I'm Roman, a human from Switzerland. Here are some facts about me: According to 16 Personalities, my type is INFP-A (introverted, intuitive, feeling, prospe...
To improve my running form, my physiotherapist sent me to the scary part of the gym. The place where the strong girls and guys move heavy iron. I was terrified of looking like a fool, lifting tiny weights and not really knowing how to even do that properly. Today at the gym, took all my courage and went there anyway. My fears of humiliation were, of course, greatly exaggerated. Nobody stared,…
This blog post came from a title trade with Ava ; she suggested the topic, I wrote about it. More info here . The Berger family is going through a rough time. The parents had some troubles in their relationship and have been fighting a lot lately. On top of that, their teenage daughter has anorexia, which has been intensifying. It has gotten so bad that the parents had to rally together to support…
Just like there's a neverending debate wether punk is dead or not 1 , we can't seem to agree wether the blog as an impactful medium is over. So it amused me to read two opposing declarations of influential bloggers that I follow. Venkatesh Rao wrote this last autumn when he announced the retirement of his blog Ribbonfarm: I do think that the end really is here for the blogosphere though. This time…
Ever since I created this blog, I've been thinking about alternative ways to write online. I wanted something that allows me to break free of the technical and formal restrictions of a blog. A digital garden is something that offers this freedom. It is something like a personal wiki: A public place where a person curates, collects and connects ideas. It's similar but different from a blog. While a…
Language Models like ChatGPT or Claude are good at some things and less good at others. They're great at language tasks: summarizing, rephrasing, translating, generating titles, etc. They're improving but still mediocre at reasoning and coding. And they remain somewhat unreliable for factual information – often correct, but we're far from being able to use them for serious research without…
When I tell people that my parents are deaf, the usual reaction is: Oh, so you must speak sign language. But I don't, for various reasons I won't get into here. We communicate in spoken language, they read my lips. The older I get, the more it bothers me that I never learnt my de facto maternal language. But it is one of those big life efforts that I "never quite got around" to do. The resources…
I find the thought of having my fundamental values written down very appealing. Whenever there's a difficult decision to make, I could refer to that document and let it guide me. Motivated by that goal, I have done numerous exercises to find out my principles, values, purpose – they come in many names. This usually involves a deep reflective journey that results list of holy items. Like Moses, I…
According to the psychologist Friedemann Schulz von Thun, every message has four layers : fact self-disclosure relationship appeal A message can operate on any of these layers (or several at once), whether the sender is aware of them or not, and the receiver may interpret the message through any of these lenses. This makes it a great model to explain miscommunication. An example: "The window is…
I like the idea of a year having a personal theme; it's more flexible than just goals and broad enough that it has the potential to exert influence in a number of areas and in ways that are serendipitous. I think I got the idea from Fernando Gros ( who just published his theme for 2025 ), and I've privately, tentatively, set myself themes at the beginning of previous years that I soon forgot…
Not long ago, I entered the fourth decade of my life. And so have, obviously, my contemporaries. People I knew as a kid are now men in their forties, and we look like men in our forties. Some grey hair here, some baldness there, more and more wrinkles. Normal stuff. When I see a stranger with these features, I think: ah, a forty-ish year old man who looks just like a forty-ish year old man. But…