experiment holds, it suggests these somatic feelings aren't just epiphenomena of mental states but constitute something essential about certain emotional experiences.
I think vibe coding is fundamentally different from coding, it favors a different kind of person, with different strengths and personality profile. Like when photography was invented, the people who excelled weren't necessarily painters.
We need to wait for this new class of professionals/artists/vibe coders to emerge and show us what excellence looks like. Bottom-up discovery rather than top-down curriculum design.
I'm not worried about companies hiring fewer junior developers, I don't think it will create a talent shortage.
And once this transition stabilizes and the environment fully shifts, we'll start seeing juniors of this new profession entering the market in a more structured / deliberate way.
From a book on friendship: the biggest skill is showing up consistently (we underestimate this).
Loneliness makes us misread social cues.
Meditation Tycoon, Roller Coaster Tycoon but you're building a meditation retreat center.
Build meditation halls, gardens, tea rooms, hire teachers (strict monk, gentle teacher, weird mystic), manage guests mental states (calm, restless, sleepy, blissful).
Noisy tourists wander in, mosquito season destroys everyone's concentration, student has existential crisis during silent breakfast.
The most important job of your body is to be a substrate for the mind. Ultimately, what matters most is our conscious experience. We are chasing super longevity and intelligence but what we want is super well-being.
There is an underlying physical reality.
Bodies age. Gravity works. Evolution happened. Science converges because constraints are strong. Physics, biology, chemistry, these are not optional and reality pushes back.
You become less trapped by whichever view happens to be running.
The most important design principle for interfaces in the AI era is flexibility.
Half of the app ideas I've had sitting in my backlog for years can now be solved just by chatting with Claude. The other half will likely be handled by a universal front-end + a persistent, user-owned data layer built into Claude.
Most people I know who made real progress in meditation report the same pattern: meditation went fine, then they did therapy (seemingly unrelated), then meditation became transformative.
Imaginal work being like in IFS: how you imagine some parts and test these emotional shifts to talk to them. But all forms of psychotherapy work this way. The only difference is the degree to which they acknowledge this imaginal nature (CBT more dualistic, IFS less).
It's possible that the answer is nothing. It might do everything we do, just with a different inner life (or none at all).
Maybe it can do everything I can do, but it won't be me experiencing it.
If you are perpetually angry, depressed, confused, and unloving, or your attention is elsewhere, it won't matter how successful you become or who is in your life: you won't enjoy any of it.
Sam Harris, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion
The best experiences in my life have been those of love, care, and openness towards people indiscriminately.
I wonder what humanity will focus on in the post-enlightenment era (after ASI-facilitation).
First hypothesis is that we'll engage in creative exploration of perception / soul-making / consciousness artistry.
After discovering the jhanas, I couldn't help but feel that we barely scratched the surface of possible experiential states.
The act of experiencing appears to be our most fundamental activity, inherently meaningful. We are the universe experiencing itself.
Unlike natural language where many things are implied, code must spell out every detail. AI bridges this gap, you can be conversational and let it fill in the precise implementation details.
I left dev despite being successful because the traditional workflow didn't click (too restless, needed more creative flow). Now with AI, I've switched from 10% to 90% of my time coding again. It's finally fun.
Maybe we should focus more on containment and less on alignment. Practical safety measures looks more achievable than solving the alignment problem.
Design/engineering split is just modernity making complex work more digestible for poor talent.
All uncool people are alike, each cool person is cool in their own unique way.
There is a way to look high-status while also being kind, happy, open, which actually is the best version.
Healing comes from addressing the mind, not altering the body.
AI will lower the IQ threshold required to do creative work in STEM. It will change the personality profile of technologists, making it way more diverse and biased towards artistic types.
Taking off the weight on IQ and democratically distributing in all kinds of individual differences.
Digital products will become way more expressive, a reflex of humanity as whole.