Threads

Conversations, thoughts, half-ideas, things I am starting to explore.

19.05.2026

started playing chess myself again after watching god-tier play of hikaru, levi, magnus. thought i understood chess by watching. tried blitz and brutally realized i didn't.
150-300 elo. accuracy below 50%. one game i even managed a 35 material disatvantage because i wasn't paying attention.

watched more. saw patterns i'd missed.
tried puzzles and solved 400+.
pins, skewers, basic mates. watched more. saw even more depth.

now i switched to slow chess. untimed bot games. some evaluate at 1400.
doesn't mean i'm 1400. means with infinite time, i can sometimes see what to do.

each iteration uncovered more.
and there is so much more to chess than i imagined.

then found GM José Raúl Capablanca.

everyone learns by memorizing openings. hundreds of variations.
capablanca reduced the entire game to 7 principles:

1. check for hanging pieces every move: yours and theirs. before anything else. loose pieces drop off. most games below 1500 are decided by one side leaving a piece undefended, not by deep strategy
2. activate your king, restrict opponent's king: centralize yours, cut off theirs. in the endgame the king is a fighting piece
3. prioritize passed pawns: main offensive plan is to create and advance them. a passed pawn must be pushed
4. rule of trade-offs: winning? trade pieces, keep pawns. losing? trade pawns, keep pieces, seek draw
5. prevent opponent plans (prophylaxis): determine what they want, stop it before pursuing your own
6. attack weaknesses, principle of two weaknesses: one weakness rarely loses. create a second on the other side of the board, stretch the defense until it tears
7. know basic endgames cold: king+pawn vs king, opposition, square rule, lucena, philidor. without these the rest is theatre

bishop endgames add some more:

• place your pawns on opposite color to your bishop
• force opponent's pawns onto same color as their bishop
• restricts their bishop, creates permanent targets, maximizes yours

the more i learn, the more there is.
but capablanca shows it can still be thought about simply.
which is very elegant to me.

i realized that i already do this instinctively.
not with rules but with board state.
i tend to mercilessly trade pieces to reach endgames.
fewer pieces -> fewer branches -> clearer position -> less room for mistakes

"The winner of the game is the player who makes the next-to-last mistake."
— Savielly Tartakower

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12.05.2026

looked into autism traits today to understand people better.
namely how perception of marketing and manipulation is affected by rational neurodivergence which made me stumble on the word "anthropomorphism":

objects as if they are human in appearance, character, or behaviour

this made something CLICK about CS vocabulary.
many concepts are inherently anthropomorphized by design:

emotions:        compiler is angry, service is happy/sad/healthy,
                 process is starving, thread is waiting patiently

relationships:   parent/child process, orphaned container,
                 master/slave (deprecated), sibling nodes

human actions:   daemon woke up, server died/killed, worker is idle,
                 garbage collector cleaned up, service is listening,
                 endpoints are talking, connection refused

human states:    process sleeping/running, cache is fresh/stale,
                 bit is dirty/clean, link is alive/dead

vs non-human but still metaphorical:

borrowed names:  zombie, worm, trojan horse, spider, crawler
architecture:    pipeline, gateway, backbone, bridge
military:        payload, attack, exploit, kill chain

the concepts aren't new to me. the label is.
the conceptual metaphors are no longer invisible.

found an umbrella term: tropes (meaning-shift)

tropes
|- metaphor          "time is money"
|- metonymy          "White House said"
|- synecdoche        "boots on the ground"
|- personification   "wind whispered"
|- anthropomorphism  "compiler is angry"
|- reification       "market decided"
+- irony, hyperbole, litotes...

was aware the shifts exist.
now i can name them.

also learned chiasmus today: reversed term order for symmetry.

"Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country" (JFK)

Breakdown:

ask not   what your country   can do   for you
ask       what you            can do   for your country

uses elegant structure to aid memorability.

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11.05.2026 (afternoon)

(yes this entry contains filler, are you yet frustrated by it?)

recently discovered the RFC writing style for the internet.
RFC 2119 defines a handful of keywords meant to remove ambiguity from specifications:

1. MUST This word, or the terms "REQUIRED" or "SHALL", mean that the definition is an absolute requirement of the specification.

2. MUST NOT This phrase, or the phrase "SHALL NOT", mean that the definition is an absolute prohibition of the specification.

3. SHOULD This word, or the adjective "RECOMMENDED", mean that there may exist valid reasons in particular circumstances to ignore a particular item, but the full implications must be understood and carefully weighed before choosing a different course.
4. ...

we SHOULD apply this to everyday language.

daily language is mostly filler. greetings burn tokens.
when both sides agree the goal is to exchange information, not feelings, email is high friction for no reason.

on a different note:
can we make it socially acceptable to write emails in a colder, denser way?

BEFORE

Guten Abend zusammen!

Wir haben eine Reservation für die Drachenhöhle am Freitag, 08.05.2026. Ursprünglich hatten wir mit etwa 18 Personen geplant, aber es sieht nun so aus, dass wir am Ende etwa 8 Personen sein werden. Da fragen wir uns, ob ein Wechsel zur Hobbithöhle Sinn machen würde. Für eine kleinere Gruppe wäre das wahrscheinlich die gemütlichere Atmosphäre.

Falls das noch möglich ist, würden wir uns sehr freuen. Ansonsten kommen wir natürlich auch gerne in die Drachenhöhle :)

Vielen Dank und freundliche Grüsse

Dani Bengl (it/its)

intention is buried. greeting, setup, filler, hedge, thanks. politeness at the cost of signal.

what i actually wanted to say:

AFTER

Reservation Fr. 08.05.2026, Drachenhöhle.
Teilnehmer: 18→8.
Wechsel zu Hobbithöhle möglich?

Dani Bengl (it/its)

the organizers will extract that core from my original anyway.
then they formulate their own core ("room available, will move", or "possible but maybe keep the bigger room"), pad it with filler, send.
i receive, scan, decode, repeat.

why can't human <-> human communication skip the encode/decode step?

maybe it can. open the channel with a header:

the following message is optimized for density. no impoliteness implied.

and inside, reduce vocabulary for load-bearing words. MUST, MUST NOT, SHOULD, MAY. capitalized as in the RFC.

builds on top of a-optimized-language, section "Why I prefer talking to an LLM over humans".

i'll try it. either non-engineers read me as cold and heartless, or they appreciate the efficiency.

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11.05.2026 (morning)

most modern languages signal sentence type at the end.
declarative, imperative, interrogative, exclamatory.
you only learn the tone after you've already read the words.
hard to read aloud. you have to guess, then correct.

why not put the marker first?

Why do we even bother with languages?

vs.

? why do we even bother with languages

reads more structured. same shape as:

Q: Why do we even bother with languages?

and while we're rewriting orthography. capitalization currently marks sentence starts.
the leading marker would already do that.
free up capitalization for meaning instead. emphasize words that MUST NOT be skimmed, like bold or italics but in plain text.

if a leading ? opens a question, does the trailing ? still earn its keep? probably drop it. one marker per sentence...

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11.05.2026 (midnight)

caught myself asking Claude to move a file for me today.
not debug something. not explain something. move a file.

the strange part wasn't that it worked. it was how little resistance i felt.
my first instinct was delegation.

used to think understanding came from doing things directly.
staying with the problem long enough for it to shape you a little.

now i can skip most of that.
describe the outcome. wait a few seconds. approve the result.

it works. sometimes better than i would have done myself.
but something about it feels deeply lonely.

like the distance between thought and reality is collapsing, and with it the need for me to exist anywhere in the middle.

not sure what remains once the process becomes optional.

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10.05.2026

Been thinking about RTGs again (radioisotope thermoelectric generators) after a long tangent that started with how things cool in the vacuum of space.

They’re basically nuclear batteries that produce steady heat from plutonium-238 decay for decades. In space they’re elegant. On Earth they’re mostly avoided. But the radiation they emit is interesting in a darker way.

Radiation brute-forces mutations. It increases the error rate in DNA copying. Most of those errors are harmful or neutral. A tiny fraction might be beneficial. Under extreme selective pressure (fire, radiation, starvation, etc.), the few survivors can carry traits that look like accelerated evolution, namely radiation resistance, fire resistance, better DNA repair, darker pigmentation, etc.

So theoretically: set an area on fire repeatedly while exposing it to controlled radiation and you might sculpt organisms that are extremely hardy to both. Like lab-directed evolution but on a landscape scale. Chernobyl’s Red Forest + later wildfires already did a messy version of this experiment.

It feels like the ultimate "move fast and break things" approach to biology. Flood the system with noise and variation, kill almost everything, and see what’s left standing. Evolution by catastrophe.

Reminds me of the AI conversation. We can now brute-force code into existence by describing it. No need for the slow, careful craft. Is that better? Or are we just trading understanding for speed and volume?

Same question here: does flooding the genome with mutations and extreme selection actually accelerate meaningful progress? Or does it mostly create suffering and dead ends with a few hardened survivors?

Nature already does this slowly with fire, volcanoes, solar radiation. We could do it faster. The question is whether we should, and what we lose in the process. Most mutations are bad. Most attempts fail. The “forward” leaps are rare and expensive.

Still...
the black Chernobyl frogs are real. They happened in ~30 years.

Curious what other traits we could force if we tried.

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04.05.2026

been thinking a lot about AI and software engineering.

not sure what software engineering even is anymore.
work has felt... empty lately ;
mostly prompting agents. describing what should exist instead of building it. it works. things get done. but it doesn't feel like doing.

had a discussion at work where we compared it to brewing beer.

you can buy beer. or you can brew it yourself.
the process is the point.

but with code it's different.

you don't just buy it. you don't even have to make it.
you can just… ask for it.

you can't prompt a beer into existence.
you still have to go through the process.

with code, the process is optional.

if i can describe a system and have it built, what part of it is mine?
if i don't write the code, do i still understand it?

and if i do write it, am i just choosing the slower path on purpose?

do i even need to understand it at all, if an AI can take the entire project, code, docs, discussions, git history, and pinpoint what matters?

AI can read everything. suggest fixes. propose optimizations.
so what is left for me to do?

is it enough to say "make it faster"?
but what does "faster" even mean?

I tried reducing engineering into a loop:
something feels slow → measure → fix → measure again

measure what?
fix based on which assumption?
what if the assumption is wrong?

AI gives answers. often good ones.

but what is an answer worth if it hasn't been tested?

if correctness only appears after something is run and observed,
is engineering just the act of confronting reality?

i still like writing code.

not sure why exactly.

maybe because it feels like real work?
maybe because it forces me to understand things?
maybe because i have more control over the process?
maybe because it is the actual act of creation, not just the idea of it?
maybe because it allows me to prove to myself that i understand something, not just claim it? maybe because it feels like a craft, something that requires skill and practice to get better at? But so does prompting, no? Why does it feel so different?

if i remove that, what is left?

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23.04.2026

setting up nctl for local dev today and misread "goreleaser" as "gore leaser". couldn't unsee it after.

started noticing it everywhere:

• postgres / post gres
• github / git hub
• linkedin / linked in
• dropbox / drop box
• therapist / the rapist
• nowhere / now here

the letters don't change. so what does?

why did i read it one way the first hundred times and another way today? was the second reading always there, waiting? if so, what decides which one i get? and if two readings sit in the same letters, how many am i missing in everything else i read?

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21.04.2026

learned the formal names for derivative notations today.

• Newton: $\dot{x}$, $\ddot{x}$, $\dddot{x}$, $\ddddot{x}$
• Lagrange: $f'$, $f''$, $f'''$, $f^{(4)}$
• Leibniz: $\frac{df}{dx}$, $\frac{d^2f}{dx^2}$, $\frac{d^3f}{dx^3}$, $\frac{d^4f}{dx^4}$

I hate Leibniz. it is so many tokens. Newton says the same thing with a single dot. why would anyone pick the bulky one?

also stumbled on the wikipage for higher-order derivatives of position. so position -> velocity -> acceleration -> jerk -> snap -> crackle -> pop? these sound so silly :P I can't imagine using them in a real paper, but they are fun to say.

and the latex for Newton dots is delightful. dot for one, ddot for two d'ots, dddot for three d'ots, ddddot for four. love it. but the dots in a row get boring for higher orders. why not play with the arrangement? (I mean there's probably a plethera of reasons why we don't, but it's fun to think about it anyway)

but then I started thinking about it.

each notation shows up in a different place. the spring mass equation uses Newton: $m\ddot{x} = -kx$. clean with no ambiguity and time being the only variable that matters. Lagrange shows up in textbooks and pure math, $f'(x)$ when there's nothing to disambiguate. I really like the scalability as you can fall back to $f^{(n)}$ when you have more than three derivatives, which is a nice perk.

Leibniz dominates numerical integration and anything with multiple variables. $\frac{dx}{dt} \approx \frac{\Delta x}{\Delta t}$ almost writes the discretization for you.

and then partial derivatives: $\frac{\partial f}{\partial x}$, $\frac{\partial^2 f}{\partial x \partial y}$. Newton and Lagrange can't express this cleanly at all. the moment you have $f(x, y)$, a dot or a prime stops being enough. you need to name the variable you're differentiating against whereas Leibniz was built for it.

but it's super verbose. look at this Jacobi matrix:

painful to write on a chalkboard. found out there's a shorthand called the comma derivative where $f_{i,j} \equiv \frac{\partial f_i}{\partial x_j}$, but replacing variable names with numbers loses readability. i don't like numbers that much, they're harder to parse.

so here's a proposal: output component as a superscript, input variable as a subscript. $f^{(1)}_x \equiv \frac{\partial f_1}{\partial x}$. parentheses around the superscript so it doesn't get read as an exponent. it reads "derive this, this much, by that."

row index goes up, column index goes down. names stay and the $\frac{\partial}{\partial}$ shenanigins disappear. it's like an extension of the Lagrange notation. probably already exists somewhere and I just haven't seen it. I think it is super cool :3

same thing shows up in code:

class Person
  attr_accessor :age, :name, :created_at, :email, :company_id, :start_date, :gender
end

struct Person<'a> {
    age: u32,
    name: &'a str,
    created_at: DateTime<Utc>,
    email: String,
    company_id: u64,
    start_date: NaiveDate,
    gender: Arc<RwLock<Box<dyn Spectrum + Send + Sync + 'a>>>,
}

Ruby assumes you can apply common sense. age is years. name is a string. created_at is a timestamp. you don't need a type annotation to tell you that, the word already did. Rust spells it out anyway. u32 not i32, not u64. &'a str not String and now you need a lifetime too, something Ruby doesn't even have a concept for. feels a bit wasteful on a higher level, until you hit something like gender, where the name alone genuinely doesn't tell you the shape, and suddenly you're writing Arc<RwLock<Box<dyn Spectrum + Send + Sync + 'a>>>. or when you actually care about memory and don't just rely blindly on an interpreter to do the right thing.

the bulk is the information. Newton's dots assume time. Lagrange's primes assume you already know. Leibniz assumes nothing.

still...

how many other defaults am i using that look wasteful until i see what they're doing?

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10.04.2026

decided to introduce threads alongside blog articles to make space for more frequent thoughts

physically sick today, in real pain.

seems like my physical health has finally caught up to my mental health. having both hit at once made me question things harder than usual.

dug a bit into philosophers this week, mainly Socrates, Nietzsche, Singer. first time actually engaging with them. these are rough impressions, not (yet) positions.

Thoughts

• starting to think knowledge might be one of the more honest ways to spend time
• been looking into nihilism for a while now, still seems like one of the more honest ways to look at things
• found this breakdown of Nietzsche's quotes by Luke Dunne surprisingly clear and useful also came across:

  "We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once."

  and kind of want to lean into that direction as a counterbalance

• it seems to me that a lot of society runs on noise that does not lead anywhere
• came across the idea that ignorance might be something people actively stay in, not just fall into
• reading into the idea that what we call evil might often be miscalculation or lack of understanding rather than intent
• Singer: the idea that charity is not generosity but something closer to duty, and that most excuses for not helping might just be comfort
• the void is real. i've looked at it. it looked back. It's scary. but it also seems to be the only thing that is not fake. I am trying to accept it but it's difficult.
• starting to suspect that being disliked by people who are comfortable might mean you are challenging something

still figuring things out. no conclusions just yet...

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