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.
Top people
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14 July 2023
13 July 2023
10 July 2023
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Devil Take the HindmostTheir words
In the fall of 1999, against the backdrop of the massive gains being achieved in tech, media, and telecom stocks, I read Edward Chancellor’s excellent book Devil Take the Hindmost.
9 July 2023
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Lovedrcmnd.app
LunarTheir words
Lunar app is one of the best apps I've used to manage my monitors.
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Usesrcmnd.app
SoundSourceTheir words
Get truly powerful control over all the audio on your Mac. I use SoundSource for a superior sound management and redirects.
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Likedrcmnd.app
1PasswordTheir words
1Password is my password manager of choice. I've been using it for years and that's usually the first app I install in any new supported device.
+ 2 more
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Usesrcmnd.app
GrammarlyTheir words
I was born in Brazil and I've been living in the US for the past 11 years, yet, english doesn't feel like my first language. I use Grammarly to help me with that.
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Likedrcmnd.app
Affinity SuiteTheir words
Affinity Suite is my go to for all my design needs. I use Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo.
7 July 2023
From one piece Are We Getting Rid of Product Managers? 2 beliefs · melissaperri.com
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korrents.com
Product management is not going away, but hiring product owners who just feed developers tasks should stop.Their words
I don’t think Product Management is going anywhere, but I do hope the days of hiring Product Owners who just feed developers tasks are done.
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korrents.com
Product management is merging with the GM role as more companies become software companies, not disappearing.Their words
As more and more companies become predominately software companies, I believe the Product Management role and GM roles are going to merge.
5 July 2023
4 July 2023
3 July 2023
From one piece The Food Problem Is Bigger Than Lettuce 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
But vertical farms are not technologies. They’re farms.
The Food Problem Is Bigger Than Lettucemichaelgrunwald.substack.com
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Their words
it’s going to be incredibly difficult, but also incredibly necessary, for the world to produce much more food with much less land.
The Food Problem Is Bigger Than Lettucemichaelgrunwald.substack.com
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korrents.com
Vertical farming swaps a land problem for an energy problem, and the energy cost is what stops it feeding the world.Their words
I explain why in the essay; the TLDR is that they’re energy hogs. The sun is a really awesome source of calories, and it’s kind of dumb not to take advantage of it.
The Food Problem Is Bigger Than Lettucemichaelgrunwald.substack.com
1 July 2023
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
A Mathematician's ApologyTheir words
This idea I learned from Hardy's A Mathematician's Apology
30 June 2023
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Lovedrcmnd.app
SuperhumanTheir words
I’ve been a happy Superhuman subscriber since they were Silicon Valley’s hottest invite-only club, and I’ve been waiting for them to do something like this for a while.
29 June 2023
From one piece George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God | Lex Fridman Podcast #387 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
I think we’re going to build super intelligence before we build any sort of robustness in the AI. We cannot build an AI that is capable of going out into nature and surviving like a bird. A bird is an incredibly robust organism. We’ve built nothing like this. We haven’t built a machine that’s capable of reproducing.
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Their words
We’re actually going to build that, I think, but it’s not going to be one static tape. I think the human brain is too complex to be stuck in one static tape like that. If you look at ant brains, maybe they can be stuck on a static tape, but we’re going to build that using generative models. We’re going to build the TikTok that you actually can’t look away from.
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Their words
When I talked about will GPT12 be AGI, my answer is no. Of course not. I mean, cross-entropy loss is never going to get you there. You need probably RL in fancy environments in order to get something that would be considered AGI-like.
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Their words
It is actually all their nuances and quirks and slight annoyances that make this relationship worthwhile. I don’t think we’re going to realize that until it’s too late.
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korrents.com
Whether time really exists does not matter; what matters is that time is a useful model for describing reality.Their words
I think time is a useful model, whether it exists or not. Right. Does quantum physics exist? Well, it doesn’t matter. It’s about whether it’s a useful model to describe reality.
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korrents.com
There is no correct list of best investing books, only the books that speak to a given readerTheir words
In the end, there is no "right" list of the best investing books. There are only those books that speak to you and those that don't.
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Recommendsaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
A Random Walk Down Wall StreetTheir words
If you haven't heard the argument for passive indexing (or haven't heard it argued well), then A Random Walk Down Wall Street is the book for you.
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Lovedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
The Psychology of MoneyTheir words
So when he decided to release his first book, The Psychology of Money , I knew it would become an instant classic. Thankfully, I was right.
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Recommendsaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
The Most Important ThingTheir words
Thankfully, Marks published a book called The Most Important Thing , where he lays out his investment philosophy through 20 timeless principles.
+ 2 more
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Recommendsaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
The Money GameTheir words
Trust me on this one and go pick up The Money Game .
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Recommendstheir ownrcmnd.app
Just Keep BuyingTheir words
My own book, Just Keep Buying , which expands upon many of these ideas.
27 June 2023
From one piece Supreme Court Clarifies "True Threats" First Amendment Exception 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
A threat loses First Amendment protection only if the speaker was at least reckless about it being taken as a threat.Their words
Now, finally, the Court has resolved the question: the First Amendment requires that, at a minimum, the government prove that a speaker was reckless about whether their statement would be interpreted as threatening.
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Their words
As I’ve argued before, the so-called “objective standard” can be very difficult to administer in this big diverse messy country where we often don’t share a common sense of reality and there is no uniform “reasonable person.”
26 June 2023
From one piece The Articulation Barrier: Prompt-Driven AI UX Hurts Usability 2 beliefs · jakobnielsenphd.substack.com
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Their words
GUIs have superior usability because they show people what can be done rather than requiring them to articulate what they want.
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korrents.com
Half the population in rich countries is not articulate enough in writing to use prompt-driven AI well.Their words
For sure, half the population is insufficiently articulate in writing to use ChatGPT well.
24 June 2023
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Their words
At the same time, in order to reduce the probability of someone intentionally or unintentionally bringing about a rogue AI, we need to increase governance and we should consider limiting access to the large-scale generalist AI systems that could be weaponized, which would mean that the code and neural net parameters would not be shared in open-source and some of the important engineering tricks to make them work would not be shared either.
23 June 2023
22 June 2023
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Likedrcmnd.app
Nothing & EverythingTheir words
I love this book so much. It's the joy of nihilism. Nothing is true. Everything is permitted. I agree completely. I would give it a 10-out-of-10 rating but I disliked the whole second half of the book. So just read the first half. See my notes here. If you like my book “Useful Not True”, you should read this.
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Their words
This was not a mistake, and it was a mistake to categorize it as a mistake.
From one piece AI Is First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years 3 beliefs · jakobnielsenphd.substack.com
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Their words
Thus, the 2nd UI paradigm will survive, albeit in a less dominant role. Future AI systems will likely have a hybrid user interface that combines elements of both intent-based and command-based interfaces while still retaining many GUI elements.
AI Is First New UI Paradigm in 60 Yearsjakobnielsenphd.substack.com
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Their words
I doubt that the current set of generative AI tools, like ChatGPT, Bard, etc., are representative of the UIs we’ll be using in a few years because they have deep-rooted usability problems.
AI Is First New UI Paradigm in 60 Yearsjakobnielsenphd.substack.com
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Their words
The third UI paradigm, represented by current generative AI, is intent-based outcome specification. The user tells the computer the desired result but does not specify how this outcome should be accomplished, such as the steps to be executed. Compared to traditional command-based interaction design, this completely reverses the locus of control.
AI Is First New UI Paradigm in 60 Yearsjakobnielsenphd.substack.com
20 June 2023
18 June 2023
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Likedrcmnd.app
You Look Like a Thing and I Love YouTheir words
A funny book explaining the basics of AI! The subtitle is How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It's Making the World a Weirder Place. A great introduction to AI. With a cute cartoon mascot. The title is from her training an AI to write romantic greeting cards.
17 June 2023
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Likedrcmnd.app
City of Gold: DubaiTheir words
So well-written! Absolutely fascinating history of Dubai. An exciting page-turner. It gave me so much admiration for the city and its visionaries.
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Slouching Towards UtopiaTheir words
Slouching Towards Utopia offers one thought-provoking answer to the question that is worth taking seriously, and integrating into your thinking.
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Dislikedrcmnd.app
The World Is FlatTheir words
I don’t know about you, but I personally feel starved of ambitious sensemaking frames for recent history that aren’t quite as silly as say Friedman’s World is Flat or Harari’s Sapiens, or quite as ideologically compromised as Graeber’s Debt.
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Dislikedrcmnd.app
SapiensTheir words
I don’t know about you, but I personally feel starved of ambitious sensemaking frames for recent history that aren’t quite as silly as say Friedman’s World is Flat or Harari’s Sapiens, or quite as ideologically compromised as Graeber’s Debt.
+ 1 more
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Dislikedrcmnd.app
Debt: The First 5000 YearsTheir words
I don’t know about you, but I personally feel starved of ambitious sensemaking frames for recent history that aren’t quite as silly as say Friedman’s World is Flat or Harari’s Sapiens, or quite as ideologically compromised as Graeber’s Debt.
14 June 2023
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korrents.com
Anxiety and worry arise from dwelling on an imagined future rather than the present moment.Their words
Most of our fears begin to subside when we just allow ourselves to be in this moment, as anxiety and worry stem from a preoccupation with an anticipated or envisioned future.
10 June 2023
From one piece Whose dream bf is it anyway 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Whether one does find a good spouse or not depends more on one's orientation towards actually building relationships, and whether they can identify non-trivial traits in a partner that would contribute to that.
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Their words
It's not that looks and status don't matter, it's that focusing on looks and status as one's dating strategy is perfectly pointless.
7 June 2023
6 June 2023
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Likedrcmnd.app
FoundationTheir words
Asimov’s Foundation books were a strong influence on me as a child
From one piece Why AI Will Save The World 4 beliefs · pmarca.substack.com
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Their words
My response is that their position is non-scientific – What is the testable hypothesis? What would falsify the hypothesis? How do we know when we are getting into a danger zone?
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Their words
I even think AI is going to improve warfare, when it has to happen, by reducing wartime death rates dramatically. Every war is characterized by terrible decisions made under intense pressure and with sharply limited information by very limited human leaders.
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Their words
The single greatest risk of AI is that China wins global AI dominance and we – the United States and the West – do not.
+ 1 more
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Their words
My view is that the idea that AI will decide to literally kill humanity is a profound category error. AI is not a living being that has been primed by billions of years of evolution to participate in the battle for the survival of the fittest, as animals are, and as we are. It is math – code – computers, built by people, owned by people, used by people, controlled by people.
From one piece A Climate Killer Disguised as a Climate Solution 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
an acre of solar panels generates as much energy as 100 acres of corn grown for ethanol.
A Climate Killer Disguised as a Climate Solutionmichaelgrunwald.substack.com
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korrents.com
Biofuels have probably raised greenhouse gas emissions rather than lowered them, once the land they take is counted.Their words
But I think it’s important to tell the whole story, so I have a new piece in the New York Times pointing out that biofuels are also a catastrophe for the climate and the environment.
A Climate Killer Disguised as a Climate Solutionmichaelgrunwald.substack.com
1 June 2023
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korrents.com
A world without mass child mortality does not have to be imagined, because rich countries are already living in it.Their words
I think we don’t have to imagine what a future could look like without this immense loss.
What does it mean when fewer people die?scientificdiscovery.dev
31 May 2023
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Likedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
The Silver TideTheir words
They're all mind candy, but of high quality, and this one even makes me swallow a time-travel plot without complaint. But it really does rely on having read the rest of the trilogy beforehand.
30 May 2023
From one piece RedwoodJS’ Next Epoch: All In on React Server Components 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
When it comes to React Server Components, it's still the first inning.
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Their words
RSC is the future of React. The React team has made this very clear and we are lucky to be in touch with their amazing team members to help us along this path.
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korrents.com
Building a secure, performant GraphQL API is tricky and adds real cost during early-stage app prototyping.Their words
While we love GraphQL for many use cases, implementing a secure and performant GraphQL API can be tricky and there is a definite cost to requiring it during early prototyping of your app.
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Their words, before
Samuelson was the one claiming realism.
Their words now
I no longer think the main substance of my earlier post was correct.
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Born in BlacknessTheir words
If you’re interested in learning more about the history of Africa, its central role in the world, and the ways in which both have been misunderstood in the West, I highly recommend Born in Blackness.
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and TomorrowTheir words
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow resonated with me for personal reasons, but I think Zevin’s exploration of partnership and collaboration is worth reading no matter who you are.
29 May 2023
28 May 2023
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Likedrcmnd.app
The Righteous MindTheir words
Brilliant insights into human nature. Moral reasoning, inventing victims, emotional reactions, the elephant (emotions) and its rider (explanations). Intuition reacts then logic confabulates a reason. Survival of the fittest applied to groups. Understanding religion and tradition. Great from start to finish.
From one piece Fantasy Farming 4 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Widespread meat-eating in the 19th century became possible only through the colonisation and clearance of Australia and the Americas
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Their words
The answer is not more fields, which means destroying even more wild ecosystems. It is partly better, more compact, cruelty-free and pollution-free factories.
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korrents.com
A romantic, low-yield farming system would need far more land and would produce more hunger, not less.Their words
But it leads, if enacted, to hunger, ecological destruction or both, on a vast scale. Our arcadian fantasies devour the planet.
+ 1 more
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korrents.com
Pasture-fed meat cannot be scaled up to feed the world, because there is not enough land on Earth for it.Their words
Their solutions, such as pasture-fed meat, with its massive land demand , are impossible to scale without destroying remaining wild ecosystems: there is simply not enough planet.
27 May 2023
25 May 2023
From one piece AI and the Hard Stuff 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
But we do not have enough data and we do not have enough insight to use AI/ML to pick better targets that have a higher chance of succeeding in the clinic.
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Their words
There are no existing AI/ML systems that mitigate clinical failure risks due to target choice or toxicology.
23 May 2023
From one piece 10 Thoughts from the Fourth Trimester 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
this is the most personal of personal decisions and no one should ever try to pressure anyone else to have kids-it's way too big a thing to be anyone else's business.
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korrents.com
Expecting parents should be required to take a mandatory course before caring for a newborn.Their words
There should obviously be like a mandatory four-hour course every expecting parent has to take before they're actually in charge of a newborn.
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Their words
The problem is, when humans went bipedal, our pelvises got smaller, and as humans got smarter, our heads got bigger. So evolution had to get creative. Its solution: all human babies would be premies, born when they were still small enough to pass through a human pelvis.
21 May 2023
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Draft No. 4: On the Writing ProcessTheir words
McPhee is a spectacular writer.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Levels of the GameTheir words
I’ve read many books about tennis, but it’s still my favorite
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Likedrcmnd.app
String Theory: David Foster Wallace on TennisTheir words
coming in a close second
+ 1 more
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Avid Reader: A LifeTheir words
If you want to understand that in-depth, grab a copy of Avid Reader: A Life by Robert Gottlieb.
19 May 2023
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korrents.com
Building more housing in a city raises its local prices, because density is what people are moving there for.Their words, before
So empirically, as you move along the density spectrum from the empty North Dakota plain to Manhattan, housing prices go up.
Their words now
Although it wasn't a mistake to ask people to change my mind, I've mostly updated against believing the theory.
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Their words
So I can now state with confidence: beating out a crowded field, this is the worst book about quantum computing, for some definition of the word "about," that I've ever encountered.
17 May 2023
16 May 2023
From one piece I wanted to be a teacher but they made me a cop 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
If my class is so boring that I have to devise an additional carrot-and-stick system to get students to pay attention, the problem is my class is boring.
I wanted to be a teacher but they made me a copexperimental-history.com
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korrents.com
Evaluation should be taken out of the classroom and given to people whose whole job it is.Their words
One solution is to separate instruction and evaluation. Let teachers be teachers and cops be cops.
I wanted to be a teacher but they made me a copexperimental-history.com
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korrents.com
Grading flattens whatever is taught into what can be tested, and teaches students to ignore everything else.Their words
Evaluation forces me to flatten everything I teach into something that can be tested, and it encourages students to ignore everything that isn’t on the test.
I wanted to be a teacher but they made me a copexperimental-history.com
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Their words
Instruction is collaborative: students want to learn, and I want them to learn, too. Evaluation is adversarial: students want the points, and I have to make sure they don’t get too many.
I wanted to be a teacher but they made me a copexperimental-history.com
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korrents.com
Teaching and grading are two different jobs, and doing both at once makes a person worse at teaching.Their words
Grade harder, grade softer, grade with words rather than numbers, hide the grades entirely—none of it works, because the problem was never the grades themselves. The problem was trying to be both a teacher and a cop at the same time.
I wanted to be a teacher but they made me a copexperimental-history.com
12 May 2023
From one piece Waste Your Time, Your Life May Depend On It 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
The freedom that automation offers is freedom from the very involvement that makes a life meaningful.Their words
The liberation we are offered is a liberation from the very care-driven involvement in the world and in our communities that would render our lives meaningful and satisfying.
Waste Your Time, Your Life May Depend On Ittheconvivialsociety.substack.com
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korrents.com
Saving time and labour has become an unexamined imperative rather than a judgement made case by case.Their words
The problem is that “saving” time and labor have become default settings and social imperatives.
Waste Your Time, Your Life May Depend On Ittheconvivialsociety.substack.com
11 May 2023
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Their words
Ships are great at carrying bulky and heavy stuff with minimal cost and energy usage. We need a battery chemistry that leans into that and sacrifices performance to reduce cost.
Why Battery Powered Cargo Ships are Compellingaustinvernon.site
9 May 2023
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Lovedrcmnd.app
MacWhisperTheir words
MacWhisper is a little app I just discovered that changed the game for me when it comes to creating high quality subtitles for my videos.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
MimestreamTheir words
Mimestream feels like the Apple Mail app I’ve always wished Apple would make. It’s incredibly fast and fluid, it syncs instantly, and it supports all the keyboard shortcuts that you’d expect in a modern app
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
PeteyTheir words
The app costs a few dollars up front and then has an optional subscription for unlimited requests, but I would recommend going directly to OpenAI’s developer dashboard, creating your own account, and copy/pasting your own API key into Petey.
+ 2 more
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Readwise ReaderTheir words
is my favorite way to save things to read later, to actually read them, and to sync my highlights wherever I want.
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Dislikedrcmnd.app
Apple MailTheir words
unlike Apple Mail, which seemingly uses shortcuts that made sense in 1995 and refuses to change.
8 May 2023
4 May 2023
From one piece Content Shaping 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
AI will soon let anyone consume any content reshaped into the timeframe, tone, voice and bias they choose.Their words
This isn't perfect, but soon it will be, and you will be able to listen to or read any content you want in the timeframe, tone, voice and bias of your choosing.
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korrents.com
The gap between what media covers and what actually matters, like real causes of death, is very large.Their words
The gap between reality and media is very large: The gap between cause of death and what people search for and read.
2 May 2023
1 May 2023
From one piece Why Chatbots Are Not the Future 4 beliefs · wattenberger.com
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Their words
I want to see more tools and fewer operated machines - we should be embracing our humanity instead of blindly improving efficiency. And that involves using our new AI technology in more deft ways than generating more content for humans to evaluate. I believe the real game changers are going to have very little to do with plain content generation.
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Their words
Good tools let the user choose when to switch between implementation and evaluation. When I work with a chatbot, I'm forced to frequently switch between the two modes.
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Their words
Good tools make it clear how they should be used. And more importantly, how they should not be used.
+ 1 more
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korrents.com
Chatbots are a terrible interface for large language models, because a text box has no affordances.Their words
Hopefully I've convinced you that chatbots are a terrible interface for LLMs. Or, at the very least, that we can add controls, information, and affordances to our chatbot interfaces to make them more usable.
30 April 2023
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Likedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
Hell BentTheir words
Mind candy fantasy / campus novel, in which Yale is literally a gateway to Hell.
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Likedrcmnd.app
Songs for the Dead: AfterlifeTheir words
Mind candy fantasy, comic book flavor. A satisfying conclusion to the story.
27 April 2023
26 April 2023
From one piece Performance Excuses Debunked 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Performance-aware programming is a skill a working developer can learn in months rather than years.Their words
Learning basic performance-aware programming skills is something a developer can do in months rather than years.
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Their words
the logical conclusion would be that programmers need to take performance more seriously than they have been, not less!
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korrents.com
Software performance is central to long-term business success rather than a niche engineering concern.Their words
Software performance appears to be central to long-term business interests.
25 April 2023
23 April 2023
From one piece Some mistakes I made as a new manager 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Neglecting maintenance of infrastructure over time makes it degrade faster and become costlier to repair later.Their words
unmaintained infrastructure degrades more quickly, and is more expensive to fix in the long run.
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korrents.com
People with little experience at a task often welcome a degree of close oversight, provided it is given thoughtfully.Their words
People with low task-relevant maturity appreciate some amount of micromanagement (if they're self-aware and you're nice about it).
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Their words
Manage projects according to the owner's level of task-relevant maturity.
20 April 2023
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On changing their mind
There's always a chance I might never see my family again. Because of that, I often regret it. It's usually best to keep options open.
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korrents.com
Removing your own ability to retreat is how you make yourself follow through on a hard change.Their words
I forbid myself from anything too tempting or addicting. I keep no cookies in my home. To prevent myself from falling off the wagon, I strap myself to the mast.
From one piece The Looking Glass: What AI Won't Change 2 beliefs · lg.substack.com
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korrents.com
The more your target audience does not look like you, the more you should be skeptical of your design intuition.Their words
The more your target audience does not look like you, the more you should be skeptical of your design intuition. Despite having seen thousands of a/b test results for minor design details, I am still regularly surprised and humbled by my intuition being wrong.
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Their words
Design is not the way it looks, or beautiful colors and animations. It's not the brand or the logo. It is how the product works. Designing is the the process of exploring and arriving at a solution. I believe all builders are designers.
15 April 2023
12 April 2023
11 April 2023
10 April 2023
7 April 2023
From one piece A design practice for social systems 4 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
A big moment of realization for me is that most of the social sciences are not design practices.
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korrents.com
The job of a multiplayer designer is to grow a community, not to make gamified numbers go up.Their words
We are no longer in the business of delivering systems where players make gamified numbers go up.
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korrents.com
A designer’s obligation is to satisfy real human needs rather than to manufacture needs that pay.Their words
Every team should ensure they are fulfilling real human needs over merely inducing needs for profit.
+ 1 more
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korrents.com
Extracting time and money from unhealthy users works in the short run and loses them in the long run.Their words
You may be able to extract time and money from unhealthy players in the short term. But long term, unhealthy players leave extractive services.
31 March 2023
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Likedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
Alberuni's India: An Account of the Religion, Philosophy, Literature, Geography, Chronology, Astronomy, Customs, Laws and Astrology of India about A.D. 1030Their words
It's mostly readable, though there are quite a few places where the translator calls for more research and this reprint, naturally, doesn't say whether it's been followed up *. In any event, I found this fascinating.
28 March 2023
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Their words
These are important principles, but they ignore the problems of sustainability, inequity, and bias. In addition, the emphasis is usually on the immediate issues, not the long-term impact. In other words, they describe the way we did things in the past, not the issues in this book, and not the way we need to do things in the future.
22 March 2023
21 March 2023
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korrents.com
An AI can already earn an A on a university economics midterm, years earlier than informed forecasters expected.Their words
To my surprise and no small dismay, GPT-4 got an A. It earned 73/100, which would have been the fourth-highest score on the test.
20 March 2023
15 March 2023
14 March 2023
13 March 2023
9 March 2023
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Recommendstheir ownrcmnd.app
Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving RelationshipTheir words
Stop working on yourself as an individual and start working on your relationship as a couple.
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Recommendstheir ownrcmnd.app
The New Rules of Marriage: What You Need to Know to Make Love WorkTheir words
Terry shares five non-starters to avoid and practical strategies for bringing honesty, passion, and joy back to even the most difficult relationship.
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Recommendstheir ownrcmnd.app
How Can I Get Through to You?: Reconnecting Men and WomenTheir words
How Can I Get Through to You? explores the causes of communication blocks between men and women.
+ 1 more
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Recommendstheir ownrcmnd.app
I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male DepressionTheir words
In it, Terry reveals how men can unearth their pain, heal themselves, restore relationships, and break the legacy of abuse.
7 March 2023
From one piece What’s Not Our Problem 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
But power is ultimately held by those with the will to power. That will does not grow in decoupled idea labs, and would immediately corrupt them if it did.
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Their words
The proportion of profiteers seems highly correlated with the number of VERITAS plaques on campus and the high-mindedness of the organization's mission statement.
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Their words
High rung thinking will almost always land on "centrist" position because it acknowledges tradeoffs, or on non-politicized positions because it's not beholden to supporting either of the two parties in a zero-sum game. It's not a coincidence that the political square is a triangle.
4 March 2023
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Their words, before
My view is that it’s going to take more than this regulatory campaign to defeat dynamism in China.
Their words now
What I did not sufficiently appreciate is that a state that would so casually decapitate a sector like online tutoring would also have the will to visit catastrophe upon whole cities.
From one piece 2022 letter 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
China's technological competitiveness is grounded in manufacturing capability rather than in scientific research.Their words
Whereas the US has a track record of doing great science, China’s technology competitiveness is grounded in manufacturing capabilities.
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Their words
Beijing decided to partner with Russia, an imperial aggressor, when it is the US and Europe that have markets and technology.
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korrents.com
The Chinese state's famous capability is largely spent putting out fires it started itself.Their words
First, it increasingly resembles a crew of firefighters who bring extraordinary skill to dousing fires that they themselves ignited.
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Their words
Second, China’s problem is usually not too little state capacity, but too much.
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Their words
And on balance I believe we should think of the Chinese state today as an autocratic regime that is occasionally capable of economic pragmatism rather than a technocratic regime that slips occasionally into Marxist faults.
2 March 2023
From one piece Choose People 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
If we collectively devoted the same levels of investment and inventive power and entrepreneurship to developing more and better legal pathways for people to move across borders to needed jobs, including a variety of modalities for labor mobility, we could solve the growing challenge of labor scarcity.
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Their words
But, whether it makes financial sense or not for the individuals involved, they are responding to distorted prices, not scarcity, and the world is not better off from their invention and innovation.
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korrents.com
The world economy is flat for capital, goods and ideas, and has a legal cliff at the border for people.Their words
This is not because there are not people who would drive trucks for Amazon in the world, and not because “natural” scientific progress has made machines that drive trucks easy and cheap, but because in a global economy which is “flat” for capital, information, and goods, there is a legal “cliff at the border” for labor, as prices don’t reflect scarcity.
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korrents.com
Labour-saving innovation in rich countries is aimed at the only asset most of the world’s poor have to sell.Their words
Therefore, we have the perverse situation that the richest people are hiring some of the most talented and technologically sophisticated people on the planet to engage in innovation aimed at driving down the demand for labor—the major and often only asset of the world’s poor.
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Their words
My key argument is that in the current global economy we have some of the scarcest resources on the planet devoting themselves to economizing one of the most abundant resources on the planet.
1 March 2023
28 February 2023
From one piece "Clean" Code, Horrible Performance 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Giving up a decade or more of hardware performance to make programming more comfortable is not an acceptable trade.Their words
It simply cannot be the case that we're willing to give up a decade or more of hardware performance just to make programmers’ lives a little bit easier.
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korrents.com
The programming practices taught as best practice are ruinous for performance and should not be followed.Their words
The ideas underlying the “clean” code methodology are almost all horrible for performance, and you shouldn’t do them.
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Likedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
The Soviet Middle East: A Model for Development?Their words
The former is a personal touchstone which shaped me deeply; the later is merely very good. Looking up something else, I happened to discover that a bunch of his books are now available through our library electronically, so I plunged in.
26 February 2023
23 February 2023
From one piece Modular Deep Learning 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
But modularity may also facilitate a shift away from a concentration of model development in a few institutions and to distributing the development of modular components across the community.
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Their words
Given the trend of pre-training larger and larger models, we believe modularity will be crucial.
19 February 2023
From one piece Twiddler 4 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
For an online creator, the platform is a boss who docks every paycheck and tells you that you’re being punished for breaking rules that your boss refuses to explain, lest you figure out how to violate them without him noticing.
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Their words
The problem isn’t the existence of intermediaries — it’s how much power the internet gives to intermediaries.
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Their words
A platform operator can effortlessly change the distribution of surpluses in an instant, while suppliers and customers have to engage in minute, time-consuming and unreliable Platform Kremlinology just to detect these changes, much less understand them.
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Their words
tech barons are ordinary mediocrities, no better and no worse than the monopolists that preceded them, and any differences come down to affordances in technology and regulation, not an especial wicked brilliance.
17 February 2023
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Their words
The biggest issue is probably that we don’t control neutral networks enough to be able to ensure AI doesn’t harm humans. We can’t even control AI to not reveal internal prompts.
From one piece A Short History of My Last Six Years 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Liberal societies currently face an existential risk that must be addressed to reach a better future.Their words
This book is my best crack at explaining what I think is an existential risk to liberal societies and what I think we need to do to get to that awesome future I used to be so excited about.
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Their words
There were a bunch of bad trends: Tribalism was flaring up everywhere, mass shaming campaigns were roaring back into fashion, politicians were increasingly clown-like, public discourse had become a battle of one-dimensional narratives.
12 February 2023
11 February 2023
8 February 2023
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Heal SquadTheir words
I spoke with @mariamenounos about the link between emotions and illness, and the importance of focusing on mental health, on her Heal Squad podcast. To listen to the full episode, please follow: https://t.co/XPIKAvi8tH
7 February 2023
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Their words, before
Experiencing sleepiness is normal and does not necessarily imply that you are undersleeping.
Their words now
Therefore, I realized that it’s very important to be as awake as possible and that my model of sleepiness where you can be “awake”, “sleepy” and “asleep” is dumb.
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korrents.com
A cultural focus on psychological health, meditation included, is one of the great obstacles to human progress.On changing their mind
I think meditation has been very good for me and that it would be very good for a lot of other people too.
5 February 2023
4 February 2023
2 February 2023
From one piece I’m Now a Full-Time Professional Open Source Maintainer 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
This is how I frame it: if the effort required to replace or fork a dependency should it go unmaintained is measured in engineer-months, that’s a critical dependency and retaining its maintainers probably makes good business sense.
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Their words
As a project gets more popular in the ecosystem, the workload increases but the value of that project for the company stays the same, so resources don’t increase accordingly.
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korrents.com
Foundations, on the whole, do not pay the maintainers of the projects they exist to support.Their words
Virtually all maintainers are either volunteers or full-time employees of large companies. Foundations on average don’t pay maintainers.
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Their words
Volunteerism is self-evidently not sustainable, as people’s life circumstances change.
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korrents.com
Maintainers of widely used open source software are not adequately funded, and that is a real and unsolved problem.Their words
This experiment started from the observation that despite being critical for the functioning of the Internet—and, by extension, the economy—the role of open-source maintainer has not yet found a sustainable manifestation.
1 February 2023
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korrents.com
Fluvoxamine probably treats COVID, at about 60-40, and doctors should be prescribing it on those odds.Their words, before
At this point I'd give it 60-40 it works.
Their words now
More recent studies have found fluvoxamine does not treat COVID.
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Their words
This wasn't exactly a mistake, since it's not wrong to give 60-40 odds on a false thing, but it seems worth acknowledging here.
30 January 2023
From one piece Cargo airships could be big 4 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Building a manufactured object at a high enough rate pushes its cost down toward the cost of its inputs.Their words
A high rate of production tends to drive costs down toward the cost of inputs.
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Their words
Designing your aircraft for the beachhead market is a huge distraction, particularly when there are certification costs that have to be paid for each new model.
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Their words
FAA certification is required before you transport anything for money.
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Their words
A small rigid-body airship for good physical reasons should not exist.
27 January 2023
24 January 2023
21 January 2023
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Their words
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.
18 January 2023
17 January 2023
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Likedrcmnd.app
fast.aiTheir words
https://course.fast.ai/ is a free course on deep learning with PyTorch. It helped me get started with deep learning, though I didn’t get that far.
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Likedrcmnd.app
CryptopalsTheir words
Cryptopals – a set of exercises to learn cryptography by breaking it. Very fun.
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Likedrcmnd.app
NightmareTheir words
Nightmare – an intro to reverse engineering. I did a few problems and it was really fun.
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
TinyWMTheir words
TinyWM is where I’d start if I wanted to learn how a window manager works
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Go standard library documentationTheir words
the Go standard library documentation is probably my favourite language reference
16 January 2023
From one piece I asked Chat GPT to write a song in the style of Nick Cave and this is what it produced. What do you think? 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Making something great is the opposite of resembling what is already recognised as great.Their words
What makes a great song great is not its close resemblance to a recognizable work. Writing a good song is not mimicry, or replication, or pastiche, it is the opposite.
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korrents.com
Songs come out of suffering, and a system that has endured nothing has nothing to make one from.Their words
Songs arise out of suffering, by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation and, well, as far as I know, algorithms don’t feel. Data doesn’t suffer.
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Their words
What ChatGPT is, in this instance, is replication as travesty. ChatGPT may be able to write a speech or an essay or a sermon or an obituary but it cannot create a genuine song.
14 January 2023
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Their words, before
The Fed needs PCE inflation to average 1.96% for the remainder of the decade in order to hit their AIT target.
Their words now
I assumed they intended inflation to average roughly 2% during the 2020s.
13 January 2023
12 January 2023
From one piece High Costs are not About Precarity 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
This is not about precarity, because this is not a precarious project; this is about total ignorance and incuriosity about best practices, which emanate from a place that doesn’t natively speak English and doesn’t trade in American political references.
High Costs are not About Precaritypedestrianobservations.com
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Their words
Importantly, low-cost countries with more clientelism and politicization of the state tend to be more deferential to the expertise of engineers.
High Costs are not About Precaritypedestrianobservations.com
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Their words
Our best explanation is that the UK adopted what we call the globalized system of procurement, privatizing planning functions to consultants and privatizing risk to contractors, which creates more conflict; the UK also has an unusually high soft cost factor.
High Costs are not About Precaritypedestrianobservations.com
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Their words
Just giving more support to agencies in their current configuration is not going to help. To the contrary, it only confirms that profligacy gets rewarded.
High Costs are not About Precaritypedestrianobservations.com
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Their words
In fact, the worst cost blowouts are for the politically most certain projects; Second Avenue Subway enjoyed unanimous support in New York politics.
High Costs are not About Precaritypedestrianobservations.com
10 January 2023
8 January 2023
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Their words
Taken together, there is an argument to be made that AVs should be safer than human drivers by about a factor of 10 (being a nice round order of magnitude number) to leave engineering margin for the above considerations.
4 January 2023
From one piece There's No Such Thing as Affordable Housing 4 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
These shifts in price without any physical change to the housing stock are by far the biggest part of the affordability story. They dwarf the impact of actual new construction.
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Their words
Affordability for the masses will live or die not by what we build this year or next, but by what happens to the price of homes that already exist, in which the vast majority of people live.
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Their words
Because affordability is not, and has never been, an intrinsic quality of a building.
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Their words
Adding chairs to the game—any kind of chairs—will tend to make the competition less cutthroat for the chairs already in play.
3 January 2023
1 January 2023
From one piece Why Not Mars 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
With our current capability, NASA would struggle to keep a crew alive for six months on the White House lawn, let alone for years in a Martian yurt.
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korrents.com
The International Space Station exists mainly to teach its builders how to build another space station.Their words
The ISS crew spend most of their time fixing the machinery that keeps them alive, and when they have a free moment for science, they tend to study the effect of space on themselves.
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korrents.com
A crewed spacecraft does no work: putting people aboard is what stops a mission getting anything done.Their words
In 2023, we simply take it for granted that if a rocket goes up carrying passengers, it’s not going to get any work done.
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korrents.com
Fifty years of miniaturisation have made robotic spacecraft better and cheaper explorers than astronauts.Their words
But fifty years of progress in miniaturization and software changed the balance between robots and humans in space.
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Their words
The goal of this essay is to persuade you that we shouldn’t send human beings to Mars, at least not anytime soon.
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korrents.com
The more freedom a design gives people to interact, the more of that freedom will be abused.Their words
The more freedom you give players, the more they will abuse it.
31 December 2022
From one piece I am not a supplier 4 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
If you use this, I owe you nothing. At all. We have no relationship. I put this up online on the condition that if you use it, all the risks are on you.
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Their words
But to do that, I am going to have to become a supplier. Which means you are going to have to start to pay me. A fair price, that we can negotiate. Under a different license.
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Their words
We are not suppliers. All the people writing and maintaining these projects, we are not suppliers. We do not have a business relationship with all these organisations.
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korrents.com
Maintainers of widely used open source software are not adequately funded, and that is a real and unsolved problem.Their words
Hell even worse, a lot of the libraries that underpin the fabric of what we all call the digital economy have trouble getting enough money to pay for food.
From one piece The Dark Forest and Generative AI 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Referencing obscure concepts, friends who are real but not famous, niche interests, and recent events all make you plausibly more human.
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Their words
Every time you find a new favourite blog or Twitter account or Tiktok personality online, you’ll have to ask: Is this really a whole human with a rich and complex life like mine?
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Their words
Easier said than done, but one of the best ways to prove you’re not a predictive language model is to demonstrate critical and sophisticated thinking.
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Their words
But I think the sheer volume and scale of what’s coming will be meaningfully different. And I think we’re unprepared.
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korrents.com
The web is being flooded with coherent, generic, generated text that buries the writing worth reading.Their words
These new models are poised to flood the web with generic, generated content.
29 December 2022
27 December 2022
From one piece Science isn't storytelling 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
A scientific paper isn’t supposed to be a story.
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korrents.com
Compressing a piece of research into a journal paper's word count is itself a distortion of what was found.Their words
The mere act of squeezing a complex process into a few thousand words—limited by a journal-imposed word count—is itself a distortion of reality.
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korrents.com
Deciding your conclusion before you look at the data is one of the most reality-distorting things a scientist can do.Their words
Having a pre-existing conclusion—a “take-home message”—in mind is one of the most reality-distorting influences on our thinking.
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Their words
This, as was noted on Twitter, is a recipe for bad studies: it encourages the cherry-picking of results that went your way and the hiding of those that didn’t.
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Their words
We know how easily these practices can distort the scientific record and give us false-positive, nonsense results.
19 December 2022
18 December 2022
17 December 2022
14 December 2022
From one piece Indie Game Dev: Death Loops 4 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Each project you finish makes the next one easier to finish and teaches you more about what a successful one takes.Their words
"Finishing games gets easier with each game you finish, and the more games you finish, the better you will understand what it takes to make a successful game."
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korrents.com
Aiming to make an objectively great work is the wrong goal; make the best you can now and treat it as one of many.Their words
My advice is to abandon the goal of making an objectively great game.
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Their words
I find it best not to spend too long on any one part of the game until the entire game is playable from beginning to end.
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korrents.com
The right way to size a project is by the size of the projects you have already finished, not by how skilled you are.Their words
the best metric for scoping a project is not technical skill, but the scope of the previous games you've finished!
13 December 2022
10 December 2022
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Likedrcmnd.app
Guns, Germs, and SteelTheir words
I have a soft spot for extremely broad histories like Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel and Joseph Henrich's The WEIRDest People in the World.
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth CenturyTheir words
Slouching Towards Utopia is a rich, nuanced story of the interplay of politics, economics, and ideas and how they shaped progress.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant SuccessTheir words
Absolutely. It is incredibly enjoyable and readable. The authors, in a way that is very rare for economists, find small stories that paint big pictures for the points they make.
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about ItTheir words
Although his training is not in economics, Richard Reeves draws on economic research, as well as research from the fields of sociology, psychology, and political science, to tell an under-told story. The book explores the problems faced by boys and men, the roots of those problems, and possible policy solutions.
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical TechnologyTheir words
Chris Miller tells us the history of how microchips were developed, emphasizing the critical role of the government, and especially defense procurement.
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Lovedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. TrumanTheir words
this one is one of the best leadership books I have ever read
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Lovedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
The War of ArtTheir words
Before I start any book project, I take a few hours and re-read The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, maybe the greatest book ever written on the creative process.
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Lovedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
Outdoor Kids in an Inside World: Getting Your Family Out of the House and Radically Engaged with NatureTheir words
It’s about encouraging curiosity and interest, and cultivating resiliency and self-sufficiency.
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Recommendssponsoredrcmnd.app
HiyaTheir words
The Reading List email is sponsored by Hiya , the pediatrician-approved superpowered chewable vitamin created by two dads tired of children’s vitamins that cause more problems than they solve.
8 December 2022
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Fellowship PointTheir words
There have been many novels written in historical modes this year, and I've hated all of them except Fellowship Point by Alice Elliott Dark precisely because that novel feels vibrant and lively and full of characters and it reminds me of early 20th century literature.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
eBayTheir words
I wanted the the superior UK edition of two Kawabata books, so I ordered them from eBay. They arrived in like five days. It was amazing.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
The Drama BookshopTheir words
Recently though, I went to The Drama Bookshop, which was a delightful surprise. It is the closest I have come to the experience of a Manhattan bookshop as a third place in the kind of Prairie Lights mode.
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
the StrandTheir words
For used books, the Strand is pretty amazing. If you want an interesting, vibey new book, you don't go to the Strand, you go to McNally Jackson.
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Recommendstheir ownrcmnd.app
The Late AmericansTheir words
Also, please preorder The Late Americans so I can write more homosexual novels—it comes out next year!
7 December 2022
From one piece Why encrypted backup is so important 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
A handful of Silicon Valley executives made the choice for us, in pursuit of adoption metrics and a “magical” user experience.
Why encrypted backup is so importantblog.cryptographyengineering.com
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Their words
It terrifies me, because these data repositories are not only a risk to individual user privacy, they’re effectively a surveillance super-weapon.
Why encrypted backup is so importantblog.cryptographyengineering.com
6 December 2022
5 December 2022
4 December 2022
1 December 2022
30 November 2022
28 November 2022
24 November 2022
23 November 2022
22 November 2022
From one piece in which legibility comes at a price 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Being easy to find online exposes people, especially those in marginalized groups, to a high risk of targeted abuse.Their words
ask any member of a marginalized group and they'll tell you that being easy to find can have a high cost when it exposes you to targeted abuse.
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Their words
the real goal was to make their users more legible, primarily for advertising purposes, but also to law enforcement and other authorities.
21 November 2022
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Stranger in a Strange LandTheir words
Of all the sci-fi I read as a teenager, Stranger in a Strange Land is my favorite.
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Likedrcmnd.app
SurrenderTheir words
Bono’s new book, Surrender, is packed with funny, poignant moments like this.
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Likedrcmnd.app
The Inner Game of TennisTheir words
But The Inner Game of Tennis is just as relevant today as it was in 1974.
17 November 2022
9 November 2022
5 November 2022
From one piece Where Are The Crewed eVTOL Videos? 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
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.
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Their words
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.
3 November 2022
31 October 2022
26 October 2022
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Recommendssponsoredrcmnd.app
Template Metaprogramming with C++Their words
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
24 October 2022
13 October 2022
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Likedrcmnd.app
Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.Their words
Fascinating account of a Gilded Age titan much worse known than Carnegie.
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Likedrcmnd.app
In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our LivesTheir words
I learned a great deal from this book about Google, which put some of my own experiences with Google products in context.
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Likedrcmnd.app
The Black CompanyTheir words
I enjoyed the first book a great deal: it’s in a fairly stock medieval setting, but it handles the dark fantasy well
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Likedrcmnd.app
Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War IITheir words
a fascinating book on the bloody aftermath of WWII as the destruction wound down
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Tombstone: The Untold Story of Mao’s Great FamineTheir words
The statistics and anecdotes are fairly horrifying, and the sheer profusion drills in how widespread the famine was.
12 October 2022
From one piece Starting from scraps 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Hence, the necessity of shitty first drafts.
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korrents.com
Writing gets better when it is handled physically, like a collage of scraps pushed around, rather than composed.Their words
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.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
The Great DivergenceTheir words
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.
11 October 2022
From one piece Review of DeLong's "Slouching Towards Utopia" 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
What I’m nitpicking here is that this decline in fertility deserves equal billing with the research lab, corporation, and globalization.
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Their words
Without this anti-Malthusian response the research lab, corporation, and globalization cannot provide sustained growth.
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korrents.com
What broke the Malthusian trap was that productivity growth raised the price of bringing a child to adulthood.Their words
The key change is that productivity growth, starting around 1870, reached down and profoundly raised the price of bringing a child to adulthood.
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Their words
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.
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Their words
It was an acceleration in productivity combined with a decline in population growth that put us on a slow trudge towards utopia.
8 October 2022
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korrents.com
The three-year bet about whether AI image models could handle compositionality was won in three months.Their words, before
In fact, not only did they reach this level in three months, but probably they were at this level before the bet was even made
Their words now
I retract my claim to have won and will continue to see how AI progress advances over the next three years.
4 October 2022
30 September 2022
28 September 2022
27 September 2022
25 September 2022
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Likedrcmnd.app
Write Useful BooksTheir words
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.
23 September 2022
From one piece The Hierarchy Is Bullshit (And Bad For Business) 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Burnout comes from not caring and from not feeling needed, not from working the hardest.Their words
The times I have come closest to burnout or flaming out have never been when I was working the hardest, but when I cared the least.
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Their words
But if there’s one thing we know, it’s that for industries that are fueled by creativity and innovation, command-and-control leadership is poison.
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korrents.com
Treating the org chart as a ladder on which higher is always better is the central lie of hierarchy.Their words
The “Big Lie” of hierarchy is that your organizational structure is a vertical tree from the CEO on down, where higher up is always better.
22 September 2022
21 September 2022
From one piece Azure Dives 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
People don't really control most outcomes, so the sensible response to events is to look for the good in them.Their words
We don't really control anything anyway, so we may as well find the good in things.
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Their words
The aim of any professional training in the end is to make you someone competent, capable of independent thought and leadership in a specified field.
19 September 2022
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Their words
Drag and tire friction dominate energy expenditure. Engineering effort to improve drag is worth so much more with electric vehicles.
15 September 2022
12 September 2022
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korrents.com
AI progress is faster than people expect, and ordinary scaling can be enough to solve problems that looked very hard.Their words
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.
8 September 2022
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Recommendstheir ownrcmnd.app
Outer Order, Inner CalmTheir words
With clarity and humor, Gretchen Rubin illuminates one of her key realizations about happiness: For most of us, outer order contributes to inner calm.
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Recommendstheir ownrcmnd.app
The Four TendenciesTheir words
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.
-
Recommendstheir ownrcmnd.app
Better Than BeforeTheir words
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.
+ 2 more
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Recommendstheir ownrcmnd.app
Happier at HomeTheir words
Happier at Home is the account of what she tried, and what she learned, when she undertook to be happier at home.
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Recommendstheir ownrcmnd.app
The Happiness ProjectTheir words
The Happiness Project synthesizes the wisdom of the ages with current scientific research, as Rubin brings readers along on her year to greater happiness.
7 September 2022
From one piece Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #318 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
If we found a thousand life forms across the universe, 995 of them would be carbon-based and living in water.Their words
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.
-
Their words
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.
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korrents.com
The primordial soup is a miracle story: life needs a continuous flow of reaction, and a soup can never provide one.Their words
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.
+ 2 more
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korrents.com
Life probably arose only once on Earth, and the deep split between bacteria and archaea is the evidence for it.Their words
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.
-
Their words
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.
6 September 2022
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korrents.com
Electric bikes are worth their cost, flaws and all, because they bring the world nearerTheir words
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.
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Mixed onrcmnd.app
BESV PSA1Their words
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.
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Mixed onrcmnd.app
Vanmoof X3Their words
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.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Klamper disc calipersTheir words
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.
+ 2 more
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Brooks grips and saddleTheir words
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.
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Likedrcmnd.app
MoultonTheir words
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.
1 September 2022
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Their words, before
That hokey unfashionable techniques like practicing gratitude turn out to have strong scientific evidence behind them
Their words now
I was wrong about gratitude. I thought it was a guaranteed way to become happier
30 August 2022
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Usesrcmnd.app
NotionTheir words
I use Notion but this guide can help you choose one if interested.
26 August 2022
From one piece Collections: Why No Roman Industrial Revolution? 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
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.
-
Their words
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.
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Their words
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.
+ 2 more
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Their words
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.
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Their words
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.
19 August 2022
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Dislikedrcmnd.app
Anbernic Win600Their words
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.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Steam DeckTheir words
The Steam Deck was my first taste of PC gaming in a handheld form factor and I love the snot out of my deck.
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
The European MiracleTheir words
I recommended Eric Jones’ The European Miracle
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
The Lever of RichesTheir words
Joel Mokyr’s The Lever of Riches
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
How the World Became RichTheir words
and How the World Became Rich by Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin.
16 August 2022
14 August 2022
9 August 2022
From one piece Insights for Making Better Decisions | Gary Klein | Knowledge Project 144 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
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.
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korrents.com
Decision-bias research is itself biased, studying only how heuristics fail and never the strength they supply.Their words
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.
-
Their words
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.
+ 2 more
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Their words
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.
-
Their words
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.
6 August 2022
1 August 2022
From one piece The Mechanism Behind Astringency in Coffee 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
The compounds responsible for astringency in coffee require very high water temperatures to dissolve efficiently.Their words
The case of astringent compounds is particularly interesting, because they require a very high temperature to be dissolved efficiently in water.
-
Their words
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.
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korrents.com
Avoiding astringency in coffee is fundamentally a filtration problem rather than simply a matter of flow evenness.Their words
Therefore, avoiding astringency is not directly a matter of flow evenness, it is actually a filtration problem !
29 July 2022
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Their words
Charming, beautiful and astronomically expensive because like in most of the western world it's illegal to build anything.
25 July 2022
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Their words, before
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.
From one piece in which the word column has several meanings, none of them architectural 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
-
Their words
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.
-
Their words
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).
19 July 2022
16 July 2022
From one piece More Even Espresso Extractions 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
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.
-
Their words
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.
13 July 2022
8 July 2022
From one piece Bjorn’s Corner: Sustainable Air Transport. Part 27. Multicopters. 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
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.
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Their words
All propulsion systems are air pumps, and they work more efficiently if they accelerate a large mass of air to a small overspeed than vice versa.
1 July 2022
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
The Early Chinese Empires: Han and QinTheir words
Mark Edward Lewis' The Early Chinese Empires: Han and Qin is probably the best companion piece to your Sima Qian readings
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Mixed onrcmnd.app
Early China: A Social and Cultural HistoryTheir words
Feng Li's Early China: A Social and Cultural History is a staid yet serviceable overview of the pre-imperial period.
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Medieval Chinese Warfare, 300-900Their words
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.
30 June 2022
From one piece Why On-Call Pain Is A Sociotechnical Problem 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
A permanently painful on-call rotation is a five-alarm emergency, not a normal cost of owning code in production.Their words
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.
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korrents.com
Engineers should own their code in production, and it is management’s job to make sure that on-call does not suck.Their words
It is engineering’s job to own their code in production. It is management’s job to make sure it doesn’t suck.
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Their words
They weren't infallible oracles, but they weren't blindly casting about either.
22 June 2022
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Likedrcmnd.app
Infinite JestTheir words
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.
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Dislikedrcmnd.app
End the FedTheir words
It's a book by a politician, about what you expect. Some interesting tid bits on the history of the Fed but you could get it from Wikipedia.
20 June 2022
From one piece Writing one sentence per line 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Weak openings like “I think” should be cut, and a sentence started on its subject and verb.Their words
Chop the weak beginnings, like “I think” and “Whether or not”. Start with powerful subjects and verbs.
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Their words
Delete any sentence not worthy of its own line.
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korrents.com
Writing one sentence per line, for your own eyes, improves prose more than any other habit.Their words
I've been doing it for twenty years, and it improved my writing more than anything else.
17 June 2022
From one piece Post 49: Things That Make Me Enjoy Giving Career Advice 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
In any mentoring conversation, only a small fraction of what's discussed turns out to be highly valuable.Their words
in general, I expect 90% of a mentoring chat to be kinda useless, and 10% to be particularly high value.
-
Their words
In particular, most EA careers and most careers to do with AI are competitive as fuck.
-
Their words
often the best way to maximise your impact is by pursuing high-risk, high-reward strategies
16 June 2022
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korrents.com
Somebody with trauma should try a trauma-focused therapy such as EMDR before treating their nightmares directly.Their words
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.
15 June 2022
From one piece Post 48: Prioritise Tasks by Rating not Sorting 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Having any ordering to follow, even an arbitrary one, helps overcome indecision about where to start workTheir words
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.
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korrents.com
In prioritizing a list of tasks, the closest calls matter least while getting the very top item right matters mostTheir words
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!
14 June 2022
10 June 2022
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
The Pigeon TunnelTheir words
The rest of the book is great, do buy it!
From one piece AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalities 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
-
Their words
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
-
Their words
We’ve got no idea what’s actually going on inside the giant inscrutable matrices and tensors of floating-point numbers.
-
Their words
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.
+ 2 more
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Their words
unaligned operation at a dangerous level of intelligence kills everybody on Earth and then we don’t get to try again.
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Their words
2 years after the leading actor has the capability to destroy the world, 5 other actors will have the capability to destroy the world.
7 June 2022
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Likedrcmnd.app
The Sense of StyleTheir words
Overall, I'm still firmly on team Strunk and White. But this was a pretty damned entertaining grammar book.
6 June 2022
3 June 2022
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Their words
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.
2 June 2022
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Recommendsaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
Influence: The Psychology of PersuasionTheir words
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.
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Recommendsaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
MeditationsTheir words
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.
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Recommendsaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
A Brief History of TimeTheir words
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.
+ 2 more
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Recommendsaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
The War of Art: Break Through Your Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative BattlesTheir words
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.
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Recommendsaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
This is WaterTheir words
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.
1 June 2022
From one piece Fiscal Policy under Low Interest Rates 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
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.
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korrents.com
There is no tight relation between growth rates and interest rates, either theoretically or empirically.Their words
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.
-
Their words
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.
+ 2 more
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korrents.com
Low interest rates reflect underlying fundamental economic factors rather than central bank policy choices.Their words
In other words, central banks are not to blame for low rates: these low rates just reflect underlying fundamental factors.
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Their words
The main challenge in discussing fiscal policy is the widely held and nearly religious belief that public debt is very bad.
28 May 2022
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Likedrcmnd.app
Edge BrowserTheir words
Modern browser with split-screen functionality. Helps organize different work contexts more efficiently. Yeah I know, I know. It's a Microsoft product.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
FigmaTheir words
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.
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Likedrcmnd.app
CanvaTheir words
Tool for quickly creating simple graphics, presentation slides, and other visual content. Very useful for everyday graphic needs.
+ 2 more
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Usesrcmnd.app
Lucide IconsTheir words
Collection of open-source icons for use in web and mobile applications. Provides a wide range of icons for various use cases.
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Usesrcmnd.app
TailscaleTheir words
Tailscale is a zero config VPN for building secure networks. I'm using this for connecting all my devices.
25 May 2022
From one piece Do You Learn More by Struggling on Hard Problems? 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
For starters, it’s abundantly clear that both practice and instruction are necessary for effective learning.
-
Their words
Pure discovery learning, where students are never shown instructions or examples, fails miserably.
23 May 2022
From one piece Major Version Numbers are Not Sacred 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
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.
-
Their words
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.
22 May 2022
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Likedrcmnd.app
An Elegant PuzzleTheir words
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.
17 May 2022
From one piece Professional Programming: The First 10 Years 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Dependencies aren't free. You have to keep them up to date. They increase your compile or loading times.
Professional Programming: The First 10 Yearsthorstenball.com
-
Their words
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.
Professional Programming: The First 10 Yearsthorstenball.com
-
Their words
Everything is the result of trade-offs. You will never reach 100% on every axis that you care about. Something has to give.
Professional Programming: The First 10 Yearsthorstenball.com
13 May 2022
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Mixed onrcmnd.app
Snow CrashTheir words
I stuck it out to the end for a deus ex machina and that was some bullshit. This book would have been a perfect short story about pizza delivery.
11 May 2022
From one piece Is There a Housing Shortage or Not? 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
There’s a reasonable amount of evidence that housing prices tend to adjust to match regional incomes.
-
Their words
The more restrictions on land use, the higher rents you see.
-
Their words
If there’s one thing to take away from this essay, it's that you can’t infer a housing shortage by looking at housing construction rates in isolation.
+ 2 more
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Their words
So, historical evidence suggests that the US is short at least several million housing units.
-
Their words
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.
8 May 2022
26 April 2022
21 April 2022
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Mixed onrcmnd.app
BreathTheir words
Anyway, the book has compelling parts, but hurts its own arguments with sloppy pseudo-science.
19 April 2022
6 April 2022
From one piece In defense of simple architectures 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
-
Their words
The cost of our engineering team completely dominates the cost of the systems we operate
-
Their words
Despite the unreasonable effectiveness of simple architectures, most press goes to complex architectures.
-
Their words
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
1 April 2022
22 March 2022
From one piece The Electric Car's Shrinking Role in Reducing Oil Demand 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Electrifying high-mileage vehicles — trucks and vans — cuts oil demand more than electrifying private cars does.Their words
Trucks, vans, and other high mileage vehicles promise to impact oil demand more than EVs.
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korrents.com
Oil demand will fall mainly because petrol cars get driven less, not because they are replaced by electric ones.Their words
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.
19 March 2022
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Likedrcmnd.app
Moonwalking with EinsteinTheir words
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.
18 March 2022
17 March 2022
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korrents.com
How science works can be reasoned about in advance, because the activity has invariants that do not change over time.Their words
If we know the invariants of the problem at hand we can make assertions about the best way to solve that problem now and in the future.
14 March 2022
7 March 2022
6 March 2022
4 March 2022
From one piece Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback (with 19 co-authors) 4 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
The next-token language modeling objective is misaligned with following user instructions helpfully and safely.Their words
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.
-
korrents.com
Fine-tuning with human feedback is a promising direction for aligning language models with human intent.Their words
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.
-
Their words
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.
+ 1 more
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Their words
Making language models bigger does not inherently make them better at following a user's intent.
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Likedrcmnd.app
The LoopTheir words
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.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Of Mice and MenTheir words
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.
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Likedrcmnd.app
Cathedral of the WildTheir words
I picked up this book after hearing Varty's recent appearance on Tim Ferriss's podcast and I wasn't disappointed.
+ 2 more
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
The Devil's TeethTheir words
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.)
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Likedrcmnd.app
Living with a SEALTheir words
The book was light and fun, but it makes a lot more sense if, like me, you first read Goggin's mega-bestselling memoir, Can't Hurt Me.
2 March 2022
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Their words
That's why I only use plain text files. They are the most reliable, flexible, and long-lasting option.
1 March 2022
23 February 2022
21 February 2022
-
Their words, before
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.
15 February 2022
-
Their words
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.
13 February 2022
10 February 2022
-
Their words
It appears that the evidence for all of these beliefs is much weaker than sleep scientists and public health experts want us to believe.
8 February 2022
-
Their words
But I do want to stress that each of these five approaches are all just trade-offs, and none of them are universally wrong.
4 February 2022
3 February 2022
2 February 2022
From one piece Future-proof ethics 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
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.
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Their words
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.
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korrents.com
Ethics based on common sense and the conventions of the time has a horrible track record.Their words
Ethics based on "common sense" seems to have a horrible track record.
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Mixed onaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
Garmin inReach Mini 2Their words
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).
28 January 2022
From one piece Bjorn’s Corner: Sustainable Air Transport. Part 4. Reality checks. 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
These projects have been around for years, yet no one has done this simple math.
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korrents.com
An airliner's empty weight is at least half its take-off weight, and no flying design has ever come in below 47%.Their words
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%.
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Their words
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.
25 January 2022
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Their words
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.
23 January 2022
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7 January 2022
From one piece My first impressions of web3 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
web3 is not on a path away from centralised platforms, and its privacy story is already below the internet’s low bar.Their words
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.
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Their words
People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will.
3 January 2022
1 January 2022
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19Their words
Briefly, I think that this is one of the most important books so far of the twenty-first century.
18 December 2021
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Their words
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.
13 December 2021
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On changing their mind
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.
11 December 2021
From one piece log4j: between a rock and a hard place 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Software upgrades that invalidate previously learned knowledge make programmers worse at their craft.Their words
When software "upgrades" invalidate my old knowledge, it makes me a worse programmer.
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Their words
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.
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Their words
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.
1 December 2021
25 November 2021
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Recommendsaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
Samsung Galaxy Watch 4Their words
The Galaxy Watch 4 is easily the best smartwatch that Samsung has ever made, and also notably, the first one on Wear OS.
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Recommendsaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
COROS Pace 2Their words
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
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Recommendsaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
Garmin Forerunner 245Their words
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.
+ 2 more
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Likedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
Polar Vantage M2Their words
In some ways, it’s really a disservice to assume that because these are budget options that they’re somehow bad.
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Recommendsaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
Garmin Fenix 6 ProTheir words
There’s still really no competition here. If you’re looking for the most feature-packed higher-end watch
23 November 2021
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Likedrcmnd.app
Life's Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be AliveTheir words
That led me to pick up this new book from one of the great science writers of our time, Carl Zimmer, and it did not disappoint.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human ValuesTheir words
I just finished this book a few weeks ago and it is still reverberating in my mind
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Likedrcmnd.app
The Bomber MafiaTheir words
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
+ 2 more
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Mixed onrcmnd.app
The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of HumanityTheir words
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
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Trust ExerciseTheir words
But what really makes it brilliant is a kind of meta-fictional twist that happens in the middle of the book
22 November 2021
From one piece The Rising Tide of Semiconductor Cost 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Finally, not just old chips and new chips, but the companies that make the chips (semiconductor fabs) are becoming more consolidated and more strategic.
The Rising Tide of Semiconductor Costfabricatedknowledge.com
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korrents.com
TSMC can pass its rising costs on because at the leading edge its customers have nowhere else to go.Their words
Given the concentration of fabrication power at TSMC, customers really don’t have another option.
The Rising Tide of Semiconductor Costfabricatedknowledge.com
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korrents.com
Chips are getting more expensive mainly because they take more process steps, not because the tools got dearer.Their words
The primary driver is not only the rising costs of tools such as EUV, but the rising number of steps to make a chip.
The Rising Tide of Semiconductor Costfabricatedknowledge.com
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Likedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
Anthro-VisionTheir words
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.
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