Dave Remy

@CoachDanGo And is there a cheat code to consistent? I think it is committing to the smallest increment. One push-up, show up at the gym, 10 minute bike ride. Then see what happens

The biggest cheat code on the planet is being consistent. Show up every day. Hit the target regardless of how you feel. Work when you're not motivated. Eat clean when no one is watching. Not everyone who's consistent wins. But you won't find one person winning who's inconsistent.

@ceciATL Curiosity clues

the things you are drawn to naturally matter a lot. they are clues. your job is to figure out why.

It can be unsettling when you notice that a technical assumption you've been making for 40 years has quietly expired. This happened to me a few minutes ago. I maintain a game called "greed". It's an old-style game from the days of character-cell terminals. Not quite a classic deserving of museum status like Colossal Cave Adventure or nethack, but worth keeping alive because it's still solidly playable. And people still are playing it, because yesterday I got a minor bug report about it. Nothing user-visible, just a silly C build problem. I fixed it. Then, because I'm generally trying to get my old C projects out of C into more modern and safer languages, I tried asking my robot friend to port it to Rust. Which it promptly did. But then I noticed something that irritated me. The Rust code had a bunch of unsafe blocks in it, which went directly against my reasons for moving it to Rust. On further examination, I discovered that it was calling the C curses library to do its screen painting. This is where I have to explain about curses. It's an ancient C library for writing TUIs. It looks in your environment for a variable named TERM, uses its value to dredge a bunch of magic strings out of a system-wide database called "terminfo" that tells it how to manipulate your terminal, and then uses those magic strings for screen painting. On modern systems, TERM is always some variant of a color ANSI terminal. In times past, when people attached a wild variety of character cell terminals to Unix systems rather than just sitting at the console, it could have been lots of other things. Those days are gone, but the habit of always going through terminfo so you can support a couple of hundred terminal types has persisted. I prod robot friend to find me a pure Rust equivalent of curses so I don't have to do unsafe and call C code. It says, yes, there is such a thing and it's called crossterm. I tell it: change this code to use crossterm. Robot friend grinds for a bit, and then tells me it can't do that because I don't have cargo (the Rust package manager) installed. This is because I never write Rust by hand. When I ship programs written in Rust, it's because I ported them from some other language and don't expect to ever touch them again without having a robot to do the code-grinding for me. This is when things get slightly strange. It tells me that instead of porting to crossterm, it has written into the greed Rust source its own little screen-painting backend the implements a subset of curses calls and (this is the important part) assumes it's talking to a color ANSI terminal. Robot friend is not an old Unix hand. It doesn't know the unwritten law of the deep magic that you always go through terminfo because...because you might have to support hundreds of terminal types that no longer exist in this century? I blink. I look at the Rust code for the back end. It is small and elegant. No more unsafe. No more dragging around a bunch of C library code. This is ... the right thing? I push it to the public repository. What sealed the deal is that code, even code in a language as rebarbative as Rust, is wet clay now. If, against all odds I get a bug report that says somebody wants to play greed on something that isn't an ANSI terminal emulator, reinstating full curses support will take a one-sentence prompt to my robot friend and mere minutes. I hadn't had to directly confront before the fact that the entire set of assumptions that made TERM and terminfo a thing are as obsolete as dial-up acoustic modems. Still, the moment when I tossed away one of the ancient laws of Unix coding felt a bit like the universe lurching sideways. Indeed do many things come to pass...

The right kind of ambition is to compete against yourself. To be the best version of yourself.

@sarah_edo I particularly liked the insight from the book that communication is less about “transmitting information” and more about building shared understanding

Supercommunicators was a really good book. It gave a lot of evidence and didn't shy away from saying headon what is challenging. It helped give some tools and framing. Some stuff you kind of know intuitively but naming it helps. Highly recommended.

@blakeaburge This reminds me of Stephen Coveys’ Important but not Urgent category in his 4 quadrants. bishophouse.com/wp-content/upl…

One of the best pieces of advice I ever got: If you want a calmer life, you need to address small problems while they’re still small. The cost of dealing with an issue rarely gets cheaper with time. Procrastination turns uncomfortable things into unavoidable things.

@DanielMiessler @trq212 Interesting idea Daniel, kind of like Model View Controller architecture with the .md as the model and html as the view layer .. and you could have multiple views .. and a human wouldn’t necessarily have to read the .md

This is really cool thinking from @trq212 here, but I think I disagree with the solution. He makes a great point about Markdown being more difficult to share and communicate ideas with, because formatting and visuals can make things super easy to understand. My problem with the approach is that, by trading editabilty for readability, we’re separating we humans even further from the creation process. I value Markdown because I value text. And I value text because I see it as one step away from thought. I believe thinking is the one thing we should be careful not to outsource, and I worry what this idea smuggles in is a major step toward making our creations opaque to humans. Not just AI's creations, but ours as well. The reason I value Paul Graham so much is because of the idea compression work that goes into writing super clean prose. It's difficult to write clearly because it requires thinking clearly. Text makes your ideas naked, and I like that. - What is the problem, exactly? - What should we do to solve it? - Why is our solution better than alternatives? I love the challenge of crystalizing this kind of critical stuff in pure text before any technology is involved. If we're not writing that text ourselves, and then editing it, it starts to feel a lot like bringing a strong robot to the gym. I worry that if we vibe-think to AI and have it spit out amazing HTML, we're instantly disconnected from the idea. Like where did the idea go? It started as vibes and got put through a woodchipper and turned into someone else's HTML. Can I see it in 4 simple bullets? Can I stare at it? Can I grapple with it. Can I tweak it? It's an idea. I need to be able to wrestle with it. Of course we can ask the AI to summarize its brilliant HTML document into four bullets, but we'll have lost through compression and expansion some percentage of the original. Maybe I'm being overly emotional here. I just feel like if you didn't put the hard thinking and writing work into the original idea, and then maintain it in a format that's easy for humans to read and edit, then you have somehow surrendered something Holy to the machines. I say this as a total AI maximalist. But I get the point he's making, and I think it's super valid. It's hard to explain or convince people of things with a giant text file. Formatting massively helps. Images massively help. Even an interface or a video or something. So we're synched on that. I just think it might be better to come at the output we both want in a different way. - MARKDOWN: Easy for humans to write, hard for humans to read. - HTML: Hard for humans to write, easy for humans to read. Maybe the solution isn't moving the first step to HTML where it becomes more opaque to both agents and humans (plus the versioning issues Thariq talked about). Maybe the solution is something crazy like document pairing: like you have the thought file and you have the presentation file(s). The proposal is to ask AI to just write HTML, right? Well why not just have a separate but linked file for that? One is for crystal-clear human creation and sync between human and AI. Simplicity, clarity, precision, and human editability. And then AI can produce whatever from that. Images, diagrams, videos, or whatever. And if you want, yes, a full HTML file that contains all of them. And that can be what you use to present or share the idea with audiences. (Plus there's the fact that some file formats are literally directories, which could be shared with lots of related content, and then there's also things like .mdx that allow for richer content in Markdown, etc.) I hate the idea of multiple files, but I think it's far preferable to losing the transparent, editable connection to the idea that you get with text. Plus, the better and cheaper AI gets, the more trivial it will be to have the core thought file plus n-number of associated versions or formats that are useful for different audiences. Basically I think it's much easier for AI to make a rich and shareable version of clean, editable thought, in the form of text, than it is for humans to stay connected with ideas as opaque HTML. And I think the human thought-to-text connection is the most important thing to preserve. Still thinking it through, however, and massive thanks to @trq212 for the push for all of us to evolve on this.

I’m going to adopt a lot of this. It’s beyond just switching from markdown to html for use with Claude. It includes ideas about how to help Claude help you with feedback to put back into the Claude prompt. Really cool stuff.

@TheBodtrainer @CoachDanGo Agree, and mobility

@CoachDanGo Agreed except cardio is the basic everyone picks. The one they skip is resistance training. After 40, that's the basic that decides whether you stay independent or not. Boring. Unsexy. Non-negotiable.

The fittest people I know have a high tolerance for boring consistency. They do the same workouts, eat similar meals, stick to a sleep routine, and do their cardio. While everyone else is chasing shiny objects, they're getting better at the boring basics.

@davefarley77 What are your thoughts about how to apply this in the ai assistant coding context Dave? Is it possible to have strong architecture and design for change in this context in your opinion?

What is the fundamental measure of quality in software? It isn't speed, and it isn't security. Those things are important, but the absolute fundamental measure of quality in our industry is our ability to change the software. Everything else is secondary. 🧵 1/5

@nickcammarata product idea. Software that monitors your agents, when no agent needs attention it provides guided meditation.

work has never been more zen. you can meditate 15m of every hour while your agents churn, like zen monks meditating15m out of every hour doing chores. spend the 45m in awake awareness flowing with your agents, rest in formal practice, ends up at 4hrs of formal practice a day

@mattpocockuk I often just ask for a handoff prompt copied to my clipboard which Claude happily gives me. Then /clear. Then paste and go.

/handoff might be my new favourite skill

@Seanfrank @nummanali Option 2 is real, and the team might be agents

two team styles crushing it right now: 1- young, no life, 12 hour days, VERY SMALL TEAM, in office, 6 days a week, hustle hustle hustle 2- remote, everyone is an expert, fully autonomous, results driven high performance culture, fully embracing ai no middle ground. no hybrid.

@Codie_Sanchez It seems like most people have done painfully hard things but perhaps filed them away as "shit that happened" rather than "thing that built me"

My new favorite interview question, "What is the hardest thing you have ever done, tell me about it." Sadly shocking how many have NEVER done something painfully hard.

@bluewmist Yes, kind of like atomic habits. Don't do 100 pushups just do 1, commit to 1, and watch what happens.

every time you replace “this is hard” with “what’s the first step?” you shift brain activity from your amygdala (fear) to your prefrontal cortex (problem-solving). that’s neuroplasticity in real time.

@drgurner Agency

Most precious things of the future: Energy, Water, Privacy

@CoachDanGo Yes, after having lost a good amount of weight over a long stretch, I am surprised how little food is needed to maintain body weight and body fat % (13.8% BFP in my 60s). For me, focusing on protein and letting other macros fit in has been key.

Eating healthy is actually eating normally but most people think it’s dieting.

@ChristineCarril @blakeaburge Wow that’s amazing.

@daveremy @blakeaburge I have, and loved it. Annie and I also led a workshop together a bit after covid. Big fan of her work.

Choose your words carefully. The way you talk about your life shapes how you experience it. Call everything stressful, & it'll feel that way. Over time, the way you speak becomes the way you think. The way you think becomes the way you act. And the way you act becomes your life.

@jasonfried @GauravSharma So true. I have an app in Apple TestFlight has been “almost ready” for weeks now … just polish needed, right?

The last 20% isn't most of the work, it's all of the work.