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.
if you often need to get everyone in the same room to discuss and decide on something, you probably have too many people discussing and deciding things.
when the main communication channels are asynchronous text and video calls (as would be the case in a remote work setup) the influence of the loudest person in the room wanes. It's transferred to the best communicators.
Here's a new one that's worth consideration: the ZOLEO Satellite Communicator ($200, 5.3 oz), which debuted in January. It's well priced, constructed, and engineered; and it offers a significantly improved messaging experience for both the owner and their contacts.
And beyond that, by the time solar scale has doubled 4 more times, to the equivalent of 16% of today’s electricity demand (and somewhat less of future demand), we should see solar at 3 cents per kwh in the sunniest areas, and 4.5 cents per kwh in moderately sunny areas.
Their words now
Both of those forecasts were wrong. Solar has plunged in price faster than anyone – including me – predicted.
Add these up, and it’s plausible that solar’s contribution to the energy system could double or triple the amount currently considered feasible for solar to provide.
We can use the last decade to predict the future prices of solar power. Not by looking at the cost of solar as a function of time, but by looking at the cost of solar as a function of cumulative scale of the solar industry.
This incredible pace of solar cost decline, with average prices in sunny parts of the world down to a penny or two by 2030 or 2035, is just remarkable.
The data paint an incredible picture: One that shows the price of solar electricity from utility-scale systems dropping by anywhere from 30-40% with each doubling of cumulative solar deployment.
Even under all the constraints and controls that I've been describing here, 90% of our drugs fail in the clinic: can you imagine the failure rate if we tried to go faster and noisier?
The procedures that have grown up around drug development are a sort of Chesterton's Fence: we shouldn't pull them down without considering the reasons why they were put up.
My favorite cocoa powder (Valrhona) is one of the most expensive and I can only encourage you not to try it because I've found it impossible to use others since.
I am a great fan of Better than Bouillon concentrates, which have much better flavor than most boxed stocks, keep for ages, and are wonderfully space-efficient.
I’ve been writing off and on recently about the notion of the deep life, in which you focus with energetic intention on things that really matter, and avoid wasting too much attention on things that don’t.
One observation that rings true from my experience is that you should resist the urge to try to build a master plan that, once implemented, will transform everything for the better in one dramatic moment.
Roman Dial is a master storyteller, and I've long awaited for a definitive book about these larger-than-life characters and only-in-Alaska events. But Roman's best lifetime work will probably stand as The Adventurer's Son, a story that he never would have wanted to write but that is more heartfelt, personal, and relevant than a book full of true but unbelievable tales.
In any case, I think we need to not only look at the incentives facing scientists, but also those facing department heads, journals, and grant-making agencies.
The lesson is that connecting with others starts with recognizing that people are so different, especially in how they communicate. But there’s a much broader lesson embedded in this book if you read between the lines.
This is a sad, depressing love story of a father to his son. It’s pure sacrifice. The narrator’s melancholy mindset and recognition of impossible odds never derails his duty to his boy. It’s the pinnacle of grace.
Naysayers will have a lot to object about Rand. But Roark embodied integrity. Integrity is more complicated than Rand presents. I don’t think the hardest questions are in here. But Roark is a good guide for many decisions life will throw at you even if he is an incomplete (or possibly just unfinished) hero.
I was disappointed. I love Tim’s work, but this didn’t deliver in the way his past books have. There’s zero thematic organization, so you can’t reference certain topics you want to learn more about except in a few cases. While this has some interesting pieces, I doubt I’ll refer back to it like I have with Workweek, Body, and Chef.
This is basically a much worse version of 4-Hour Chef. Kaufman doesn’t bring nearly as much to the table as Ferriss, and it feels a little rushed and under researched. Wouldn’t recommend it if you’re trying to quickly develop skills, I’d read 4-Hour Chef instead.
My wife Amanda is the real reader in our house, and last month she came home from the library with Dreams of El Dorado: A history of the American West, by H. W. Brands. I moved quickly through its 480 pages (with an occasional photo), and thought it was one of my more enjoyable recent reads.
Similarly, if you're intrigued by Powell's Report on the Lands of the Arid Region, then pick up Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner, which is the definitive history of water in the West.
Because arguably the majority of our time working on software is not spent writing it: we're reading code, trying to understand it, slightly tweaking and editing it.
As generative drug analoging grows in importance, it's going to be crucial for people to make the entire training set available in detail when such work is published.
A well-made design system created for the right reasons is reparative. One created for the wrong reasons becomes a weapon for displacement. Tools are always beholden to values.
At first glance the Fastball struck me as a humble offering, but it quickly grew on me. Mostly after I started to carry and use it. I wasn't immediately impressed when I pulled the Fastball from it's box, and as a collectible I'd probably pass. But as a user piece I can easily recommend it.
Zoom is something I use multiple times a day for video and audio communication. It's been the best video calling service I've used to date and works well for a remote working.
To ensure I have great audio quality, and to enable low-latency audio for music production, I use a Focusrite Sapphire 2i2 audio interface. It's light and USB powered and does the job.
I've DJ'ed since 1988 and I can't stand bad audio. Since my days in nightclubs spinning vinyl, I've sworn by Senheiser headphones. My current (and previous) pair are the Senheiser HD25.
Rather than hard, difficult country being the breeding ground for the state, it is in fact the richest, softest areas that were (for those who have been to Mesopotamia and are wondering why it doesn’t seem quite so rich and soft anymore, the word you want to look up is salinization).
I was most influenced by the essays in the book, and I ended up being attracted to the same sort of writers as Borges, mostly Anglo-American writers of 1820-1920.
I run a Sony RX100 III with the HDMI out plugged into an AVerMedia 4K capture card - I find it more stable than the Elgato CamLink or knockoff camlink that I used previously.
spending an increasing amount of my free time working with tools like Google Colab, Runway ML, TensorFlow, and Hugging Face to play around with machine-generated text, audio, imagery, and video.
American by Day is engagingly written. Miller isn't afraid to write characters who are opinionated. They don't hold their tongue about what they believe in, they let rip. People are angry, people are passionate. I love the unorthodoxy of it, I suppose.
It's a really great read. I read this in two days when my life was very busy, and I really shouldn't have been taking time off to sit in the corner and read, but I just kept wanting to return to it because I was marvellously entertained and engaged by it.
I occasionally use these Adobe CS4 programs: Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Acrobat, Illustrator, and Flash. I don't use any of them enough to justify a subscription to their latest cloud offerings.
Air pollution is a very big deal. Its adverse effects on numerous health outcomes and general mortality are widely documented. However, our understanding of its cognitive costs is more recent and those costs are almost certainly still significantly under-emphasized. For example, cognitive effects are not mentioned in most EPA materials.
I found that the book consistently overstates the problem of lack of sleep, sometimes egregiously so. It misrepresents basic sleep research and contradicts its own sources.
Eye movement directed reprocessing (alternative when the book was written, now basically establishment) where you move your eyes back and forth while talking about your trauma, and this seems to somehow help you process it better.
If intelligence lies in the process of acquiring skills, then there is no task X such that skill at X demonstrates intelligence, unless X is actually a meta-task involving skill-acquisition across a broad range of tasks.
Today, it is increasingly apparent that both of these views of the nature of human intelligence - either a collection of special-purpose programs or a general-purpose Tabula Rasa - are likely incorrect
We argue that ARC can be used to measure a human-like form of general fluid intelligence and that it enables fair general intelligence comparisons between AI systems and humans.
We argue that solely measuring skill at any given task falls short of measuring intelligence, because skill is heavily modulated by prior knowledge and experience: unlimited priors or unlimited training data allow experimenters to "buy" arbitrary levels of skills for a system, in a way that masks the system's own generalization power.
To make deliberate progress towards more intelligent and more human-like artificial systems, we need to be following an appropriate feedback signal: we need to be able to define and evaluate intelligence in a way that enables comparisons between two systems, as well as comparisons with humans.
Update 2020-11-16: For my home, I ended up switching from the corncob bulb to three 7-way splitters and 21 100W equivalent 5000K Cree bulbs from Home Depot. I found the Cree bulbs on sale so they were about the same price, the light was more diffused and they have a higher color-rendering index.
For my book, I've used Scrivener to store all my research notes. I don't actually write in Scrivener; but it's been really useful to help me organize this big writing project.
I used to have a special fountain pen, but printer cartridges and fountain pen cartridges are annoying and expensive, and so these days I stick with the ol' Pilot Gel Ink Retractive Roller Ball pen. Blue ink. It's got to be blue ink.
I prefer to edit my writing on paper than on a screen, so I do print out longer essays and chapters and make changes by hand. I have an HP OfficeJet printer.
I do have a QNAP NAS for local file service, movies and music, but I foolishly bought one with too little RAM so to keep it from paging I have it reboot itself every 24 hours.
I also rely significantly on a home server built from an ODROID-C2. In the past this role had been filled by older Raspberry Pi models, but the ODROID is well-suited as a server.
The Art of Statistics is a really accessible and comprehensive introduction to statistics. It's not only about the tools of statistics, but it also goes through lots of interesting and relevant areas where statistics can help us make important decisions.
Matt is a stand-up comedian and he's a very funny guy. He makes mathematics interesting by making it funny. In this book, he pokes fun at people who've made silly mathematical mistakes, but at the same time he also looks at some issues that are quite serious: bridges collapsing and killing people, for example. He can do the somber, serious stuff as well. It's a great book. As far as I know, it's the first math book that's ever been a number one bestseller.
It's increasingly coming to the fore and Marcus deals with it in a really interesting way. He takes us through lots of different areas where AI is being used to mimic creativity, which some people would argue is the essence of being human. It's interesting to see how close to being human AI is getting.
I suggested that psychedelics might work by strengthening the brain's top-down priors.
Their words now
A more recent paper by Carhart-Harris and Friston provides compelling evidence that psychedelics probably work by _weakening_ the brain's top-down priors, meaning I got this one maximally wrong.
so we use Google Meet speakermics, which allow for full-duplex conversations, which makes conversation far more organic. That device turned Google Meet from something exhausting to something really good.
I host all of my course videos on Vimeo. It's essentially the only option — everything else is crazy expensive in comparison. Awesome service though, absolutely love it.
I hate the app so much (so many damn modals and toolbars everywhere!) but the call quality is better and more reliable than any other tool so I tolerate it.
It's basically the Vim of audio editing software, so I wouldn't recommend it if you don't have the time and energy to heavily invest in customizing it for your workflow, but I can move like lightning in this thing.
Specific parts of academia that seem to be problematic: rigid, punishing for deviation, career progression; peer review; need to constantly fundraise for professors.
here's some notable software that I use daily. I also maintain an active list here. Fish Shell. Micro text editor. Toot Mastodon client. cmus audio player.
here's some notable software that I use daily. I also maintain an active list here. Fish Shell. Micro text editor. Toot Mastodon client. cmus audio player.
A must-read for every entrepreneur. A holistic, generous, human, emotional, long-term, story-driven approach to your business. The world would be a much better place if businesses were led this way. You'll have a competitive advantage if you do this, since so few do.
Instead of having people do the parts of a task that machines are bad at, let’s reverse the process and have machines do the parts that people are bad at. Instead of requiring people to work on technology’s terms, require the machines to work on human terms.
Human error is blamed for over 90 percent of industrial and automobile accidents. It is the leading cause of aviation accidents, and medical error is reported to be the third-largest cause of death in the entire United States. Horrifying? Yes, but why do we label it “human error”? It is design error.
If the people can decide, even if they come up with the same, identical solution as the expert people or machines, they will trust them, implement them, and abide with them.
Solve the fundamental, underlying issues, not the symptoms. We recommend starting with field studies and observations of actual practice (an applied ethnography). Ask “why?” at each issue.
We challenge this approach. It encourages design by committee and infuses a superficial sense of collaboration that leads to compromises and weakens ideas. Our view, the product of years of studies of and participation in innovation projects, is that effective teams do not defer critical reflection; they create through criticism.
There is a limit to translation. You can make your translations more and more complex, and you can get very fast at them, but it will never be as fast or as fluent as simply thinking in the language.
But that can’t possibly be true. Singers and actors learn new accents all the time, and they’re not, on average, smarter than everyone else (and they certainly don’t all start before the age of 7).
If you want a push I strongly recommend Austin Kleon’s short book Steal Like an Artist. I read it on New Year’s Day 6 years ago and just re-read it on vacation (twice!) last week.
Regardless of what you say, any specific mockups are going to bias what other people do after you—especially if you’re in a higher position than them. They’ll take every detail in the initial mockups as direction even though you didn’t intend it.
Shaping is primarily design work. The shaped concept is an interaction design viewed from the user’s perspective. It defines what the feature does, how it works, and where it fits into existing flows.
Work that’s too fine, too early commits everyone to the wrong details. Designers and programmers need room to apply their own judgement and expertise when they roll up their sleeves and discover all the real trade-offs that emerge.
Over-specifying the design also leads to estimation errors. Counterintuitive as it may seem, the more specific the work is, the harder it can be to estimate.
Excellent touch interfaces feel tactile. The best “touch interfaces,” in my opinion, are actual buttons, things with physicality, haptics. But on a screen, to feel tactile is to move without latency.
I love software that does this: Software that unbloats over time. This should be the goal of all software. The longer it’s around, the more elegant it should become. Smooth over like a river stone.
Speed and reliability are often intuited hand-in-hand. Speed can be a good proxy for general engineering quality. If an application slows down on simple tasks, then it can mean the engineers aren’t obsessive detail sticklers.
Fast software is not always good software, but slow software is rarely able to rise to greatness. Fast software gives the user a chance to “meld” with its toolset. That is, not break flow.
Speed in software is probably the most valuable, least valued asset. To me, speedy software is the difference between an application smoothly integrating into your life, and one called upon with great reluctance.
I'm of the view, though this would take another post to explain, that the problems that science suffers have more to do with how science is done (funded, organized, produced) rather than how much money is gets, in general.
For Skype calls and podcast recordings, I use the Logitech C920 webcam and either a Blue Yeti or Audio-Technica ATR2100 mic. Both are excellent mics for around $100.
Lastly, I'm not super-picky about office chairs, but I've finally found a model that works for me without any fuss: the Tempur-Pedic TP9000 Mesh Task Chair from Staples; pro-tip: take the armrests off.
I prefer melamine whiteboards because they're lighter and cheaper than porcelain or glass ones, and I use Avery Marks-A-Lot brand dry-erase markers on them.
These were the notebooks that we worked on in Moscow and one realised that here was most of the raw material for Life and Fate which I think is probably the most important work of fiction about World War II.
But Anna Reid's book goes far further because, with excellent research in archives which weren't available before, she is able to show how totally cynical Stalin's attitude was to Leningrad. Indeed it was a major factor in the appalling loss of life and suffering, which is very hard to appreciate.
This book, A Woman in Berlin, is one of the great diaries of the whole war. Although it was published anonymously we do know the name of the woman who wrote it now.
It is a remarkable work, not just of scholarship and research but, above all, of a fresh angle on the way that the inter-reaction between Nazism and Stalinism actually caused such appalling levels of hatred and murder in this particular area.
Bradley Hope and Tom Wright, Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World: Is financial fraud becoming its own sub-genre? This reporting into yet another fraud reminds me of The Spider Network or Bad Blood. What distinguishes this one is the size: it involved billions of dollars.
Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg and Alan Eagle, Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley’s Bill Campbell: I understood Bill Campbell was a behind-the-scenes guy in Silicon Valley, but I had no idea just how influential he was. Bill Gurley of Benchmark noted “I would argue that Bill has had a bigger impact on Silicon Valley than any other single person simply because his reach was so amazingly wide.” That’s a story I want to read.
Charles C. Mann, The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World: When it comes to climate change, there are many possible futures. At one end, things get irreversibly worse; at the opposite end, technology “solves” climate change just like any engineering problem. This book looks at that intellectual clash between environmentalists on the one side and the techno-optimists on the other by telling the history of two little-known twentieth-century scientists.
Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life: Rory Sutherland is the Vice Chairman of advertising giant Ogilvy; he describes his “attractively vague job title” as allowing him the freedom to create a behavioral science practice within the ad agency. This looks intriguing.
Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid: A masterwork from 1979 that focuses on how cognition can emerge via a variety of hidden neurological mechanisms. I always regretted blazing through GEB in college for a class. This is the summer when I finally get to reread it slowly and carefully.
I’ve seen recurring comments to the effect of “This is great, but individuals aren’t where the money’s at, it’s companies”, which is a position I’ve also previously taken.
For coding, I use Visual Studio Code. I use Git for source control, Photoshop for 2D art, Audition for audio editing, Premiere for video editing, and our team coordinates on Google Docs and Skype.
Peripheral-wise, I have a mechanical Razer Huntsman Elite keyboard, a Razer Mamba Elite mouse on a Razer Goliathus Chroma mousepad, and Razer Nommo Chroma loudspeakers. The lights cheer me up.
When you come across an article set in a superb typeface for reading, some excellent airport signage or a well designed door handle, you don’t think about it or even notice it. If anything you might just notice being happier, or simply not frustrated. That’s how you know a design is great: it disappears.
But given the already complicated premise of long exposure photography, the best possible thing we could do — and as a designer this is hard to admit — was to stick to a fairly conventional design and let the actual features surprise and delight.
The book and movie only tangentially touch on Apollo itself (although it does appear!), but they make the list because they are well worth the read / watch, and they tell an important story of yet another facet of the immense collaboration that was the space program, and the incredible diversity of people and backgrounds and stories and kinds of work that went into making it all work.
This documentary was a solid telling of the story of that mission, and of the later-in-Apollo scientific goals and geological exploration that was achieved, as well as a wistful look back at the story of the last humans, to date, to set foot on the moon.
I honestly don't recall that much from this book. I read it fairly early on in my Apollo exploration. I'd recommend Eyles' Sunburst and Luminary, above, as a better starting point if you're interested in the computers that flew Apollo.
As for my personal feelings on the matter, however, I’m skeptical that new licenses are the right approach on a systemic level, both in terms of feasibility, as well as where I think the world is going.
Since reading it over two decades ago, I have recommended The Soul of a Machine at essentially every opportunity, believing that it is a part of computing's literary foundation – that it should be considered our Odyssey.
This catalogue was published on the occasion of the first ever exhibition of a long-dead painter at the Museum of Modern Art. It's only about thirty pages, but it is utterly brilliant.
This is a micro-study of how one might interpret the paintings of Turner and Constable and what they're really trying to do. It's one of the very few works I've ever read about Turner or Constable that addresses the real issues of their work.
This is a brilliant piece of social history. It's a daughter's expression of love for her father, even though it was a complicated love. I think it's a very memorable portrait of a particular painter. She relates his work to his life, to his fathering, and regrets the toll taken on him by the rather damaging macho culture of the male artists of the New York School, who seemed to have felt obliged to drink at least a bottle of whiskey and smoke five packets of Camel no-filter cigarettes every day. It's amazing that he lived as long as he did, given that he died in his mid-sixties.
These are the writings of a painter who was so bad at art, and yet was one of the greatest prose writers of the nineteenth century. He completely mistook his vocation and wrote these utterly astonishing diaries in which all sorts of things crop up.
His book Principles for Navigating Big Debt Crises is an important read for investors that want to protect themselves from or benefit from recessions and other financial crises.
Since you’re on my website, you probably enjoy my work. If that’s the case, then my book StockDelver will be of use to you, if you like investing in individual stocks.
David Kaiser has contributed an introduction to the book (available here , or, if this doesn't work, try here ) which does an excellent job of putting the material in historical and intellectual context
What we are actually listening to is human limitation and the audacity to transcend it. Artificial Intelligence, for all its unlimited potential, simply doesn’t have this capacity.
A sense of awe is almost exclusively predicated on our limitations as human beings. It is entirely to do with our audacity as humans to reach beyond our potential.
Formal verifiers have a dilemma: the more expressive the language, the harder it is to prove anything in it. But the less expressive the language, the harder it is to write anything in it.
Other applications I use frequently: 1Password, Slack, PureVPN, Photoshop, LICEcap (for creating screencaps to be shared with teammates or added to GitHub PRs, particularly for UI changes).
Other applications I use frequently: 1Password, Slack, PureVPN, Photoshop, LICEcap (for creating screencaps to be shared with teammates or added to GitHub PRs, particularly for UI changes).
The original smartphones solved a real problem: how do I check in on work when away from my office computer? This problem is now better solved by more recent innovations.
I was doubtful, but everyone kept telling me it’s awesome, so I reluctantly read it. Holy crap! It’s GREAT! Feels like the definitive masterpiece on the subject of how to make good habits and break bad ones. Very focused on helping you take action. Very relatable and inspiring.
Compassionate Inquiry is an in depth teaching and distillation of the approach I have developed to working with human beings beset by personal issues, health problems that need gently guided exploration, mental health challenges, addictions, relationship difficulties and, above all, an unhealthy relationship to their own selves.
My go-to headphones are wireless Bose QuietComfort 35’s, which are fantastic for when you need to concentrate or you’re just tired of noise from a plane or train.
Did you know, the tests you write with react-testing-library look almost identical to the tests you write with vue-testing-library. Magic things happen when you don't test implementation details. :)
Now, almost everything happens in Google Docs, except for when I write straight into the Axios or Substack CMS. (Both of which are lovely, WYSIWYG, very simple and easy to use.)
My sea serpent bracelet from Jill Platner. I put it on and take it off dozens of times a day, and slide it back and forth between my hands. It has the perfect weight and feel
Intuitively, it is reasonable to believe that a deep bidirectional model is strictly more powerful than either a left-to-right model or the shallow concatenation of a left-to-right and a right-to-left model.
Such restrictions are sub-optimal for sentence-level tasks, and could be very harmful when applying fine-tuning based approaches to token-level tasks such as question answering, where it is crucial to incorporate context from both directions.
We argue that current techniques restrict the power of the pre-trained representations, especially for the fine-tuning approaches. The major limitation is that standard language models are unidirectional, and this limits the choice of architectures that can be used during pre-training.
Intuitively, it is reasonable to believe that a deep bidirectional model is strictly more powerful than either a left-to-right model or the shallow concatenation of a left-to-right and a right-to-left model.
Such restrictions are sub-optimal for sentence-level tasks, and could be very harmful when applying fine-tuning based approaches to token-level tasks such as question answering, where it is crucial to incorporate context from both directions.
We argue that current techniques restrict the power of the pre-trained representations, especially for the fine-tuning approaches. The major limitation is that standard language models are unidirectional, and this limits the choice of architectures that can be used during pre-training.
Intuitively, it is reasonable to believe that a deep bidirectional model is strictly more powerful than either a left-to-right model or the shallow concatenation of a left-to-right and a right-to-left model.
Such restrictions are sub-optimal for sentence-level tasks, and could be very harmful when applying fine-tuning based approaches to token-level tasks such as question answering, where it is crucial to incorporate context from both directions.
We argue that current techniques restrict the power of the pre-trained representations, especially for the fine-tuning approaches. The major limitation is that standard language models are unidirectional, and this limits the choice of architectures that can be used during pre-training.
Intuitively, it is reasonable to believe that a deep bidirectional model is strictly more powerful than either a left-to-right model or the shallow concatenation of a left-to-right and a right-to-left model.
Such restrictions are sub-optimal for sentence-level tasks, and could be very harmful when applying fine-tuning based approaches to token-level tasks such as question answering, where it is crucial to incorporate context from both directions.
We argue that current techniques restrict the power of the pre-trained representations, especially for the fine-tuning approaches. The major limitation is that standard language models are unidirectional, and this limits the choice of architectures that can be used during pre-training.
Check out the New Rustacean podcast by Chris Krycho. I have really enjoyed Chris's podcasts, and have been working my way through them when commuting or doing household chores.
Let me close by offering a sincere thanks to those in the Rust community who have been working so long to develop such a terrific piece of software – and especially those who have worked so patiently to explain their work to us newcomers.
The likelihood that someone is providing high-quality information in these domains is lower than in less controversial areas like physics or neuroscience.
The work of Philip Tetlock, PhD and others has shown that people who have one big idea to explain everything (“hedgehogs” or ideologues) are very bad at accurately modeling the world, predicting outcomes, and recommending effective actions.
A $250/mo recurring donation to would be a drop in the bucket of most businesses, but a major boon to any open source project, with which the business will almost certainly see tangible value-add as a result.
I do not sign CLAs and I think they’re a harmful practice for this very reason. Asking a contributor to sign them is a slap in the face to the good will which led them to make a contribution in the first place.
But the Commons Clause doesn’t present a solution for supporting open source software. It presents a framework for turning open source software into proprietary software.
What should we do about open source maintainers not getting the funding they need? It’s a very real problem, and one Kevin has explicitly asked us to talk about before we criticise his solution to it.
The best book I have read about being an entrepreneur is Shoe Dog by Nike founder Phil Knight. If you are interested in business and have not read this book, what exactly are you reading?
To me, this book is an illustration of the power of names. Today, in the era of Google, if you know the name of something, you can find out about it with a simple search. But if you don't know of what you're looking for, it suddenly becomes much harder to find it. Having in the back of your head the names of common algorithms that help you solve problems is really powerful.
This is about the craft of software development, and thinking about how to produce good code. As the name suggests, it's a very pragmatic and hands-on book. It really helped me on my journey as a software engineer, to be able to write quality code day in and day out, and be confident that it's going to work correctly.
This book gave me the tools to analyze a text and identify the reasons why it doesn't work, for example stating the topic of a paragraph only in the middle of it. I found it very useful to consciously analyze my own writing.
Partly because of another book that nearly made it onto my list: Domain-Specific Languages by Martin Fowler. It talks about the idea of writing a small language inside another language, to express ideas in a specific domain
Silicon Valley enthuses over “disruption” because we have become so used to the succession problem remaining unsolved within discrete institutions such as companies.
The succession problem has two components: power succession (handing off the reins of the institution, keeping it piloted) and skill succession (transferring the skill needed to pilot the institution well, keeping it a live player).
One thing that I think hasn’t gotten enough attention is the fact that NuSI staff, particularly Attia, paid themselves enormous salaries while they were at NuSI
Their words now
NuSI executives didn’t set their own compensation, as I and others have implied.
I was up very late last night reading a great book that will appear in stores soon written by Scott Belsky entitled The Messy Middle that explains why this passion is required.
Wow. A profound little philosophy book from Japan, communicating the psychology of Alfred Adler - a rival of Freud. Told as a conversation between an angry student and a patient teacher. A little book so good that I rushed home from other activities to keep reading it, and finished in a day. A surprisingly fresh perspective on how to live. (The “disliked” part is not the point, so don’t let the…
Small teams (<4) are not teams. I’ve sponsored quite a few 1-2 person teams, and each time I’ve regretted it. To repeat: I have regretted it every single time.
Managers should support 6-8 engineers. This gives them enough time for active coaching, coordinating and furthering their team’s mission by writing strategies, leading change, and so on.
So that's precisely what I've done - intercepted my own traffic passed over an insecure connection and put together a string of demos in a 24-minute video explaining why HTTPS is necessary on a static website.
It is much more difficult to make a dysfunctional institution functional than to create a functional institution from scratch; institutions will nearly always have internal forces that resist change, and diagnosing institutional dysfunction in the first place is challenging.
And just as a tornado cannot assemble a Boeing 747 by passing through a junkyard, functional institutions are not spontaneously generated. The machinery, if it functions, was assembled by someone with good judgment: the institution’s founder.
People who did great things often did so at very surprisingly young ages. (They were grayhaired when they became famous... not when they did the work.)
More broadly, nobody is going to teach you to think for yourself. A large fraction of what people around you believe is mistaken. Internalize this and practice coming up with your own worldview.
The question we must answer is not “can we find evidence that supports the CIM”, but rather “does the CIM provide the best fit for the totality of the evidence”.
Certain forms of carbohydrate probably do contribute to obesity, among other factors, but I don’t think the CIM provides a compelling explanation for common obesity.
It is not dry and scientific. I don't think Stephen is particularly interested in science. It's got lots of value judgements, and it is a good solid read.
This a journalistic book, a very sound bit of journalism by Suzanne Mustacich. She is based in Bordeaux, but she clearly travelled to China an awful lot and unravelled a most amusing commercial battle that went on in the early years of this decade between the Bordeaux chateau owners and merchants on the one side and Chinese business people on the other.
I've chosen his third collection of writing about wine, The Juice. They're all fun. They're all very well written because Jay is a very good writer, and doesn't take it too seriously.
There's a very good book on Burgundy called Inside Burgundy by Jasper Morris, which is really nice and beautifully designed as well. I would certainly recommend it to anyone.
In this case, it’s to maintain enough slack in your team’s schedule that the team can build quality into their work, and operating continuously in innovation, and avoid backtracking.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.