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.
Grinding too fine will liberate a lot more astringent compounds by breaking more coffee cells, which will result in an astringent cup regardless of how even the water flows through the coffee bed.
If you get a check during a pandemic, you’re not going to go out and spend it at restaurants and bars, because…well, there’s a pandemic. Instead, you’re more likely to stick it in the bank, pay down debt, or pay the back rent that you owe.
Their words now
I had some theory and some evidence on my side for this prediction, and yet I ended up being very wrong about what would happen to consumption.
Programming, of course, is forgetting, but we need to at least try to be aware of the costs of the abstractions we choose and consider who it is that ends up being forgotten.
In my opinion the root cause of this bug is that when a white american developer sees a terminal they immediately interpret it as this idealized cartesian plane where they can lay out any writing they want in neatly-spaced characters that behave in "predictable" ways (in other words, behave exactly like English).
flat burrs tend to send the coffee preferentially on one side of the portafilter (to the right side with the design of EG-1), an effect probably worsened by the use of high rpm.
I now suspect that adding a source of hydraulic resistance under the puck that is non-negligible compared with the espresso puck itself is desirable to reduce the impact of channels because it slows down the flow of water where it would tend to become otherwise too fast and as a consequence less even across the surface of the coffee bed.
In order to move this army or sustain it in place it is thus necessary to ensure a massive and relatively continuous supply of food to the army. Failure to do that will result in the army falling apart long before it comes anywhere close to the enemy.
So there are sharp limits to how much extra range an army can get by adding carrying capacity; in practice about a month and a half’s logistics buffer is the maximum that’s possible and even doing that is expensive.
The tyranny of the wagon equation is thus inescapable: an army that plans to be in the field for more than just a few days cannot bring all of the food it needs with it; it must find most of its food locally.
The drone-like architecture of the multicopters is simple, but as the rotors are responsible for keeping the unit at a constant altitude with hover power, they represent an energy-intensive version of VTOLs. Their range is, therefore, short, typically less than 20 miles.
David Graff's Medieval Chinese Warfare, 300-900 is actually a political-institutional history of China from 200 AD-1000 AD, and is probably the best political narrative history we have for the time period.
Being on call should not be a constant cycle of things breaking down and firefighting, or alerts going off at all hours. This is not ‘normal.’ These are telltale signs of a fragile system and lack of alert discipline.
This 1992 book changed everything about my life. It’s my Bible. Most of my beliefs come from it. I read it many times at a formative age, but re-read it now 30 years later, taking notes. It’s not a perfect book. It’s too verbose and full of expired American references. But its core messages are the wisest, most effective life philosophy I’ve ever encountered. You choose how you feel. Your emoti…
It's incredibly written, deeply complex, confusing as hell, and you'll probably throw it at the wall when it's done. But then you'll kinda go "okay... I'm glad I did that" and maybe start it again.
I would recommend that anyone who thinks they're suffering from trauma (eg PTSD) try a trauma-focused therapy like EMDR before trying to address nightmares directly, unless the nightmares are overwhelmingly worse than all their other trauma symptoms.
There's a surprising amount of value in having any order at all (even an arbitrary one like first-come-first-served!) to break past indecisiveness about where to start.
In hindsight, the hardest comparisons are in fact the least useful - if I do the fourth most important task before the third most important, that's no big deal, but doing the tenth before the first is a screw-up!
A strategically aware intelligence can choose its visible outputs to have the consequence of deceiving you, including about such matters as whether the intelligence has acquired strategic awareness
The best and easiest-found-by-optimization algorithms for solving problems we want an AI to solve, readily generalize to problems we’d rather the AI not solve; you can’t build a system that only has the capability to drive red cars and not blue cars, because all red-car-driving algorithms generalize to the capability to drive blue cars.
With each rule and added complexity you make the system less human and less fun. You make it a Computer Scientists rube goldberg machine while sterilizing it of all the joy of life.
Once again, I was wowed by Towles’s writing—especially because The Lincoln Highway is so different from A Gentleman in Moscow in terms of setting, plot, and themes.
The Ministry for the Future does a better job than any other book I’ve read of playing out, in a dramatic but realistic way, how high temperatures can literally kill people.
Tyler Cowen will often praise a book by saying it is interesting on every page. Together with Daniel Gross, he has written a book that very much matches this description.
This is my list of the 10 best nonfiction books. These are the pillar books that have helped shape my thinking and approach to life. In my opinion, these are 10 nonfiction books everyone should read.
This is my list of the 10 best nonfiction books. These are the pillar books that have helped shape my thinking and approach to life. In my opinion, these are 10 nonfiction books everyone should read.
This is my list of the 10 best nonfiction books. These are the pillar books that have helped shape my thinking and approach to life. In my opinion, these are 10 nonfiction books everyone should read.
This is my list of the 10 best nonfiction books. These are the pillar books that have helped shape my thinking and approach to life. In my opinion, these are 10 nonfiction books everyone should read.
This is my list of the 10 best nonfiction books. These are the pillar books that have helped shape my thinking and approach to life. In my opinion, these are 10 nonfiction books everyone should read.
Real interest rates have steadily declined in all major economies for more than three decades. This decline was not caused by the Global Financial Crisis or the Covid crisis.
while the growth rate may well affect saving and investment, there is no tight
relation between growth rates and interest rates, either on theoretical or empirical
grounds.
A low r is actually a signal that something is wrong with the economy: In effect, if we think of the safe rate as the risk-adjusted rate of return on capital, the low safe rate is sending the signal that, risk adjusted, the return on capital is low.
I’ve noticed that, instead of treating them like other kinds of conflicts—where you put your hands up and admit to them but then do your best to make sure they don’t influence your science—scientists sometimes revel in political conflicts.
Modern browser with split-screen functionality. Helps organize different work contexts more efficiently. Yeah I know, I know. It's a Microsoft product.
I'm using Figma as just a design tool but now it's become our virtual whiteboard for the entire company. Never would have expected the collaboration features to be the real hook.
I actually prefer more frequent major versions with smaller sets of breaking changes. There is a real danger in saving up all your significant changes and releasing them in one whopping major version once a year.
If we want to live in a world where SemVer improves our collective experience as much as possible, it means we need to believe something new: Major version numbers are not sacred.
I read this book because I read Will Larson's blog and newsletter and they're frequent sources of management insight. This book reads like a collection of blog posts with smooth transitions.
Code has mass. Every additional line of code you don't need is ballast. It weighs your codebase down, making it harder to steer and change direction if you need to.
There is essentially zero correlation - the metros with the largest rent increases had added population / added housing ratios no different than metros with smaller rent increases.
Climate change is the existential crisis of our time. We need more ideas and progress in every sector, including software-based approaches to preventing emissions and sequestering carbon.
computers are fast enough that high-traffic apps can be served with simple architectures, which can generally be created more cheaply and easily than complex architectures
When you take venture funding, you sign up for a rocket ship ride that will either take you to the moon or to crash-land painfully back on earth. Those are the only two choices. And both rides tend to require heavy extraction of value from the customer.
Falling consumer oil demand looks much more like driving the Camry 6000 miles per year instead of 12,000 miles rather than a shiny new electric car in every garage or robot taxis swarming everywhere.
The book Moonwalking with Einstein explores humans' relationship to memory, our ideas of knowledge, and how that's shifted over time. But it begins with an exploration of competitive memorization and the techniques used by memory champions.
Finally, the health of the project depends on issue triage, bug fixes, refactors, and design work more than on new features. In fact, new features increase the maintenance burden.
I often read advice along the lines of “if you want to help a project send PRs” and I never understood it. Reviewing and iterating or pushing back on PRs is work! Often more than writing the code itself.
This is because the language modeling objective used for many recent large LMs-predicting the next token on a webpage from the internet-is different from the objective "follow the user's instructions helpfully and safely" (Radford et al.,, 2019; Brown et al.,, 2020; Fedus et al.,, 2021; Rae et al.,, 2021; Thoppilan et al.,, 2022). Thus, we say that the language modeling objective is misaligned.
Even though InstructGPT still makes simple mistakes, our results show that fine-tuning with human feedback is a promising direction for aligning language models with human intent.
For example, large language models can generate outputs that are untruthful, toxic, or simply not helpful to the user. In other words, these models are not aligned with their users.
Science journalist Jacob Ward warns about a future in which AI technology forms a tight cybernetic feedback loop with the biases ingrained into the human brain, pushing our day-to-day existence in frightening directions. It's sort of like a version of The Terminator in which Danny Kahneman plays a starring role. As longtime readers and listeners of mine know, a big theme in my techno-criticism is the under-appreciated degree to which technologies exert powerful, unintended consequences on our personhood and culture, so Ward's warning hits a sweet spot with me.
Steinbeck deploys a standard third person omniscient narrative style that avoids all the flash of the modernists, and then postmodernists, that soon after took over the literary scene. But in his hands, it's enough. I still think about the ending.
I'm a big fan of Susan Casey, who has perfected a style of nature journalism that's built around a narrative of personal adventures. (I recommend you start with The Devil's Teeth.)
One of the reasons I've never cared for crypto currencies is that the associated utopia of trustless society had zero appeal to me. I don't think the world is better off by erasing the need to trust in our transactional counterparts, so turning these transactions into pure computing always struck me as a regression.
Their words now
But wherever this leads us next, it's clear to me now that I was too hasty to completely dismiss crypto on the basis of all the things wrong with it at the moment. Instead of appreciating the fundamental freedom to transact that it's currently our best shot at protecting.
These ideas can be disturbing and off-putting, but I think there is also a strong case for them, for those who wish their ethics to be principled and focused on the interests of others.
Combining these three pillars yields a number of unusual, even uncomfortable views about ethics. I feel this discomfort and don't unreservedly endorse this approach to ethics.
Indeed, I think some of the best opportunities to do good in the world come from working on issues that aren't yet widely recognized as huge moral issues of our time.
I own an inReach Mini, used it for several years, and have no intention of upgrading to the Mini 2 because I don't see $400 of value in these improvements (or even $250, if I was able to sell my used Mini for $150).
Precisely because the late Roman system was so top-heavy and centralized, the collapse of central Roman rule mortally wounded it and left the successor states of Rome with much more limited resources and administration to try to achieve their aims.
The model output, which uses data from 74 presently flying airliner variants, from short-haul Commuters to long haul Widebodies, made with aluminum or composites, shows that the OEW fraction (OEW divided by MTOW) never go below 47%.
the electric technology used for cars only has to beat energy hogs that are below 10% in efficiency, our everyday car. But to qualify for aircraft use, the technology has to equal or beat what is used today, which is at the 30% to 40% efficiency level using modern turboprop or turbofan engines.
as you age, you just naturally build up all of this all of this sort of psychic scar tissue and you have all these cautionary lessons in your in your head all the time. And you just you and and therefore as a consequence, right? Your your aperture of what you're willing to explore as you get older just shrinks.
it's like could you ever have another Soviet Union like in the era of the internet? Um you know North Korea's doing their damndest to try to maintain that model you know but without going full North Korea like I'm not sure you can. I I mean, I guess I'm an optimist on this point. Like I tend to think open access information basically makes a lot of these historical things, you know, fundamentally impossible.
what we have now is kind of at the at the sort of deepest level what we have is kind of this big fight between people who want to use the internet to basically reinforce top-down power uh, versus people who want to use it to disrupt top-down power.
And so all of the people who have achieved positions of power and authority in the world based on prior generations of technology are inherently threatened by new technology because new technology will upend the power and status structures and then a new set of people will, you know, come to the foreground and and take the power.
What what I find generally is if I don't understand something, I I try to read backwards and and and kind of the further back back I read, the more universal things I find. And the more things that I think are kind of remarkable and unique to our era actually turn out to be quite universal.
I don’t think it’s on a trajectory to deliver us from centralized platforms, I don’t think it will fundamentally change our relationship to technology, and I think the privacy story is already below par for the internet (which is a pretty low bar!), but I also understand why nerds like me are excited to build for it.
The US focus on efficiency has revealed the brittleness of its economy, which has neither the manufacturing capability to scale up domestic production of goods nor the logistics capacity to handle greater imports.
It has displayed a stronger record of reform than any other developing country, as the leadership keeps pulling off politically-difficult tasks: shrinking the state sector, re-orienting the economy towards export-led growth after WTO accession, and so on.
Free software is designed to be used commercially, but you have to do it correctly. This is a resource which is made available to companies who want to exploit it, but they must do so according to the terms of the licenses.
I used to think that this was unequivocally a win for open source. That to fight for attention with the commercial alternatives, we had to adopt the commercial playbook. Now I think it’s at the very least a mixed blessing.
We as a profession misunderstand and misuse the concept of backwards compatibility, both upstream and downstream, by focusing on narrow legalistic definitions instead of outcomes.
a good software project tries to break downstream as little as possible, and when we do break downstream, we should do our best to make the breakage obvious and easy to fix.
A fine intro to investing if you think you can reliably beat the market or that active trading is a good use of energy. If you're already bought in on index funds though, you won't find much here.
Arguably the single unit on this entire post with the most bang for the buck, the COROS Pace 2 is a full multisport watch that can do swim/bike/run/triathlon, but even more than that
While this Garmin watch lacks some of the triathlon features the COROS Pace 2 has, it makes up for it with added running features like PacePro and in the case of the 245 Music, well, music.
It’s one of the first truly audio-first books that I’ve encountered, both in the prose style which has clearly been written from the ground up to be heard, not read
I wouldn’t say that this is the most compelling book I’ve ever read in terms of the prose style or storytelling, but it does provide a very helpful, almost quantitative overview of all the potential threats looming out there
Finally, not just old chips and new chips, but the companies that make the chips (semiconductor fabs) are becoming more consolidated and more strategic.
Steven Johnson, Extra Life – Johnson explores the astonishing expansion in life expectancy over the last two hundred years, and asks how we measure it and who – and what – deserves the credit. Wide ranging and a pleasure to read.
Adam Rutherford and Hannah Fry, The Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything – just delightful, wide-ranging stuff from the surely best science-communication double-act in the world. The perfect gift for the nerd in your life.
Gillian Tett, Anthro-Vision – my colleague Gillian Tett makes the case for thinking like an anthropologist in business and in life. The description of how KitKats took Japan by storm is a particular delight.
Adding a dependency is a serious decision which requires consensus within the team, an audit of the new dependency, an understanding of its health and long-term prospects, and an ongoing commitment to re-audit them and be prepared to change course as necessary.
Hybrid-electric cars are an engineering abomination. They have both gas and electric powertrains, ensuring they are more expensive and complicated than their competitors.
Surprisingly, fuel consumption per passenger mile would be lower in a Celera 500 than in a 737. The larger the fuselage, the harder it is to achieve the same drag reduction.
I believe this needs to change because, as a former longtermist who published an entire book four years ago in defence of the general idea, I have come to see this worldview as quite possibly the most dangerous secular belief system in the world today.
For example, there’s a good case to make that the underlying commitments of longtermism are a major reason why humanity faces so many unprecedented risks to its survival in the first place.
The fact is that the EA movement is deeply utilitarian, at least in practice, and indeed, before it decided upon a name, the movement’s early members, including Ord, seriously considered calling it the ‘effective utilitarian community’.
The initial thing to notice is that longtermism, as proposed by Bostrom and Beckstead, is not equivalent to ‘caring about the long term’ or ‘valuing the wellbeing of future generations’.
The short answer is that elevating the fulfilment of humanity’s supposed potential above all else could nontrivially increase the probability that actual people – those alive today and in the near future – suffer extreme harms, even death.
great engineers really shouldn’t need to manage large teams to get promoted, and companies lose out on a critical skillset when they push all of their good engineers into management.
When you don’t give your team the context for the work and just pass on tasks and work items to them, you make it clear that they are simply “doers” and your job is the job of “decider.”
If it’s your code that gets you over the finish line for every project, you aren’t providing multiplicative value for the team, you’re providing the additive value of your work as an engineer.
As a manager, your output is not measured by your individual work. Rather, your output is measured by the work of your team and the people that you influence.
Like nuclear physics, with its potential for global catastrophe when put to destructive ends, the proliferation of pandemic biology ought to be considered a matter of international security.
But perhaps the biggest question of all isn’t being asked insistently enough: Why is anyone trying to teach the world how to make viruses that could kill millions of people?
I started listening to Darryl Cooper's Martyr Made last year as part of a deep dive on cults, but kept going because I found him incredibly insightful.
There's a book, which isn't in the five I've chosen (though it could well have been), Peter Godfrey Smith's Other Minds, which I think is a beautiful exploration of other minds.
There are a couple of other books I'd have loved to have included here. My PhD supervisor, Phil Husbands, and Owen Holland, have a recent book called The Mechanical Mind in History
Now a self-help classic, Disarming the Narcissist is a practical, step-by-step communication guide to help you cope with and confront the narcissist in your life.
This online community is a powerful way to stay in touch with other schema therapists around the globe, on a regular basis; to be part of the ever-growing ST community.
This video series is grounded in an understanding, both conceptually and practically, of the essential value of the therapy relationship in schema therapy
While I have enjoyed the AeroPress a lot in the past especially when travelling, I have always had one big complaint about it: getting a thick coffee bed to minimize uneven flow when pressing out the water limits the brew ratios that can be used.
Everyone should read this book of little essays about listening. It teaches your ears to pay more attention. It calls your attention to sounds you hadn’t noticed. It’s beautifully written, and makes your life better. I read it twice, 24 years ago, and reading it again this week, it was even better than I remembered.
In traditional classroom settings, the development of skills often gets overlooked in favor of facts. Facts in the form of conjugation tables, word lists, grammar explanations, the names of verb tenses, and so on. All of these things are related to language, but it’s important to realize that knowing these things has nothing to do with speaking and using a language productively.
This is an important detail that often gets overlooked, because language learning is, first and foremost, about acquiring skills. About learning how to read, write, speak, and listen, along with all of the countless subskills that any competent language speaker has in his or her toolbox.
Consider the possibility that mild discomfort – butterflies in the stomach, a sense of difficulty, a moment of boredom – might simply be the price of doing things you care about.
the perfectionist's fantasy of reaching her deathbed with a perfect record of accomplishments under her belt isn't just extremely unlikely, but doomed from the start
This, in my experience, is the only way personal change ever really happens: by first seeing that it's always a matter of rebuilding the ship mid-ocean, making adjustments to a life you can't ever take back to port or trade for another.
Sedgewick was more successful in developing his characters, and I also appreciated that he took regular tangents into other related and interesting matters like the Leadville mining boom, the growth of Los Angeles, and the business maneuvers of other railroad barons like Jay Gould and Collis Huntington.
I’ve read this book three times since 1999, and gifted it many times to others. It’s changed the way I look at buildings. I read it again now because I’m building a new house. Its main idea is that all buildings are predictions, and all predictions are wrong, so design to make them easy to change. I think of it metaphorically in life: assuming my predictions about what I want will probably be w…
This brings us to the central challenge of all content tracing proposals so far: to make tracing possible, a tracing system needs to turn every WhatsApp user (including the originator) into a cooperative green circle — regardless of whether users actually want to cooperate with police.
Rather: NSO’s genius is that they’ve done something that attackers were never incentivized to do in this past: democratize access to exploit technology.
The problem that companies like Apple need to solve is not preventing exploits forever, but a much simpler one: they need to screw up the economics of NSO-style mass exploitation.
Despite these advances, contemporary physical and evolutionary-history-based approaches produce predictions that are far short of experimental accuracy in the majority of cases in which a close homologue has not been solved experimentally and this has limited their utility for many biological applications.
Here we provide the first computational method that can regularly predict protein structures with atomic accuracy even in cases in which no similar structure is known.
Sophie and her grandmother spend a lot of time pottering about and playing and building little Venetian lagoons for the ants to go into and that sort of thing. It's very funny and very charming. And you think that's all it is—a sweet little book about a child and her grandmother.
I read it because it was a book, and books were fun. I thought it was terrific. Really wonderfully funny. I've gone on thinking that for the subsequent 60 years or so.
Pen poised, I sit to attention, in my suit, on the edge of my imagination, prepared for the beautiful line to arrive. Sometimes it does, sometimes it does not — either way I am powerless to influence the outcome.
I also have an affinity with artists who treat their craft as a job and are not dependent on the vagaries of inspiration — because I am one of them. Like most people with a job, we just go to work.
It is the kind of book you will keep by your desk and pull out from time to time to figure out how to approach an issue or to help one of your senior leaders figure out how to do that.
Every now and again I go searching for a replacement IDE. VSCode came closer than anything else in the last two decades to replacing Vim, but somehow I am back here.
The router and Proxmox machines are attached with some QSFP+ 40gbit hardware I got off eBay. It's fun! I highly recommend playing with second-hand network hardware.
Conclusion: If you expect to regularly carry the device but not a smartphone, which is the case with very few people, the inReach is the better option. Otherwise, the Somewear is more attractive: its seamless messaging and cost-savings more than offset the 0.5-ounce weight penalty and its slightly larger size.
The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective is the best book on the country’s adoption of sustained economic growth at the turn of the nineteenth century, full stop.
Classic book with near-cult following. How to manage every last itty bitty tiny thing in your life. Keep your inbox empty. Re-read 16 years later. Still great.
Many films are the most fun the first time because a part of our brains loses itself in the plot and actually experiences what the characters are experiencing, to an extent.
Clearly something other than the current type of healthcare advances will be needed to crack through the natural human lifespan ceiling-it'll take some deeper recoding of the human genome.
Currently hooked on Dan Carlin's Hardcore History . 100 people recommended it to me and I kept putting it off and finally listened to the 6-part WWI series and that was that for me.
But Instagram has gotten pretty good at it and now I own a gravity blanket , a moon pod , stretchy jeans , a great hoodie , and like 19 fidget toys and physics toys and other stupid things that make me happy .
But Instagram has gotten pretty good at it and now I own a gravity blanket , a moon pod , stretchy jeans , a great hoodie , and like 19 fidget toys and physics toys and other stupid things that make me happy .
The 2nd-best and most-radical book about great writing. It tells you to focus entirely on the sentence, an approach that was already my favorite, which is why I bought this book. It recommends you boldly eliminate transitions and conjunctions, split compound sentences, don't save your point for the end, and revise by deleting. This is the first book I've seen printed as one sentence per line —…
I’m currently stuck in a loop where, at least in science, I’m only going to read The Beginning of Infinity and The Fabric of Reality over and over again until I understand them fully.
I’m currently stuck in a loop where, at least in science, I’m only going to read The Beginning of Infinity and The Fabric of Reality over and over again until I understand them fully.
Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud: I believe I first saw this book being recommended highly by Bret Victor aka worrydream. I think I then encountered a few screenshots of it on the Internet that made me really like it. It's very worth reading even if you don't really care all that much about comics.
I was really excited when a friend sent me this book, because it gets right into the details of the history and production of these games that meant so much to me.
The Nasty Bits, by Anthony Bourdain. I read this book not too long before Anthony Bourdain died. I remember really enjoying his voice, his style, his sense of flair.
Predatory Thinking, by Dave Trott. I found this book in a bookshop at some point and I found it really compelling. It includes a story about neutrinos that I love.
The book is worth reading for its own sake, and it's particularly worth reading (in my opinion) to get a sense of how it has impacted so much of sci-fi and pop culture.
A must-read for anyone who wants to start a business, has started a business, wishes they started a business or has ever thought about starting a business.
I was impressed with the depth and insight in this memoir. I hate to say it, but you rarely expect much from celebrity books. This one delivered though.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s very good and a great story. But much like Hillbilly Elegy a few years ago, I was left wondering, “What’s everyone going on about?”
First, it justifies various psychotherapies - EMDR and coherence therapy seem to come out especially well here - that focus on trying to get the brain to pay unusually precise attention, under unusually safe conditions, to something it usually represses.
AI was in the air in the mid 1980s, but there were two things especially that made me want to work on it: a novel by Heinlein called The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
In people living their normal lives, circulating insulin level, and the insulin response to carbohydrate, don’t reliably predict who will gain weight and who won’t.
No matter what your model of obesity is, in order to explain the development of an obese body, energy imbalance has to be a link in the model’s causal chain.
On the iPad, I write using 1Writer or Drafts, and edit podcasts using the Apple Pencil and Ferrite Recording Studio, which is the best podcast editing app I've found on any platform.
Stagnation just means slower progress. And not even slower than that pre-industrial era, but slower than, roughly, the late 1800s to mid-1900s, when growth rates are said to have peaked.
The way I see this is that reviewers can identify what's obviously not great and what is obviously great (Perhaps identifying the latter is easier than the former). But there is a "messy middle" where it is unclear what to fund.
I have reviewed before the effectiveness of peer review at figuring out "what's good" in the context of grant awards, finding that peer review as currently practiced does substantially better than chance at predicting future impact, especially for the most impactful of the papers; but at the same time is is far from perfect, leaving plenty of variance unexplained.
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.
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.