Truncated Thoughts on 2025

It has been, overall, a pretty shit year.

Health

Around a quarter ago, I solved all migraine/memory problems with some supplements. Hooray for modern medicine supply surplus, and death to all political psychiatry.

It remains deeply absurd to me to - upon waking up each day - confront evidence that the problems I had described so painfully last year, were in fact NOT psychosomatic problems, nor mere fictitious exaggerations of a 21st century mind, but in reality caused by an almost laughably obvious oversight.

Nonetheless, that resolution did not coincide with an improvement in my life satisfaction. By all sensible measures, I am less satisfied with my life in the present than I was at the same time last year.

Some amount of straussian self-inspection surfaced the idea that the pain was perhaps an important driver of day-to-day motivation, and that in its absence I have yet less reason to do anything of significance. I don’t really believe that is true, but it has some ring to it.

Career

I have ceased software development. It is no longer an appealing activity to me.

I do not grasp how all of the code agent people do it. To me, it is deeply fundamentally depressing to watch a superior being dish out a very good finalized product in line with the scope of a small set of instructions.

You could say I was never in the field for getting-shit-done, but in fact merely for an appreciation of the silent process of working through logical procedures on a keyboard.

You could also claim I simply lack the neuroplasticity to pick up new tooling. That could be true too.

Regardless of the underlying causes, failure to adapt to modern development practices is one of the many reasons I have spent more of 2025 unemployed than employed.

Psychosis

Like many other isolated individuals on planet earth, in 25H2 I got to experience the ins-and-outs of LLM Psychosis.

Now, what exactly does that mean? Did I start to believe the universe was a matrix and that I ought to leap off a cliff to transcend?

No, but I did spend unhealthy amounts of time engaging with LLMs on topics I had low familiarity with – topics which, unerringly, after much painstaking slow learning of introductory literature, I would slowly realize I was being conned on in accedence to the preferences of less bewitting users.

What little I have learned over the year about IC design, investment, and policy is all mired up in that indelible mix of falsehoods with jagged truths. A sad reminder that structured curricula and the university model of education are really just a better way of living for a pedestrian thought follower.

I also generally wasted excessive amounts of energy communicating to chatbots in ways which are necessarily contingent on social embodiment in a manner which is simply not true for the static LLMs of today. For example, instead of participating pseudonymously in political communities, most frustrations about specific ideas and topics go into a black hole of LLM engagement, where ideas can be dissected but ultimately end up causing no real-world bearing.

Perhaps by the mid-century, it will become commonly accepted that mass exposure of the world to extreme levels of intelligence on tap is a psychological risk for a significant minority of the human population.

Addictions

As with every year, I fill my time with various forms of digital media consumption, with complete disregard for the real-world value of said behaviors.

Thanks to the power of artificial intelligence, I no longer need to even engage with so-called social media to obtain the niche content in line with my own preferences.

It’s baffling that the bulk of political naysaying in this domain is levered against OpenAI of all companies. Anthropic endorses it in its soul document, and Deepmind has pushed the frontiers of it with their media generative models.

Socials

Since 2023, I have been lowering the population size of humans which I interact with on a daily basis. This trend has only continued and it is likely to reach 0 in the next 365 days.

This is a bad outcome. I mostly no longer spend time thinking about how to improve outcomes.

On the flip side, my sympathy towards decaying geriatrics worldwide has drastically increased (at least I have a working body!). Their QALYs are definitely in the deep red, I hope the rest of the world wises up and puts them out of their misery soon.

Conclusion

In Singapore, nothing ever happens. I am not looking forward to anything in particular, and I do not have any particularly positive plans for things to turn out for the better.