#attention

The Culvert, Again

On repeated attention, the trouble with familiarity, and what becomes harder to know

Анхаарлын эдийн засаг

Attention Economy

Why Most Gaming Ad Budgets Never Make It Past the Pitch

The pitch usually has enthusiasm. What it’s missing is proof.

Seeing Is Mostly Guessing

Focus Is a Skill Everyone Can Learn

“You will never reach your destination if you stop and throw stones at every dog that barks.” — Winston Churchill

the country club taught me what i actually wanted to buy | musing no. 124

it wasn’t the membership. it was never the membership.

Stop ‘Grazing’ Your Attention: The ‘Perpetual Digital Fidget’ Trap and My Return to Intentional…

I found myself sitting at a bustling cafe, waiting for a simple americano. My eyes, instead of taking in the vibrant street scene or the…

Is One Layer Enough?

“Sometimes the biggest breakthrough in machine learning doesn’t come from adding more parameters — it comes from realizing that we may not…

Hard Work Was Never The Problem. Turns Out Focus Was.

For the longest time, I genuinely believed I was one of the hardest-working people I knew.

Attending to all attentions (a try!) (Part 1)

From Bahdanau’s original idea to FlashAttention and Multi-Head Latent Attention.

We Gave Children Infinite Choice and Took Away Their Ability to Choose

What old songs, short attention spans, and the disappearance of boredom reveal about freedom in the age of the algorithm

I Thought My Attention Span Was Broken. I Was Looking in the Wrong Place.

What four months away from social media taught me about what “broken” actually means.

THE HUMAN EVENT A Handbook for Participation

Please read these first (The Prologue is here ) (Chapter 1 is here)

The 100,000-Token Lie: Why microgpt’s Context Window Costs 14x More Than the Benchmark Claims

Last month I was running cost projections for an agentic AI platform called OptiMax that we are building at a global technology firm.

Even Interrupting Teenagers

I talk on the phone. A lot. I always have.

Сиз чарчамагансиз — диққатингиз парчаланган

Дам олиш тузата олмайдиган чарчоқ ҳақида

On the Value of Attention

I’ve written before that money isn’t value. Money is a claim on value.

Silence Your Digital Alarms: The ‘Reactive Inbox’ Trap and My Return to Focused Flow

It was 11 PM. My partner was already asleep beside me, but I wasn’t. My phone buzzed faintly on the nightstand — another work email…

YOLOv12 Explained

How Attention Entered Real-Time Object Detection

Les deux commencent par A

Aujourd’hui, j’écris parce que je sens que je porte en moi une anxiété que j’ai besoin d’apprivoiser. Elle n’est pas insupportable. Elle…

Street Photography and the Art of Seeing Human Scale

The Word Says Human. The Posture Says Look Again.

Street photography, public language, and the gap between the labels we display and the embodied lives we actually carry through the street

You Don’t Have an Attention Problem, You Have a Meaning Problem

You Can Scroll for Hours… But Can’t Focus for 10 Minutes

Learning FlashAttention the Hard Way

Part 2: Efficient CUDA Kernel Generation

The End of Boredom and the End of Depth

What disappears when every empty moment is instantly filled?

What Happens When You Go From No Attention To Too Much?

A weekend away

Technology Changed More Than Work — It Changed Human Rhythm

We did not only become more productive. We became less synchronized with ourselves.

Who really owns your stuff?

On Convenience vs. Ownership, and who really controls your life…

Life After the Feed

The quiet art of building a life that is no longer organized by endless input

The Gentle Collapse of Assumptions

There are moments when assumptions collapse gently — not through force, not through contradiction, but through a quiet loosening of what…

Where Meaning Has Not Yet Formed

There is a region within experience where meaning has not yet formed — a place before any relation is drawn, before any outline begins to…

3 tips on how and what to pay attention to, from Plutarch of Chaeronia

From the philosopher’s long, great text “On Listening”

July 3

with eyes on the road . we see what’s ahead, but miss . everything else

A Trillion Dollars, and the Attention Gap Beneath It

Global advertising crossed the trillion-dollar line in 2025. The more useful question is how much of that money the brain actually keeps…

Making Sense of Modern Hopfield Networks and Attention

Reference. This derivation is based on Hopfield Networks is All You Need (Ramsauer et al., 2020)

PagedAttention with vLLM — I

PagedAttention is one of the most important systems-level innovations in modern LLM inference, and understanding it requires building up…

Short Videos, Long Effects: What Are They Doing to Our Attention

Content is increasingly focused on capturing our attention at any cost, and we are the ones paying the price.

Attention and Language Modeling Basics — How Next-Token Prediction Makes LLMs Work

Why Transformer-based LLMs generate text one token at a time, and how Attention, Context Vectors, and Query–Key–Value make that process…

Attention Is the Last Courtyard

by John Zacharias (“Gentle”)

I Thought Time Management Was About Scheduling Every Minute Until I Learned The Truth

For years I filled every hour with plans, tasks, and deadlines, believing that control was the answer. Then I realized I was managing the…

Regard d’une professionnelle Holicare : “Les salariés manquent d’attention.”

Cette semaine, Kenza, psychologue clinicienne chez Holicare, analyse pour vous le rapport d’étude Ipsos x Uside du 8 juin 2026…

Are Attention Spans Killing Our Modern Movie Experience?

On second screens, cognitive closure and the slow death of sitting still

Why ChatGPT Is More Than Autocomplete

A rich internal state, rebuilt one token at a time

Why Hybrid Attention Models All Hit the Same Long-Context Ceiling

A new paper from Tsinghua and OpenBMB takes a fresh look at the hybrid attention architectures that have become so popular lately. The idea…

The Book That Taught Me How to Pay Attention Again

Bookish lessons from Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death

Stop Hacking AI Memory: How SubQ-1.1-Small is Making “Whole-Artifact” Reasoning a Reality

The most valuable AI workloads today share an awkward shape. They don’t just want a tidy little excerpt; they want the whole thing. An…

Is Attention Really Explanation? A Debate at the Heart of Explainable AI

The Attractive Power of Attention

Build a Sound Stack for Focus (You’ll Actually Use)

Most focus advice quietly assumes you’ll feel motivated at the right time.

Attention! Don’t Ignore This

Then we go ahead and ignore it with nonchalance

PagedAttention: Taught So Well You Can Yap About It

As transformer models continue to push the boundaries of AI capabilities, efficiency and scalability are becoming increasingly important…