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
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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.
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most here. Choose an area and the row leads with the people whose beliefs are about it;
tap a face for their feed.
Paul Strathern’s terrific book Mendeleyev’s Dream traces that journey all the way back to ancient Greece, when people first started questioning why the world is the way it is.
All radically new products, and air taxi eVTOLs certainly count as radically new, require the convergence of many different capabilities and technologies. Often one or more technology will be lagging and it may take decades for them all to come together in the right place at the right time.
I see lots of hype about eVTOLs being on the verge of being big, but I can’t find any videos of prototypes doing what the hype says will be common place by 2025.
I spent the last few weeks reading Template Metaprogramming with C++ by Marius Băncilă. It is currently 50$ on Amazon. Though, technically, the book is about advanced 'template' techniques, it is much more broad and practical. It is one of the 'good programming books'. If you are an experienced C++ programmer, you should give it a peek
I’m constantly on a quest to make writing more hands on — more manipulative, in the sense that you’re using your hands to shape it. The more I treat writing like one of my collages, the better it gets.
His 2000 masterpiece The Great Divergence argues that the Americas, won and worked by force, provided the critical ghost acreages that propelled Britain past the Old World's common ecological constraints.
More generally, you’ve got to wonder if Dweck considered whether the results of this very small, to my knowledge unreplicated, study were really ripe for publicising to literally millions of people
Initial massive exaggeration of the importance of an effect gives way to more realistic, much smaller effects (which might still be useful) after people start doing better studies.
The decline effect is the idea that scientific findings get smaller over time. That is, initial findings tend to report effect sizes that then crumble away—sometimes to nothing—with subsequent research.
Prior to this inflection point, productivity growth had increased before, but every time had induced a response of higher population growth rates, eroding any gains in per-person living standards.
How to write a non-fiction book so useful to people that they recommend it to others. A great step-by-step methodology from someone experienced, who’s done it successfully a few times already.
How to improve your HUGE major life decisions, like whether/who to marry, whether to have kids, where to live, career paths, and such — where you can’t use the usual checklist/data approach. This economist addresses self-identity, “deepest self”, and “something I was meant to do”. You can’t use a pro/con checklist with an item that says “lose respect for myself”.
I think this matches the general finding that AI progress is faster than expected, and increases my certainty that scale and normal progress can sometimes be enough to solve even very difficult problems.
Our Tendency shapes every aspect of our behavior, so understanding this framework lets us make better decisions, meet deadlines, suffer less stress and burnout, and engage more effectively.
With her signature mix of rigorous research, easy humor, and personal experimentation, author Gretchen Rubin identifies the 21 habit-change strategies that will help every reader to create the habits that will transform their lives.
The Happiness Project synthesizes the wisdom of the ages with current scientific research, as Rubin brings readers along on her year to greater happiness.
I would say pretty fundamental. I wouldn’t like to say it’s impossible for life to start any other way, but water is everywhere. Water’s extremely good at what it does, and carbon works in water especially well. And carbon is everywhere. So, those things together make me think probabilistically, if we found 1,000 life forms, 995 of them would be carbon-based and living in water.
So, there is no necessary trajectory towards great complexity in human beings at the end of it. It’s very easy to imagine that without photosynthesis arising or without eukaryotes arising, that the planet could be full of bacteria and nothing else.
So, how did they do that? You may as well say that a miracle happened. I don’t believe in soup. I think what we have in a vent is a continuous conversion, a continuous growth, a continuous reaction, a continuous converting a flow of molecules into more of yourself, you might say, even if it’s a small bit.
But there’s a very interesting deep split in life between bacteria and what are called archaea, which look just the same as bacteria. And they’re not quite as diverse, but nearly, and they are very different in their biochemistry. And so any explanation for the origin of life has to account, as well, for why they’re so different and yet so similar. And that makes me think that life probably did arise only once.
It’s possible it started multiple occasions. There’s two provisos to that. One of them is oxygen makes it impossible really for life to start. So, as soon as we’ve got oxygen in the atmosphere, then life isn’t going to keep starting over.
Sure, electric bikes aren't cheap. But I believe they're a rare object to be well worth the cost. This in spite of their annoying flaws, their often bad software, their defective geometries. Because they open the world.
Despite these flaws I put hundreds of kilometers on this thing in the first month. The front and rear suspension turn every road to glass, and are even fine for dirt trails; I find myself hunting down paths through parks I'd never otherwise think about.
The Vanmoof is much smarter — the brain and software within it are refined, the app good, the acceleration curves smooth — but the bike is all custom components, and they aren't the highest quality at that.
The Pauls feel as fresh today as the day I put them on, whereas the hydraulics have required much bikeshop tuning over the course of the last eighteen months.
I upgraded my BESV to an SRAM drivetrain and Paul brake levers and Klamper disc calipers, some MKS pedals, and a set of Brooks grips and saddle and it feels wonderful through and through.
I still have a custom orange Moulton that I've modified into a single-speed city bomber that goes remarkably fast while floating atop its simple suspension.
New land can be brought under cultivation (or cultivated more intensively) of course, but marginal gains decrease rapidly (because the best land is cultivated first and because adding more labor to already cultivated land, while it can increase harvests, is less efficient than cultivating new land) and there is a fairly hard ceiling on total production of this sort that was, for the most part, fairly low.
If you had given the Romans the designs for a Newcomen steam engine, they couldn’t have built it without developing whole new technologies for the purpose (or casting every part in bronze, which introduces its own problems) and then wouldn’t have had any profitable use to put it to.
The specificity matters here because each innovation in the chain required not merely the discovery of the principle, but also the design and an economically viable use-case to all line up in order to have impact.
As much as we might want to imagine that the greater currents push historical events largely on a predetermined path with but minor variations from what must always have been, in practice events are tremendously contingent on unpredictable variables.
In my view the key takeaway here is just how contingent the industrial revolution was: the industrial revolution that occured required a number of very specific pre-conditions which were really on true on Great Britain in that period.
I don't know who I would reccomend this device to. The premise of this device has a lot of promise, but in practice it has so many problems that it's overall not really worth choosing in comparison to devices like the Steam Deck.
Best philosophy of love relationships I’ve ever found. Like meditation teaches you that moods pass, this experienced marriage counselor says this applies to relationship communication as well. When angry or insecure, don’t vent, don’t share that. Let the feeling pass. Your anger doesn’t reveal some real truth. Everyone in a romantic relationship should read this.
But their lives became miserable. It would take them 45 minutes to decide what restaurant to go through. They got divorced. They lost their jobs because they could not use their emotions because our emotions are a way of drawing on on the patterns we've built and on our experiences.
Um but nobody has done research on the positive side of these heuristics. And so, I think that's a bias on the part of the decision bias researchers that they're only looking at the down arrow. How do these heuristics get us in trouble? And they're not looking at the strength of these heuristics.
I don't like the idea of decision biases. I know my sense of the literature is that there's been little if any success in debiasing people. And I think that's a good thing. Because the biases that get identified are essentially related to the heuristics that we've learned and are part of the experience that we have. And they only look like biases in hindsight once one of them doesn't work.
What we could we could train people by saying, "Here's the recognition prime decision model. Now, you know, follow this." And that would be useless. Because of uh telling people the strategy isn't going to buy them anything. The intuition part is a reflection of the patterns they've built up through experience. And so there's no shortcut for that.
in 1985, um my colleagues and I came up with a description of how people actually make life-and-death decisions under extreme time pressure and certainty. And we called it the recognition prime decision model. And it's a blend of intuition plus analysis. And we found we studied firefighters. We found that most fire that accounted for almost 90% of the tough decisions firefighters made.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 .
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 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.