Pedro Antúnez

A mathematician noticed that the scientists at Bell Labs who shut their office door to focus got more done that week, and the ones who left it open and got interrupted all day won Nobel Prizes. He spent 30 years figuring out why the interruptions were the reason. His name was Richard Hamming, and he had earned the right to notice things like this. He won the Turing Award. He invented the codes that let every computer on earth catch and fix its own errors. And for 30 years he ate lunch in the same Bell Labs cafeteria, watching which of his brilliant colleagues became legends and which ones quietly disappeared. Near the end of his life he put everything he saw into one book. It's called The Art of Doing Science and Engineering. The open door thing is the part everyone quotes, but almost nobody sits with what it actually means. The closed-door scientists were not lazy. They were disciplined. They protected their time. And over a single afternoon, they won. No interruptions, more output. But stretch that out over 30 years and something strange happened. The open-door people pulled miles ahead. Every idea drifting down the hallway walked through their open door. Every problem someone else was stuck on landed on their desk. Ten years in, they were working on questions the closed-door people didn't even know existed yet. The interruptions weren't stealing their focus. They were feeding it. That's the whole book in one image. The thing that looks like a cost is often the investment. He does the same move again and again. When Bell Labs refused to give him the team of programmers he asked for, he didn't sulk and he didn't quit. He sat with the rejection for weeks. Then he turned it inside out and asked why the machines couldn't just write the programs themselves. That single flipped question pushed him straight to the frontier of computer science. The wall became the door. Then there's the part that hurts to read. Hamming said most scientists spend their whole careers dodging the biggest problem in their field. Not because they can't see it. They see it fine. They avoid it because the odds of failing are high, and failing on a big problem is embarrassing. So they pick a safe problem sitting right next to it, solve it cleanly, publish, and move on. And because they never once swing at the hard one, they never hit it. If you do not work on important problems, you will not do important work. He said it flatly, like it was arithmetic, because it is. The last idea is the one I keep coming back to. He said knowledge compounds like money left in a bank. Someone who works 10% harder than you does not finish 10% ahead over a lifetime. They finish twice as far ahead, because the gap doesn't add up year by year. It multiplies. And it multiplies silently for a long time before anyone can see the distance. He closed on a line I've never been able to shake. Luck favors the prepared mind. He didn't mean it as a poster. He meant it as an instruction. You don't wait around hoping luck finds you. You build the exact conditions where it can land, then you stand there long enough for it to happen. Open doors. Hard problems. Questions turned inside out. Hours stacked on hours. Hamming died in 1998. He gave his final lecture a few weeks before, at 82. The book is still in print. The lectures are free online. The manual for a career that actually matters has been sitting in the open for years. Most of the people who need it will never open it.

José Mourinho in training today. 🇵🇹

Jeff Bezos reveals why compromise is one of the worst ways to resolve a disagreement "An example of a really bad way of coming to agreement is compromise. If I say the ceiling is 11 feet and you say 12 feet, we say let's call it 11 and a half. That's compromise" "The advantage of compromise is it's low energy. But it doesn't lead to truth" "Another really bad resolution mechanism is who's more stubborn. Two executives disagree, they have a war of attrition, and whichever one gets exhausted first capitulates. You haven't arrived at truth, and this is very demoralizing" "Escalation is better than a war of attrition. Escalate to your boss and say, we can't agree, we like each other, we're respectful, but we strongly disagree, we need you to make a decision" "Exhausting the other person is not truth seeking. Compromise is not truth seeking"

Silencio sepulcral en el Club de la Ceja

Me está dando un coraje enorme comprobar que ya la IA resuelve perfectamente ya casi cualquier tarea burocrática administrativa que se haga con un ordenador. La de tiempo y horas irrecuperables que habré perdido de mis años mozos, hasta los 35 que tengo ahora... Los que sois jóvenes ahora, montaos un agente y aprovechad ese tiempo, que la vida vuela y se esfuma recopilando facturas, comprando billetes de tren, coordinando reuniones... 😙

Acabo de pagar 320 € por los libros de texto de mi hijo. Mi hija hizo el mismo curso hace solo dos años y solo le sirve un libro. ¿De verdad han cambiado tanto las matemáticas o la filosofía en 24 meses? Qué gran negocio tienen montado las editoriales y los colegios.

Coca-Cola unveils a new global brand identity

One pattern I find useful for working with LLMs is a nice long ramble session. Sometimes the LLM needs more bits to understand what you're trying to achieve, but you're too lazy to type them. In these cases I like to lean back, switch to /voice and just ramble for like 10 minutes, total mess, anything goes, full stream of consciousness. Sometimes I declare it up top, something like "switching to speech recognition sorry for any typos...". Sometimes I turn it into a small interview of a few turns. But I find that the LLMs are somehow very good at reconstructing long incoherent rambles and often their echo of your own tangle of thoughts comes out quite a bit cleaner than what you started with. The result is that you improve the mind meld and have to correct things less from that point on.