In the brain dumps I try to clear my head of everything I’ve experienced, read, and learned in a month. Primarily as a journal for myself — but maybe useful to you, too.
Learnings
Measure it, don’t guess it.
This month I kept building on last month’s „system“ — bundling how Claude starts a session, checking my own knowledge base against itself automatically. It felt faster. It felt smarter. So instead of trusting the feeling, I built a tracker. Turns out „feels more efficient“ and „is measurably more efficient“ are two different claims, and only one of them is worth anything. Data lands end of July. I’ll report either way — that’s the deal you make once you decide to measure something instead of assume it.
Kids don’t need your blessing. They need cover.
My oldest got into a professional esports development program this month — one of roughly 470 applicants, accepted. He wants to leave the traditional school track after next year to chase it. My job here wasn’t to understand competitive gaming as a career path — I genuinely don’t, not fully. It was to make sure the boring stuff underneath still holds: health insurance stays continuous, an actual apprenticeship runs alongside it, nothing falls through a bureaucratic crack while he goes after something real. Support doesn’t require comprehension. It requires attention to the parts that would otherwise quietly break.
The boring local model wins again.
Spent time this month comparing speech-to-text models for dictation on my own machine. The flashier one got almost everything right — except my own birthdate, which it insisted on spelling out in words instead of digits. The smaller, less-hyped model got it right, every time, no correction needed. No hype, indeed: sometimes the unglamorous option that’s actually tuned to what you need beats the one with the better demo reel. So now it’s Whisper Small until I get fed up again.
Front row, whatever they’re into.
Four concerts with the kids this month — one of them singing on stage with her class, one discovering his first mosh pit, one hearing a band play a venue for the first time ever in its history. Everything somehow also my genre. All of it worth being there for. Showing up for what they love, (and as a bonus what you’d have picked yourself), might be the highest-leverage thing on this whole list. If you’re interested: 4k United, Limp Bizkit, Nina Chuba, System of a down.
Links
-
Andrej Karpathy — The LLM Wiki Pattern · The idea behind half the „second brain“ tooling showing up on GitHub right now: instead of retrieving from raw documents at query time, have the LLM incrementally build and maintain a persistent, self-correcting wiki. I’ve been running a version of this for months without having read the source. Reading it properly this month closed the loop. → Gist
-
rotatingsandwiches.com · A website that is, without exaggeration, only animated GIFs of sandwiches rotating slowly on a plate. No text. No explanation. No point. I have no notes, only respect. → rotatingsandwiches.com
-
neal.fun — Printing Money · Visualizes exactly how fast different companies and governments create or burn money, in real time, side by side. Makes abstract balance-sheet numbers viscerally stupid or viscerally alarming, depending on which bar you’re looking at. → neal.fun/printing-money
Quote
„Being talented matters. But being dependable, useful, and easy to work with probably matters more than people want to admit.“
— Mike Layne
What are the brain dumps? Monthly entries where I empty my head — learnings, links, quotes. Started in 2015, back now. If you were here back then: good to see you’re still around.