A isFavorite: Bool is the most violent compression anyone's ever done to a feeling. "I loved that shot of espresso on a rainy Tuesday when the grind finally clicked" gets crushed down to a single byte. The heart icon is a one-byte shrine to a memory it can't actually hold.

The sad, nerdy part is that we know one byte is nowhere near enough to be true, and we also know it's exactly enough to be useful. So we ship it. A real model of why you loved something can't be computed, and even if it could, nobody's tapping through twelve screens to log it. A faithful record of the feeling is useless. A sliver of a truth you can query is gold. That's what a favorite button really is. A quiet admission that we'd rather keep a searchable lie than an unsearchable truth.

And that's most of data modeling, honestly. The question is never "how do we represent reality?" It's "how much of reality can we throw away before the query stops coming back?"

PS: A Bool is represented using a byte in most languages as opposed to a bit because the CPU can't directly address a bit.

Amdahl's Law says the speedup you get from throwing more workers at a problem is capped by the part that can't be split. You can run a thousand agents in parallel and still sit there waiting on the one commit that has to happen in order. It's the same as a company hiring a thousand engineers and still grinding to a halt because one person/team understands the deploy script.

Parallelism doesn't kill the bottleneck. It just clears everything else out of the way until the bottleneck is the only thing left standing, lit up, impossible to ignore. The more you speed up the easy parts, the more obvious it gets that the slow part was always the drag.

Most of what we call "scaling" is just elaborate work to avoid looking straight at the one step we never wanted to deal with. We'll automate, distribute, and optimize around it forever, because that feels like progress, and staring at the actual problem doesn't.

Solving and optimizing for that is the real efficiency-unlock.

Philosophers spent two thousand years on the Ship of Theseus: replace every plank one by one, is it still the same ship? A programmer heard the question, ran the planks through a hash function, and said "no, it's a different ship, here's the receipt, can we go to lunch."

Turns out the riddle was only hard because everyone insisted the answer had to be profound. Ask "the same in what sense, and who's asking" and it stops being philosophy and becomes inventory.

I’ve landed on a simple rule. Generative models handle the mundanity in my life: whatever bores me.

If the task needs my mind, my mind does it. That’s my guardrail against a certain quiet atrophy.

The creative, exciting, emotional, problem-solving parts are worth keeping for myself. That’s the human experience I won’t give up on.

Perhaps my most abstract yet confluent article about my thoughts on AI and where it's headed, yet.

Here are some of my thoughts about Cloudflare's Markdown for Agents and the impact it would have on accelerating the zero-click internet.

If you like this format of video, please give it a like and subscribe to Nihil Codes on YouTube.

Undeniable proof that LLMs have social anxiety just like humans.

/s

Sugar withdrawal is quite something.

Apple Music needs a Picture-in-Picture mode for Live Lyrics.

I've been thinking. Seating, in general, sucks! More thoughts will follow.

It's genuinely good food when it doesn't allow you to be bothered by how shitty the place is.

— Rahul's (my brother) insightful yardstick.

Some movies fade once you “know.” The genius of Arrival is that rewatching it isn't redundancy. Every viewing becomes an act of homage that mirrors the film's own architecture.

Those who know, know.

The short story it is loosely based on—Story of Your Life, although quite different from the movie, is also worth a read.

A pedestrian-friendly horn would go a long way in India. Sure, reducing honking is the real fix. But inside AC cars, horns are muffled; outside, they're deafening. The class divide echoes loudest in decibels.

And yet, as the world changes, I am neither stuck in time nor rushing to catch the first wagon. I prefer to stand with one foot forward and the other lingering behind. In that spread, in that gradient, there is a kind of depth—holding context from what was while venturing into what is becoming. It brings with it discomfort, the ache of missing what once was, but that is simply the cost of change.

Remembering is how we soften that cost, how we keep the past alive even as we move forward.

Taking a flight has always felt like one of the last rituals of the human condition where disconnection was still possible. There is something quietly bittersweet about it. The last texts sent, the goodbye calls made, the soft “I will miss yous” offered before the world slips out of reach. Then comes the waiting: loved ones tracking your path across the sky, sending their messages only when they imagine you’ve landed, when they believe you’ve found your signal again. For a few suspended hours, life allows a rare interlude, an enforced distance, a pocket of solitude in an always-available world.

But with the spread of onboard Wi-Fi, even this gentle distance, this small modern human ritual of absence, is beginning to vanish.

I wrote about a man I saw on the streets, walking by himself, enjoying an ice cream. We shared a quick glance and a smile. It's a quick one. Read below.

When I was little, our 40-year-old house felt haunted in ways only a child can believe. If anything so much as shifted or creaked on its own, I'd freeze in terror. My mother reminded me of that today, as we sat in the very same house, now older and renovated but still full of memory. She looked at the robot vacuum gliding across the floor and said, “Isn't it strange? Back then, an object moving by itself was the scariest thing. Now it's just everyday life.” In her words was the weight of a whole generation of change.

AI coding tools are the new LEGO for adults. They are so much fun, and have truly shortened the gratification loop for hobby projects!

Some people buy land, some others buy domain names.

There’s a quiet joy in a product that feels right in your hand—solid, balanced, with just the right heft.

You can’t be a market purist and anti–walled gardens. Pick a lane. Enclosure, lock-in, and moats are features of unchecked capitalism, not bugs.

Straight roads are for getting somewhere; winding roads are for living.