And… I succeeded, for a little while. I often found a nice way to do things. It always worked. Until it did not. And I always wondered what went wrong, and quickly went on to look for the new order in way to do things. Finding it, I have always thought: “Now I know the truth, now I know what I should have been doing all along!” Why did I not know the right way to do things from the beggining?

This pattern kept repeating in my life. And I always though: “Why do I not find the right way from the start?” But it seems that Eminem knew the truth all long:

“I had to go to that place, to get to this one.”

It always seems you have to do things one way, to learn that you should have been doing something else. You gotta keep learning. And there is no wrong. No that there are not bad choices, there are certainly many. Bad you do not know until you do that. And you cannot figure out what you have to do from the start, the only thing that you can do is try, and some things will stick, some will not.

So I will keep reinventing myself. My habits always stick half a year, sometimes two years. Sometimes moments come where I finally see what I should have seen from long time before, and I see what it all means. And those moments are hard earned by the moments where I did it all different way, which worked at that moment, but not anymore. And those moments pass, and new experiences come, and I change.

The Dutch have a slendid word for this: “houvast”, something to hold on to. It can be anything, it is your basis. Sometimes you are searching to what you can hold on to. And you always find, eventually, but it always goes aways. So that you can find the next thing, and that is beautiful.

I will try to embrace it. This blog. Has changed 3 times already. 3 platforms. And we keep going. Same me. 5 years older. We keep pushing. Same person. Different at every moment. Isn’t it quite poetic?

PS: Maybe the best answer is no answer. This is why I think that investment in index works so well. You do not know what will work, you just know something will work, and that is good enough.

I spent an amazing weekend spend with my friend Olek who visited me from Netherlands, and went to make Chocolate in Lindt.

We had a wonderful time revisiting nostalgically the times we had back in Groningen, and just discussing how we view life, professional and personal, as of now. I feel extremely grateful for these precious moments!

During his visit, we took a short swing by a Czechoslovak party, where I met these beautiful people.

You might be thinking, why are you even showing this photo to us? Well, so it happens that among them, there is one reader of my blog! (Spot him if you can!) That has absolutely stunned me, never would have thought that any of my peers would ever look at my posts unless I forced them to. Honestly, it made me feel a bit awkward, and rethink what I am sharing, and if I actually would like to have a bigger audience. I came to the following conclusion:

1. I am not yet fully sure what I am doing with my blog, what audience I want to reach and why,
2. hence I feel weird about somebody reading it,
3. maybe in the future I will give this more shape and I will have a target audience,
4. if (3) happens, I think then will have authentic message to share,
5. if (4) happens, I hope I will identify with that message enough to be able to represent it.

So as of current, I am not a famous blogger, and I am not gonna become famous, cause even if I wanted, I actually do not know if I could, cause I would not want to. Maybe it will come with time. Till then this is undercover blog. Read it before others find it to be cool :)

Thanks for reading!

Talk to you soon! :)

PS: Super nice article about culture in AI in china made me rethink what a contribution means.

This week I was at a short presentation by Forgent AI who are trying to apply AI agents to help companies to apply for public tenders. However, the talk was not about that, the talk was about how AI coding assistants, Claude and the like, are changing how their company works. This made me reflect about the fact that this is now a reality: the world is changing extremely fast, and is time to adapt. The cognitive work is being automated, and that means we have to start adapting. We have to adapt the way we collaborate – organisations will change to work faster, and with less human supervision. And as individuals, technical skills in some domains will matter less. I am thinking a lot for myself what I should be focusing on. It is certainly still valuable to learn and understand concepts, design good experiments and architectures, be able to explain value of things to others. But current skillset I focused on (mostly engineering) will not be that valuable anymore.

When I was in the middle of thinking about this, I came across this talk by venture capital firm Sequia Capital on YouTube. The pointed three interesting takes:

Artificial Intelligence is to cognitive work the same as photography was to painting.

Before we had cameras we had to paint to capture things. There were many people learning to do this, and be as accurate as possible. However, then cameras came and the need to capture the reality by human labour has disappeared instantly. Art has remained though, but it started focusing less on the technical, and more on the description of the human feelings. This is beautiful. It also means that in the future we will still do what we do now, but with different motivation.

Artificial Intelligence is the steam of the new industrial revolution.

Before industrial revolution, most of physical labour was done by humans. This has changed quickly with the usage of steam. Small tasks are still done by humans, but bigger operations are automated. Same will be done to cognition. You might read one document, but nobody not hundreds of them a day, that will be automated. The demand for cognitive work will sky-rocket as it gets cheaper, and humans will still be doing small specialized parts of it, but not the bulk.

Large language models are formed by data and rewards. In contrast to human creation which are formed by curiosity and motivation.

This is noted by Andrej Karpathy. I think we should keep that in mind, since it shows us that LLMs are fundamentally different than we are. That informs how they work, and what they will be good at. Good to keep in mind when using them.

As a final thought, I think we should not be scared by this. I at first thought we are all doomed: AI is gonna take our jobs. But no, world is not efficient. There are millions of bullshit jobs. People are not paid for what they do, they are paid for positions in organisations, and their responsibilities. Those will still be needed. Actual labor not, but position and prestige is still there to be fought for.

One of the nice moments of this week was when I was sharing that I am trying to write this blog with a friend. He also likes writing, but our approaches differ, so we were comparing. He likes to educate himself how to write well. I am trying to push my thoughts out of my head and onto the paper, I like to share. He pointed out to me that the most valuable thing about that is that I can look back and understand what I was thinking. Interestingly, looking at the old posts, I do not remember much about what I have written, and I am always quite surprised by my opinions. This week I want to take a snapshot of a really personal topic.

Poverty

You might be thinking, what? Michal has completely lost his mind. He is living in Switzerland, what are you even talking about. But that is exactly what I want to talk about. I moved out of Czechia almost 5 years ago to study at a university in the Netherlands. I remember that my summer savings were quite small, but my parents were happy to help me out, which I am eternally grateful for. I never struggled to buy food, clothes or health products that I needed, so in that sense I never experienced true poverty. But coming from Czechia, which is economically way less powerful than Netherlands, my savings were just worth so much less. I would say I come from a family that is quite well-off, both parents having stable jobs and good health, and neither has bad spending habits. However, I moving into a richer country and the “higher society” of international students has been quite a jump. International student might look poor on the first glance, but most people that can afford to study abroad are backed by parents that are well-off (unless being extremely cracked and on scholarships, but even those usually are not doing bad).

Either way, I do not think it is too difficult to understand that it might be difficult to get around as a student in an richer country than where you come from. To articulate this better, let’s look at the poverty lines for the different countries.

Numbers

I came to Netherlands in 2021. The poverty line for a single person in 2019 there was 1,090 EUR, whereas Czechia reported 12 818 Kč (=474 EUR). That is almost a double! So what barely gets you over the edge in the Netherlands amounts to a good lifestyle in Czechia. I kept meticulous track of my spendings back then, and I can tell you I have been below the poverty line in Netherlands for the whole time of my studies, except for months when I was paying moving in and out and paying deposits, or occasional travel tickets. In 2024, I moved to Switzerland, which at that time reported a poverty line of 2388 CHF (= 2593 EUR). That is ridiculous. That is a lot more than median netto salary in Czechia (in 2024). Once again, my spendings during my first year of studies have been steadily below this. Details I keep for myself, but I think we can conclude I just spent 4 years living under the line of poverty.

Eventually, I started earning some money, and it made me realize all of this. Especially with aging population in Western civilizations, this is not an average experience one has. I can certainly blame myself for not being resourceful enough, there are people who found themselves better jobs or ways of gaining income. The numbers are clear, but to tell the whole story I wanted to write to discuss how poverty influences day-to-day experience.

What does it feel like?

What helped me to get the narrative in my mind straight was this podcast. It talks about a woman who has gone from a leadership position into unemployment, and being able to barely afford to provide for her children. Most importantly, she talks about her feelings. How bad it feels that she cannot pay an activity that all classmates of her children are doing. For me I realized this when I was in Zurich, where suddenly anything but student event started feeling extremely unaccessible. I saw this campaign of Caritas on a tram just like here at the image below.

It says: “Armut ist… wenn das Leben an dir vorbei fährt.” (literally “Poverty is when life is driving past you.” meaning that life is passing by on you, and you cannot take fully part in it.) At that time, I did not have a public tram subscription and I felt the pain of spending whenever I had to buy a ticket. I lived close to uni, so I was just walking every day. My first salary in Switzerland, I have spent most of it on the yearly public transport ticket, and I finally felt like I could take part in all the life that was happening in Zürich, commute to see my friends and do sport activities.

To be fair big part of it was my fear of spending too much. Coming from a not extremely afluent background, spending has not been associated with nice emotions for me. This has been amplified by the extra costs that I had to make.

Why?

So why? Why did I do it? When it is so bad? I do not think I care about my own comfort sufficiently, and I think I was okay throughout. And I would totally do this again. I think pain gives life meaning, in this podcast they talk about how being parent is stressful, but super rewarding, and I would think of my life in the same way. It has not been the most comfortable way that I have chosen to go about my life, but it has been extremely meaningful and rewarding: I literally got to live out my dream. But still, want to keep this note for myself. For future Michal, so that he knows that it was not easy.

Having Money

For the first time in my life, I am a working man. I can spend a lot less time worrying about money and a lot more time enjoying it. Especially with the buying power of Swiss Franc compared to the Turkish Lira. Being able to afford food without caring too much for the price (avoiding posh places ofc) has been a massive improvement to the traveling experience. This also goes for most attractions (though Turkey’s landmarks have very unfriendly policy towards foreigners, making them pay 5x more than locals).

However, spending money makes me realize that the only reason virtually anyone talks to you during your vacation at all is exactly the fact that you have money. Walking on the street, your credit card becomes what everybody hunts for. You get called into restaurants all the time, offered things on the street to taste. Get lured into shops, or even handed items that you have to later pay for. Moreover, with my blond hair it takes the locals no time to spot I am a tourist, and they happily overcharge me even in small shops on the street, with their eyes just checking how much I am willing to cash out. To them, I am just a walking credit card. Nothing more.

I can think to at least 5 specific instances of very aggressive behavior, including handing a bill for something I never asked for, paying 4x the amount for a bottle of water, and being asked my nationality in order to sell me something. Especially bitter was the final experience, where taxi to the airport overcharged us extra 10 bucks than what the taximeter was saying. When trying to argue, I was told there was an extra fee, and the driver was not ready to talk to me any further. I am so happy that 10 euro mattered to me too little for me to continue the conversation and I rather moved onto catching the airplane. It felt all very dishonest, especially when you are asked to leave a rating online afterwards after such experiences. Istanbul’s restaurants – even the most shitty places – boast themselves with near 5-star ratings, making the whole system of ratings pretty much useless. Same goes for taxi driver’s, my guy had 4.8 rating on Uber, while running on the city centre-airport connection and speaking not a single word in English.

Society Development

You know what, I am just a visitor, I am gone again a short time, so why do I care?

When I walk around cities like Istanbul, I cannot stop comparing it to other cities, like Zurich, where I live at the moment. Zurich feels a lot more safe, organized, cleaner and calmer. And I do not want to say that one place is better than the other, but looking at the wires sticking out of the buildings and the badly maintained roads in Istanbul I would argue that some things could be improved. And I would describe myself as a huge fan of Turkey, so I would love the country to get better, richer and more safe. And I am willing to pay for it in tourist taxes and prices of services and goods that I consume while I am there.

However, I think that scamming tourists is just harvesting the low hanging fruit, and not creating a long-term sustainable economy. Yes, it does work, yes, you generate money. But I do think the smart and diligent people of Turkey could spend their time better, invest in their own infrastructure and develop services of high value, instead of ferociously negotiating 200 TRY mark up on your baklava order.

My favorite example of not solving a real problem, but making money off of it is this man selling water to people in the taxi traffic jam in the tourist area. This road has traffic jams every day, so why not make the people that wait in the taxis pay for the water they could have gotten otherwise if they already were at their final destination?

What really triggers me is that I do not know what to do about this. I do not know any other way to be a tourist. I would like to spend my money on local business with sustainable plans for the future, but I do not even know how to find them. The good will is there, but the means are missing. If I could, I would rather donate 10 EUR to the public transport office of Istanbul to improve the conditions of the place rather than cheap trinket sellers and vendors of fake Prada apparel. How can I teach a man how to fish to feed him for life, when I keep giving him fish and feeding him for a day?

Volunteering

So as we just established, it is tough to talk to anybody while being a tourist without having to pay them. This is given that you have money. That has not been a given for me for the past 24 years of my life, so I had to find a different way to travel around. The answer for me has been volunteering. I have volunteered in Turkey, Spain, France, Germany and twice back in Czechia, different causes ranging from heritage restoration to helping out camp for disabled children. Why not just go back to that? These projects usually fund (a part of) your travel, accomodation and food expenses. Well, usually there is a small fee attached to the project, for registration and running the admin around the volunteer work. This is fine, however, it indicates something: you are actually not creating something of value to the community, you are the one extracting the value from the community. You are the client. Most of the people that come as tourist to volunteer, are there for the experience, for getting to know people, for parties and for a CV boost (having done volunteering sounds really good for certain roles and college applications, in some degrees it is even mandatory). This is simply because it is near impossible to contribute meaningfully to the local economy in the location which you know nothing about, you do not know the language of and in a craft you are just learning. This work is best done by local laborers.

Anecdote to support this: while on archeology camp in Galicia (Spain), we had to cut down some trees. We were told that due to the architectural site protection, this is best done with man-held axes and saws, not chainsaws. This causes less polution, and can also be done without safety risks. We have internalized that, and worked hard the whole day cutting down invasive species of trees which are destroying an archeological site. Until we have encountered a problem. One of the trees that we cut down got stuck on a bigger tree, which was too big for us to cut down. The smaller tree was posing a danger to us and the archeologists, as a gust of wind could make it fall down and cause damage and maybe even hurt somebody. At the end of the day, local forest worker came with a chainsaw, took the tree down, and while he was in it, he took down 10 more trees. He also chopped them up, such that they could be loaded onto a truck and removed from the site. That is more than the whole group of 16 volunteers, who flew in from around the world, could achieve in a day.

As you can see, if the project contribution money was spent on the local qualified workers, we could have achieved a lot more towards the actual goal. I totally admit there are other effects of organizing this camp, such as cultural exchange. However, do the benefits really outweigh how ineffective it is? Why is it advertised as volunteering activity anyway? It is certainly a more sustainable way to be a tourist, you connect with the locals, but for sure not an efficient way to move the world forward. Volunteering is more like a feel-good product sold to rich people who end up paying hundreds of euros (e.g. on this site) to be able to pretend that they have done anything useful. Sad. Very sad.

Future Vacation Ideas

Takeaways? What shall we do about this? It has been a rather depressing blog: I spent my time and money, but did I get anything out? I think you can feel that I am not satisfied. I spent some time thinking about this, and I came up with better ideas on how to spend my free time and money in the future. Here they are…

1. Fully disconnect: I get easily overwhelmed, and I think a good idea is a vacation where I can go fully offline. I do not have to look up where I go, and what I am doing. Fully disconnect from the internet and give my brain a break. Do some dopamine detoxication. Maybe spend some time in silence.

2. Travel intentionally.: Travel for a language course, a conference, concert or a pilgrimage. Travel with a very specific goal in mind, with an intention. If expenses are made along the way, so be it, but at least it is not time wasted. There was a bigger goal behind it, a passion or a legacy.

3. Spend time with family.: Go back home, and just relax with my family. Being a working man, time is getting more and more precious. Same with friends that I have made around the globe. You get accomodation for free, and you are warmly welcomed in the place where you arrive. One down side, you have to adjust to their timetables, and they might not be able to take much time off just for you.

4. Do not take vacation.: I count myself lucky, I actually really LOVE my current work, and I was really sad not to be in the weekly meetings and kept in the loop with the recent developments. If that is the case, then why take vacation at all? Just keep working and be happy.

I hope you liked this post. Let me know if this resonated with you at least the slightest. I will be super happy to discuss in detail with you!

Backpockets. Yes, that is right. I love them. But I think this story starts elsewhere. I love to drink. I love to keep myself hydrated. I think it is a habit I have built up in my sport days, and one that I keep carrying on. It prevents headaches, and especially if the weather is hot, it becomes essential. However, there is one downside. You always have to have a bottle with you.

And that is where backpockets come to save you. On (almost) all pants made for males there are backpockets. And they are big, trust me, bigger than you think. Yet, most people do not use them! I ask myself why, and one major downside I can immediately think of is that you can sit on the contents of your backpockets really easily, destroying what you put in them. However, with a bit of cautiousness you can avoid this, and you can just reap the benefits. You suddenly have your hands free, and your bottle always with you.

I get often laughed at, but this is how I go around my days. For illustration, here I include a picture of how I fill my backpockets. My bottle, and a kindle for reading.

So go, go out to the real world and use your backpockets. Or actually, use anything that is underutilized, and do not feel limited by what the mainstream accepts.

If you already are a user of your backpockets, then let me know how you use them, I would love to get inspired!

Have a wonderful Easter weekend!

Michal

This week we went on a trip to Thun on Saturday. It was nice to see a place a bit more off the beaten path. Coincidentally, a friend who lives in Thun was also there, so he gave us a little tour. We have this cute memory from the day!

Well, good weekends to you, and do not be like me—rest sometimes too!

Michal

In this post, I would like to pose my thoughts in 3 paragraphs: (1) where do we already see the impacts, and what can we learn from them, (2) what does this mean for jobs and (3) what shall we be doing as individuals to prepare for the future.

Software Engineering Psychosis

When I was choosing a career, I was fascinated by artificial intelligence. Back then it was not exactly what everybody was doing, but rather a niche technical track that was quickly gaining popularity. Since then a lot has changed. More or less successfully I have crawled myself towards the end of the Master’s studies (not done yet!). However, I realized, I did not know what kind of skills or vision I had entering the work force. Therefore I have decided to follow my passion and started an internship, and this is where a massive change has come.

At my work, I was suggested to use Claude Code. I knew about the tool, but did not have the access to the full paid version before and I have quickly started using it. Claude Code is a nice little AI, that sits at your computer, looks at your files and helps you programming. However, over the last year, it has evolved from something that helped you find a typo or format a file to a beast that can plan and execute 1-2 hours of coding efforts. As I write this I have Claude trying to fix something for me, it works completely autonomously: it plans, sees its errors and proceeds to solve them.

Yes, it makes mistakes. Yes, it is not perfect. Yes, it did spawn so many containers that it killed my memory and I had to restart my laptop. Yes, and when I told it next time it pruned the containers such that it killed processes that were vital for other things on my laptop. But yes, it does mostly work. And it is incredible, it is better the longer you use it and it does everything you have ever dreamed of as a programmer.

Suddenly, the time spent at work is not the bound, the bound is our capacity to the human brain that can coordinate processes. People are stopping to read the code that they write. The best example of this is Peter Steinberger, creator of OpenClaw (AI that takes control of your PC), which famously coordinates fleets of these autonomous coding agents.

Incredible implication of this is that you can define a problem, a metric and constraints, and let agents just work on it. This goes by the term autoresearch, term coined by Karpathy automates training of large language models using that. Does it work? Yes, it does, but no better than previous tools. More than actual results, it is important to ponder the power of this concept. Autoresearch is so much easier to setup. This is not some crazy math optimization problem somebody tuned for ages, this works like a human would (also with its errors and drawbacks) and it can iterate whole night while you sleep. Only cost? Tokens, and grounding of the experiments (e.g. in the lab or by computing the results on a GPU). Incredible.

Jobs Will (Not) Disappear

Okay, okay, okay, Michal, what does this mean? Are like all programmers replaced? What is the next job AI will take? I think the reasonable thing to do is to look at what has happened in the past. I might be very much influenced by the recent Karpathy’s interview, in which he brings up the example of bank tellers. The invention of ATM has not killed the job, rather the contrary, the access to money has become seamless, and suddenly there were more jobs in the industry. Only later has the number of people employed in the area decreased. This means that the jobs will not disappear, but rather the entry bar will be lower, and there will be more (also less qualified) jobs in the area. Now you do not need a Master’s degree to be bringing up a website, basically anybody could do that. The highly qualified jobs will get even more interesting, having the right ideas and understanding the right concepts – creating something people actually want will be even more important.

Currently, the capabilities of tools like Claude code have increased massively, giving developers wings. I can tell you that from experience, cause I always had problems with exactly the aforementioned: websites. Figuring out ports, backends and frontends, never wrapped my head around it. Now I just say, claude "do me a little website" and it spins it up in a few seconds. That being said, I still struggle with usage of these tools. Especially starting a new work, I have realized that I am extremely disorganized, both in my ideas and my execution. The fact that Claude accelerates my development does not mean I produce a better product, I actually just generate garbage faster. Additionally, I am slow in managing my agents. I cannot do more than two instances at a time, and my context switching has a huge cost. I am not able to read anything properly and process it, when I am waiting for my agent to finish, it is just shallow processing. I have to learn to use these tools effectively: plan, execute, with right permissions at a right time, delegate well-defined tasks, and understand the outcomes. Document and test prototypes, even more than before, I have been given a chainsaw to cut bread and now there is a lot of mess around.

Also, we really do not know what is going to happen. We are fundamentally bad at making predictions. I was just having a blast reading the The Fourth Industrial Revolution by Klaus Schwab. It is written in 2016, and it talks about the revolution that is coming. You might ask, how did he know ChatGPT was coming? Well, he did not. He predicts that by 2025 we will have small cities with fully self-driving traffic and houses being printed by 3D printers. He is not alone in thinking this, he presents statistics showing a significant percentage of experts being certain in this. And they are also not completely wrong, those technologies have indeed developed, however, different technologies, which turn out to be even more important are not even mentioned (most of the ideas of the book still apply though). This means that fundamentally, we have no idea what is going to happen. Thinking about what jobs will be there, and which not, makes sense, but we should not be worried.

One point of the book that I really enjoyed was that big revenues are made with smaller and smaller amount of people. Back in the age of cars coming out, you needed a whole city to run a globally successful company. If you wanted or not, you had to give jobs to people around, and build up the ecosystem, and if nothing else, you needed their labour. This is not true anymore now, the same amount of revenue is made by smaller and smaller groups of people, be it Tech giants, or the rising AI Labs. This is precarious, given that intelligence is computational (more on that in this post about ‘What is Life?’ by Blaise Aguera y Arcas), meaning that whoever controls the tokens is gonna control intelligence. The tokens / or whatever unit we are going to have is the raw power behind the future revolution. If the trend continues, it is plausible, that human power will not be needed for economic activity anymore. If this happens, this might be a problem for human well-being. Now states are motivated to keep us alive and happy, cause we bring them products. If human existence is automated, then why would they care? The arguments for this are nicely summarized in Curse of intelligence. In this same source it is mentioned that paths to prestige are changing faster than ever, cause the world is changing so much. I like this, cause this means you might just as well think for yourself instead of sinking time to please a system that might not even work in the end. With all the startups it seems that taking chances and bets is rewarded more than being hard-working and consistent.

Thriving During a Revolution

I have recently joined a machine learning research company, and that has pushed me onto the edge of the actual development of what is actually happening, especially on the tools that we are using and the channels that we are following. This has made me feel the shift even more. The last week I took a step back, I stopped burning so many tokens on Claude code, and started writing the parts of code that I care about myself. I feel like writing code makes me more aware of what I do, and I think more clearly. I would like to combine the clarity of thinking with speed of Claude, but I am not there yet. Either way, it made me rethink how I approached work with LLMs, and made me realize that the capabilities are limited by me, not by the tools. My understanding, clarity of mind and communication with others about my goals is what limits me. For myself, I have made a little guide of how I want to treat this. In my blog a year ago, I famously said I stopped using ChatGPT, and it got controversial among my friends. There is certainly an unsolved question of what is the best way to collaborate with these tools. My message this time, however, is that there is nothing to fear, and all is going to stabilize (eventually). Meanwhile, I wrote a couple of points for myself of how to sleep calmly when it is storm outside:

1. *Read science fiction.* I am a firm believer that our limit is our imagination. You cannot live a life that you cannot imagine, may that be a profession, relationship or a company. It always starts with your subconscious. Start dreaming. But also be careful what you pray for. Either way, especially in times of AI thinking for you it is nice to exercise your own imagination. Try to dream up a future, and you will most likely be wrong, but that is fine. The world of Dune or Contact is now closer to reality than ever.

2. *Curiously learn about the tools.* Tools are here to stay, so regardless of what it does to your job, you might just as well take advantage of them. Learn to use them, and use them well, such that they do not disempower you, but rather lead you to deeper insights.

3. *Create your own things.* Nobody cares about AI generated music. No, really, not. If you want to create something of value, you have to actually put in the work. AI does not have a hunch, and does not understand a product market fit. Good innovation is still precious.

4. *Protect your mental space.* Be conscious about what you are doing with AI, and where it takes over. The stuff you one-shot overnight might not be so valuable in the end, and maybe one day of actually thinking is more valuable than one day of vibe coding, even if you feel like you have magical amount of progress. Francois Chollet says that the time to learn how to think for yourself was before genAI, if you missed your chance, good luck, but I do not think so. It is just something that we have to be more conscious of now, same as physical exercise is something encouraged to prevent obesity.

5. *Believe.* Does not have to be religious. World will not be the same, nobody can guarantee that. Or more so, I can guarantee it will not be the same in a year. If you start studies now, you will finish them and the world will be different, maybe your job will not be needed anymore (just like it seems to be happening to mine). It does not make sense to try to study for a job.

Good, now that I have spent the sunny Sunday locked in my bedroom typing on my laptop, I can leave this blog post and go talk to my Claude as we finish together my other projects. And on Monday I will get up and try to advance intelligence further.

It is incredibly exciting times. And oh yeah, this text is fully written by me. Human tokens. Awesome, right? (Now that I think about it I just created more training data for AI.) Thanks for reading so far, really appreciate it.

Booking tickets late is stupid, costly, and stressful. So is packing, and as I used my university backpack I forgot to take out my set of screwdrivers, which was taken away from me on security. So was the bike lock, that I tried to import to be able to use with my friends bike… Anyways…

I called up my friend Theophile, who lives in Paris, if I can stay at his. Had a wonderful time, as always. We went to the Hackathon, and we had an idea from the start: we wanted to use AI for forensic sketching. And that is what we eventually did. A nice little video of our product, called ShareLock, can be found here. Other than that, we have been talking to a bunch of interesting people, chilling and eating free food (I actually ate too much, and the chair under me broke – not even kidding). Eventually, the judges gave us 2nd place out of 44! This was amazing, since coming such a long way, I wanted to make the most out of it.

Some pictures: this is our lovely team!

And this is my lovely host. He let me use his bike, which was super fun. Biking around Paris is AMAZING. There are actually plenty of bike paths, and nobody respects the rules of traffic, so you have to pay a lot of attention to what you are doing.

So that is it. We went out Saturday night to celebrate. We were all super happy that it went so well, but I hope you can feel that we had a lot of fun building and presenting our solution. I was also losing it a lot cause I could not believe I was in Paris. What a surreal weekend it was, I am super grateful for it.

Till next weekend!

Michal