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.
Not only are the traditional staples of classic value investing (readily discernable quantitative measures of cheapness in the here-and-now) no longer likely to produce a sustainable edge on their own, but the world has gotten more complex, with many more dynamics that can drive a decoupling of near-term metrics from valuation, both to the positive and negative.
My extensive discussions with Andrew led me to conclude that the focus on value versus growth doesn’t serve investors well in the fast-changing world in which we live.
Rather than being defined as one side of this artificial dichotomy, value investing should instead consist of buying whatever represents a better value proposition, taking all factors into account.
Adopting the traditional semiconductor manufacturing business model to compete head to head against the likes of Intel would guarantee automatic failure.
This is a fortunate conclusion, because it means that it's possible to use bibliometrics to select a candidate set of sufficiently good scientists, and then use human reviewers to select among them.
It is rare that a sports book captures my attention, rarer still when a sports autobiography does. But “Open” delivers a compelling life story superbly told by an athlete. Desire, motivation, and competitive drive him to the the highest levels of professional tennis, but he loses his interest, and was so often unhappy, confused and unfulfilled by his achievements. As an autobiography, it is bluntly honest, sometimes painful, but most of all a fascinating compelling read.
He was game, and as part of my prep, I read this amusing short collection of his writings. They were fun and funny and informative — everything you could want in a collection about cars.
If you’re interested in learning more about the real lives caught up in our country's justice system, I highly recommend The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander.
The Splendid and the Vile is a brilliant account of another era of widespread anxiety: the years 1940 and 1941, when English citizens spent almost every night in makeshift shelters as massive bombs rained down on them.
Other software I use to build stuff includes Netlify for hosting, GitHub for version control and collaboration, SVGO and TinyPNG for optimization, Kap for screen recording, GoatCounter for analytics, and Chrome and Firefox dev tools.
For communication, I use Slack for work and community text chat, Talky for video calls, DropBox Paper for writing, Trello for task management, and regular old texts and phone calls for chatting with family.
For communication, I use Slack for work and community text chat, Talky for video calls, DropBox Paper for writing, Trello for task management, and regular old texts and phone calls for chatting with family.
But nobody will ever get to the billions of representative miles necessary to say anything compelling about expected safety until after they actually deploy their fleet.
Even if you have the best possible safety drivers, every test mile adds some risk. Hopefully that risk is no worse than human driver vehicle risks, but that’s a different discussion.
The fast route — venture capital funded — is going to impose constraints on your business that will ultimately make it difficult to remain true to your open-source mission.
I follow Ed Latimore on twitter. He writes a lot of interest things there, so I was curious to pick up his book to see what he'd say in a longer form. This book is like getting beers and talking life with Ed for about 5-6 hours. Lots of truisms and life lessons that should resonate in the world we live in today. It's no Earth-shattering, but it is a great way to get more good ideas in your head.
Not only is Tina Fey a very funny writer, it's fascinating to have the opportunity to climb inside the head of a successful female leader. Reading the internal drama within Tina's head as she thought about whether she wanted a second child while considering how it would affect the 100+ employees that worked for her on 30 Rock was priceless. As a manager, it gives me an understanding and level of empathy I wouldn't have had otherwise.
A lot of people have raved about this book in Silicon Valley, so I wanted to see what it was all about. It's a great interpretation of the history of man. Unfortunately, it has about 10% of the citations it deserves for the subject matter. I found it a really interesting set of ideas for how to think about how we evolved. I felt there was some inaccuracies, but appreciate having the perspective of an expert.
If you've ever read Malcolm Gladwell's books, you know the formula: 5-10 specific anecdotes and a rule he emphasis throughout. Save yourself some time and read a blog post or review of the book. 4. "Startup Lessons Learned" by Eric Ries (10.12.10)
If you actually want to learn how to actually BE a lean startup or how to actually do it, this book will not help you. If you want to learn the high level concepts only then this is a great book. The other books I have above I encourage you to read before this one if you want to truly learn and implement lean practices. 7. On the Shortness of Life by Seneca (3.13.18)
I like the Pocketboy and it's staying in my bike bag for the long haul. Recommended for people who need a small high-performance folding saw to cut through whatever is in your way.
Benchmade Mini Griptilian - There's always a use for a reliable knife. A bonus in going with Benchmade: they will sharpen and clean your knife for free for life; just mail it in.
Stowa Flieger Classic 40 - When I'm not wearing my Apple Watch, this classic Pilot watch is on my wrist. Sapphire crystal, blued steel hands, and a date window at the 6 o'clock position. Perfect.
Breville Bambino Plus Espresso Machine and Baratza Encore ESP Pro Coffee Grinder - Developers need coffee, and I like mine HOT. The integrated milk steamer is a must-have, and since this machine takes freshly ground beans, the grinder allows me to tweak the grind size for perfect single dose espresso shots.
For a free Markdown editor (on Mac), I can't recommend MacDown highly enough. It has a simple interface with an editor and preview pane and it just works.
To read papers, I use Adobe Acrobat Reader and sync them in the cloud. This lets me read, highlight, and sync my papers across devices (work laptop, personal laptop, iPad). Instapaper does the same for online articles.
To read papers, I use Adobe Acrobat Reader and sync them in the cloud. This lets me read, highlight, and sync my papers across devices (work laptop, personal laptop, iPad). Instapaper does the same for online articles.
A foundational conviction of this project is that progress is a trend with definite, substantive causes, and that it can continue far, far into the future.
For your health and sanity, do not force yourself to learn a language using a method you hate, no matter how good other people say it is. Trying to do so will only lead to disappointment, and ultimately burnout.
While there is no absolute best and fastest way to learn a language, there definitely is a best and fastest way FOR YOU, personally, to learn a language. A method that is tailored to your likes and dislikes, your learning style, and your schedule.
after 30 years of learning languages and 10 years of coaching people to do the same, I am 100% positive when I tell you that there is no absolute best and fastest way to learn a language.
Others are the golden threads of this world, holding it together at the seams with no more than a dozen people knowing about it. Remove one of these and it all comes crashing down.
Such an incredible book on becoming a better chef, with little tricks and methods I use almost every day now. Plus the recipes in the back are delicious!
If you're not comfortable typing a lot and you'd rather not write something down then typing is the bottleneck and you need to fix it. Typing is not something you should need to think about.
It doesn't matter if you can type 90 words per minutes or 130, but if it takes you effort to type something and, if given the choice, you'd rather not do it, then we have a problem.
Anything creative (except perhaps accounting) should come with a sense of liberation and the satisfaction of having made order and beauty out of incoherent parts.
the very best position to be in as a photographer is an amateur: a person who engages in the activity for the love of it, without the constraints of shooting to a client's expectation
If what's holding you back from shipping is, say, getting more customer input, or a brittle release process, or flaky monitoring, or missing tests, then all the bot does is to add noise. It doesn't help you ship.
Another thing that needs to be fixed when it ultimately breaks down, another bit of automation that works 99% of the time, but starts making funny noises when you slip into the 1%
Despite being an excellent epistemic opportunity, civilizational collapse seldom inspires introspection among thinkers living through it. Mayan or Roman thinkers don’t seem to have reflected on their ongoing collapse.
Taleb is always filled with surprising ideas and confrontational bragging. Ignore the hot air and gather the gems. Great thoughts around putting your ass on the line with consequences — not just thinking things in theory but doing things in reality — in the real world.
I believe creativity is really two parts: curiosity and the ability to not just ask "what if?", but also use some foresight to imagine the potential outcome.
I’m a code nerd and a font nerd, so I don’t take this choice lightly, but this is my favorite dev font. I love its combination of legibility and subtle personality, and plus, the code ligatures are great.
Firefox is a great browser with some awesome tools, plus strong privacy. I use Edge when I need to test on Chromium; I don’t even install Chrome on my personal machines.
my current favorite notes app. Can grow and get as complex as you need it to be, but for simple notes, the markdown and code highlight support is fantastic.
I block distracting parts of websites with uBlock Origin’s amazing “element blocker,” which lets you select and remove any part of the page. As a fan of minimalism in web design, I really enjoy being able to adversarially enforce it on any rogue webpage.
Witch can display separate app windows separately, only display windows from the current workspace, and supports text search on window titles so that you can search directly for the window you want without having to skip over.
A special dishonorable mention goes to Slack, which can easily suck away a quarter of your time without you noticing. If you use Slack and you haven’t disabled the “unread messages” badge, stop reading this post and do it now.
And no one should feel burdened to become the therapist of the narcissist in their life. It's not your responsibility as a partner, as a child of a narcissist, or even a friend.
the approach that I use is called Schema Therapy, and Schema Therapy is designed to work with very complex personality types, personality disorders, and even those that are happening along a spectrum
In 30+ years of working with narcissistic men mostly - yes, it is possible for people to change. And even narcissists can change. Now, I don't really believe anyone changes completely, but it is possible to get meaningful change.
This isn’t because they are ‘lazy’ – the ‘lazy peasant’ (or poor worker generally) is a standard hypocrisy of the literature of the leisured aristocratic class towards poor farmers, today and in the past – but because they have priorities which are simply not served by labor maximization.
These small subsistence farmers generally seek to minimize risk, rather than maximize profits. After all, improving yields by 5% doesn’t mean much if everyone starves to death in the third year because of a tail-risk that wasn’t mitigated.
Because these folks – these farmers – make up the majority of the population of basically all agrarian societies in the pre-modern period. And when I say ‘the majority’ I mean the vast majority, on the order of 80-90% in many cases
The problem is the knife is way too heavy. Maybe if they ditched the liners, thinned the blade, and re-worked the steel backstrap you would have something that could cross-over between outdoor use and Urban EDC without pulling your pants off. As it stands the Pro Hunter strikes me as an oddity in my collection. Large and heavy, which makes it less practical. I hope it won't stop Victorinox from attempting to innovate, but it doesn't entirely feel like a step forward for the brand.
pop history will not get you tenure, which leads to neglect in the academy and consequently the big pop-history books are often not written by the best historians in their fields.
It's an online graphing calculator that makes it very simple to whip up surprisingly complicated graphs. I found it abundantly useful for live presentations over a stream, and what's nice is that you can share the links of what you build so that students can play with them.
These are just three of the names on the list of thousands of Black men and women who lost their lives to the systemic racism that is woven into the fabric of this country.
undergoing some of these experiments was incredibly fun and a great excuse to study a number of textbooks on biochemistry (I liked "Molecular Biology of the Cell"), biology (I liked Campbell's Biology), human nutrition (I liked "Advanced Nutrition and Human Metabolism"), etc.
undergoing some of these experiments was incredibly fun and a great excuse to study a number of textbooks on biochemistry (I liked "Molecular Biology of the Cell"), biology (I liked Campbell's Biology), human nutrition (I liked "Advanced Nutrition and Human Metabolism"), etc.
undergoing some of these experiments was incredibly fun and a great excuse to study a number of textbooks on biochemistry (I liked "Molecular Biology of the Cell"), biology (I liked Campbell's Biology), human nutrition (I liked "Advanced Nutrition and Human Metabolism"), etc.
Suckless offers an alternative to this continuous cycle of bloat and meaningless redesign. Suckless tools aim to keep things simple, minimal, usable and hackable by default.
while the myth of the golden Renaissance does terrible damage to how we understand the Middle Ages, it does just as much damage to how we understand the Renaissance.
when plague finally diminished in Europe, not because of any advance in medicine, but because fourteen generations of exposure gave natural selection time to work
in school they talk as if the plague swept through in 1348 then went away, but the bubonic plague did not go away, it remained endemic, like influenza or chickenpox today, a fact of life.
In Italy, average life expectancies in the solidly Medieval 1200s were 35-40, while by the year 1500 (definitely Renaissance) life expectancy in Italian city states had dropped to 18.
As a Renaissance historian, I feel it’s my job to shoulder the other half of the load by talking about what the Renaissance was like, confirming that our Medievalists are right, it wasn’t a better time to live than the Middle Ages
I had taken my kids to see DuVernay's superlative Selma years prior, and I had heard about 13th (and I had recalled my wife saying she wanted to watch it), but it was – like many things – "in the queue."
Ultimately, however, one-shot, or even sometimes zero-shot, seem like the fairest comparisons to human performance, and are important targets for future work.
Here we show that scaling up language models greatly improves task-agnostic, few-shot performance, sometimes even reaching competitiveness with prior state-of-the-art fine-tuning approaches.
By contrast, humans can generally perform a new language task from only a few examples or from simple instructions - something which current NLP systems still largely struggle to do.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.