Working Notes: a commonplace notebook for recording & exploring ideas.
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— Kunal
This has been a fairly busy week. I've settled on using this newsletter as my microblog, accumulating entries over the week (that I keep refining till Sunday), and then start all over again. It's slightly more coherent than having to manage different accounts.
Used some more travel time to continue iterating on my first essay for the year, djn. Writing the essay cleared my head a lot, particularly around vibe limits, or risk management -- it took several iterations to get the graph to a place that felt intuitive.
I've fallen out of practice with writing coherently, the essays are a good way to rebuild those muscles. This time around I'm trying to use both Claude and Codex as line editors; the last time I hired real editors but that felt a bit too expensive just for the sake of writing practice.
Given how painful writing can be I'm very annoyed it helps clear up how I think so much.
As I explore ways to learn faster I've been exploring ways to use agents to review and improve my writing, without directly rewriting anything. That way I can generally improve and make writing smoother again.
The Worst Possible Outcome would be if I internalized the ChatGPT voice, but I think I should be able to watch out for that and prevent it, and explicitly prompt the agents accordingly. So far the structural feedback has resonated well.
This week's experiment is asking Claude to help me write as a mix of some of the writers I look up to a lot.
A recent habit I've picked up is to quickly run through a typ.ing challenge or exercise before I start working as a quick warmup and brain reset. The accuracy and speed I hit also gives me quick feedback around how fresh and comfortable I happen to be at that point of time, which is useful.
The website is fairly wonderful and my favorite of a lot of different typing tutors / challenges I've used online: all the way from the venerable Gnu Typist to Typeracer and ZType which is satisfying on several levels. It's run by ZSA: their keyboards have always been tempting but I'm currently extremely satisfied by the Nuphy while I'm out and about and the Glove80 while I'm at a desk.
The reset exercise that prompted this post:
π Todayβs typ.ing daily challenge:
π Speed: 125wpm
π― Accuracy: 100.00%
π₯ Position: 2 out of 87 players today
π₯ Streak: 9
π typ.ing/daily
Generally, I only trust I understand something if I can implement it.
My new favorite way to learn and internalize how a given system works is to get Claude to write out an execution plan for me. And then I go ahead and implement to the best of my ability and use Claude for debugging when I get stuck.
I used this to play with GRPO to some success with very limited time, and I've been doing the same with flow matching. It does mean I don't build as much debugging muscle up front as I'd normally do while struggling through a problem, but it significantly increases the amount of exploration I can do without repeatedly getting exhausted.
Asking for idiomatic ways to do things after writing them up also helps me improve much faster.
I asked Claude to list general design constraints: a more up to date list of numbers everyone should know; and then to rearrange them so that everything was in GB/s so I could keep things straight in my head.
This is useful enough I wanted to make sure I captured it somewhere; Claude's output is saved here.