Kenny Alami

On playing hard Not working hard in the sense of you could work on the wrong thing for hours at a time or grind on copy pasting hundreds of things in spreadsheets. But playing hard as in you actually are committing and giving your all to a domain day in day out and enjoying it despite it being a hard endeavour. Pushing your limits everyday and having fun doing it.

Literally how I say goodbye on 75% of my calls.

I don't want to use the AI chat in your app. I want your app to make it easy so the AI tool I use everyday can get the data I need, without having to log into your app.

Can AI help with that? Because it looks like people care a lot about the topic. This post is now at 162k views and 463 comments in 12 hours.

Casino machines have a great design to ooze money out of you. You even feel good about it. The way they do it is that they give you intermittent wins so you keep hoping you’ll win big. But obviously the algorithm is designed so that you always lose more than you win. Until you don’t have anymore money. Feels the same with AI. I see people enjoying the dopamine of progress and optimizing every bits of their lives. It’s very good at oozing time, energy, and tokens out of you. Whether it’s actually moving the needle forward is irrelevant because it feels like progress nonetheless. It gives you a sense of “you’ll get there soon, just a little bit more.” Obviously this “there” is loosely defined and the target constantly moves. I wouldn’t be surprised if we found out some of the exact psychological phenomena are at play here.

Two days ago, I asked my wife if she knew what AI psychosis was (she definitely has it). Yesterday she was teaching a Claude code to my father in law. This morning he was telling me how much his mind was blown. Exciting times ahead!

The kind of things do with our AI assistant as a family of 4: - Have it manage our calendar for any appointments or social events - Save doctor appointments, prescriptions, invoices, log treatments and send us reminders - Manage passport applications (we have too many to count) - Manage our project management system. We always have so many loops running we need help to keep track of that and figure out next steps - We use it to find vendors (therapist, lawyers, food services, anything) and start the relationship or book initial calls (we usually contact 5 or more people to test out the various offerings and it’s a lot of comms) - It also does initial due diligence on the best vendors - Air purifiers and air measurement devices are connected to it so we can ask it to blow it all the way up when it feels extra polluted - Various reminders like specific things to buy or messages to send people - Initial research on products or anything really. I’d rather do some initial research on a legal situation like that and then come to a lawyer prepared with specific questions rather than waste time figuring it out in a call - We just made a database to keep track of health related stuff (meds taken, symptoms, weight, height, workouts, contexts, etc.) I’m sure there’s a ton more missing but that’s the super useful ones I can think about right now. The big unlock for my wife and I is that we can both be in the same WhatsApp group and have the AI interact with its own Google workspace account. We’ve made it so it only has access to specific shared drives with information we’re okay sharing with the labs.

Modern life is becoming too complicated.

Released my first iOS app!! kennyalami.com/mamou My wife and I had such a hard time finding a name. We did the classic spreadsheet for the first one and it was painful! Next time around when it was spreadsheet time again, I was like, "Hell no." Let's at least try to make this fun. I slapped a swiping mechanic with a bunch of voting rounds. And it was fun! Until it wasn't anymore. There's only so many voting rounds you can go through. We're looking for unique names too. And the names that made the top 10 and top 5 were not resonating with us. We didn't want a name we couldn't be proud of. So I went ahead and downloaded all the name databases from a ton of countries we could relate too. We had 200k names and I brought it down to 100k by cleaning it all. Instead of swiping 100k names, I thought, "We have so many criteria. Why can't we have an algorithm identify the clusters of names we like and help us navigate the 100k names." We let it learn our preferences. It worked great. We saw a ton of the names we liked. But the voting rounds were still there and still boring. So I thought, "How did we decide on a name last time?" I asked my wife, "What's important to you in a name?" Turns out: - The way it looks - The story - The way it sounds So instead of simple voting rounds. I create rounds were you SEE the names in context, you READ the stories and choose the ones that resonate, and finally you SAY it out loud to see if you'll like saying it thousands of times. The app is embracing this process as close as possible (and it's free). Check it out or share it with your pregnant people! kennyalami.com/mamou

I’m constantly surprised by how much learning our kid is doing. We generally don’t come with expectations or try to refrain her from doing most things. If you want to try, just give it a shot! At the same time, it’s incredible the amount of repetition it takes for her to get something. The persistence to jump higher, open doors, speak different languages, and more, is just admirable. Now if we were constraining her, she simply wouldn’t do that many reps. I’m sure she’d would learn slower because of that. And I can’t stop thinking of how stupid my education was in so many aspects. It was so slow, so inefficient, so painful, so distressing. I have so few memories of actually enjoying what I was learning in my childhood. It took my teenage years and adulthood to actually have fun learning! But that’s way too late. My kids can’t wait until adulthood to pounce on their learning. The pace at which things are changing and at which they will be learning is mind-boggling. We simply can’t delve into inefficient learning shenanigans anymore. It’s going to fail completely.

The stigma about play being only for kid is doing us a disservice. It's preventing us from accessing more refined and sophisticated ways to have fun and play. Most people conflate how kids play and how people are goofy with play as an entire phenomenom. It also doesn't help when people long for their childhood years of being free of constraints and responsibility, when they could play most of the time. A Peter Pan syndrome. I don't know if people need to grieve those years. But you play like a child because you are a child or because you have a child. Kids are, for sure, way smarter and capable than we think they are. At the same time, their whole biology is still developing and they cannot yet access more refined and sophisticated experiences. So we need to put ourselves at their level and play with them at this level. Doesn't mean that you can't play with your kids or that all of kid's play should be inaccessible to adults. But you can't stay at this level and expect to live a meaningful and fulfilling life. We do have more complex play experiences in the forms of video games, board games, etc. As complex and refined as some of those experiences can be, they still carry a stigma because they don't have meaningful consequences outside of the game world. "You're a nerd if you play video games or board games, you're addicted, you're prone to violence, you don't take care of yourself." Obviously, we have all this toxicity and addictive behaviour in video games. That's not helping. Because as a responsible and grown adult, you then think. "Playing is stupid and I should not have fun in my life." Because play is associated with all those behaviours. You do see extreme examples of people that seem to enjoy themselves in business, music, art, sports, etc. But it feels so inaccessible. Because it feels impossible to replicate. You don't think, "If they can do this, I can do it too." But what if it's not impossible? What if we put our minds to it, we could apply the same rigour we design video games to how we design how we work and solve problems? It's not only being goofy. It's also launching yourself as hard as you can at a problem and finding deep enjoyment and fulfilment in the process. We need to make it as easy as possible to work on hard problem.

Play as a fundamental evolutionary tool. People used to do physical activity WAY more back in the day. Most of my ancestors, starting from my grand parents, were doing some form of physical labour. And we've completely lost that. Today, we need to force ourselves into the gym. A boring and repetitive activity that no one wants to do. Now we need to motivate ourselves to go to a place. Before we did this out of necessity. It's not all bad. I met an old Sicilian man while traveling in Italy and he told me he worked as a farmer his whole life. And his entire body hurts all the time. Waking up is painful because he just comes back to pain. We can avoid that with weightlifting because you can get the most optimal dosage and progression. You can measure your weight so accurately that you'll avoid injury and progress faster. So that's a good thing. Let's switch to AI and intelligence for a moment. We had to think to just do stuff. And now, we don't need to think anymore? It's not a prerequisite. The machines think for you. You really need to motivate yourself to think about the problems you need to solve. Otherwise, why do it? The good thing is that your intelligence might be applied to only specific and more complex problems rather than blunt activities lacking any sort of cognitive stimulation. I think that lifting weights for the sake of lifting weight is stupid and uninteresting. I only lift weights because I want to be a better climber. Lifting weights is something wrapped inside the context of climbing. Something I do after my climbing session. I enjoy climbing. I want to become a better and stronger climber, so I lift weights. My hunch is that I'll find thinking for the sake of thinking and keeping yourself sharp stupid and uninteresting as well. Play might provide an answer here. There are problems in the world that interest me. Sure to solve them I'll go to the thinking gym so I can make my thinking sharper and enjoy solving those problems. We didn't invent climbing. There are rocks and we need to go places, so we climb them. Although the current activity of rock climbing has been "formalized" over decades of practice by thousands of people around the world. Millions of people enjoy climbing and have fun on rocks. It's hard to get people in the gym even though it's good for them. A lot of people might then extrapolate, "If it's not fun, why think at all?" So, how do we do to thinking what we did to rock climbing?

When I was a kid, our mom had a hard time finding things we liked. She had a rotation of things we liked and whenever we liked something new, she would add it to the rotation. If we tried tacos, we'd now eat tacos every week or every other week. Now if my mom was a modern AI or machine learning algorithm (like we find on social media, Spotify, Netflix, etc.), I would tell her I like tacos. And she would serve me tacos breakfast, lunch and dinner. When I'll eventually say I need variety, she will misunderstand and serve me slight variations of tacos. Still for breakfast, lunch and dinner. If I happen to do a classic experiment with cabbage and dyeing, and I'd mention it once. She would then unprompted add cabbage to all the tacos she would serve me at every meal. That's how I feel online. On my timeline, tacos. On Netflix, tacos. On YouTube, tacos. On Spotify, tacos. Ads about tacos. Paid posts about tacos. I said, "Tacos" once and now it's tacos everywhere I look. It's tiring. I feel stuck. I feel I need to be super careful about what I click, what I watch and for how long, because everything will train the algorithm in some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy I'll only be able to escape if I completely wipe out my accounts and start from scratch. I watched an interview of Tim Berners-Lee years ago and he spoke of pushing the internet in another direction. Instead of serving you more of what you liked. Why can't it introduce you to this person that's loosely connected to your ideas, this movie that feels like a stretch but could transform your life, the music that doesn't sound like the thousand of hours of music in your history but will delight you. I'm not sure this is computable. But if it were, I'd like more of those moments. I've experienced this online and I'd like more of that. Maybe I'll be tired of it. But right now, it would feel refreshing to experience more of those magical moments.

Remember in 1899, this is how they thought about the 2000's. Go through the pictures but you'll see how funny it is what they think should be automated, how everything has to be flying somewhere, and how somehow they wanted to do so many things under water. Same pattern today. We start applying the technology to our faulty systems instead of reimagining our systems and tech from the ground up. A few examples of things they imagined 100 years ago: - Churn books in a machine and batch send it to students' headphones. - Paris to London with paper planes and floating stands for refreshments. - Long distance communication through some sort of telegram + projection of the guy on the other side of the line. - Heating through radioactivity in your chimney. - Do everything with planes in the city (planes are cool!) - Architect design houses and it's automatically built at the same time. - Barber clicks buttons and he can cut the hair of multiple people at once. - Auto make-up station. - Aerocab station (everything flying everywhere). If you want to see more about how the French saw in the future 100 years ago: publicdomainreview.org/colle…

Such an accurate analogy!

Teach someone theory = they'll forget everything in days Teach someone theory at the right moment as they practice = it'll click faster and they'll actually use it right away

What AI assistant do you guys use for your family? The Muse and @bot are super easy to set up but very annoying I can’t get my wife and I in the same groups. We have Openclaw in WhatsApp and it’s been working. But there’s always random stuff to maintain and we need something simpler.

Are you in the camp I give my AI assistant access to my personal inbox and files? Or in the camp “it has a dedicated account with restricted access”? Why? Or why not?

The wrong way I’ve been taught most subjects and most courses still teach like that today. Teacher: In this class, we are going to learn how to make crepes. Me: Great. I love crepes. Teacher: In front of me, you’ll see all the ingredients and all the utensils. I also have all the equipment necessary to cook them. Me: And do we have that too? Teacher: You have a list of everything so you can keep track. Me (dubious): Okay. Teacher: Now, we have eggs. Let me tell you everything about eggs and demonstrate it. 20 minutes later Teacher: … That’s how chicks are born. Here is the exact temperature they need to be in to survive. Me: And the crepes? Teacher: We’re coming to that but first let me show you all the things we can do with eggs. Sunny side up. Scrambled eggs. Teacher: Now let me teach you about flour and how it grows. And next class we’ll visit a mill. Me: And when do we make.. Teacher: And that’s a wrap for today. Time flies. Going to teacher after the class. Me: So when do we make crepes? Teacher: Oh no. You don’t make crepes. First, we’ll learn about all the ingredients on the list. How to cook them individually. I will show you because it’s too dangerous for you. Then we’ll study where they come from. This will take a year. Then 1 week before the last exam, you will have time to practice making crepes and we’ll grade you. Me: But wouldn’t be better if we actually made crepes right now and in a year we’d be making the best crepes because you would coach us along the way. Teacher: Ha! Now that’s a very stupid way to learn.

Can I just stop working and actually play all day long, but somehow those things still align?