Henrik Karlsson

If you're interested in preserving your ability to think for yourself in the age of AI, I recommend Henrik Karlsson's blog Escaping Flatland. While not directly about AI, his articles "Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born" [1] and "Childhoods of exceptional people" [2] explore similar themes of how to train your mind to have original ideas and learn to solve problems on your own. [1] https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/good-ideas [2] https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/childhoods https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/archive?sort=top

This feels like a side tangent, but why have you focused on technology for creative and curious childhood? I'm curious if you have considered the following: I.e. Maria Montessori (founder of the Montessori methodology of teaching) did a pretty good job showing that's the natural state of kids, and there's quite a bit in her teachings about the importance of physical things, being outdoors, etc. There's some pretty strong reasoning that technology might in fact be the problem, and while I'm sure you can make better technology with that focus in mind, it seems like a better approach might not be technology. Here's a few articles that lead to this point: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/honestly-its-probably-the-phones https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/childhoods

Leetcode is good practice but go into full exploring mode and learn new tech. I got back into full stack development (mainly backend guy) and I now have endless ideas. I learned sveltekit and tailwind css to build my portfolio website. I love rucking and did some research and found out there's no real good rucking tracker. Consider social media such as Twitter and Reddit groups like saas, entrepreneur, and indiehackers. This article blew my mind because we as software engineers have immense power, we just need to use our skills to build stuff and take advantage of social media to harness/sell it. https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/search-query

I'm working on a collection of networked games, around the central theme of a lockstep deterministic network model with 'delay frames' (between acting directly on user input and progressing actual shared network state). You can try this here: https://locksteparcade.com/Client Games included in the arcade, currently: - Neon Swarm, a take on the classic lemmings game, with multiplayer versus and coop modes - Serpents, a snake game (where you eat food, grow a tail and need to avoid this growing tail), with inertial movement and multiplayer - Spirits, an homage to N++, where you work together to get someone to the exit, while avoiding enemies, figuring out how to open doors, and so on - Pilots, a multiplayer asteroids battle with homing missiles Each game solves the network delay problem (the problem of providing immediate feedback to user input and hiding the fact that actual changes to shared state are delayed) differently, and it has been very interesting to work through a bunch of different approaches to this. If anyone else here is working on multiplayer network games, I'm very interested in setting up a regular "play each other's games" session. The idea is that regularly playing with other game developers will help develop a kind of 'scene' (where you get a group of people together who make work in public but really aimed at each other, pushing and unblocking one another to become bolder and better at an accelerating rate, as described here:…

Guarding your heart with elegant nonsense you don't really mean is a classic defensive posture, and probably is directly impeding their ability to be present in emotionally intense (and often difficult) situations. It reminded me of this: >There is a scene in the opening of Into the Abyss. Werner Herzog is interviewing a Reverend who in fifteen minutes will go in to be with a boy as the boy is led to the gurney to be executed by injection. >The Reverend is talking about how the Lord works in mysterious ways, and so on—it is exactly the type of conversation you want to avoid. It is very ChatGPT. It is the Reverend repeating things he’s said before—words that protect him, that allow him to perform the role of Reverend, instead of being what he is: a man named Lopez, who will soon have to watch a boy die. >At one point, the Reverend, as a part of a monologue about the beauty of God’s creation, mentions that he sometimes meditates on the beauty of the squirrels he sees on the golf course. Herzog, standing in a graveyard with nameless crosses, says, with mad Bavarian seriousness, “Please describe an encounter with a squirrel.” >Lopez is a bit surprised by the question, but he takes it in a playful spirit—his voice lifts, joyously. He starts to talk faster. (This is where the conversation shifts into the type you want.) He is no longer saying versions of things he has said before, he’s not protecting himself, he’s just there. >From that point on, it takes about ten seconds…

I quit at April 2025. Mostly because of agonizing corporate culture, loss of meaning and long term direction. It took me couple of months to recuperate. Turned down couple of similar jobs and some nicer ones. Then I started working on cheap sidewalk delivery robots, knowing nothing about robotics [1]. Made far enough to lunch a pilot (as a research project) and thinking about commercial pilots afterwards. Absolutely don't have FU money, so I'm unfolding this and let's see where this would lead me [2]. [1] https://manvel-robotics.com [2] https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/unfolding

The architect Christopher Alexander has this pattern in "A Pattern Language" called "Home Workshop". (Summary: https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/christopher-alexanders-architecture) Roughly, the idea was that if you can walk around your neighborhood and see different people working at their professions, the wholeness of the neighborhood increases. It comes more alive. Children imbibe a more realistic sense of what different professions involve. Professionals are connected to the world as they create. I try to keep this in mind. As our world has grown more digital, this consideration was one of the reasons I created this devlog last year: https://akkartik.name/freewheeling-apps

Here is an article that really helped me write better blogs https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/start-a-blog

Writing helps me think. Posting a thought in public forces me to commit to an idea and clean up how I communicate it. I learn more about the subject and myself along the way. Henrik Karlsson has a good series of posts on this subject: https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/writing-to-think I journal daily about a topic I pull off a backlog of ideas. After the end of my allotted journaling time, if I think “there are more threads here to uncover,” I spend more time on it. If I feel confident, I clean it up into a blog post. Obligatory link to my own blog: https://www.seanmcloughl.in

Here is a somewhat different motivation: "A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox" https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/search-query

https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/multi-armed-bandit Applies world models and explore/exploit concepts in ML to real life. Gives insight about dynamics of priorities in our life.

Hi Helgardt, Reghardt van Katstraat. I think Henrik has written about what he calls onramps in society for younger generations, I am struggling to find the exact reference to it. But his blog is full of ideas similar to what you have written about here. As economies develop and more specialization is allowed, it takes longer and longer for young people to "actually do work". Which is a good and bad thing. https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/apprenticeship-online

> ideally people can always just think in concepts Are you pursing an idea of how to help people like this author* access this mode that some of us are always in unless kicked out of it by the need for words? Very needed right now — the opposite of the YouTube-ization of idea transfer. It doesn't seem clear this is accessible without other changes in wiring? The inability to "picture" things as visuals seems to swap out for "conceptualizing" things in -- well, I don't have words for this. An attempt from that essay: This is not what Hadamard is talking about when he describes the wordless thought of the mathematicians and researchers he has surveyed. Instead, what they seem to be doing is something similar to this subconscious, parallelized search, except they do it in a “tensely” focused way. The impression I get is that Hadamard loads a question into his mind (either in a non-verbal way, or by reading a mathematical problem that has been written by himself or someone else), and then he holds the problem effortfully centered in his mind. Effortfully, but wordlessly, and without clear visualizations. Describing the mental image that filled his mind while working on a problem concerning infinite series for his thesis, Hadamard writes that his mind was occupied by an image of a ribbon which was thicker in certain places (corresponding to possibly important terms). He also saw something that looked like equations, but as if seen from a distance, without glasses on: he was…