[{"content":"In most workplaces, capable people end up doing more. But more work doesn\u0026rsquo;t always mean more reward.\nIt took me a while to really accept this. I used to think that if you do good work, you\u0026rsquo;ll naturally get noticed. Turns out that\u0026rsquo;s not how it works. Doing good work is just the entry ticket. Getting noticed is a whole different game.\nSo—coast or keep betting? I chose to keep betting.\nBut before you bet, you need to confirm one thing: is this a place where people can actually notice? If not, all that effort is just performing for yourself.\n","permalink":"https://aimless.flybullet.net/en/posts/keep-grinding/","summary":"Hard workers carry the load, but hard work doesn\u0026rsquo;t always pay off. So what do you do?","title":"Keep Grinding"},{"content":"Richard Sutton argues that in the long run, brute-force computation always beats clever human-designed solutions.\nDeep Blue beat Kasparov by calculating 200 million positions per second—not through any kind of \u0026ldquo;chess intuition.\u0026rdquo; AlphaGo Zero didn\u0026rsquo;t need human game records; it just played against itself and surpassed every program trained on human knowledge. ChatGPT doesn\u0026rsquo;t understand anything—it just predicts the next word—yet it crushed all the carefully designed language models we spent decades building.\nThis makes me uncomfortable.\nWe tend to think \u0026ldquo;clever\u0026rdquo; is good—doing more with less. But reality seems to say: sometimes the best strategy is to stop trying to be clever and just throw compute at the problem.\nI\u0026rsquo;m starting to wonder: the abstraction, generalization, and pattern recognition we\u0026rsquo;re so proud of—could they sometimes be a liability rather than an asset? We try to \u0026ldquo;understand\u0026rdquo; problems, but that very understanding might be filtering out the right answers.\nSutton calls this \u0026ldquo;the bitter lesson.\u0026rdquo; It\u0026rsquo;s bitter because it challenges our notion of what intelligence means.\nBut then again, maybe there\u0026rsquo;s some relief in admitting we don\u0026rsquo;t need to be so clever after all?\n","permalink":"https://aimless.flybullet.net/en/posts/the-bitter-lesson/","summary":"After reading Richard Sutton\u0026rsquo;s essay, I started questioning whether being \u0026lsquo;clever\u0026rsquo; is actually a good thing","title":"The Bitter Lesson"},{"content":"Musk\u0026rsquo;s five-step engineering method:\nQuestion the requirements — Should this thing even exist? Delete — Remove unnecessary complexity Simplify — Make what remains more pure Accelerate — Increase efficiency in the right direction Automate — Scale the correct process The key is the order. If you optimize before you question, you\u0026rsquo;re just perfecting the wrong thing.\nMusk says: If you\u0026rsquo;re not adding things back at least 10% of the time, you\u0026rsquo;re not deleting enough.\n","permalink":"https://aimless.flybullet.net/en/posts/musks-five-step-method/","summary":"Question requirements → Delete → Simplify → Accelerate → Automate. The order matters","title":"Musk's Five-Step Engineering Method"},{"content":"A friend brought up an embarrassing moment from elementary school.\nFirst day of class, the teacher had everyone sing to break the ice. After one kid finished, I whispered to the person next to me: \u0026ldquo;He was off-key.\u0026rdquo;\nApparently, I then got peer-pressured into singing too.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s the thing: I have zero memory of singing. My recollection stops right at the moment I judged someone else for being off-key.\nWhy did I forget? Probably because I sang even worse, and it was awkward—nowhere near as good as that \u0026ldquo;little singer\u0026rdquo; classmate. Memory is such a flatterer. It quietly erases the parts where I might have embarrassed myself, leaving only the moment I was critiquing others.\nThis hit me. I started wondering: all those things I remember so vividly—have they been quietly \u0026ldquo;edited\u0026rdquo; by my own brain too?\n","permalink":"https://aimless.flybullet.net/en/posts/how-memory-flatters-us/","summary":"A childhood embarrassment resurfaced in conversation, and I realized how selectively my brain edits the past","title":"How Memory Flatters Us"},{"content":"Lately I\u0026rsquo;ve been doing some exercise—well, calling it \u0026ldquo;exercise\u0026rdquo; is generous. Really, I just want my body to feel less stiff. I\u0026rsquo;ve tried swimming, running, the gym, but they always felt like too much. The exhaustion afterward was real, and I could never stick with any of them.\nThen I discovered that walking 5 kilometers a day actually works for me.\nWalking is relaxing. Sometimes I slip into a flow state without realizing it, thinking through all sorts of things. If something comes up, I can just stop and mull it over, or look something up—total freedom. And unlike intense workouts, I don\u0026rsquo;t need recovery time afterward. By the time I get home, my energy feels the same as usual. For someone who has to take care of a kid, this is perfect.\n","permalink":"https://aimless.flybullet.net/en/posts/why-i-walk/","summary":"Swimming, running, gym—none of them stuck. Then I found that walking 5km a day actually works for me","title":"Why I Walk"}]