Nestor Arocha

The LLM code bet

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Companies and projects are using new LLM tools to do coding tasks. These are some thoughts on the changes so far and the bet that it constitutes.

The pre LLM way

Somebody has an idea and decides to either implement or hire someone to do it.

There is a tiny loop in here where the business knowledge slowly accumulates in the codebase as the code is written. I will refer to this as domain wealth .

Two sections in here do most of the heavy lifting:

documentation: Any written form of the business knowledge or processes
process: The ways people adopt to produce the desired outcome.

Poor documentation, process or implementation leads to tech debt as the codebase drifts away from the actual business. Most of the code belongs to platform, testing, libraries and has no direct business relationship.

The post LLM way

Now they use a LLM combined and prompts to produce the codebase. The current LLM services allow to provide markdown files as a way to persist the prompts. MCP is also an option to persist interfaces.

There is a tiny loop in here where the business knowledge slowly accumulates in the markdown files that have not been produced nor ever modified by the LLM.

The same two sections apply, but the process and the documentation can contain LLM outputs.

Aside from the tech debt, cognitive debt can also accrue as there is no need to fully understand the business need to produce the desired outcome.

The bet

Some projects believe that the increase of productivity (1) is greater than:

the cost of the added debt (2),
the change of developer costs (3)
the changes in procedures (4)
the LLM service (5)
the long term loss of domain wealth in code (6).

(1) I don’t think there is enough evidence to measure the changes of productivity.

(2) The added debt is also hard to measure. There are reports of teams hitting a wall of cognitive debt but like productivity it is hard to know with the current data.

(3) The changes of LLM costs is also difficult to predict. Most people report that LLMs are as useful as the knowledge and skill of the prompter. So will salaries increase for those that already have the knowledge and are willing to use LLMs. However most people that are not skilled or experienced will find harder to find jobs.

(4) The changes of procedures are unknown. Things like code reviewing, merge (pull) requests, code ideation, code design, testing strategies all have to change. Given that LLMs work in the negative space of adding restriction of what is generated, there will be a shift to restrictions compared to the traditional implementation process.

Agents can act autonomously or semiautonomously, adding further complication and imprecision to the procedures.

I believe that the tools are not quite ready for this shift. Typing systems, tests methodologies and software paradigms are not made for this level of imprecision. Ultimately this will contribute to (6)

(5) The cost of LLMs are a serious concern. The route for profitability is not clear. Models require big companies with capital investment available and hardware out of reach for most people (thank you). I have been using the heuristic of revenue/capex to conclude that the real price with consolidated players or monopolies is at least 5x the current price.

Even if the current cost is stable, this cost will continue as a rent forever while the codebase needs changes. This cost will be added to the existing infrastructure costs.

(6) Similar to (2), there is no easy way to measure this. This depends on both if the markdown description can contain domain information with enough detail and if domain implementation is a requirement to the project.

An added concern is how difficult will be to climb down from a high LLM project to a more traditional project. The procedures will need to change, and (2) and (6) will guarantee a painful transition that will make (5) hard to escape.

tags:#llm #essay

Traversing the library of Babel

Sat, 14 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On 1941, Jorge Luis Borges published the fictional short story “The Library of Babel” (La biblioteca de Babel)

a library with all the possible books, including those written in the future, waiting to be discovered.

The problem for its users us that it is impossible to separate meaning from nonsense. The book describes people leaning on religion and other beliefs to decide what is useful or isn’t.

The short story premise is analogous of the Infinite Monkey Theorem: any random generation of text with enough time will eventually lead to any finished work.

The old and the new way

For the library to be useful, readers would need to search the book that they are looking for one character at a time.

Most people think of this as writing, a skill that requires understanding of the topic, learning the language of writing and a shared interest with the reader.

But some time around 2020, transformer technology and other advances have made prompts a viable alternative to traverse the library.

Here is how it works: A machine takes a lot of energy to store a set of information of what is meaningful or isn’t. Then a conversation structure with the human emerges. The human prompts something, and the machine produces the likely continuation of that prompt.

Prompts can be requests of any kind or level of abstraction, and the machine answer can produce anything that combines any of the inputs in any way, coherent or not, trutful or not, useful or not.

LLMs do offer a way to traverse the library in a different way that in theory requires less effort compared to writing. A single prompt produces the most likely answer, and then subsequent prompts refine the generated output.

But there is a limit of precision and truthfulness that cannot be overcomed. They are random necessarily as they are statistical machines. And eventually the prompts are too long and the quality of the response starts to degrade. It cannot fully converge into a book or any other complicated form.

Who goes to the library today?

When Borges wrote his essay, libraries had a different role to today. Neither internet nor computers were invented yet. Most people access to culture relied on the library. Newspapers were there, radio was a baby and that’s about it.

Today’s libraries are less common. There are internet equivalent structures and most books, essays, papers, articles and any other form are available in there, which makes internet a new form of library.

Thinking on how to access to culture alone is too narrow for the nowadays equivalent of the library. Internet provides a lot of entertainment, work, close peer communication needs and community access.

I would argue than in the old world of seeking for information in the library, using LLMs would not make sense. Getting incorrect information knowingly would have no use.

But the LLM itself makes information access much easier, almost instantaneous. Which transforms the user of the library by inducing demand.

Propaganda, advertisement and entertainment are good candidates for its use. Suddenly, creating plausible but unverified content is very cheap and frictionless, so these modes of communication are more available. Flooding the zone.

The case for traversing programs

Programming has also been subject to this new way to traverse the universe of possible programs. In theory LLMs allow to create prototypes much faster. Programming also has self evaluating error correction mechanisms, like interpreters, verifiers, type checkers or tests that reduce the sloppiness of the final result.

But my personal experience is that the generated code is monotonous and lacks intent, which I described in the previous blog post as “LLM monotony”. [[2026-01-20-20260120223336-llm-monotony]]

It seems like over time this lack of intent or theory builds up and creates what Margaret Storey describes as Cognitive Debt, which is the careless sibling of technical debt. Eventually the cognitive debt reaches a limit of what is understood, so even the LLM lacks the understanding to manipulate it further.

To me, from a software design angle, it seems inevitable. The goal of software is to produce a executable version of the theory of the company goals, so adding more code that is not understood is a liability.

The solutions to this problem are well known. Meeting each other and share the theory building.

LLM monotony

Tue, 20 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

One limitation I have noticed when reading LLM byproduct is that the intent gets lost. Soulless information.

Summaries

When summarising a meeting the LLM is unable to register the importance of the different sections or the feeling of agreement or disagreement of various parts.

A standard meeting might have a few important or controversial points while the rest are routine agreements.

So a meeting with

a passionate argument on why the company should acquire a competitor or decide on which product line to pursue
20 maintenance items that everybody agrees on

Will be summarised with proportional allocation of time but not intent, so roughly 21 segments each and no sense of capturing disagreement.

The disagreement is captured as a yuxtaposition of opinions with no particular weight, creating a sloppy reference of items occurred and not an actual summary.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org defines summary as

a short, clear description that gives the main facts or ideas about something

Code

I have observed the same effect in code. A prompt can request the reimplementation of a function in certain style, or any style. The generated code will, if lucky, contain a piece of code that provides the functionality in question.

But the style will be off as well. A python code snippet will look like:

def my_function(argument1:type1, argument2:type2) -> None|type3:
   """
   A slighly verbose docstring explaining what the function does.
   argument1: type1
   argument2: type2
   returns: None|type3
   """

   ## small note describing step1

   content = argument1.data
   ...

   ## small note describing step2

   content_as_list = [x for x in content]
   ...

   ## small note describing step3

   return_value = library.function(content_as_list, argument2.property1)

   ## small note describing step4

   if condition
       return return_value
   else:
       return None

various techniques to assign intent get lost in the prompt. For example, the first 2 steps could be in a separate function that starts with _ to signify local module only to prepare data.

Or the step3 could be considered a separate service with its own funcion for reusability.

Perhaps step1 did not need a comment at all. Or a superfluous variable to say if LEGACY_MODEl: ....

Most of these intent revealing writing methods get lost in the prompt. They can be part of the prompt, but to truly capture intent the prompt would be the code itself.

Total Library

These byproducts are suboptimal for human consumption. Writing is a human communication tool. Intent matters because it is part of the theory building and sharing.

Over time the generated writing will reduce the amount of information per document, and increase the effort require to go through all of these reference like, intentless documents.

Borges wrote about the fictional concept of the “total library” [[]]:

Everything: but for every sensible line or accurate fact there would be millions of meaningless cacophonies, verbal farragoes, and babblings. Everything: but all the generations of mankind could pass before the dizzying shelves – shelves that obliterate the day and on which chaos lies – ever reward them with a tolerable page

This concept is similar to the thousand monkeys with typewriters, or “The Library of Babel”. All of them convey the idea that there are infinite possible writings, and that to find something valuable the effort is equivalent to writing it.

In our current predicament, LLMs would be the equivalent of both reading and writing at higher speed. An assistant available for a small nominal price so far that will produce likely outputs to whatever it consumes.

It started with a regular big library made by humans, output of millions’ effort. But as more humans used LLM outputs, the new library resembles more and more the “Total Library”. Now both humans and the assistant have to go through more reading to get useful or intentional information.

Eventually, only the reading speed of the LLM will allow to extract useful information in a reasonable timeframe. In coding, complexity will be overwhelming and assisted manipulation will be the only option.

Monopoly and hope

The big corporations would love this hypothetical scenario where most people need a LLM to perform their reading and writing. I believe this is the reason they are subsidising them despite the lack of profit plan.

And that they can of course because they are monopolies.

Internet search and social media are tipping towards rents and away from markets, and this seems like a natural next step.

It is hard to predict where LLM are going to go. On one side efficiency and performance keeps improving. On the other hand natural resources are becoming harder, plus training requires more curation. When will capital dry up and how stable the world will be are unknown.

Something that gives me hope against this power imbalance and technical usurpation of intellectual wealth is admonition. The social rules around LLM usage. The frustration of having to review slop, the shaming of those that share a made up reference.

Dijkstra wrote an essay on the foolishness of natural language programming, criticising the tools that people were trying to create back then.

These arguments will continue to exist, and there will always be demand for easy to understand texts and code.

Instability is a less hopeful but also effective way to reduce the negative effects of the LLM. When enough people start to believe incorrect things that the LLMs help produce, democracy suffers. And given how much technology is involved, I doubt that authoritarian governments will be able to maintain the delicate structures to produce the hardware or the software.

*#llm

Adaptive cycle, Ω phase, collapse

Sat, 03 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Recently I have been reading on the adaptive cycle and panarchies in general. I want to know if there is any answer to the question where things are going and how to prepare.

On my first few reads, I interpreted the adaptive cycle

as a trend that any living system follows. So while we clearly live in the K area, lately it feels that there isn’t much potential left and things are degrading, or simply not growing.

In that reductionist reading of the cycle, the choice we have is to persist on conservation by falling into the “rigidity trap”, or trigger a release by war or degrowth.

Subsequent reads helped my understanding of the “nested” and “discontinuity” concept. These adaptive cycles are nested, feeding on each other. They are separated by externally imposed discontinuity in space, time or energy mechanisms.

I believe that we are reaching the limits of our industrialisation cycle, and that the new cycle falls into a different adaptive cycle. The old cycle was dominated by oil and gas. The new one will be dominated by coal, renewables and perhaps nuclear. The new cycle has a smaller energy footprint, less energy density and will be slightly less taxing for the earth.

It will be accompanied by more adverse conditions because of resource limits and climate impacts. We will have to rely further on the traditional adaptive cycle (e.g.: harvests without a lot of fertiliser).

Reconfiguration

Assuming we can’t sustain the amount of energy per person we currently spend and that our system will crumble no matter how much we optimise so we don’t fall into the “rigidity trap”, we will experience a humankind scale Omega phase. Perhaps we are already in it.

In this analysis, culture wars and polarisation are a consequence of this mechanism. There is uncertainty over which size will the new adaptive cycle gobern. Will it be a few superpowers? Or perhaps smaller nations?. Or even nations will be unable to exert control and the power will reside at province level?

There is also the smaller scale polarisation. Religion, ethnicity, social status are all disputed in a stage of release to lead to reconfiguration.

Strategies to avoid disruption

Assuming we are not heading for the rigidity trap, I have thought of 2 ideas so far:

Following Peter Turchin cliodynamics model, the most effective way to avoid disruption is to reduce the power of the elites. In a world with lower amount of energy per person, the current wealth inequality is not sustainable.

The current elites are the techno/surveillance elites and the wealthy. Rejecting their influence is an obvious way to reduce their power.

The second idea is to invest on communities with a smaller scope. It is unclear which communities and which scopes will emerge from the reconfiguration stage, but is is safe to say that investing on the global communities (mostly with capitalistic involvement) is likely to be unsustainable long term.

In both cases, echoing Turchin, the idea is to avoid violence.

Free gifts review

Tue, 09 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Free gifts is a 2025 book by Alyssa Battistoni on capitalism , environment and freedom. A dissection of capitalism mostly through a Marxist angle but with an existentialist twist.

Summary

The starting point of the book is the analysis of nature as “free gift”. How nature doesn’t fit in the concepts of work, capital or commodity. Nature cannot get a wage nor become a commodity without human work, so it is a free of value thing that we call free gift.

[[]]

In the quest to set a value for nature, there are some freedom obstacles caused capitalism. The two constraints that the author highlights are class struggle and market unfreedom.

Markets in particular are very effective at setting the value for us as an aggregation of supply and demand that doesn’t allow to set a real value by ourselves, restricting our freedom [[]]

Some people claim that they work outside this capitalism framework. The book uses the example of mushroom pickers and fisheries as professions that can’t be fully subsumed by capitalism and its automation. However she makes very clear that they are still part of the same system, with capitalism setting the value of the goods that they extract.

The main reason these arrangements happen is that capitalism can’t fully conquer these fields.[[]]

Another aspect of the free gift that the author focuses on is pollution. She argues that it is a byproduct of capitalist production and is also treated the same way: as a 0 value object. [[]]

Similarly, most of the reproductive and caring work that mostly women do is also capitalist influenced but not fully absorbed. She argues that care is hard to optimise so they suffer from cost disease. These jobs support capitalism while not being rightly valued, and sometimes even set at 0 value [[]]

All of these factors converge into the climate crisis and the loss of freedom. The solutions that this book offers are not new, not that they could be. It has to be politics, people setting the value of things that capitalist markets can’t or won’t . [[]]

And from the freedom perspective, to learn to live within the limits that handling nature properly would impose. [[]]

Thoughts

This is an incredible book. It takes the simple premise of defining free gifts to explore many aspects of capitalism and its imposition on us by us.

It is both encouraging and crushing. The book encourages everyone to find agency through freedom in the existential sense. It is crushing as it outlines the impossibility of finding solutions within markets or monetary systems.

These limitations are inherent to markets as a method to set values, to decide what matters. It is also limited by its power. Not everything can be fully commoditised.

In many ways it is a different account of Marx alienation, charged with the individual freedom and struggle described by existentialist philosophers. A reiteration of the necessity of nature as the commons.

I personally feel the struggle in many ways. It really doesn’t matter to buy green stuff or buy less stuff while the markets will use that to simply alter prices in infinitesimal ways, beyond myself. My work contributes to better market allocation which increases extractive forces efficiency. It is a battle that can’t be won from within the market.

This change of perspective is accompanied by numerous references to philosophers, economists and climate experts. While staying relatively accessible and grounded.

*#book #review

Systems Thinking review

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Systems thinking by Diana Montalion is a 2024 book about systems thinking as a career path or work role.

It is an account of choices, skills, learnings and insights of the author over her career.

There is some valuable advice in the book: focus on communication, make your case effectively, be humble about your shortcomings, use feedback, etc. Most of the things that I would describe as experience milestones.

However, the premise of the book is that systems thinking is a career path separate from other paths. A space to grow into for people that think in the broad scope too much.

I was with the book in the first few chapters. But as the book progressed there wasn’t any strong insight, methodology or justification for the systems thinking process. It is as if the author is contemplating the successes of her career and labelling it as systems thinking in retrospective.

Two books came to mind when I was reading it: Eric Evans’ Domain Driven Design and Donella Meadows’ Thinking in Systems. They both share some insights from their career as well and they both label something in retrospective.

In my view the difference between Systems thinking and these two books is that when I read Thinking in Systems I got insight on a different way of thinking. A new methodology, new names and reframing of common patterns. DDD also created a new methodology and concepts that influenced the way that people think.

In contrast this book feels backwards. A collection of techniques to use the term to label your path, rather than a new path with new insight.

tags:#book #review

World3 is Garbage in, Garbage out

Sun, 19 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0100

World3 is the model used by the limits to growth to draw its conclusions. It is a program that ran on old computers and had certain constraints programmed that combined with the input data produced a simulation with future outcomes.

[[2024-06-02-20240602081511-brian-hayes-on-world3-model]]

In Daniel Susskind book “Growth” he echoed one of the criticisms that the readers of the New York Times had for the model:

‘[it] takes arbitrary assumptions, shakes them up and comes out with arbitrary conclusions … best summarized not as a rediscovery of the laws of nature but as a rediscovery of the oldest maxim of computer science: Garbage in, Garbage out’

[[2025-10-17-20251017154237-growth-daniel-susskind-review]]

This got me thinking. It bothered me too. I thought that the assumptions that limits to growth are necessary, unavoidable. There are many relationship we don’t know their causality, when do they operate linearly, human behavior, outside boundaries, etcetera.

How could it be any different for a book written about growth? Growth causes are, by definition, outside the realm of economics. Is it technology making us more efficient? Or are we extracting more materials? Is it a good weather year all around? Or maybe we found new oil? A new way of working?

Economics register the outcome of growth, but can’t fully explain it. Invisible hands, energy surpluses, productivity increases. They all are vague and they can’t possibly be any clearer.

To achieve certainty over growth we need to include the material world, physics, nature, anthropology and psychology. This country grew X because it consumed Y amount of extra energy, the rate of losses hasn’t changed and this pattern of behaviour has increased perceived utility by Z.

That last paragraph sounds like Garbage in, Garbage out too. It requires many assumptions to be coherent, and it might create something chaotic that can’t predict anything. Maybe anything written about growth will suffer the same fate.

Software is Garbage in, Garbage out

I have seen the same type of arguments while working developing software. Some people want to keep computation in the realm of first order logic, algebra or Turing machines. A lispian model of computation where all the types are well defined, all the code is proven.

While anything outside that realm such as software methodologies, patterns, systems thinking, Domain driven design, team topologies is somewhere between uninteresting and counterproductive.

Here is the same argument than the growth argument: Is software a method to instruct the machine to do things, a science? Or is it a method to build theory as Naur described it?

https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf

This is, in my opinion, the source of technical debt. It is the build up of discrepancies of theory over time. Computer science is not equipped with methods to deal with it because the theory and reality are beyond its boundaries. In the same way that the causes of growth are beyond economics.

It is Garbage all the way down

In both economics and computation I have deliberately drawn a line between the certainty of science and linear thinking against the loose reasoning of systems thinking and its variants. They are two sides of the same coin.

What are axioms if not the recognition of the limitations of a science. It is quite common to hear about “rational choice” as a very questionable truth of economics. Game theory, collaborative behaviour are at odds with it quite commonly.

On computation we can go all the way down to maths and Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. Less assumptions, almost no axioms. But inevitably axioms.

In both cases it is a forced perspective that is more coherent than the broader view, but does not guarantee truth. The more uncertain and broad the problem is, the less reliable are these scientific approaches. Correctness diffuses.

How to deal with all this Garbage

When facing the complexity of the real world, both approaches are flawed. Systems thinking makes global assumptions. Linear thinking narrows down to the limits of its axioms. Neither can get us closer to the truth.

All left is politics, narratives and beliefs. Which is the best we have. Why is growth a contentious topic? I believe it is because nobody really fully understands it and there isn’t a self coherent theory for it.

Is it that growth is the outcome of our intelligence? Or is it mainly that we found a lot of oil? Is it modern economics? Or is it the amount of immigration? Is it globalisation?

Is it that the software system is too coupled? Or is it that we are not following this methodology? What if we move everything outside, or everything inside? Should we make this a service?

I persuade you, you persuade me. The aggregate of opinions drive the outcome, despite its unevenness. Someone will try to formalise it and change that outcome, moving the discussion to its axioms. But it is all “Garbage in Garbage out”, even the fanciest proven axiom dependent theorem.

tags#collapse

Growth by Daniel Susskind review

Fri, 17 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0100

Growth A Reckoning is a 2024 book written by Daniel Susskind. It is a review of the history, present and future of growth.

I think the strongest part of the book is the historical review of growth. The timeline mostly refers from 1800 to the present, with Malthus and Keynes as the two most pivotal figures and GDP as the key concept that dominates the last 50 years of politics.

In these earlier parts of the book I already noticed that the narrative was slightly off. According to the book, humans have been “surviving” mostly until the 1800s, and then something changed and prosperity started.

In my understanding of the book account, these changes come from the enlightenment period, the byproduct of thoughts of many people that managed to unlock growth. I thought that the role of both industrial revolution was severely understated.

The author’s perspective is that growth is a consequence of invention, of efficiency, an outcome of the human mind. It is a choice to embrace or not, and there are very few limits to it. In his view, the drawbacks of growth are:

Inequality
Pollution or climate change
Politics

And the space of solutions are either changing GDP (gdp minimalism) or some form of degrowth. The author proposal is not too different to Kate Raworth’s doughnut economic framework of “growth agnostic progress”. With some elements of “free lunch” efficiency progress through human ingenuity and technology:

Intelectual property reform
More people
More R&D

Lastly the book cites pareto improvements, which sound like arguments that our intellect will unlock further free growth and ignore the limits. The idea of accepting tradeoffs was relegated to politics and similar to Raworth’s work, unclear.

The drift

Almost from the beginning of the book I found myself disagreeing with the narrative presented. The information was factually correct, with some missing pieces and very different judgements to the ones I have reached over time.

This is expected as growth is one of these systems thinking style of problems in which there is no true understanding of its causes beyond physics.

The main cause of the drift is that I see energy as one of the key ingredients for growth. Without energy there is no power for human inventions that then produce further growth. Human ingenuity is a necessary ingredient too, and that one does accumulate.

Steve Keen has some work explaining how relevant is energy to produce stuff compared to capital or labour.

[[]]

In a way I see degrowth as the only think that we humans can really choose We can’t choose how much we grow because we have no full control over our inventions nor how much energy is available.

But we can choose not to grow, although I agree with the author that it really isn’t a great choice. In that sense Kate Raworth’s angle seems like a better version of degrowth where prosperity is selective and decoupled from traditional growth (unclear how though).

[[]]

There is another reason the book ideas felt drifting away: resource constraints as described by the limits to growth. Water, sand and oil require more and more energy over time, and reduce the amount of growth available. See Charlie S Hall work in terms of EROI.

[[]]

These two omissions made really hard to follow the rest of the book. The appeal to better intellectual property laws, or more R&D, or more people seem like a choice that we can make for our own betterment.

But if your line of thinking is closer to the idea that we have no choice, all of these suggestions seem like fantasy.

I also found myself disagreeing with the framing of globalism as a choice in a similar way to energy. It is a choice to decide how global are policies when there is enough energy and technology to enforce them.

Global capital would not be an option if the energy used by civilisation goes below certain threshold. On some hot takes on what the world would look like, see [[2025-01-04-20250104125645-peter-zeihan-the-end-of-the-world-is-just-the-beginning]]. Also a similar EROI framing of what’s possible see [[]] Jessica Lambert

Summary

I enjoyed the initial growth and GDP history, and got progressively more annoyed as I perceived the opinions and judgement were more detached from my own perspective. I did not see a compelling argument, just omissions and arbitrariness. Which is the same criticism against the book “limits to growth” that the book echoes.

*#book #review

Scaling back note automation

Thu, 09 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0100

I recently read the bullet journal book. I think it is an uneven book, but the method is solid. The author emphasises using a pen and paper as it helps to form memories, and it matches both studies and my personal experience.

At the same time I have been rolling back some of the automation aids I had for my notes. In particular I had a zettelkasten style directory generation that would emulate the tree hierarchy by checking links and dates.

The problem was that I wasn’t using the generated index at all. It helped to get the last few topics if I missed context, but not to find old notes.

I was using search as a crutch, which is also an impediment to learn the paths to get to the notes or the notes themselves.

So some time ago I started to use a manual index similar to Luhmann’s method as described in How to Take Smart Notes, and use the daily notes as an index similar to the bullet journal.

I think the ownership of the index is the important part. The path to remember how to get to a note. Even the automated timestamp is too hard to use.

While this change has been an improvement in my overall system, it also made me realised how many iterations of my notes I have done. And the big gap in them caused by relying on google search, or email search, or task search.

In all of these cases I gave up on my ownership of the index, even for my own files. Which in my experience is the starting point of getting distracted. Literally the ownership of that entry point.

AI Art

Why would anyone use LLMs for personal notes? The goal is to remember, to sharpen thought. I can understand its use when it is to write for others though (just about).

Recently I read https://theoatmeal.com/comics/ai_art by Matthew Inman. It is good and also raises an interesting idea. It seems that there is a distinction between what is meaningful to each of us and deserves our attention versus what we think as chores.

The argument being that it can be acceptable to use LLMs for chores.

I agree with this line of thought: In an ideal world I would rather create a network of people that exchange valuable things that other think of as chores.

With LLMs we are automating them away destroying the network itself, but maybe opening new networks by changing what is chore and isn’t and making us more efficient.

Like modern industrial farming.

While also increasing the extent the structures of power, which is a net negative.

Art is more than art

Inman’s cartoon includes the idea that the purpose of his art is to communicate an emotion, and that the LLM takes that emotion away.

I do not know if the more narrow definition of art as a creation aside usefulness would consider his comics more than art.

Certainly note indexes are not for external consumption, although they do evoke an emotion. The clarity of ownership of the path of the ideas, the retelling of the memories, the classification imposed by our sense making of the world.

The active choice of what is ours vs what is not.

We could have a copy of our thoughts recorded and classified by a machine. An entity separate of us, animated by a external power that decides its actions.

Or simply keep the index, notes, work, skill as part of ourselves.

*#notesystem

[[]]

Cruel Optimism review

Wed, 08 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0100

Cruel optimism is a 2011 book written by Lauren Berlant. Very hard to read. I doubted my ability to read English.

Sentence structure is complicated, particularly when the message becomes more introspective. Vocabulary is broad, but generally it feels necessary because how complex the topic is: any writting about the perception of the present can’t possibly be simple.

The book is an exploration of the concept “cruel optimism”. A relationship with something or someone that has some hope embedded but at the same time it cannot be achieved because of its constraints.

This exploration happens through the review or deconstruction of various books, poems, movies, performances. Each of them add a slightly different angle though the struggles of its people: Queerness or fatness or poverty or gender or social class.

All of them experience some form of detachment between the roles that their environment assigns to them (normativity) and their actual reality. This constant subconscious struggle leads to an impasse which is the term the author uses to describe their situation.

They want to get better but the constraints of the system they participate on don’t allow them to.

My take is that the overall critique is to societal structure when imposed to us. As we live in a highly social, class and economic defined society this is a very useful angle to explore. Awareness of these dynamics can bring relief, in the same way that awareness of gambling can allow recovery.

Despite the struggle reading it, I highly recommend this book for a deep exploration of the daily experience. In particular for those struggling with modernity’s predicament.

#book #review