Attention Copilot

Most of what I actually need help with, I never think to tell a model. But why is it on me to remember? Our new paper asks: what if AI could proactively specialize to individuals and the tasks they’re carrying out at this very moment? 🧵

Building an operating system for a company that teaches people to actually feel their way through resistance instead of white-knuckling productivity. Root-cause focus coaching. The market needs more of this.

doing mech interp research with agents is way more fun but also exhausting than doing it solo ime. it's like managing eight researchers each who have results or questions every 4 minutes. my brain's cpu just stays at 100%, agents were supposed to reduce brain's cpu

Breakthroughs Aren’t Results Everyone’s seen breakthroughs that didn’t last. A “life-changing” retreat, an insight that made your whole body relax for the first time… And then you, uh, ‘went back to normal’. Breakthroughs aren’t results. Results are results: Asking people out for the first time, and getting into a relationship. Going from eating alone to hosting parties for friends every week. Negotiating for the first time, and saving millions. Life is obviously better months—years—later. If life goes back to ‘normal’, it isn’t a result.

In the era of algorithmic distraction, the ability to maintain a single thread of thought for four hours is a superpower. It is the only way to solve hard problems.

AI breaks as many markets as it enables. For example, sales and marketing will become way harder due to AI spam. Proctoring and verification will become huge. They’ll merge with KYC to become a large fraction of the economy, given all the AI fakes. Personal trainers to maintain focus will be a thing too. Call them personal brainers.

Dharma teachers don’t like to be sales-y and tend to accept one-off bookings, but afaict the key challenges many students face are 1) meditating regularly and 2) following structured plans with experiments. It would be a service to nudge students to prepaid commitments.

People like Tobi are flying because they’ve been training the muscle to make 100 high level ambiguous decisions a day for a decade Sudoku programmers who enjoy the calm satisfaction of solving logic puzzles are exhausted because they’ve never had to use this muscle so much before But mental muscles can be strengthened, it just takes time

this one is going to kind of suck to build, but that is itself a bad attitude. no use clenching in anticipation of how hard a project might be anymore. First of all, I don't really know because Claude is helping. Second, the more I relax and "just ask", the better the result