Spaghetti prompt and post it notes

What does prompts and post it notes have in common? It is messy!

There is this term called “Spaghetti code”, where instead of clearly structured code, it is all over the place like Spaghetti. The era of prompts has opened up the floodgates of not code but free text that we call it prompt.

But if we think of prompts to be like post it notes, it been around for a long time and it is still around. Well organised notebooks or software didn’t “kill” post it notes. Post it notes works just fine.

If we are in an era that we enable everyone to build, the path from post it notes to a system that people can put a punch card in and it just works is what we should be looking into, because while that is clear to developers, it is still not clear for the rest of the billions of the people to truly be empowered.

Where drag and drop made sense

There is a lot of promise around low code tools, and a lot of them has a "drag and drop" feature.

As a developer, you would easily say no to a drag and drop way of doing things because it would usually create chaos and silos. That being said, using website builder as an example, there are still tons of drag and drop website builder out there in the market.

Perhaps it is the segment of software development that makes drag and drop make sense. If the flow is very complicated, chances are first of all, it doesn't have to be that complicated, and if it is indeed a very complicated process, the low code promise doesn't apply here.

How to identify the threshold where low code made sense? The limit test is whether an average LLM can figure it out a flow, if it is not then maybe it's time to look beyond low code tools.

Before you automate it

A lot of the people talks about how AI will automate jobs. This reminds me of how Elon Musk thinks about automation in the following 5 steps:

1. Make Requirements Less Dumb
2. Delete the Part or Process Step
3. Optimize
4. Accelerate
5. Automate

Think of a simpler requirement and take out steps first before you automate things!

Franchising Software

You might have been to some fast food chains, and most fast food chains are a franchise. You take the brand and their quality control system to just simply run the chains.

What happens if it's franchising software? It made me think whether this is possible. One obvious difference is that software distribution has a near zero marginal cost, so that is why it doesn't make sense.

But if we further dig deeper into more complicated workflows, it is the templates that is like a franchise. Instead of building it from scratch, one can just pick up a template and go from there.

The idea of franchising and templates have things in common that helps to scale the experience.

Talk is cheap, but is it as cheap as LLM?

"Talk is cheap" as they say, but with LLM, its as cheap as free for some bots to "talk".

But I think talk is still worthy in many ways, especially that is from your own experience. One things that we as humans do is we can live our life, something that no LLMs can do. And if we write down the things that we experienced, that is definitely more than cheap.

What makes it more expensive is that talking is usually just system 1 that consumes less energy than writing it down which usually is system 2. In terms of energy, talking is indeed cheaper and uses less energy.

But what are we if we don't talk at all! Keep talking, and occasionally write down what you talked about. That can be something for you in the future at least.

The driver and the passenger

Many interactions in life is like a driver and a passenger.

You might be the passenger that don't know where you are heading. You might be the driver that wants to drive to a different place than the passenger.

As a driver, you might want to drive to a different direction or drive a different way.

As a passenger, you might want to have a smooth ride over a fast ride.

You might be sitting in the front or sitting at the back. You might know how to drive or you don't.

It's all a ride and always try to figure out what ride you are on, are you the driver or the passenger and do you have a destination.

Four quadrants of life

The more I think about it, the more that I think there are four quadrants of life: On one axis it is on a scale of real to digital, The other axis is on alone to a group. Here are some examples.

• Alone and real: You are at home cooking
• Alone and digital: Watching TV
• Group and real: A party at friends home
• Group and digital: Playing fortnight

The proportion of how we spend out lives in each of these quadrants should be something we should think about. Ideally, more real and more group experience should be what we should strive for.

Buying fast and slow

We buy things every day, but not all buying are equal.

There is system 1 buying: A pint in the pub, a coffee and so on. There is also system 2 buying: A company, a property and so on.

Usually, as the price of the purchase increases, the more likely that it shifts from system 1 to system 2. The more people think, the more reason that they can say no to you. But also because it is a system 2 buying, they are more likely to talk about you than a random pint that they bought from a random pub.

If you are selling something, think of your value preposition: are you system 1 buying or system 2 buying.

The most popular festival

We humans loves celebration. Christmas is one of them. After moving to London, I realized the importance of Christmas, as it is the festival that marks not just the end of the year, but also telling you that it's half way through the winter.

The movies, songs and the shopping is dazzling, but also made it even more "Christmasy". It is probably one of the few things on earth that tried to bring people from all different walks of life together.

If you need to give a vivid definition of having a good time, it's probably strolling around the streets with the festive lights and a bit Christmas tree. If you need some reference on creating a festival, Christmas is probably a very good one.

The king of loyalty points

Earning miles is a hobby for some, but for the extreme ones, it's their job.

It makes me think whether these are the origin of "crypto" where it's basically just points that people think it's useful.

At some point the miles are so valuable that its even more than the airline business itself.

How can we use our time, or miles better and create incentives towards that? It's something to think about.

Github as a consistency tracker

The built-in heat map of your contributions on Github is the reason why I choose to write on Github daily. I don't have to worry about anything, but just write on.

However, it only tracks the consistency of showing up, but not the consistency of how thoughtful you are. You can throw in some lorem ipsum and it will still count you as showing up.

Of course I tried to be as thoughtful as possible, but I treat this as a daily exercise of my mind, where I and "inference" my mind and think through a lot of the things in life.

The lesson here is showing up consistently is good, but showing up with a mindful direction to head to is better. Gotta start working on the second a bit more now.

The context window and the telegram

One of the limitation of many LLMs out there is something called the context window, which is essentially how many words (or tokens) that you can "fit" into the context that the model can read. If the context is very long, then you would have to think about the ways to break it down into smaller chunks.

This reminded me of the telegram that we used back in the days before telephone was a thing. Sending telegrams was expensive at the time, so people would skip gramma all together so save words. Instead of writing "I will arrive at the train station at 3 PM," they might write "ARR TRAIN STA 3 PM."

This makes me think of our communication, we had enough of these communication now from our sms or notification of an app. But what we need more in times like this is perhaps more authentic and live communication.

From streaming to live broadcast

Netflix first ever big livestream event became a major flop. What is interesting to me is that as Netflix ran out of population to grow further, they are now starting to explore different frontiers like live stream.

Why live event? I am thinking about this more because live event matters that is one of the rare experience that brings people together. Think of a meetup event where people with the same interest can meet and exchange ideas.

In the world of streaming is saturated, maybe it's time to go back to live events.

The nomads and the mainland

55% of the worlds population lives in cities. That number is expected to rise further into 70% by 2050. This trend reminded me of the "fight" between the nomads and the mainland.

In Chinese history, there are countless times that a nomad tribe from the north took over China by storm, then stayed to rule their kingdom, picked up ancient Chinese books and turned more Chinese after a few generations. UK also started a bit like that too, where the normans and the vikings first started as invaders, but overtime settled in and turned more and more like Scottish, Welsh, Irish or English.

I guess ultimately, people are meant to be more connected like it or not, and if this trend continues, the smaller cities would start to see more and more big cities stuff like McDonalds and Apple Store, where as nomadic places would be more like a getaway places for people in the cities.

Poetic GPT

The more that I used LLMs, the more that I think about every word that I inferences out of myself.

The ultimate words that one can write is probably in the form of a poem. Poems are meant to be short and concise, as well as full of room for imagination for the reader.

The information per token is also off the charts, because one would have to fit many concepts and ideas into just a few words.

I had a dream that we can all be poet of our own lives with the help of LLMs!

Unbundling Disneyland

Sometimes when I am walking in the streets of London, it really does make me feel like I am in a theme park. If the city is a theme park, how can we learn from one of the biggest theme park brands, Disneyland?

I would like to start with toys. Think of the Jelly Cat, when I am in Selfridges and seeing people queuing up for the special fish and chips edition, it remind me of the time when I was in Disneyland and people are queuing up to buy Disney Merch.

There is a research that says by 2025, 70% of the world population would be living in cities. Think of all the other up and coming theme parks around the world!

Did LLM made the journey shorter?

One of the popular task of LLM is to summarize text so we spend less time reading. But it also made me wonder, Did it made the trip longer or shorter?

A lot of chatbot is disappointing because it actually makes the trip longer. Identifying what is the trip and how LLM can make the trip shorter is the key. Not all trips are created equal, so we would need to find that out first before we throw some LLM at it.

Take Perplexity vs Google Search, while Perplexity does very well in some cases, Google is still a better choice in some cases that you need granular control with say the exact site or the exact keyword that you need.

Finding the trip that is worth throwing LLM at is what we need to make judgements on.

Food for system 2

Sometimes I wonder why do we need good food. There is a scale of terrible to nice food, but it also made me think of the system 1 and system 2 mind.

When you are a solider, what you eat is usually some terrible canned food, because what you need is your system 1 to function well so that you can keep fighting. But when you are in a executive business meeting, there is usually a buffet because you needed that for your system 2 thinking.

Maybe great food is to help us to use our system 2 more.

Useless asset

As Bitcoin soring into an all time high, it is right behind Sliver as an asset. But compared to sliver or gold where there are some use of those raw materials, bitcoin has no practical use.

If we look back on the 4 properties of money, which is:

• Medium of Exchange
• Unit of Account
• Store of Value
• Divisibility

It actually did very poorly on the first two property but very well on the last two properties. Maybe that is why Bitcoin are still the poster child of the new digital gold.

Automated Communication

One of the popular use case of AI is to replace customer service agents, yet for bespoke services like real estate, real humans are here to stay.

Fast food chains used kiosk to replace ordering because those are transactional communication, you just need to fill in the blanks. But for expensive transactions, you usually need someone that is beside you because it a lot of money!

Think about your communication, is it a lot of transactional communication in your daily life? Is so, try to be more human!

The white gold Porcelain

Porcelain originated from China. Marco Polo bought a small jar to Venice in 1295, but it was not until early 1700 at Meissen, which is Germany today, has managed to create porcelain in europe.

It took 400 years for Europe to copy China, whereas today, there is a joke that the distance of advancement between China and the US is 8 hours, because they only start copying when China is awake in the morning.

But as the saying goes, good artist copy, Greta artist steal. It is those who steal that makes great artists.

Sell me this pen

It used to be a time when writing is expensive. People need to use feathers to write.

Fast forward to now, we can get pen and papers from almost anywhere, yet it became almost like a niche to adults.

Writing on paper becomes more of a special occasion like writing Christmas cards.

It is the warmth that we remember in this cold industrial era.

Communication Prioritization Creativity

How do you do more than one can possibly do? You can't.

But what you can do is to communicate what you are doing now, what is the prioritization and the creativity.

• Make sure no one is surprised because of your communication
• Getting the priority right
• Over achieve creatively
• Excited team will get more done can work harder or smarter
• Peer relationships is about negotiate, communicate and influence
• Invent a new way and change the playing field

The manger should not do work, just like a coach does not play.

The metric of life

Ages are interesting. It measures how long you have lived, and we also expect what that means. Explain it like I am five (ELI5), for example, assumes you cannot understand it when young. Over 60, on the other hand, means you have spent enough time on Earth to ride the tube in London for free.

You can't improve what you don't measure, yet when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. I guess that is the biggest take away when you talks about age as a metric for life. We all as human being on earth are striving the improve this metric, it's just that sometimes we have stop thinking about it as a target, but think of it as a measure on itself.

Commute between languages

Translation is an interesting thing. As more content is generated, more needs to be translated.

I came across the company DeepL. They started off by saying they could translate better than Google Translate. I thought Google Translate was good enough, but there are always improvements to be made. Fast forward 7 years later they are processing on average 200M character each day.

It made me think if there is one thing that we do as humans, it is the urge to communicate. But of all communications, they are not treated equally and some are more precious than others. Words do matters, but you have to try harder to find the cracks that does.

Funny vs Humorous

Something is funny is not exactly the same as something humorous. Funny laughs right away, but humor needs a pause.

It reminds me of System 1 and System 2 thinking. Funny is for System 1 and humor is for System 2.

The challenge now is, what if most people don't want to use their System 2? It does take more energy. How can we help more people to use their System 2 is the real challenge.

The Department Store Floor Plan

When I think about shopping, the department store always gives me a glimpse of what people buy.

• The grocery or food hall is usually in the basement
• The ground floor always starts with cosmetics, it attracts mostly women, and men will have to follow because that is what we do.
• The second or third floor is usually accessories and clothing
• After that is the home department, bathroom and bedroom
• Then you have entertainment, toys for kids and tech gadgets for adults
• The top floor is the restaurant

Obviously there are more vertical categories now, but this is a good foundation for most retail consumption, and if you like some floors more than others, those might be the floors that you are interested in.

Bitcoin is the 13th Fiat

Currency was always tied to a country, until Bitcoin came along. Fast forward 15 years, Bitcoin is now the 13th currency by market cap.

While it is a illegal currency for some, it might also be the go to currency for some for those that are in countries with very weak fiat.

When would the time comes that Bitcoin could be spend in places just like how that used to take USD?

Good experience, bad experience

There is a time I tried to turn off my YouTube history so that I would not be prompted videos to watch when I opened up the YouTube app. I deliberately made the experience worse and introduce friction.

For typical big tech products, we are already accustomed to the interactions so well that we stopped thinking, but that doesn’t necessarily means good experience.

Think of you stay at a resort, why it is a good experience and what does hospitality mean in a digital setting? Hotels are meant to deliver good experience, and how to transfer that philosophy into a digital setting would be something to think about.

One click less

Would all LLM wrappers dies? It remind me of the one click button that Amazon introduced back then, where you can stick it on the fridge and click the physical button to order.

The friction is drastically reduced, but for the majority, the friction is still very high. Try to think of how to reduce the steps as much as possible on getting an ideal outcome.

100 Million Builders

Recently Notion announced that they reached 100 Million users, similarly, last year Github also announced that they have crossed the 100 Million developers mark.

This made me think these are the future builders, but in a different way. Notion is for low code builder and Github is for code intensive builder. While we have already way too many system, this will be the age that ones ability to expressive themselves via software, and these two platforms are currently in the lead.

My bet is that Notion would be much bigger than Github in the long run, because the templates communicate better on how it solved a problem, but then the integration between both might be the key to unlock the next era of development.

Physical things are a luxury

While there are new reusable rocket launches, we are still struggling to get access to physical things. I am talking that random candy that you found when you are travelling to Tokyo, the spice from the wet market back in Thailand or that book that doesn't have a ebook.

The new AR/VR headset is pushing the boundaries of augmented reality, but do we want real reality instead? If the very human nature of breaking bread around a bonfire is becoming a luxury, then is becoming a human a luxury as well?

Something to think about.

The overlooked sector of the economy

Working at big techs was the dream of a lot of people, including me. But after the pandemic and layoffs, it made me think again.

Living in London gave me a perspective on "owning a postcode" as opposed to the scale that big techs are going after. You can monopolise an expensive streets cleaning and maintenance and make a fortune out of it, the extreme version of the 20/80 rule.

With that in mind, those are usually the overlooked sector of the economy, such as real estate. Finding these overlooked gaps would be more important than ever now.

Inspiration: Reflections on Palantir

The calendar monopoly

I was trying to setup a calendar that logs all the economic events into a google calendar. However after some quick research, there are actually very few places where you can access it.

This also makes me wonder, the calendar that most of the world uses actually shapes our everyday life. It governs our way of life more so than anything else. Things got more expensive as well as cheaper because of that and people travel across the world because of that too.

It reminded me of the disciplined life of a children who study at school. While we growth up we thought we had some freedom, we are just actually governed by yet another calendar.

What's the way around it? Well, you can create your own calendar!

Use hardware to upsell software

I bought a new Macbook Air recently, and I found this "Service Included With Purchase" in my settings app on my iPad, which is the bundle you got for every new apple devices that you bought.

I paused for a moment and thought, what company on earth can sell ads in the settings app? That might be just Apple. I remember back in the days Xiaomi MIUI also started to place adds into settings app but got a lot of backlash. It is Apple that has the brand value plus cross selling the services that are of the same brand that made people tolerated it.

Now you might ask did this strategy worked? Here is what I found from perplexity: Services revenue grew from 46 billion in 2019 to 85.2 billion in 2023, representing an 85% increase over four years.

Apparently it's not just that but I guess it worked.

Appreciation based networking

I got a cold LinkedIn message from a uni graduate, which asked me for advice. I actually don't have any, but I do cold message message people on LinkedIn as well, and here is what I learned so far.

• Treat it like a message in a bottle floating in the sea, you don't expect to hear back
• Don't ask for a meeting, thank them in advance for reading and responding. The best is thank for their article published online, their talk online, their book. That is of course that you have read it and you are truly appreciated of their work, be specific of your appreciation
• Only ask them out if you have a clear thing to discuss about them, not about you

So here are the rule of thumb on how I cold message. The next question is how to covert, but that is another level of networking, let's see how it unfolds.

Why do you travel anyway?

I was next to a cab driver that is driving us back to the Naxos town centre from a restaurant, and he told me this that I remembered deeply.

"Morris", he had a deep voice, "Why do you think people travel?" I looked at him and not sure what to say.

"They want memories and pictures."

So the moral of the story is don't hesitate next time when you want to take that picture, the future you will thank you for that.

Owning the letter K

What do you think of when you see the letter K? Korea wants you to think of Korea.

I came across the YouTube channel Netflix K Content that covers everything that is Korean related on Netflix. All content that starts with K goes to Korea, that quite a strategy of owning a letter of a foreign language.

The VIP experience of software

The strong case of software is that the marginal cost of a new copy of the same experience is near zero. On the other hand, a VIP experience is that it is a unique experience, and it is also the VIP experience that allows one to charge at a premium because VIP experience is expensive.

How can software be more like VIP? If we follow most innovation, it usually starts from a VIP experience. However, software is usually the opposite, where something went viral and attracted attention, and it grows from there.

Look for experience that you liked, and find out where can you find the same experience but are 10 times more expensive. If you can deliver even more value in the 10 times more expensive setting, you might have a shot.

15 words question and back of a business card business plan

Came across Don Valentine presentation in Stanford Business School back in 2010, these are the points that stuck with me:

• If you ask a question, make it under 15 words, which means you have to think very hard about what you are actually asking
• Write your business plan in the back of your business card
• Money flows with a story

Source: Don Valentine, Sequoia Capital: "Target Big Markets"

A physical GitHub

IKEA is probably the only brands on earth that always has something in everyone's home. I remember I saw almost a dozen IKEA drying racks in the balcony of the whole building.

But people wanted to feel special and represent themselves. This where the IKEA hack comes in that turn IKEA products around. A shelf and be turned into a stool, a stool can be turned into a side table.

This reminds me of the template code that we modify it into our own versions. You put different pieces of open source together, then you would have an new app. Maybe IKEA is the physical version of this.

Are LLMs like yet another phone now?

Every week there is a new LLM released. We just can't keep up with it anymore. And that's why there is now benchmarks that helps you compare LLMs.

However benchmarks reminds me of the smartphones back in 2009, where there are tons of benchmarks that compares phone's CPU on what they are capable of. I remember when I new phone launched, I would always look up the geekbench score to tell whether it's a good phone with a good CPU or not.

Fast forward to now, we care less about that now. When will we reach to a point that we don't care about LLMs benchmark anymore? What does the get the job done LLMs looks like?

The safest software

I was a happy Arc user, their browser is really well thought out and has a lot of useful features. Yet recently it got hit by a serious security incident. The gist of it is that a feature called Boosts that lets you change fonts, colours and even add your own custom CSS or JavaScript ended up became a vulnerability.

It got fixed now, but it made me think what safety really is in the online world. We know that in the physical world, airplanes are the safest way to travel, but the extra effort that is needed to make it safe is very extreme, like from having two to three sets of pilots and crew members to the notorious security checks in the airport. Despite the hassle, it delivered the safety promise.

How can a software be truly safe with reasonable compromise on user experience? I got a lot more logins that are now requiring two factor authentication, and I have to say while it is annoying to put in the pin, that 10 seconds of finding the pin and put it in is a lot easier now. Maybe that is the standard of safety for now as baseline.

Pricing is an interesting thing

Water has different prices in different places, free when you are next to a pond, and very expensive when you are in a theme park.

Software was always free to many developers, but how can we create software more like water so that we can prove differently?

Something to think about before you write that line of code.

Remote work is like long distance relationship

Amazon and Spotify couldn't be more different. One has mandated that employees return to the office five days a week while the other one maintains a flexible work-from-anywhere policy, allowing employees to choose their work environment and only requiring in-person meetings for one week each year.

Who will win? I will bet on Spotify.

Hello world