What public figures publish and believe, in their own words.
About this feed
Highlights: posts that did unusually well for the person who wrote them, everything
they published at length, each release and new project, and every belief — at most
two a day from anyone. Day by day, newest
day first; within a day, the people with the most beliefs on this site come first. Nothing
else orders it. Show everything instead.
The quoted blocks are what people actually said; a beneath one is
the belief those words support, in korrents' wording. Nobody here wrote their own page.
Top people are the people in this feed with the most beliefs on this site, then the
most here. Choose an area and the row leads with the people whose beliefs are about it;
tap a face for their feed.
Substack is focused mainly on generating paying subscribers, rather than just subscribers, and so it can be hard for people to realize that it's entirely possible (and welcome!) to sign up for free.
Though it's good to say yes when you're starting out, wanting any opportunity, or needing variety, it's bad to say yes when you're overwhelmed, over-committed, or need to focus.
Amazing point: Would your belief in something stand up to the question, “Wanna bet?” If you had to gamble significant money on that belief, would you still feel 100% about it? Or maybe more honestly 60%? This creates healthy skepticism encouraging you to seek the best information instead of just defending your belief. Now objective accuracy wins instead of argument. Combine with “The Biggest Bl…
A higgledy-piggledy apartment building doesn't create density on its own, and Habitat 67 remains, half a century after its construction, bereft of the kind of schools and shops and other facilities that would help to kickstart a genuinely livable suburb.
I chose The Communist Manifesto, rather than, say, Capital because it shows in a much easier-to-read, shorter work something that is central to Marx's vision.
I chose this book particularly because we are having a lively discussion about freedom of expression today. Some of the challenges to freedom of expression today come from the left rather than from the right, although some of them still do come from the right. In this context, Mill's arguments are still relevant and deserve to be more widely known and more widely thought about.
I like The Descent of Man better than The Origin of Species because Darwin is prepared to be much bolder in The Descent of Man. In The Origin of Species he was still a little bit timid.
Parfit himself said that The Methods of Ethics contains more true statements about ethics than any other work: it builds on the work of other great scholars, but it contains more truth than other works. I do think it is a wonderful work, and if it is not the best book written on ethics, I'd like to know what is.
Discerning whether an institution is near failure is a difficult epistemic problem. There are many outwardly visible pieces of institutions that do not reflect their actual health.
There's another ancient text I could have mentioned: Galen's That the Best Physician is Also a Philosopher. It's essentially a call to arms for doctors to concentrate on the perfection of their clinical skills and to give up on ideas of attempts to get rich through their art. It shows all the ways in which he doesn't trust those doctors who use their talents for a gain other than the benefit of their patients. It is short and elegant.
I think it's a really important piece of writing just because it's so beautifully executed. That said, it does lose its way about half way through, and Woolf goes off in pursuit of some enthusiasms that I don't share.
I appreciate this book for its irreverence, the elegance of its prose and because the essays in it are succinct, punchy, with the tyrannical discipline that newspaper journalism has to have.
So it's a book which is utterly original and gets at something very real and valuable about convalescence. Sometimes I find myself recommending it to patients.
I use a Chili Pad to be cold while I sleep if I can't get the room cold enough, which is great but loud (I set it up to have the cooler unit outside my room).
I use a full spectrum LED light most mornings for about 10-15 minutes while I catch up on email. It's great—if you try nothing else in here, this is the thing I'd try. It's a ridiculous gain for me.
A unique thinker with strong opinions presented as indisputable fact. More surprisingly interesting ideas than almost any book I've ever read. Extremely thoughtful, but occasionally abruptly concludes with an unsupported point. It has a conservative “this is how it is” certainty. It’s a broad collection of thoughtful insights on life, mixed with a lot of Bible interpretation.
Visual Studio Code is the go-to editor for some complex languages like React using JSX or TypeScript and I finally agreed with Wes Bos that VS Code is better for development of React JS.
Cobalt2 Theme Official is the theme used by Wes Bos, which comes with a nice user experience and a lot of awesome features. I am using a modified version of Cobalt2 that's a crossover between Monokai and Cobalt2.
Fanny (macOS Specific) is a free Notification Center Widget and Menu Bar application to monitor your Macs fans. Allows me to know the speed of my fans and heat generated by the CPU, so that I can make sure I keep my apps to a minimum and get the maximum performance.
However, contemporary experience is that the sparse architectures produced by pruning are difficult to train from the start, which would similarly improve training performance.
Neural network pruning techniques can reduce the parameter counts of trained networks by over 90%, decreasing storage requirements and improving computational performance of inference without compromising accuracy.
However, contemporary experience is that the sparse architectures produced by pruning are difficult to train from the start, which would similarly improve training performance.
Neural network pruning techniques can reduce the parameter counts of trained networks by over 90%, decreasing storage requirements and improving computational performance of inference without compromising accuracy.
In particular, this means that incredibly powerful AI will emerge in a world where crazy stuff is already happening (and probably everyone is already freaking out).
The main disagreement is not about what will happen once we have a superintelligent AI, it’s about what will happen before we have a superintelligent AI.
Mazes are not the most interesting gameplay element if you're relying on intrinsic motivation - they're just not very entertaining - but if there's some sufficiently compelling extrinsic motivator I think their irritating properties become quite interesting.
For me, a good prototype expresses a single idea or tests a single hypothesis, so a prototype is actually a great container for a creative prompt, which typically takes the form of a single encapsulated concept or provocation.
please stop reading this immediately, and click over a remarkable place that, in my opinion, delivers more good ideas per square inch than anything else on the web: Adam Grant's Twitter account.
Directness is best in my experience, so a great photo, memorable illustration, or pitch-perfect sentence does most of the work. Beyond that, fancy implementation has never moved the needle much for my clients.
I wonder if I have twenty years of experience making websites, or if it is really five years of experience, repeated four times. If you’ve been working in the technology industry a while, please tell me this sounds familiar to you.
Illegibility comes from complexity without clarity. I believe that the legibility of the source is one of the most important properties of the web. It’s the main thing that keeps the door open to independent, unmediated contributions to the network.
So, I thought it would be useful to remind everyone that the easiest and cheapest strategy for dealing with complexity is not to invent something to manage it, but to avoid the complexity altogether with a more clever plan.
Podcast. Despite the apparent red flags about the book, it’s actually pretty genius! Read it with the right mindset (filter out bullshit), transform your relationship with objects, and declutter your life once and for all.
Ideas about developing teams that work together better. Underwhelming — took just a few base concepts and then stretched them very thin by applying to them a dozen different (not always compelling) stories.
Guide to transforming top-down organizations into lean ones, where everyone is a leader. Written by a submarine commander, it’s mostly useful to managers in big corporations and other institutions.
Richard Branson’s second autobiography. As someone not very familiar with his work, it was an interesting read (but as always with autobiographies, take it with a grain of salt).
Depending on your mood, either The Sovereign Individual, Sapiens, Siddhartha, Total Freedom (JK), The Untethered Soul, or the Rational Optimist. Books are cheap, buy all and skim them for the one that grabs you.
Mandelbrot and Richard Hudson are the authors of the influential book The Misbehavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Financial Turbulence. I suggest you read this book for yourself (even though it is not an easy book to read).
Classic Food of China was really her great work, though. I think it was the last book she produced before she died, some years ago. It's one of the few really well-researched historical and cultural Chinese cookery books.
It was probably the first book in English to bring serious academic scrutiny to Chinese food culture, and to use the scholarly techniques applied to other subjects to food, offering the views of different experts on different periods of Chinese history.
It offers a good counterpart to the KC Chang. It's very well researched and comprehensive, covering all aspects of Chinese cooking – ingredients, cooking techniques, history, agricultural system and so on.
It takes more than 20 sessions, or about six months of weekly therapy, before 50 percent of patients show meaningful improvement. It takes more than 40 sessions for 75 percent of patients to show meaningful improvement.
It would make more sense, if we want to think seriously about how to reduce emissions, not to engage in the illusions of degrowth in a very poor and unequal world but to think how the most emission-intensive goods and services could be taxed in order to reduce their consumption.
The world would have to move from an inequality level that is higher than that of South Africa to complete equality that has never existed in any recorded society.
How much of a reduction would this imply for the global top 27% (those with incomes above the global mean)? Their incomes would have to be cut by almost two-thirds.
Then, unless we change the distribution of income, we are condemning to permanent abject poverty some 15 percent of world population that currently earn less than $1.90 per day and some quarter of humankind who earn less than $2.50 per day.
From these exchanges I got the impression that they were unaware of just how unequal and poor (yes, poor) the world is today and what would be the trade-offs if we really were to decide to fix the volume of goods and services produced and consumed in the world at the current level.
One of the most commonly emphasized points in the AI safety literature is that one must never anthropomorphize AI—that is, don’t project human mental properties onto artificially intelligent systems.
A superintelligence whose goal system is even slightly misaligned with ours could, being far more powerful than any human or human institution, bring about human extinction for the very same reason that construction workers routinely slaughter large populations of ants.
Awesomely creative think-piece. 40 very short fictional stories about what happens when you die. The framework is inspiring for anyone: coming up with 40 different answers to any one question. But they’re also just brilliant ideas and powerful little fables. I just read it a 2nd time and love it even more now.
There are several jewels of medieval Greek literature but Anna Komnene's is probably the brightest. She was the daughter of one of the emperors—she was porphyrogenita—and it is the first narrative history written by a woman in any European language. It's a text that is incredibly florid, very beautiful, and extremely interesting.
It's a text that's filled with humour, of a man describing a world that is unknown. And I suppose that's a theme for me, looking at different parts of the world that have important significance and value and yet get overlooked because we're always staring at our own reflection in the mirror.
As with movies, it's very rare for a book sequel to be so much better than the original. Seven Surrenders is rated 0.34 points higher on Goodreads than Lightning, which is the gap between an average book and "best of" lists.
The Mark and the Void is my favorite of the three novels but this review will be the shortest because it would superfluous. This review by Slate magazine is excellent, covers all the bases, and it's what has gotten me to read the book to begin with. I'll just focus on the magic.
If your team is completely overwhelmed with work, well, it’s partially your fault. You are the manager, and you are the person who is responsible for pushing back on the work commitments for the team.
I resisted reading this popular history of mankind, because it came out when I had just finished “Guns, Germs, and Steel” and “Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches”, on the same subject. But wow - this book is at its best when the author is sharing his personal perspective about binding myths, humanism, and other ways that “truths” are not true. And you get an interesting history of the world along wi…
In some cases, this has led to once-held "truths" about how we create and manage accounts to be totally flipped on their head, yet we still see modern organisations applying the patterns of yesterday to the threats of today.
If you're working in an environment that mandates regular password changes, you're very likely doing the same thing because it's an easy human control to deal with a technology requirement that's seen as an impediment.
When a website blocks the pasting of passwords in an attempt to improve security, they force some users to weaken their passwords to the point where they're dumbed down to easily typed versions.
So whether it is Robert Moses then or Elon Musk today, people who would have – in a time past – been called charlatans or hustlers, now become deeply admired for their willingness to take bold action (with public money or supported by tax subsidies).
It is incrementally rising land values, combined with the ability to redevelop to something more intense, that naturally prompts the redevelopment of property in decline.
To the best of our knowledge, however, the Transformer is the first transduction model relying entirely on self-attention to compute representations of its input and output without using sequence-aligned RNNs or convolution.
We propose a new simple network architecture, the Transformer, based solely on attention mechanisms, dispensing with recurrence and convolutions entirely.
To the best of our knowledge, however, the Transformer is the first transduction model relying entirely on self-attention to compute representations of its input and output without using sequence-aligned RNNs or convolution.
We propose a new simple network architecture, the Transformer, based solely on attention mechanisms, dispensing with recurrence and convolutions entirely.
To the best of our knowledge, however, the Transformer is the first transduction model relying entirely on self-attention to compute representations of its input and output without using sequence-aligned RNNs or convolution.
We propose a new simple network architecture, the Transformer, based solely on attention mechanisms, dispensing with recurrence and convolutions entirely.
To the best of our knowledge, however, the Transformer is the first transduction model relying entirely on self-attention to compute representations of its input and output without using sequence-aligned RNNs or convolution.
We propose a new simple network architecture, the Transformer, based solely on attention mechanisms, dispensing with recurrence and convolutions entirely.
To the best of our knowledge, however, the Transformer is the first transduction model relying entirely on self-attention to compute representations of its input and output without using sequence-aligned RNNs or convolution.
We propose a new simple network architecture, the Transformer, based solely on attention mechanisms, dispensing with recurrence and convolutions entirely.
To the best of our knowledge, however, the Transformer is the first transduction model relying entirely on self-attention to compute representations of its input and output without using sequence-aligned RNNs or convolution.
We propose a new simple network architecture, the Transformer, based solely on attention mechanisms, dispensing with recurrence and convolutions entirely.
To the best of our knowledge, however, the Transformer is the first transduction model relying entirely on self-attention to compute representations of its input and output without using sequence-aligned RNNs or convolution.
We propose a new simple network architecture, the Transformer, based solely on attention mechanisms, dispensing with recurrence and convolutions entirely.
To the best of our knowledge, however, the Transformer is the first transduction model relying entirely on self-attention to compute representations of its input and output without using sequence-aligned RNNs or convolution.
We propose a new simple network architecture, the Transformer, based solely on attention mechanisms, dispensing with recurrence and convolutions entirely.
Management is highly interruptive, and great engineering — where you’re learning things — requires blocking out interruptions. You can’t do these two opposite things at once.
The best frontline eng managers in the world are the ones that are never more than 2-3 years removed from hands-on work, full time down in the trenches. The best individual contributors are the ones who have done time in management.
So, if you're looking for an easy way to quit the junk food and try a low-variety diet that's unlikely to injure your hypothalamus, I recommend MealSquares as worth a look.
to treat the addiction, which is a symptom, without treating the pain that underlies it is to deal in effects rather than in causes, and therefore dooms many to ongoing cycles of suffering
But trauma is not restricted to horrific experiences. It refers to any set of events that, over time, impose more pain on the child than his or her sensitive organism can process and discharge.
Childhood trauma is the template for addiction-any addiction. All addictions are attempts to escape the deep pain of the hurt child, attempts temporarily soothing but ultimately futile.
It is time to realize, then, addiction is neither a choice nor an inherited disease, but a psychological and physiological response to painful life experiences.
Seeing Like A State is the book G.K. Chesterton would have written if he had gone into economic history instead of literature. Since he didn't, James Scott had to write it a century later. The wait was worth it.
Facing Addiction in America is also the first governmental attempt to ground policy not in prejudice but in research, not in conjecture but in science. It collates an impressive body of evidence to illuminate the pathological processes and impacts of substance addiction in the human brain and body, and suggests evidence-based practices for treatment and prevention.
As robots and other computer-assisted technologies take over tasks previously performed by labor, there is increasing concern about the future of jobs and wages.
As robots and other computer-assisted technologies take over tasks previously performed by labor, there is increasing concern about the future of jobs and wages.
For handling email, I use GMail with lots of filters to automatically file and label message (I get about 1400 email messages per day, so I have to be quite efficient to deal with it all in a reasonable amount of time).
Most of the code I write is in C++, although I've written fair amounts of code in Java, Python, Perl, Self, Cecil, x86 assembly, and Pascal over the years.
The bottom line: When trillions of dollars are managed by Wall Streeters charging high fees, it will usually be the managers who reap outsized profits, not the clients. Both large and small investors should stick with low-cost index funds.
There are many things to criticize Facebook for; running a product that deployed end-to-end encryption by default for over a billion people is not one of them.
If you suffer one of those diseases, in addition to talking to your doctor, I recommend the work of Dr. Sarah Ballantyne. She has a PhD in medical biophysics, and managed to cure four of her own severe autoimmune diseases with the autoimmune protocol.
It includes all sorts of thought experiments that all but destroys the concept of self. I couldn’t finish the book because it was too hard and jargony.
Presentism is sometimes conscious, but often unconscious, so mindful historians will pause whenever we see something that feels revolutionary, or progressive, or proto-modern, or too comfortable, to check for other readings, and make triple sure we have real evidence.
In such a history whole eras can be dismissed as unworthy of study for failing to forward progress (The Middle Ages did great stuff, guys!) while other eras can be disproportionately celebrated for advancing it (The Renaissance did a lot of dumb stuff too!).
ConvertKit - my newsletter is where I build relationships, and earn trust. This is where I'll share what I'm learning, and ultimately ask people to buy.
ScreenFlow - I believe the future of my business is in video + video courses. I'm in ScreenFlow almost every day. Sometimes I use it to "hijack audio" during interviews. Sometimes I use it to edit video. It's getting a lot of use.
Transistor - my podcasts have been one of the biggest ways I've built authority and reputation. Transistor is dead simple, and has great analytics. Plus, it's cheaper than what I was paying Amazon S3 to host them!
This book had a big impact on me as young software developer. It was the first time I saw in print the principle "bugs that go away by themselves come back by themselves". It's something that I've often repeated to myself, and my team, if nothing else but to prepare us mentally for when that hard bug does come back. The chapter advising developers to "proactively step through your code during development, don't wait for the bug report" improved my productivity enormously, and I followed the practice for many years.
What can one say about this book, that hasn't been said already? Perhaps this: that of all the books written about programming, this has the highest information density of them all. And yet it's so pleasant to read. There is something about the tone of this book — the way the authors speak to you. They explain everything, and yet never seem patronizing or condescending. The joy they feel for their craft — it really does seem like this book comes from a time when programming was a craft — is unmistakable. Many of today's programmers — web developers, iOS developers, front-end engineers — may have no need to ever read this book. But for those who have not done so, and really want to improve as programmers, work through this book. It's a rite of passage.
The Unix Programming Environment is a book you can't read too soon. It's something I wish I'd come across years before I actually did. An authoritative and comprehensive manual for using Unix as a programmer, it clearly explains concepts such as inodes, hard and soft links, system calls, and the power of joining programs together via stdin and stdout. By the time I came across this book I already knew these concepts, but had never studied them before in one place, and in such a coherent manner.
Becoming a Technical Leader is both an interesting and subtle book. At times it feels like a self-help book, at other times a Machiavellian explanation of how programming teams really wok. But in the end it's sincere and mature, and wants to help. Weinberg's introspective style will appeal to many programmers, and it appealed to me. This book is useful because it talks about many of the practical issues of becoming a technical leader or manager within a team of developers — and from many unexpected viewpoints.
this is where the oft raised concern that hiring is
slowing us down comes from: at high enough rates, the marginal added value of hiring gets
very slow, especially if your training process is weak.
Behavioral science can play an even more important role in the policymaking process in coming years if practitioners instead begin with some of the large-scale questions that economic policymakers face and then develop insights that, often as a complement to more traditional policy tools, can help solve them.
But to date, the integration of behavioral science into public policy has proceeded from developing a set of tools to then searching for problems these tools can help solve.
Asking me to select my favorite book written by Michael Mauboussin is like asking me to pick my favorite child. I love them all the same. But if I had to choose one book it would probably be The Success Equation.
Every business wants to get you addicted to their infinite updates, pings, chats, messages, and news. But if what you want out of life is to create, then those are your obstacles.
But the only way to grow enough corridors quickly, so that you cover much of the city with frequent service that can succeed in ridership terms, is to take frequent fixed-route bus service seriously.
It runs on the assumption that whatever we sell to the wealthy today we can sell to the masses tomorrow. But some things stop working when everybody buys them.
In dense cities, where big transit vehicles (including buses) are carrying significant ridership, any “small vehicles replacing big vehicles” solution increases the total number of vehicles on the road at any time.
Nothing about any of the protocols we’ve developed requires centralization; it’s entirely possible to build a federated Signal Protocol-based messenger, but I no longer believe that it is possible to build a competitive federated messenger at all.
Movie that I loved and took fully seriously and then saw again with people who were laughing the whole time and realized it was actually a comedy: Being John Malkovich.
I’ve also recently gotten into the small S’well thermos, which I use when I don’t have my bag because unlike my normal one, it fits in my jeans pocket.
When you serve your pages over HTTP, anyone along the transport layer can do basically anything they want to your pages. More and more often it's becoming increasingly common for somebody in the chain of custody to do something to your pages that you don't want them to do.
As technologists, we can’t build an access system that only works for people of a certain citizenship, or with a particular morality, or only in the presence of a specified legal document.
My favorite books so far: A History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russel, The Guide to the Good Life by William Braxton, and the Philosophize This! podcast.
It's well studied in a number of other contexts including healthcare, aviation, mechanical engineering, aerospace engineering, and civil engineering, but we don't see it discussed in the context of software.
The data are clear that humans are really bad at taking the time to do things that are well understood to incontrovertibly reduce the risk of rare but catastrophic events.
as an application developer, writing to files safely is hard enough that it should be done via some kind of library and/or database, not by directly making syscalls
We provide comprehensive empirical evidence showing that these residual networks are easier to optimize, and can gain accuracy from considerably increased depth.
We provide comprehensive empirical evidence showing that these residual networks are easier to optimize, and can gain accuracy from considerably increased depth.
I put less weight on explicit cost-effectiveness analysis. Conceptually, my goal is to maximize the impact of my charitable contribution, but I put less weight on the explicit cost-effectiveness models we create than others.
Their words now
I remain ambivalent about putting so much weight on cost-effectiveness estimates because they are subject to numerous debatable assumptions, but I’ve changed my mind based on work we did over the past few months.
But there are a lot more cases in which meta-programming is unnecessary and additional baggage on top of the solution, which gets in the way of understanding what the code is supposed to do.
I internet in Chrome, email in Inbox, slideaphone in Keynote, work-chat in Slack, friend-chat on Hangouts/Adium, tweet about squirrels in Tweetbot, and verb all the things in real life.
I internet in Chrome, email in Inbox, slideaphone in Keynote, work-chat in Slack, friend-chat on Hangouts/Adium, tweet about squirrels in Tweetbot, and verb all the things in real life.
The known connection between geometry, logic, topology, and functional programming suggests that the connections between representations and types may be of fundamental significance.
It also wasn't obvious that derivatives were the right way to train them. Those are only obvious once you realize you can quickly calculate derivatives. There was a circular dependency.
In theory, RNNs are absolutely capable of handling such "long-term dependencies." A human could carefully pick parameters for them to solve toy problems of this form. Sadly, in practice, RNNs don't seem to be able to learn them.
And if I’m allowed to extrapolate, a clear path is now laid out towards a future where the steps to go from sketch to design to implementation are greatly more accessible to everyone with an idea.
The main issue, however, is that underestimating the size of the state space is actually very easy. In other words, it’s difficult to come up with the complete list of questions that your UI needs to answer.
For keyboards, most of my typing is done on the MacBook keyboard using just my inner fingers, sometimes a Kinesis contoured keyboard (the weird scoopy one) if my outer fingers aren't being the problem at the moment, and sometimes other keyboards.
For video editing, mostly Adobe Premiere, unless it's a very simple job and also I'm working on the MacBook, in which case I'll use Final Cut Pro just because the export time is a little faster.
know in your bones that game design is a powerful way of imprinting behaviors on people, and that it is entirely possible to imprint behaviors you didn’t want.
Where UX tries to provide a likely false but useful mental model of the interior workings to the user, game design tries to guide the player towards a fairly accurate mental model.
This leads to a powerful argument for a monolith-first strategy, where you should build a new application as a monolith initially, even if you think it's likely that it will benefit from a microservices architecture later on.
I use Outlook to maintain my calendar and address book. I hate that program, too, but I can't find anything else that lets me sync locally to my iPhone without going through the cloud.
I however recently started to experiment with crouton, which allows me install a chrooted Ubuntu (or other variants of Linux) on a Chromebook and I can use GnuCash there. So far, this set-up seems to be working well enough for me, so I may be able to lose the Vizio someday.
In one of whose windows I run emacs, in which I use gnus newsreader, and there I spend most of my day, exchanging emails with the project participants.
Since the project I work on is a command-line tool that is primarily implemented in C, I use the usual CLI development tools, e.g. make, gcc, gdb, etc. The documentation is in AsciiDoc.
The problem with level 2, though is that it works on abstract, mechanical-level analysis of systems, which doesn’t relate directly to what players actually want from their games: emotions.
In the 1990s, I was excited about the future, and I dreamed of a world where everyone would install GPG. Now I’m still excited about the future, but I dream of a world where I can uninstall it.
I believe every material has a grain, including the web. But this assumption flies in the face of our expectations for technology. Too often, the internet is cast as a wide-open, infinitely malleable material.
It is better. I will take async-await over bare callbacks or futures any day of the week. But we're lying to ourselves if we think all of our troubles are gone.
The method is straightforward to implement, is computationally efficient, has little memory requirements, is invariant to diagonal rescaling of the gradients, and is well suited for problems that are large in terms of data and/or parameters.
We introduce Adam, an algorithm for first-order gradient-based optimization of stochastic objective functions, based on adaptive estimates of lower-order moments.
The method is straightforward to implement, is computationally efficient, has little memory requirements, is invariant to diagonal rescaling of the gradients, and is well suited for problems that are large in terms of data and/or parameters.
We introduce Adam, an algorithm for first-order gradient-based optimization of stochastic objective functions, based on adaptive estimates of lower-order moments.
This has reinforced my intuition that excellent organizations are significantly more likely to succeed than others, and GiveDirectly’s overall excellence increases my estimate of the impact it will achieve.
A few months ago, as I was reading Constance Reid's excellent biography of Hilbert, I figured out if not the answer to this question, at least something that made me feel better about it.
Then comes Prince, which converts HTML and CSS to beautiful PDF files. (Disclosure: I'm the chairman of the board of YesLogic, the company behind Prince.)
I also use emacs a lot. I type this in emacs, and I read email in emacs (in vm, to be precise). I've used emacs since 1988 and I have email archives from back then.
And Complicite was really determined – which is why I like this play – not just to talk about mathematicians as crazy characters but also to embed the ideas of mathematics in the structure of the play, so they worked really hard to understand what Ramanujan and Hardy were obsessed with.
Yes, one of the things that really excited me when I read this – again when I was at school – was this idea of infinity. Gamow was a physicist first of all: Mathematics is the language of physics and you can see that through this book.
There's another book by George Gamow which also turned me on, which is Mr Tompkins in Paperback. It's a set of physics lectures which this guy, Mr Tompkins, goes to and always falls asleep during the lecture and then he dreams he's in a world in which the speed of light is 30 miles an hour so he can see the effects of relativity happening on the streets.
When I read that book I thought, 'Yes, this is the game I want to play.' That's what I try to do in the work that I do, to combine my love of music, to explain why music and mathematics have these common themes, to bring mathematics alive through the theatre, write the books I do. That's my ultimate aim, to become a master of the glass bead game.
But it's just a beautifully told story and also they talk about their writing of the book, so it's very self-referential, which is the whole key to Gödel's proof.
Affordances control what actions are possible. For designers, signifiers are far more important. Signifiers are how communication takes place, how one signals the appropriate controls and operations.
The main takeaway I made from all of this was: Asian languages are hard, and attempting full-immersion without sufficient preparation is usually not going to work.
The no-English rule was largely what made the difference. Although there are many ways of learning a language, going for full immersion made it possible to learn what would have taken years in just a few months.
I love reading, so I have to mention Pocket (short form) and Kindle (the app, not the hardware) for long-form. Kindle plus GoodReads have amped up my reading in a huge way.
Other frequently used programs include Dreamweaver and Fetch for my site; Chrome, iPhoto and Preview for reference hunting; iTunes, Spotify, and Downcast to keep me company.
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one
sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at
korrents.com.
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said.
The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in
korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who
else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public
statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
About the English under a post
Some people here publish in a language other than English. Where they
do, this site shows a machine translation beneath the post, in
this typeface — the site's own, not theirs.
The post itself is never changed, moved or hidden: what is set in the
serif above is exactly what the person published, and it is what to
quote them on. A translation can be wrong in ways that matter,
especially about tone.
Only the post's own words are translated. A quoted post, a linked
article and a belief on korrents.com
are left in their original language.