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.
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24 March 2024
22 March 2024
From one piece Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War, CIA, KGB, Aliens, Area 51, Roswell & Secrecy | Lex Fridman Podcast #420 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
First of all, we have 44 interceptor missiles total, period, full stop. Let me repeat, 44. Earlier we were talking about Russia’s 1,670 deployed nuclear weapons. How are those 44 interceptor missiles going to work? And they also have a success rate of around 50%. So they work 50% of the time.
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Their words
So, in addition to the Launch on Warning concept, there’s this other insane concept called Sole Presidential Authority. And you might think, in a democracy that’s impossible, right? You can’t just start a war. Well, you can just start a nuclear war if you are the commander in chief, the President of the United States. In fact, you’re the only one who can do that.
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Their words
Because we have that policy, Launch on Warning, which is exactly like it says. It means the United States will not wait to absorb a nuclear attack. It will launch nuclear weapons in response before the bomb actually hits.
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Their words
First millions, then tens of millions, then hundreds of millions of people will die in the first 72 minutes of a nuclear war. And then, comes nuclear winter where the billions happen from starvation.
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Their words
I’m coming back at you with a very dark answer and a very big number. And that number is 5 billion people.
From one piece Redis Renamed to Redict 2 beliefs · andrewkelley.me
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Their words
In short summary, the licenses limit the freedoms of what one can do with the software in order for Redis Labs to be solely enriched, while asking for volunteer labor, and having already
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korrents.com
Handing stewardship of Redis to a company whose goal is extracting profit was a mistake for the projectTheir words
I think that was an unfortunate move because their goal is mainly to extract profit from the software project rather than to uphold the ideals of Free and Open Source Software.
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
RedictTheir words
In other words, Redict is the true spiritual successor to what was once Redis.
21 March 2024
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Lovedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
La Sportiva MutantTheir words
The La Sportiva Mutant (men's, women's) is my overall pick for backpacking and light canyoneering, and my personal favorite.
19 March 2024
18 March 2024
From one piece Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI | Lex Fridman Podcast #419 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
I kind of hate ads just as an aesthetic choice. I think ads needed to happen on the internet for a bunch of reasons, to get it going, but it’s a momentary industry. The world is richer now. I like that people pay for ChatGPT and know that the answers they’re getting are not influenced by advertisers.
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Their words
So part of the reason that we deploy the way we do, we call it iterative deployment, rather than go build in secret until we got all the way to GPT-5, we decided to talk about GPT-1, 2, 3, and 4. And part of the reason there is I think AI and surprise don’t go together. And also the world, people, institutions, whatever you want to call it, need time to adapt and think about these things.
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Their words
The way I think about it is not what percent of jobs AI will do, but what percent of tasks will AI do on over one time horizon. So if you think of all of the five-second tasks in the economy, five minute tasks, the five-hour tasks, maybe even the five-day tasks, how many of those can AI do?
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Their words
But compute is different. Intelligence is going to be more like energy or something like that, where the only thing that I think makes sense to talk about is, at price X, the world will use this much compute, and at price Y, the world will use this much compute.
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Their words
Look, I think compute is going to be the currency of the future. I think it will be maybe the most precious commodity in the world, and I think we should be investing heavily to make a lot more compute.
17 March 2024
16 March 2024
14 March 2024
From one piece What I learned from looking at 900 most popular open source AI tools 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Several people have speculated that we'll see many very valuable one-person companies (see Sam Altman's interview and Reddit discussion). I think they might be right.
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korrents.com
The lower a layer sits in the software stack, the harder it is for an individual developer to build in it.Their words
the lower we go in the stack, the harder it is for individuals to build.
13 March 2024
From one piece Raising Agricultural Yields Spares Land 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
The case for raising yields, especially among smallholders, is humanitarian as much as environmental.Their words
What this also tells us is that, at the end of the day, the argument for boosting yields—especially among smallholder farmers—is not just environmental: it is humanitarian.
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korrents.com
Making American farms more productive shrinks cropland in the rest of the world by more than it adds at home.Their words
Nelson Villoria estimates that for every 1% gain in Total Factor Productivity (inputs required per unit of output) in the US, croplands in the rest of the world shrink by 0.7%.
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Their words
Claims to the contrary could lead to a misallocation of investments and, consequently, worse environmental (and social) outcomes.
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korrents.com
The claim that higher yields backfire and end up increasing farmland is much weaker than the literature assumes.Their words
In sum, land sparing is common at the local level and the norm at the global scale, in contrast to recent appeals to Jevons' paradox.
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Their words
Without yield improvements, therefore, we would have seen more than double the cropland expansion.
12 March 2024
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Usesrcmnd.app
Lume Cube EdgeTheir words
I ended up sticking with this as part of my more sophisticated light setup
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Recommendsaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
Dream Studio courseTheir words
I took the Dream Studio course
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Likedrcmnd.app
Canon EOS M50 Mark IITheir words
Camera: Canon EOS M50 Mark II
+ 2 more
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Usesrcmnd.app
Logitech K380 Multi-Device Bluetooth KeyboardTheir words
Keyboard: Logitech K380 Multi-Device Bluetooth Keyboard
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Usesrcmnd.app
Logitech Signature M650 Wireless MouseTheir words
Mouse: Logitech Signature M650 Wireless Mouse
11 March 2024
10 March 2024
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Likedrcmnd.app
China’s World ViewTheir words
Senior academic advisor to the Chinese Communist Party feels most political tensions come from a misunderstanding of China’s world view, hence the subtitle “demystifying to prevent global conflict”, and his intrinsic desire to explain. I love its insights and historical context, especially around “Respect-centered diplomacy” and how the CCP is structured.
9 March 2024
From one piece 40 Life Lessons I Know at 40 (That I Wish I Knew at 20) 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Most people are fundamentally good, which makes the risk of trusting them worth taking.Their words
Most people are good. And while you might get hurt or embarrassed sometimes, the alternative is just way worse.
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korrents.com
Life's most valuable things, like health, wealth and knowledge, compound slowly over long periods of time.Their words
The most valuable things in life compound over a long period of time
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korrents.com
How a person treats themselves determines who they let into their life and how those people treat them.Their words
If you treat yourself poorly, then you will also unconsciously seek out and tolerate others who treat you poorly.
8 March 2024
7 March 2024
6 March 2024
4 March 2024
From one piece Serhii Plokhy: History of Ukraine, Russia, Soviet Union, KGB, Nazis & War | Lex Fridman Podcast #415 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
What I think would happen one way or another is the Soviet collapse in a different form, on somebody else’s watch at some later period in time.
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Their words
The United States of America didn’t want the Soviet Union to collapse and disintegrate. They didn’t want that at the start of the Cold War in 1948. We now have the strategic documents. They were concerned about that, they didn’t want to do that. And certainly they didn’t want to do that in the year 1991.
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Their words
So the most important story for me, this is the story of the continuing collapse of the Russian Empire and the rise of not just local nationalism, but also rise of Russian nationalism that turned out to be as a destructive force for the imperial or multi-ethnic, multinational state, as was Ukrainian nationalism or Georgian or Estonian for that matter.
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Their words
And the Soviet collapse is continuation of the disintegration of the Russian Empire that started back in 1917, that was arrested for some period of time by the Bolsheviks, by the Communist ideology, which was internationalist ideology. And then came back in full force in the late ’80s and early ’90s.
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Their words
Very often people confuse three different processes that were taking place in the late ’80s and early ’90s, and the one was the collapse of communism as ideology. Another was the end of the Cold War. And the third one was the end of the Soviet Union.
From one piece How to Break Free from Dopamine Culture 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
If you look at the 10 largest companies in the world, half of them are trying to create this addictive relationship to technology.
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korrents.com
A service paid by the hour of your attention is rewarded for delivering the opposite of what it promises.Their words
The dating app does not make money from you finding a life partner—it needs you to keep looking, so the app provider can hold on to you as a recurring customer. These companies actually get rewarded by delivering the opposite of what they promise.
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Their words
They aren’t designed to solve your problem, but actually aim to prevent closure, and create an illusion that there are still infinite choices available to you.
3 March 2024
From one piece Why HBM is the Hottest Thing in Memory 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
They will shift what cash they generate to HBM capacity, which will keep supply growth in DRAM and NAND low.
Why HBM is the Hottest Thing in Memoryfabricatedknowledge.com
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Their words
HBM has the unique dynamic of costing a lot more than traditional DRAM, and the dynamic 2x higher capex is driven by the twice as large die size for HBM.
Why HBM is the Hottest Thing in Memoryfabricatedknowledge.com
29 February 2024
From one piece Accessibility Has Failed: Try Generative UI = Individualized UX 2 beliefs · jakobnielsenphd.substack.com
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Their words
I foresee a much more radical approach to generative UI to emerge shortly — maybe in 5 years or so. In this second-generation generative UI, the user interface is generated afresh every time the user accesses the app. Most important, this means that different users will get drastically different designs.
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korrents.com
Accessibility has failed as a way to make computers usable for disabled users, after thirty years of trying.Their words
Accessibility has failed as a way to make computers usable for disabled users. My metrics for usable design are the same whether the user is disabled or not: whether it’s easy to learn the system, whether productivity is high when performing tasks, and whether the design is pleasant — even enjoyable — to use.
28 February 2024
From one piece Predictive Human Preference: From Model Ranking to Model Routing 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
One pattern is that for simple prompts, weak models can do (nearly) as well as strong models. For more challenging prompts, however, users are much more likely to prefer stronger models.
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Their words
With more and more models being developed, each with different capabilities and a cost structure, model routing has clear economic values.
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korrents.com
Routing prompts to different AI models can improve response quality while lowering cost and latency.Their words
Model routing has the potential to increase response quality while reducing costs and latency.
From one piece Rethinking the startup MVP: Building a competitive product 2 beliefs · linear.app
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Their words
To be able to do this with limited resources, you must scope down your audience (and thus your ambitions) as much as possible to make competing easier, and aim to solve the problems of specific people.
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Their words
The MVP as a practice of building a hacky product as quickly and cheaply as possible to validate the product does no longer work. Many product categories are already saturated with a variety of alternatives, and to truly test the viability of any new idea you need to build something that is substantially better.
27 February 2024
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Usesrcmnd.app
ZFS.rentTheir words
$10/month for zfs.rent + €10/month for Hetzner.
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Usesrcmnd.app
Hetzner Storage BoxTheir words
$10/month for zfs.rent + €10/month for Hetzner.
From one piece True Zero-shot MT 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
the embodied, interactive, and multi-modal nature of first language (L1) acquisition is challenging to replicate with current models.
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Their words
many under-represented languages are primarily spoken; they do not have a written tradition or a standardized orthography. Text-based NLP technology is thus of limited use to them.
25 February 2024
From one piece How I build and run behavioral interviews 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Most workplace problems have more than one person contributing to them, not a single culprit.Their words
Sometimes this is true, but usually problems aren't a single person's fault!
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korrents.com
Someone who can't name what they'd do differently is unlikely to be good at improving over time.Their words
if the person responds to "what would you do differently" with "nothing," or with non-actionable vague platitudes, it's a sign they may not be great at figuring out how to get better at things over time.
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korrents.com
Repeated vague platitudes without follow-up specifics signal weak first-principles thinking.Their words
If they don't follow this up with a more specific, precise or nuanced claim, they may not be a strong first-principles thinker.
24 February 2024
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Lovedsponsoredrcmnd.app
Theft of FireTheir words
Theft of Fire offers a plausible and realistic universe. The characters, Marcus Warnoc and Miranda Foxgrove, are not mere archetypes; they are complex, flawed, and deeply human. Their struggle to trust one another and overcome their own demons is a powerful allegory for the modern human condition.
22 February 2024
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Their words
But unfortunately, today, we know conclusively that it is simply not true. A great amount of people's personalities, dispositions, beliefs, and dysfunctions are genetically-driven.
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Lovedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
JamesTheir words
Briefly, James is Huckleberry Finn retold from the perspective of Jim. It has all the energy and humor of Twain's work—in Everett's own unique voice of course—and adds a whole new level of depth to the story.
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Lovedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
HeadshotTheir words
Rita Bullwinkel follows up her excellent and weird story collection Belly Up with a knockout punch of a debut
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Lovedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
The Novices of LernaTheir words
And if you are, like me, a fan of surreal and fantastical literature I think you will be blown away by The Novices of Lerna.
+ 2 more
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Lovedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
RebootTheir words
For now, let me say I tore through Reboot, which is a sharply written and hilarious novel about a has-been actor in a downward spiral who tries to fix his life with a (yes) reboot of the Buffy-by-way-of-Baywatch teen drama that made him briefly a star.
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Lovedtheir ownrcmnd.app
The Werewolf at DuskTheir words
Obviously, my text appears in the book but I would have loved it even if that wasn't the case. Small is just an astounding artist—see his bestselling memoir Stitches
20 February 2024
From one piece Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech | Lex Fridman Podcast #413 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
The most difficult analysis to do as an investor is that, is kind of figuring out how wide is the moat, how much at risk is the business to disruption? And we're in, I would say, the greatest period of disruptability in history.
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Their words
Price matters a lot. You can buy the best business in the world and if you overpay, you're not going to earn particularly attractive returns.
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Their words
You want to buy a company at a price that if you're wrong about what you think it's worth and it turns out to be worth 30% less, you paid a deep enough discount to your estimate that you're still okay. A big part of investing is not losing money.
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korrents.com
Most investments are really speculations, because only a handful of businesses can be predicted with any confidence.Their words
And very few businesses that you can have a really high degree of certainty about. And as a result, many investments are speculations because it's really very difficult to predict the future.
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korrents.com
The value of anything is the present value of the cash you can take out of it over its life.Their words
The value of anything, I would say, other than love, let's say, is the present value of the cash you can take out of it over its life.
19 February 2024
18 February 2024
From one piece The State of the Culture, 2024 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
They don’t want to find the next Michelangelo or Mozart. They want to create a world of junkies—because they will be the dealers.
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korrents.com
The fastest-growing part of the culture economy is not art or entertainment but distraction.Their words
The fastest growing sector of the culture economy is distraction.
17 February 2024
From one piece Muse retrospective 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
A business succeeds through a small number of highly effective distribution channels, not many mediocre ones.Their words
any given business will find a small number of highly-effective channels, and the rest don't matter.
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Their words
After that, I think you have to be left with software that serves a deep and hard-to-replace purpose in people's lives.
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korrents.com
Prosumer software needs tens or hundreds of thousands of users for its development costs to be sustainable.Their words
You need tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, to make the cost of development sustainable.
14 February 2024
13 February 2024
12 February 2024
From one piece Thoughts on the 2024 AI Job Market 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Large research team sizes on frontier AI projects create friction that makes execution and decision-making harder.Their words
Such size poses challenges for the effective execution and prioritization, increasing friction and making it more difficult to quickly make decisions.
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Their words
In light of the applied nature of current research problems, there is another path that exposes you to cutting-edge AI work: joining a startup.
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Their words
This lack of knowledge sharing may impede progress in AI development.
9 February 2024
From one piece All My Thoughts After 40 Hours in the Vision Pro 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
It's the next step in a centuries-long human mission to conquer long-distance.
All My Thoughts After 40 Hours in the Vision Prowaitbutwhy.com
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Their words
If you zoom out on a story of technology, you usually see a big exponential curve. But if you look at the curve up close, you see that it's wavy, made of S-curves.
All My Thoughts After 40 Hours in the Vision Prowaitbutwhy.com
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korrents.com
Augmented reality and virtual reality are no longer separate categories, but points on one continuum.Their words
And it's a general reminder that AR and VR2 being separate categories is a thing of the past.
All My Thoughts After 40 Hours in the Vision Prowaitbutwhy.com
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Meta Quest 2Their words
In 2020, standing around during Covid with my dick in my hand like everyone else, I got myself a Quest 2. It was amazing. I loved it.
8 February 2024
6 February 2024
From one piece jsonfile: a quick hack for tinkering 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Programming is fundamentally the practice of making tradeoffs about what matters and what doesn't.Their words
Programming is the art of tradeoffs. You have to decide what matters and what does not.
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korrents.com
Most projects fail before they even begin because the activation energy required to start is too high.Their words
Most projects fail before they start. They fail because the activation energy is too high.
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korrents.com
The right moment to migrate from an ad hoc data store to SQL is the moment you first need an index.Their words
I suspect, considering the process retrospect, a great deal of that pain can be avoided by committing to migrating directly to an SQL system the moment you need an index.
From one piece Encyclopaedia Automatica 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
AI-generated writing is already fairly good but still lacks the direction and insight of human editors.Their words
As of today, computers write pretty good articles but lack the direction and insight of human editors.
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korrents.com
AI should be approached as a collaboration between humans and computers, not a forced choice between them.Their words
We need to find ways to work with this new tech to get the best of humans and the best of computers, together, rather than thinking in terms of one or the other.
5 February 2024
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korrents.com
High-quality data collection depends more on careful human execution than on machine learning techniques alone.Their words
Lots of ML techniques in the post can help with data quality, but fundamentally human data collection involves attention to details and careful execution.
4 February 2024
3 February 2024
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Likedrcmnd.app
ArabsTheir words
3000 years of factual Arab history, and personal insights from this Oxford Brit who lived in Yemen for 37 years, translates classical Arabic, and clearly cares a lot. Huge and thorough but really wonderful for those with the interest. I loved his writing style and poetic asides. Read my notes here for a taste. What a great book.
2 February 2024
From one piece 10 technologies that won't exist in 5 years 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
With an extra $10 billion over 10 years I’m pretty sure we’d get to 5 or 6 of the 10 on the list, and millions of unnecessary deaths would be prevented.
10 technologies that won't exist in 5 yearsblog.jacobtrefethen.com
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Their words
Technological progress is not a mystical force that delivers the most important ones first.
10 technologies that won't exist in 5 yearsblog.jacobtrefethen.com
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korrents.com
A technology company's success is determined mainly by how fast it operates and learns.Their words
The biggest determinant for success in a technology company is the speed at which it operates and learns - the "clock speed" to use a CPU analogy.
1 February 2024
31 January 2024
From one piece A Few Thoughts on Spending Money 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
There is no objective level of wealth: how rich you are is always a judgement made against someone else.Their words
There is no such thing as an objective level of wealth. Everything is relative to someone else.
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Their words
Unspent money buys something intangible but valuable: freedom, independence, autonomy, and control over your time.
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Their words
There are two ways to use money. One is as a tool to live a better life. The other is as a yardstick of status to measure yourself against others.
30 January 2024
From one piece My McLuhan lecture on enshittification 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
In theory, you could have all just left for somewhere else; in practice, you were hamstrung by the collective action problem.
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Their words
I think that the enshittification framework goes a long way to explaining it, moving us out of the mysterious realm of the 'great forces of history,' and into the material world of specific decisions made by named people – decisions we can reverse and people whose addresses and pitchfork sizes we can learn.
29 January 2024
28 January 2024
27 January 2024
26 January 2024
25 January 2024
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Their words
The Spotlight Effect says that we all tend to assume that people are paying far more attention to us than they actually are.
24 January 2024
23 January 2024
From one piece 2023 letter 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
China will not fade away, so America has to reform itself for a protracted contest with a peer competitor.Their words
It is that China will not fade away, meaning that America must reform itself for a protracted contest with a peer competitor.
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Their words
While 50 percent of China’s economy might be dysfunctional, the 5 percent that’s going spectacularly well is pretty dangerous to American interests.
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Their words
The trouble with Xi Jinping is that he is 60 percent correct on all the problems he sees, while his government’s brute force solutions reliably worsen things.
+ 2 more
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korrents.com
China's industrial lead was manufactured by deliberate state industrial policy rather than by market forces alone.Their words
The foundations of China’s success in EVs were built a decade ago, when the state decided to bet on batteries, and then bought up a lot of the mines for these metals.
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korrents.com
The West's biggest blindspot is repeatedly underestimating China's speed and capabilities.Their words
I worry however that one of America’s superpowers is to spin up yarns to reduce the urgency for action.
20 January 2024
19 January 2024
18 January 2024
17 January 2024
From one piece Five Fertility Fails 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Expecting AI or longer lives to arrive in time makes people skip having a plan for falling birth rates at all.Their words
And they don’t see a need for a plan B, in case their forecast fails.
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Their words
They do not want to give such enemies the satisfaction of admitting they have a point.
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Their words
Similarly, most recent discussions of how to promote fertility discuss how we might promote housing, inequality, schooling, day-care, etc., but few consider directly paying parents big amounts to have kids. As indirect approaches require us to guess what are the actual main obstacles to fertility, they are more likely to fail.
From one piece Palabras del Presidente Javier Milei en la 54ª Reunión Anual del Foro Económico Mundial, Davos, 17 de enero de 2024 3 beliefs · casarosada.gob.ar
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korrents.com
Social justice is intrinsically unjust, because the state can only fund it by collecting taxes coercively.Their words
El problema es que la justicia social no es justa, sino que tampoco aporta al bienestar general; muy por el contrario, es una idea intrínsecamente injusta porque es violenta; es injusta porque el Estado se financia, a través de impuestos y los impuestos se cobran de manera coactiva.
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Their words
La conclusión es obvia: lejos de ser la causa de nuestros problemas, el capitalismo de libre empresa, como sistema económico, es la única herramienta que tenemos para terminar con el hambre, la pobreza y la indigencia, a lo largo y a lo ancho de todo el planeta.
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Their words
hoy estoy acá para decirles que Occidente está en peligro, está en peligro porque aquellos, que supuestamente deben defender los valores de Occidente, se encuentran cooptados por una visión del mundo que – inexorablemente – conduce al socialismo, en consecuencia a la pobreza.
16 January 2024
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
CommuniquéTheir words
David Adeleke's dispatches from the African tech scene introduce me to companies and entrepreneurs who are as fascinating as they are unfamiliar. The sharp analysis and quality-over-quantity approach to newslettering makes it stand out.
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
NewcomerTheir words
Eric Newcomer is the rare Substack journalist who thrives on breaking news. His dispatches from Silicon Valley and beyond have the knowing voice of a veteran observer, but with the open-mindedness that defines a great reporter. The accompanying podcast is also well worth a listen.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Search EngineTheir words
It's a deeply humane project that also manages to be formally inventive; I never feel like I'm in surer hands as a podcast listener than when Vogt is telling me about what he has learned.
+ 2 more
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
SupervisedTheir words
Longtime tech reporter Matt Lynley offers an uncommonly technical assessment of new AI developments in his newsletter Supervised. Original reporting and a fast cadence help this one stand out from other AI newsletters.
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Design LobsterTheir words
Ben Strak's short and sweet Monday newsletter offers weekly inspiration to designers and anyone else curious about the world around them. A good example of how newsletters thrive on the authentic curiosity of the people who write them.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
InvestopediaTheir words
A few years back, my friend Caleb Silver became the editor-in-chief of one of the best resources in all of finance - Investopedia.com.
13 January 2024
12 January 2024
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korrents.com
A book you want is always worth buying: never let time or money stop you from having itTheir words
I promised myself a long time ago that if I saw a book that interested me I’d never let time or money or anything else prevent me from having it. This means that I treat reading with a certain amount of respect.
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Lovedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
Pontius PilateTheir words
Ann Wroe’s biography of Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judaea–the man who sentenced Jesus to his gruesome death–was so overwhelmingly good that I could only read a couple pages at a time.
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Recommendsaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to BeTheir words
I just interviewed Dr. Becky too but I don’t think it will come out until January. Stay tuned and in the meantime, you just HAVE to read this book
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Likedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
The Book of Charlie: Wisdom from the Remarkable American Life of a 109-Year-Old ManTheir words
The Book of Charlie: Wisdom from the Remarkable American Life of a 109-Year-Old Man by David Von Drehle. It’s a short, great read.
+ 2 more
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Recommendsaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
The Past That Would Not DieTheir words
by Walter Lord is a riveting, must read narrative nonfiction thriller about James Meredith’s brave and bold campaign to integrate Ole Miss in 1962.
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The Greek WayTheir words
Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way is a wonderful discussion of what made the Greeks so special, what they can teach us and how they thought about life.
11 January 2024
10 January 2024
From one piece How to be more agentic 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
What I discovered by casting a wide net was that I have very little ability to predict how useful a call will be in advance.
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Their words
If you aren’t trying to get real feedback from people who know you, you’re cooking without tasting.
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Their words
Ask for things that feel unreasonable, to make sure your intuitions about what’s reasonable are accurate (of course, try not to be a jerk in the process). If you’re only asking for things you get, you’re not aiming high enough.
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Their words
Most subject matter is learnable, even stuff that seems really hard. But beyond that, many (most?) traits that people treat as fixed are actually quite malleable if you (1) believe they are and (2) put the same kind of work into learning them as you would anything else.
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Their words
In my way of thinking, radical agency is about finding real edges: things you are willing to do that others aren’t, often because they’re annoying or unpleasant.
9 January 2024
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A Short History of Financial EuphoriaTheir words
And this gives me a great opportunity to reference one of my favorite quotations from John Kenneth Galbraith’s wonderful book on market excesses:
7 January 2024
5 January 2024
From one piece Questionable Advice: "My boss says we don’t need any engineering managers. Is he right?" 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
What sets a company’s velocity is spending its time on the right things, not how much code it produces.Their words
What matters is moving the business forward, not churning out code.
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Their words
On the other hand, the manager-free experiments I’m aware of (e.g. holacracy at Medium and GitHub, or “Choose Your Own Work” at Linden Lab) have all been quietly abandoned or outgrown.
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Their words
If you aren’t making building the organization someone’s number one job, it won’t be anyone’s number one job, which means it probably won’t get done very well.
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A few larger teams under experienced engineering managers outperform many tiny teams each led by a working tech lead.Their words
But everything I have ever experienced leads me to believe that a fewer number of larger teams, each helmed by an experienced engineering manager, should way outperform this gaggle of tiny groups.
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Their words
But hierarchy is not intrinsically authoritarian. Hierarchy did not originate as a political structure that humans invented for controlling and dominating one another, it is in fact a property of self-organizing systems, and it emerges for the benefit of the subsystems.
4 January 2024
3 January 2024
From one piece Revitalizing US Navy Shipbuilding 4 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Nothing kills labor productivity like sections that don't fit together.
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Their words
Specialized suppliers need multiple shipyards in one location to steady their business.
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korrents.com
A modern shipyard can match a whole wartime industrial mobilisation with a fraction of the workers.Their words
South Korea's yearly production often matches the total tonnage the US produced in WWII - with one-fifth of the workers!
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Their words
Labor costs are not an excuse!
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Tokyo ViceTheir words
it’s fun but I think a lot of it probably made up. Still fun.
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Mixed onrcmnd.app
Elon MuskTheir words
The back half is kind of a hit piece on his Twitter acquisition in way way too much detail
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Chip WarTheir words
Great history of the semiconductor industry, starting in Silicon Valley and ending in Asia.
+ 2 more
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SolarisTheir words
Classic scifi. Guy shows up on a research station above a planet with a strange (alive??) ocean
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The Cold War: A New HistoryTheir words
Concise summary of the Cold War from the end of WW2 to the fall of the USSR.
2 January 2024
From one piece Seven things you didn't know about life expectancy 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Women outlive men because their death rates are lower at every age, not because men die in accidents and violence.Their words
But women actually tend to live longer than men because they have lower death rates across their lifespans, which you can see in the chart below.
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Their words
Many other predictions have already been broken, as life expectancy has continued to rise.
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korrents.com
Every age of life is less deadly than it was for the generation before, not just childhood.Their words
Each age of our lives is less deadly than it was for previous generations.
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Their words
Life expectancy isn’t a prediction of how long people will live.
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Their words
To me, one of them is that longevity isn’t one obscure problem that needs to be ‘cracked’ in order for us to live longer.
1 January 2024
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Recommendstheir ownrcmnd.app
Secure LoveTheir words
Secure Love shows you how to understand your attachment style, calm conflict, and build the secure connection every relationship needs.
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Recommendstheir ownrcmnd.app
Attachment Style QuizTheir words
Take the free Attachment Style Quiz and get personalised insight into how you connect, where your patterns come from, and your next step toward secure love.
31 December 2023
From one piece in which an escape route is discovered 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
In a subtle but very real sense, every Lua function is an anonymous function.
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Their words
most macros don't actually do anything other than pure transformation of their arguments. It's almost always safe to run them during static analysis, except you don't know for sure
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korrents.com
Metaprogramming in a language creates fundamental obstacles to static analysis of its code.Their words
Languages with metaprogramming tend to put up fundamental hurdles to static analysis
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Nothing to HideTheir words
Mind candy thriller, somehow equally about a serial killer and about secrets in marriage. (Previously in this series.)
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Dark CountryTheir words
Mind candy horror/mystery, stalking and being stalked by the somewhat-supernatural serial killer, with extensive local color for contemporary South Africa. There are rough patches, but it's a perfectly enjoyable specimen of this type of novel. It's obviously the set-up for a series, and I'm not sure I need to follow these characters, but I would be happy to read more by Snyman.
30 December 2023
29 December 2023
From one piece My Automated Vehicle Safety Prediction for 2024 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
The Cruise debacle of the last few months proved (once again; remember Uber ATG?) that it only takes one company doing one ill-advised thing to hurt the entire industry.
My Automated Vehicle Safety Prediction for 2024safeautonomy.blogspot.com
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Their words
At a higher level, the real event was a catastrophic failure of the industry's strategy of relentlessly shouting as loud as they can "Hey, get off our case, we're busy saving lives here!"
My Automated Vehicle Safety Prediction for 2024safeautonomy.blogspot.com
26 December 2023
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The Last InterviewTheir words
The Last Interview by Anthony Bourdain - There are some people who I often wish were still alive so I could have their take on things.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and TomorrowTheir words
Tomorrow and tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin - A gut punch of a book, beautiful and lyrical.
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The Invisible Life of Addie LaRueTheir words
A wonderful idea for a book and brilliant execution as she lives from Medieval France to modern day.
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Olga Dies DreamingTheir words
Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzalez - Olga grows up in the Puerto Rican community in New York and becomes enormously successful as a wedding planner, but cannot manage her own relationships
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Neural Network Methods for Natural Language ProcessingTheir words
I also read a ton of technical books last year, but the most impactful one for me was Neural Network Methods for Natural Language processing by Yoav Goldberg
24 December 2023
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A Theory of Everyone: The New Science of Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re GoingTheir words
Best books I read in 2023: Just a note that these books weren’t all necessarily published this year (though some were). A Theory of Everyone: The New Science of Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going by Michael Muthukrishna
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Lovedrcmnd.app
The Two-Parent PrivilegeTheir words
Best books I read in 2023: Just a note that these books weren’t all necessarily published this year (though some were). A Theory of Everyone: The New Science of Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going by Michael Muthukrishna The Two-Parent Privilege by Melissa S. Kearney
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Keep the Aspidistra FlyingTheir words
Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell This lesser known book from Orwell offers an illuminating glimpse into the arrogant, entitled, and self-pitying mindset of downwardly mobile elites.
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A Personal OdysseyTheir words
A Personal Odyssey by Thomas Sowell My review here . Insights into the mindset required to climb out of poverty and remake one’s fortunes. A countervailing perspective from the above Orwell work.
23 December 2023
From one piece The pharma industry from Paul Janssen to today: why drugs got harder to develop and what we can do about it 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Biology is unpredictable, especially when the immune system is involved, and there is no guarantee that a drug that appears safe in animals will be safe in humans.
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Their words
The most significant factor preventing us from taking better molecules into clinical trials is not our ability to design arbitrary molecules, but our (lack of) understanding of underlying disease biology. In other words, we often know how to make something, but not what to make.
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Their words
The cost to discover and develop a drug today is orders of magnitude higher than in the 1950s. Despite this, the probability that a drug entering clinical trials will eventually reach the market has hardly improved in the intervening years.
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Their words
In reality, the productivity crisis in the pharmaceutical industry is the culmination of decades of just about every aspect of drug discovery and development getting gradually harder and more expensive.
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Their words
Such prolificacy is unlikely to be repeated any time soon; if current trends hold, a drug discovery scientist starting their career today is likely to retire without ever having worked on a single drug that makes it to market.
22 December 2023
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Lovedrcmnd.app
The OdysseyTheir words
Love the Iliad and Odyssey
21 December 2023
From one piece How Effective Altruism Lost Its Way 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Diverting attention and resources from global health and poverty is an enormous gamble, as it will make many lives poorer, sicker, and shorter in the name of fending off threats that may or may not materialize.
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korrents.com
The more effective altruism has absorbed itself in saving humanity, the less humanistic it has become.Their words
Strangely enough, as EA becomes more absorbed in the task of saving humanity, the movement is becoming less humanistic.
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korrents.com
A movement that has decided its job is to save humanity is uniquely prone to hubris, dogma and motivated reasoning.Their words
This is a worldview that’s uniquely susceptible to hubris, dogma, and motivated reasoning.
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Their words
Unlike other interventions EA has sponsored, there are scant metrics for tracking the success or failure of investments in existential risk mitigation.
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Their words
While there are interesting theoretical arguments for these causes, there’s a disconnect between an almost-neurotic focus on hard evidence of effectiveness in some areas of EA and a willingness to accept extremely abstract and conjectural “evidence” in others.
20 December 2023
19 December 2023
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Likedrcmnd.app
How Languages are LearnedTheir words
To that end, I read a few different books from the field of second language acquisition (SLA) over the summer, and even wrote a review of How Languages are Learned.
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Likedrcmnd.app
The Science of Learning PhysicsTheir words
Mestre and Docktor tackle this challenge by reviewing the large body of literature on learning physics. I plan on writing a full review of their book, which I found to be a helpful summary.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
The RepublicTheir words
To my surprise, I really enjoyed The Republic. It is both well-written and weird, which puts it above many other famous philosophical books that are too obscure to be easily read.
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Social Learning TheoryTheir words
Social Learning Theory is a difficult book to summarize, but it has profoundly impacted my thinking.
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Beginning to ReadTheir words
Marilyn Jager Adams's extensive review of the literature concluded essentially the same thing in 1994.
From one piece Take Tesla safety claims with about a pound of salt 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Whatever safety gain a driver-assistance system delivers is cancelled out by the driver complacency it creates.Their words
suggests that any steering automation safety gains (e.g., Level 2 autopilot) are approximately negated by driver complacency, with autopilot on being slightly worse than autopilot off
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Their words
Any true safety improvement for Tesla is good to have, but is much more likely due to comparison against an "average" vehicle (12 years old in the US) which is much less safe than any recent high-end vehicle regardless of manufacturer, and probably not driven on roads as safe on average as where Teslas are more popular.
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Their words
To look back on a year of reading is to be handed a clear mirror of your priorities and passions, of the questions that live in you and the reckonings that keep you up at night.
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Lovedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
What Looks Like BraveryTheir words
She tells the story of those difficult, transformative learnings in What Looks Like Bravery
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How to Say GoodbyeTheir words
How to move through it is what my talented friend and sometime-collaborator Wendy MacNaughton explores in How to Say Goodbye
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Leaning toward Light: Poems for GardensTheir words
The garden as a place of reverence and responsibility, a practice of ample creative and spiritual rewards, comes alive in Leaning toward Light: Poems for Gardens
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Archives of Joy: Reflections on Animals and the Nature of BeingTheir words
The secret pulse-beat of joy is what Jean-François Beauchemin explores in Archives of Joy: Reflections on Animals and the Nature of Being
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Lovedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
The AskingTheir words
For half a century, Jane Hirshfield has been slaking the world's soul on poems of perspective and consolation, fusing her Buddhist training, her passion for science, and her tenderness for all things living.
18 December 2023
From one piece Performance engineering, profilers, and seeing the invisible 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
A profiler measures time already spent in an operation, not how much time would be saved by optimizing it.Their words
a profile tells you how much time a program spent in a given operation; but not how much time it would spend if you optimized that operation.
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korrents.com
Profilers show where time is spent but not which of that time can feasibly be reduced or is worth optimizing.Their words
Profilers can only show you "what is there"; skillful performance engineering requires understanding the information that shapes and informs the profile but is "not there" in the profile itself.
14 December 2023
From one piece Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin | Lex Fridman Podcast #405 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
The only interesting problem is dramatically reducing the cost of access to orbit, which is, if you can do that, you open up a bunch of new endeavors that lots of start-up companies everybody else can do. One of our missions is to be part of this industry and lower the cost to orbit, so that there can be a renaissance, a golden age of people doing all kinds of interesting things in space.
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Their words
Efficiency and invention are sort of at odds, because real invention, Not incremental improvement... Incremental improvement is so important in every endeavor, in everything you do, you have to work hard on also just making things a little bit better. But I'm talking about real invention, real lateral thinking that requires wandering, and you have to give yourself permission to wander.
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Their words
If you think about the good old days, they're mostly an illusion. In almost every way, life is better for almost everyone today than it was say 50 years ago or 100 years ago. We live better lives by and large than our grandparents did, and their grandparents did, and so on. And you can see that in global illiteracy rates, global poverty rates, global infant mortality rates. Almost any metric you choose, we're better off than we used to be.
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Their words
Yeah, the only way to get to that vision is with giant space stations. The planetary surfaces are just way too small.
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Their words
I would love to see a trillion humans living in the solar system. If we had a trillion humans, we would have, at any given time, 1,000 Mozarts and 1,000 Einsteins. That our solar system would be full of life and intelligence and energy.
13 December 2023
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Their words, before
If I were forced at gunpoint to guess, I'd say that human-level AI seemed to me like a slog of many more centuries or millennia
Their words now
I was wrong, of course, not to contemplate more seriously the prospect that AI might enter a civilization-altering trajectory, not merely eventually but within the next decade.
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Their words, before
precisely because smart people do devote brain-cycles to these possibilities, the rest of us have correspondingly less need to.
Their words now
I accepted what’s turned into a two-year position at OpenAI, thinking about what theoretical computer science can do for AI safety.
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Their words, before
If I were forced at gunpoint to guess, I’d say that human-level AI seemed to me like a slog of many more centuries or millennia (with the obvious potential for black swans along the way).
Their words now
I was wrong, of course, not to contemplate more seriously the prospect that AI might enter a civilization-altering trajectory, not merely eventually but within the next decade.
11 December 2023
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Mixed onrcmnd.app
Words Without MusicTheir words
Any Glass fan is going to want to read this, I think. But it’s not problem-free.
10 December 2023
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Usestheir ownrcmnd.app
WorkplaceTheir words
Instead of meetings, I used Workplace posts (Meta’s internal version of Facebook Group posts) to share thoughts, start discussions, and make announcements.
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Mixed onrcmnd.app
Witch KingTheir words
Witch King is really well-crafted. The combat scenes are explosive.
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Likedrcmnd.app
The Kaiju Preservation SocietyTheir words
These are blasts of pure fun, with razor-sharp dialog
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Likedrcmnd.app
Starter VillainTheir words
These are blasts of pure fun, with razor-sharp dialog
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The Saint of Bright DoorsTheir words
It’s as colorful as anything I’ve read in years. I really enjoyed that
9 December 2023
From one piece Food, land, work and rent: the real story of Vallis Veg 4 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
wherever in the world can be found the cheapest assemblage of land, labour, energy and capital to produce a given food commodity, that will be a preferential site of its production.
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Their words
In my opinion, normal market economics is incentivising the wrong things. I think its preference for horse liveries or campsites over vegetables and other local food production will lead us to disaster
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Their words
My wife and I have averaged a joint annual income of £5,500 from the market garden over the last ten years.
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Their words
One clue to the difficulties I faced, if I hadn’t been too naïve to see it, is that almost nobody works in small-scale, local, agroecological market gardening in Britain and most other rich countries. There’s a reason for that.
8 December 2023
7 December 2023
From one piece Stop Demanding Dumb Answers To Hard Questions 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Demanding simple answers to hard questions is itself a political harm, not just an intellectual one.Their words
The stubborn thirst for simple answers to hard questions is bad for America.
Stop Demanding Dumb Answers To Hard Questionspopehat.substack.com
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korrents.com
Whether calling for the genocide of a group breaches a university's harassment policy genuinely depends on context.Their words
If you think the question “is calling for the genocide of a group against your policy” is an easy question with a one-word answer, you’re wrong.
Stop Demanding Dumb Answers To Hard Questionspopehat.substack.com
6 December 2023
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Their words
Opportunity solution trees help product trios: Resolve the tension between business needs and customer needs
5 December 2023
3 December 2023
From one piece Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events | Lex Fridman Podcast #403 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
That was originally one of the hopes of Large Hadron Collider. I’d say at this point, it would be very unlikely given what they’ve already accomplished, but there are these underground detectors, xenon detectors that look for dark matter coming in, and they are going to try to achieve a much stronger bound than exists today.
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korrents.com
A far-fetched idea earns its place in physics only when you can go out and look for its observational consequences.Their words
That’s also why I like the dark disk because there’s a scientific story behind it. As far-fetched as it might sound, you could actually go and look for the experimental consequences, for the observational consequences to test whether it’s true.
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Their words
The interesting thing is that if some of the dark matter does radiate, and I like to call it dark light because it’s light that we don’t see, but dark matter would see. It could radiate that and then it could perhaps collapse into a disk the same way ordinary matter collapsed into the Milky Way disk.
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Their words
In fact, I would say it’s more surprising that the matter that we know about is constitutes as big a fraction of the universe as it does. We’re limited, we’re human. The fact that we see 5% of the energy density of the universe, about one sixth of the energy density in matter, that’s remarkable.
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korrents.com
It is dark matter, not ordinary matter, that drives galaxy formation; ordinary matter just comes along with it.Their words
In fact, dark matter is in some sense more important because it can collapse more readily than ordinary matter because ordinary matter has radiative forces, which makes it hard to collapse on small scales. Actually it’s dark matter that drives galaxy formation and then ordinary matter comes along with it.
1 December 2023
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Usesrcmnd.app
BackblazeTheir words
Cloud: entire computer remotely backed up to Backblaze
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Usesrcmnd.app
TwingateTheir words
Twingate - for remote access
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Usesaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
Bose Noise Cancelling Headphones 700Their words
Bose Noise Cancelling Headphones 700
+ 2 more
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Logitech ERGO K860 Wireless Ergonomic KeyboardTheir words
Logitech ERGO K860 Wireless Ergonomic Keyboard
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Anker 777 Thunderbolt Docking StationTheir words
Anker 777 Thunderbolt Docking Station
30 November 2023
29 November 2023
From one piece Lant Pritchett, economist: ‘Negativity around migration is the last breath of a moribund system’ 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
When you separate those two questions in public dialogue, the negative attitudes disappear.
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Their words
Governments should create three tracks for people who come to live in their country. One track is that of people who hope to become Spanish. Another is that of those who we are going to allow to live and work here; the third is that of those of we are going to allow to be in Spain out of necessity.
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Their words
But once the demographics reverse, the challenge will be to find a person for every job. In the coming years, the impact of demographic changes is going to lead to chronic labor shortages.
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korrents.com
Without immigrants Spain’s labour force falls from 22.6 to 15.7 million by 2050, far too few to run its economy.Their words
In the absence of immigrants, between 2020 and 2050 Spain’s labor force (its active population) will drop from 22.6 to 15.7 million people. You’re not going to fill all the jobs needed in a modern and sophisticated economy like that of Spain’s with 15.7 million people.
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korrents.com
Hostility to migration is the last gasp of a dying system rather than the shape of the future.Their words
The negativity around migration is the last breath of a moribund system and the transition to a more realistic approach.
28 November 2023
From one piece In Continued Defense Of Effective Altruism 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
These skewed priorities are the exact problem that effective altruism exists to solve - or the exact inefficiency that effective altruism exists to exploit, if you prefer that framing.
In Continued Defense Of Effective Altruismastralcodexten.com
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Their words
Movements are coalitions. Sometimes this means different people with different priorities choose to work together. But other times it means the same people tend to share both priorities.
In Continued Defense Of Effective Altruismastralcodexten.com
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Their words
EA has done a great job working on this (see list of accomplishments above), and I think the AI and x-risk people have just as much to be proud of as the global health and animal welfare people.
In Continued Defense Of Effective Altruismastralcodexten.com
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Their words
And I notice that the tiny handful of people capable of caring about 200,000 people dying of neglected tropical diseases are the same tiny handful of people capable of caring about the next pandemic, or superintelligence, or human extinction.
In Continued Defense Of Effective Altruismastralcodexten.com
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Their words
I think EA’s track record of accomplishments vs. scandals is as good as any of them, maybe better.
In Continued Defense Of Effective Altruismastralcodexten.com
27 November 2023
26 November 2023
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korrents.com
Mars Sample Return as designed is too complicated, too slow and too expensive to succeed.Their words
The brief summary is that MSR’s architecture, pictured below, is incredibly complicated, slow, and expensive.
What is going on with Mars Sample Return?caseyhandmer.wordpress.com
23 November 2023
21 November 2023
20 November 2023
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Mixed onrcmnd.app
ObsidianTheir words
Depending on your goals, needs, and tolerance for customization, Obsidian might be the perfect choice for you.
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Dislikedrcmnd.app
TanaTheir words
I encountered much the same experience as I did with Obsidian: too much complexity, most of it front-loaded and unavoidable, making it difficult to get to the task of writing.
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Dislikedrcmnd.app
MemTheir words
I liked Mem’s editing experience within notes because it resembled word processing, without extra steps getting in the way. But I found the app otherwise surprisingly lacking in basic functionality, despite its polished appearance.
+ 2 more
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Usesrcmnd.app
EvernoteTheir words
If you look at the sheer number of different methods for getting content into Evernote, it becomes clear how difficult it will be to replicate this functionality.
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
How to Switch From Evernote to ObsidianTheir words
I recommend checking out Nick Milo’s video How to Switch From Evernote to Obsidian if that’s you.
From one piece What do I do with these songs? 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
The only thing a maker really controls is telling the good work from the bad; what arrives is not up to them.Their words
Where we do have control is in identifying which is which.
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Their words
But I have come to understand that the feeling of creative control is an illusion, that the songs are predetermined and have their own destiny, that they are not our own.
From one piece My Free Speech Means You Have To Shut Up 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
In my view, too many critics of “cancel culture” are recklessly promoting not the speech of the powerless, but the censorious resentment of the powerful.
My Free Speech Means You Have To Shut Uppopehat.substack.com
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Their words
“Your criticism violates my right to free speech” is a fatuous but common American sentiment.
My Free Speech Means You Have To Shut Uppopehat.substack.com
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korrents.com
Refusing to advertise on a platform is protected expression, not an attack on the platform owner's free speech.Their words
Elon Musk’s sullen yawp amounts to a claim that he has a right for companies to sponsor his speech, no matter what he says. That’s nonsense, both legally and philosophically.
My Free Speech Means You Have To Shut Uppopehat.substack.com
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Not the End of the WorldTheir words
His life and work have influenced my own tremendously—and just a few pages into Ritchie’s essential and hopeful new book, Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet, it became clear that she was carrying on his tremendous legacy.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
The Song of the CellTheir words
If I had been able to read The Song of the Cell by Siddhartha Mukherjee in school, I might have fallen in love with biology a lot earlier.
19 November 2023
17 November 2023
From one piece John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3 | Lex Fridman Podcast #401 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Economic interdependence does not prevent war, because survival always trumps prosperity.Their words
The point is that economic interdependence at its root has prosperity as the core variable. In the realest story, the core variable is survival, and survival always trumps prosperity.
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korrents.com
Whether a state is a democracy or an autocracy makes no difference to how it behaves abroad.Their words
A realist like me would say that it doesn't matter whether a state is a democracy or not, all states behave the same way because the structure of the system, getting back to our earlier discussion about international anarchy, the structure of the system leaves those states no choice, whether they're democracies or autocracies.
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korrents.com
States are not inherently aggressive; anarchy leaves them no choice but to behave aggressively.Their words
So it's very important to understand that I'm not arguing that states are inherently aggressive. My point is that as long as states are in anarchy, they have no choice but to behave in an aggressive fashion.
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korrents.com
A state's power rests on two material foundations only: the size of its population and its wealth.Their words
The two key building blocks of power are population size and wealth. You want to have a lot of people and you want to be really wealthy.
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Their words
I believe that power is the currency of international relations, and by that I mean that states are deeply interested in the balance of power and they're interested in maximizing how much power they control.
16 November 2023
From one piece The Looking Glass: How to tell if work is beautiful 4 beliefs · lg.substack.com
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Their words
Better design does not mean more design. Often, the most obvious designs are invisible.
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Their words
Obviousness comes from conforming to people’s existing mental models. Don’t waste time reinventing common UI patterns or paradigms unless they are at least 2x better, or you have some critical brand reason to do so.
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korrents.com
If the people a product is designed for cannot generally agree that the design is good, it is not good.Their words
If you cannot get a group of people for whom your product is designed for to generally agree that your design is good, it’s not good.
+ 1 more
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Their words
Do not judge a product’s beauty by its aesthetics; judge it by how it made you feel.
15 November 2023
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Likedrcmnd.app
The Vagabond’s WayTheir words
Best travel book I’ve ever read! Shook my soul many times. Tiny “daily meditation” format, with lots of quotes from others, but wow what wonderful insights. They make me yearn to travel again. Love love love these ideas and perspectives so much.
12 November 2023
10 November 2023
From one piece Permitting Reform Or Death 4 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
There is almost no lower-impact use of low-value land than covering it with solar panels.Their words
In summary, it is hard to imagine a lower impact use of low-value land than solar development.
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korrents.com
Delay in permitting clean energy kills more Americans every year than the September 11 attacks did.Their words
The terrorist attacks on 9/11 killed 2996 people in a day of singular horror. Our ongoing indifference to regulatory inefficiency, considering only the area of green energy development, kills more people every year – more than 10 people per day, and that’s only within the US.
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Their words
The primary driver of increased impact, longer time scales before displacement, and catastrophically high levels of avoidable pollution is environmental protection regulations.
+ 1 more
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korrents.com
The binding constraint on building anything in America is permitting and litigation, not money.Their words
Yet solar development is hopelessly snarled by dozens of different development regulations which begin with the assumption that it will permanently and severely harm the environment unless proven otherwise, at exhaustive length.
9 November 2023
From one piece Elon Musk: War, AI, Aliens, Politics, Physics, Video Games, and Humanity | Lex Fridman Podcast #400 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Look, I think I would just recommend do not send the flower of Ukrainian youth to die in trenches, whether he talks to Putin or not, just don’t do that. Whoever goes on the offensive will lose massive numbers of people and history will not look kindly upon them.
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Their words
So generally, I think we obviously want to prioritize civilizational risks over things that are painful and tragic on a local level, but not civilizational.
-
Their words
So really the question is like for every Hamas member that you kill, how many did you create? And if you create more than you killed, you’ve not succeeded. That’s the real situation there.
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Their words
So the counterintuitive thing here, I think that the thing that I think should be done, even though it’s very difficult, is that I would recommend that Israel engage in the most conspicuous acts of kindness possible
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Their words
People think of nature as perhaps some sort of peaceful thing, but in fact it is not. There’s some quite funny Werner Herzog thing where he is in the jungle saying that it’s basically just murder and death in every direction. The plants and animals in the jungle are constantly trying to kill each other every single day, every minute. So it’s not like we’re unusual in that respect.
8 November 2023
6 November 2023
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Their words, before
If the future is like the past, this implies that debt rollovers—that is, the issuance of debt without a subsequent increase in taxes—may well be feasible. Put bluntly, public debt may have no fiscal cost.
Their words now
Across advanced economies, the celebrated ( r - g ), i.e., the difference between the interest rate and the growth rate, appears to have durably changed sign or, at a minimum, to have gone from a substantially negative number to a number closer to zero.
From one piece If markets are right about long real rates, public debt ratios will increase for some time 2 beliefs · piie.com
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Their words
Thus, once current debt has been refinanced and the average interest on debt reflects the higher long rates, absent changes in policy, debt ratios will increase.
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Their words
It is fair to say that, while economists expected the short end of the yield curve to reflect the higher rates needed to win the fight against inflation, the sharply steeper long end of the yield curve in the last few months has come as a surprise. I shall freely admit that I did not predict it.
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Their words
One thing that drives me crazy about the React ecosystem, and more specifically "tech influencers" and "thought leaders" in the space, is the infantilization of the developers using and working in it. I’m tired of reading takes like TypeScript generics, mapped types, etc should only be needed and used by library authors for most use cases. Or today’s discourse; Don’t use `useCallback’, ‘useMemo’, and React.memo. If you’re building anything beyond a simple CRUD app or a an incredibly focused app with few features, you _will_ need these features.
4 November 2023
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
The VulnerablesTheir words
Sigrid Nunez's novel The Vulnerables: Nunez's most famous novel, The Friend, was what you get when you take autofiction from a well-established NYC writer and add a big, friendly dog.
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Family MealTheir words
Bryan Washington's novel Family Meal: Bryan is the great millennial fiction writer of food, among many other talents. His descriptions of cooking and meals are fantastically rich, as much for the food itself as for the social and emotional exchange involved.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Stay TrueTheir words
Hua Hsu's memoir Stay True: This book is now out in paperback, and you probably don't need me recommending it (it won a Pulitzer), but it is fantastic.
+ 1 more
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Usesrcmnd.app
ZojirushiTheir words
Turn on the rice cooker for normal or quick cooking (I have a Zojirushi, either setting works).
3 November 2023
2 November 2023
1 November 2023
31 October 2023
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Likedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
Palm Beach FinlandTheir words
Mind candy: black comedy crime fiction / murder mystery, in rural Finland. I enjoyed both the comic darkness and the convincing happy endings all around. (At least, happy by the characters' own lights...) My first Tuomainen, but I'd read more if they crossed my path and I was in the right mood.
30 October 2023
28 October 2023
26 October 2023
From one piece Managing extreme AI risks amid rapid progress (with 24 co-authors) 4 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Despite evaluations, we cannot consider coming powerful frontier AI systems "safe unless proven unsafe". With current testing methodologies, issues can easily be missed. Additionally, it is unclear if governments can quickly build the immense expertise needed for reliable technical evaluations of AI capabilities and societal-scale risks. Given this, developers of frontier AI should carry the burden of proof to demonstrate that their plans keep risks within acceptable limits.
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Their words
Without sufficient caution, we may irreversibly lose control of autonomous AI systems, rendering human intervention ineffective. Large-scale cybercrime, social manipulation, and other harms could escalate rapidly. This unchecked AI advancement could culminate in a large-scale loss of life and the biosphere, and the marginalization or extinction of humanity.
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Their words
For AI to be a boon, we must reorient; pushing AI capabilities alone is not enough. We are already behind schedule for this reorientation. The scale of the risks means that we need to be proactive, as the costs of being unprepared far outweigh those of premature preparation.
+ 1 more
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Their words
Society's response, despite promising first steps, is incommensurate with the possibility of rapid, transformative progress that is expected by many experts. AI safety research is lagging. Present governance initiatives lack the mechanisms and institutions to prevent misuse and recklessness, and barely address autonomous systems.
25 October 2023
From one piece Adversarial Attacks on LLMs 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Universal adversarial trigger attacks are easy to detect because the learned trigger tokens tend to be nonsensical.Their words
One drawback with UAT (Universal Adversarial Trigger) attacks is that it is easy to detect them because the learned triggers are often nonsensical.
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Their words
High perplexity makes an attack more vulnerable to be detected and mitigated.
From one piece Age of Invention: Lessons from the Rise of Coal 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
“lots of anonymous people just invented through trial and error and adaptation” just doesn’t cut it for me — I’ve never found such stories to be true upon closer investigation.
Age of Invention: Lessons from the Rise of Coalageofinvention.xyz
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Their words
Yet lime is a huge blind spot for economic historians, despite it increasing the productivity of what was still by far the largest portion of the economy: agriculture.
Age of Invention: Lessons from the Rise of Coalageofinvention.xyz
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Their words
The Dutch Republic’s Golden Age did not fail because it lacked energy sources.
Age of Invention: Lessons from the Rise of Coalageofinvention.xyz
24 October 2023
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New TycoonTheir words
Going Infinite is awesome. I would have been happy with my decision on the basis of any one of the following:
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korrents.com
Most people who love the Next.js app directory would also love Remix nested routing, for many of the same reasons.Their words
Most people who love the next.js app directory would also love remix nested routing for many of the same reasons.
19 October 2023
18 October 2023
17 October 2023
16 October 2023
From one piece The Techno-Optimist Manifesto 2 beliefs · a16z.com
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Their words
We believe technology is a lever on the world – the way to make more with less. Economists measure technological progress as productivity growth: How much more we can produce each year with fewer inputs, fewer raw materials. Productivity growth, powered by technology, is the main driver of economic growth, wage growth, and the creation of new industries and new jobs, as people and capital are continuously freed to do more important, valuable things than in the past.
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korrents.com
There is no material problem, whether created by nature or by technology, that cannot be solved with more technology.Their words
We believe that there is no material problem – whether created by nature or by technology – that cannot be solved with more technology.
15 October 2023
From one piece Orbitals 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
It's important to look around you for solutions instead of accepting the current unavailability of options.
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korrents.com
Reading even one book on a niche topic sharply shrinks the number of people you can discuss it with.Their words
Most people don't read books. If you read a book on a topic (say, clouds, or Italian furniture), you can now only communicate on that topic with 1 in 10 to 1 in 100 people.
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Their words
you should be frightened of smart people who don't read. They're the ones that build Jurassic Park, or send all the dentists to build a dam.
12 October 2023
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korrents.com
Meat substitutes have to become clearly cheaper than meat, not merely as cheap, before most people will switch.Their words
Meat substitutes need to be quite clearly cheaper, especially if we want them to break into middle- and low-income markets.
11 October 2023
4 October 2023
From one piece The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
But while I have seen no evidence (and Chris provides none) that higher food prices alleviate global hunger, there is a wealth of evidence that they exacerbate it.
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korrents.com
Local self-provisioning cannot feed the world, because most people do not live within reach of enough fertile land.Their words
They show that, while agrarian localism might be great as far as it goes, it simply cannot, by itself, meet the challenge of feeding the world.
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korrents.com
Long-distance food transport is what stops a local harvest failure from becoming a famine.Their words
But without long-distance transport, many more would starve.
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korrents.com
Raising yields on land already farmed is what keeps farming from taking more of the wild world.Their words
It was achieved almost entirely through higher crop yields per hectare.
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Their words
In 2023, a world of 8.1 billion people suffers far less hunger and famine than the world of 3.2 billion did in 1963, the year of my birth.
3 October 2023
From one piece A Fertility Reckoning 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
the most likely identifiable scenario by which fertility will rise again is via the growth of currently-small insular high-fertility subgroups like the Amish and Orthodox Jews
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Their words
Its main causes are tied to deeply held modern values that have been pushing us in this direction for most of this time across most of the world.
1 October 2023
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korrents.com
Returns for performance are superlinear rather than proportional across most domains that matter.Their words
One of the most important things I didn't understand about the world when I was a child is the degree to which the returns for performance are superlinear.
From one piece GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time and Why Does it Matter? 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
I am myself skeptical that there is a clearly defined notion of who “the right people” might be, and thus I am on public choice grounds far more skeptical of government than Keynes was.
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Their words
I view Keynes’s bisexuality and his strong interest in gay sex as a significant cause of what made him interesting and which gave him so strong an ability to grasp different and outside perspectives.
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Their words
I often like to say that all thinkers are regional thinkers, namely they are indelibly shaped by the circumstances they grew up in
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Their words
I don’t view Keynes primarily as an economist, rather I see him as a British aesthete rationalist who did economics in his spare time, and fortunately he had lots of spare time.
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Their words
And indeed overall that interaction fits with my more general reservation about Friedman: he wanted to make economics just a little bit too simple.
29 September 2023
28 September 2023
From one piece Mark Zuckerberg: First Interview in the Metaverse | Lex Fridman Podcast #398 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Open sourcing a foundation model creates significantly more value than the risk it carries.Their words
I think at this point there's the value of open sourcing, a foundation model like Llama 2. It's significantly greater than the risks in my view.
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Their words
I don't think we necessarily want there to be one big super intelligence. We want to empower everyone to both have more fun, accomplish their business goals, just everything that they're trying to do. We don't tend to have one person that we work with on everything, and I don't think in the future we're going to have one AI that we work with.
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korrents.com
Screens, books, art and board games are all better as holograms you can summon and dismiss than as physical objects.Their words
I mean, any screen that you have can be a hologram, any media, in any book, art. It can basically be just as effective as a hologram, as a physical object. Any game that you're playing, a board game or any kind of physical game, cards, ping pong, things like that, they're often a lot better as holograms.
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korrents.com
By the end of the 2020s, walking into a room will mean seeing as many holograms as physical objects.Their words
And in that world, I think that there are going to be, not too far off, maybe by the end of this decade, we'll be living in a world where there are as many holograms when you walk into a room as there are physical objects.
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korrents.com
The real world is not the physical world; it is the physical and digital worlds coming together into one experience.Their words
And I kind of think increasingly, the physical world is super important, but I actually think the real world is the combination of the physical world and the digital worlds coming together.
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Lovedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
Nasty, Brutish and ShortTheir words
Nasty, Brutish and Short, is the most accessible and fun book on philosophy you'll encounter this year.
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Likedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
King: A LifeTheir words
King: A Life, is a clear and direct biography of one of our greatest citizens.
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Likedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
Nothing Is Missing: A Memoir of Living BoldlyTheir words
My friend Nicole has written a provocative, funny and honest memoir. Nothing Is Missing: A Memoir of Living Boldly. I'll be interviewing her in NYC on October 9.
+ 2 more
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Recommendsaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
MisbeliefTheir words
Dan Ariely's book Misbelief is a must-listen for anyone trying to understand how social dynamics are changing the way some people see the world.
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Lovedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
Kafka on the ShoreTheir words
Years later, Kafka on the Shore remains one of my favorite all-time audiobooks. It's an extraordinary story, beautifully told.
25 September 2023
24 September 2023
21 September 2023
From one piece What I learned from analyzing 300 particle size distributions for 24 espresso grinders 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Burr geometry matters more than burr size for how uniform and unimodal a grinder's output is.Their words
It therefore appears that burr geometry may be more important than burr size in determining unimodality and uniformity.
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korrents.com
Grinders that produce fewer fines (more unimodal) also tend to produce more uniform particle sizes.Their words
Contrary to popular hearsay, more unimodal grinders appear to also be more uniform on average.
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korrents.com
Conical burrs tend to be less unimodal and less uniform than flat burrs, though the two overlap a lot.Their words
Conical burrs appear on average less unimodal and less uniform, although there is a large overlap meaning that one can easily find a specific flat burr that is less unimodal and less uniform than a specific conical burr.
From one piece Quantum Confusions, Cleared Up (or so I hope) 4 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
The collapse postulate cannot simply be discarded without replacement instructions for measurements.Their words
As we just saw, one cannot just discard the Collapse Postulate. For this reason, if one does calculations in any Many Worlds approach, one must effectively replace the Collapse Postulate by other assumptions, notably about what happens to observers and/or measurement devices when worlds branch.
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korrents.com
Decoherence has not yet satisfactorily solved the measurement problem and does not restore local causality.Their words
while decoherence has the potential to solve this aspect of the measurement problem, it hasn't yet been satisfactorily done. Decoherence also certainly does not return us to Local Causality.
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korrents.com
Violations of Bell inequalities reveal only properties of models, not of nature itself.Their words
Since Local Causality is a property of a model, observing violations of Bell's inequality cannot tell us anything about nature itself, but merely about the properties of the model that we use to describe nature.
+ 1 more
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Their words
The Copenhagen Model-and because of that, the Copenhagen Interpretation-is not locally causal in Bell's sense.
18 September 2023
15 September 2023
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
ChatGPT Custom InstructionsTheir words
Using Custom Instructions properly can completely transform your experience with ChatGPT.
14 September 2023
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Their words
Less than half their revenue comes from game engines. Over half comes from advertising.
13 September 2023
From one piece Self-exfiltration is a key dangerous capability 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
If a model was capable of self-exfiltration, it would have the option to remove itself from your control.
Self-exfiltration is a key dangerous capabilityaligned.substack.com
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Their words
Moreover, model exfiltration is likely impossible to reverse.
Self-exfiltration is a key dangerous capabilityaligned.substack.com
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Lovedtheir ownrcmnd.app
Pulsar dripperTheir words
After years of development, I'm super happy to report that the dripper I dreamed of for so long is finally out!
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Likedrcmnd.app
Lvl-10 dripperTheir words
I was super excited when I saw the Lvl-10 dripper, because it was very close to what I wanted to achieve, and as I expected, it performed very well in terms of extraction quality.
10 September 2023
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Objective KnowledgeTheir words
The first thing I would do is start meditating, and then I would read, concurrently I would read Objective Knowledge by Karl Popper.
7 September 2023
From one piece Read terrible books, too 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
What you want to avoid, I think, is mediocre writing, which neither thrills nor instructs.
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korrents.com
Reading bad work is instructive as well as reassuring, so a maker should not read only the good stuff.Their words
Yes! Reading bad writing not only boosts one’s confidence, it can be very instructive.
5 September 2023
From one piece Biofuels: the US could switch to electric cars and solar power on just a fraction of the land 4 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Growing food to put in cars is a mistake at a moment when the world should be farming less land, not more.Their words
The world’s croplands are still expanding. At a time when we should be using less land for farming, allocating high-quality farmland to grow food that we then put into cars is a mistake.
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korrents.com
We worry about the land solar needs while ignoring how wastefully the world already uses its farmland.Their words
While we fret over the amount of land needed for solar, we are often blind to how inefficiently we have used the world’s farmland.
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Their words
You can drive about 150 times as far from a solar-powered electric car compared to using corn bioethanol.
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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
They estimate that biofuels have increased emissions, not decreased them.
4 September 2023
2 September 2023
From one piece Why NYT’s Connections makes you feel bad 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
A puzzle whose categories can only be seen by the broadly educated is elitist by construction.Their words
But it’s fundamentally elitist — it basically requires you to have a broad education to find the categories in the first place.
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Their words
Fundamentally, the game invites you to make guesses, but punishes you for them — and a missed guess doesn’t help you prune the logic space, only the trivia space.
1 September 2023
From one piece Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature | Lex Fridman Podcast #394 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
So if you think about entire all of nature, let's say all of living systems as a matrix that runs across two axes one is material sophistication, which is terribly relevant for designers, and the other is communication. The termites ace on communication, but their material sophistication is crap.
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Their words
So we keep coming back to this answer of nature wants to increase information, but decrease entropy. So find order, but constantly increase the information scale.
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korrents.com
The mycelial network is not the model for a connected nature, because it stops wherever there is a physical gap.Their words
Well, first of all, yes, they're connected, but that network stops when there is a physical gap. That network does not necessarily enable the whales in the Dominican to connect with an olive tree in Israel to connect with a weeping willow in Montana.
+ 2 more
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Their words
Everybody talks about intelligence these days, but I like to think that nature has kind of wisdom that exists beyond intelligence or above intelligence, and it's that wisdom that we're trying to tap into through technology.
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Their words
I think that let's say from the beginning of mankind going back 200,000 years, the products that we have designed have separated us from nature. And it's ironic that the things that we designed and produced as humankind, those are exactly the things that separated us.
31 August 2023
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korrents.com
The evidence that driverless cars are already safer than human drivers is piling up, especially for Waymo.Their words
But the evidence for better-than-human performance is starting to pile up, especially for Waymo.
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Likedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
Star KingdomTheir words
Buroker is a reliable author of very fluffy mind candy, either science fiction or fantasy. A lot of her output is re-working material from identifiable prior art, without hewing so closely to the canon as to constitute fan fiction.
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Likedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
Spy IslandTheir words
Comic book mind candy, affectionately parodying several genres at once: glamorous spies, mysterious islands, etc.
30 August 2023
From one piece Farming Needs to Suck Less 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
the solutions to our food and climate problems need to scale up absurdly quickly.
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korrents.com
Synthetic fertiliser is a serious climate and pollution problem and also the reason half the people alive are alive.Their words
They suck! But they also feed the world. Half the people alive today would be very not alive if fertilizers manufactured from natural gas weren’t super-sizing our harvests.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Sony WH-1000XM3Their words
Sony WH-1000XM3 headphones. Best thing I bought in 2019.
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Usesrcmnd.app
Kindle PaperwhiteTheir words
Kindle Paperwhite e-book reader, for when I don't have access to the print version of the book.
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Usesrcmnd.app
Razer Viper UltimateTheir words
Razer Viper Ultimate With Charging Duck - Quartz mouse (pink version).
+ 2 more
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Usesrcmnd.app
Akko World Tour Tokyo 87-Key R1Their words
Akko World Tour Tokyo 87-Key R1 pink mechanical keyboard.
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Usesrcmnd.app
Fujifilm X-T4Their words
Fujifilm X-T4 camera.
29 August 2023
From one piece Language models surprised us 4 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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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
This rapid scaleup will probably drive another qualitative leap forward in capability like what we saw over the last 18 months.
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Their words
Massively underestimating near-future progress could be very risky.
-
Their words
Most importantly, ML experts and superforecasters both seem to be massively underestimating future spending on training runs.
+ 1 more
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Their words
Most experts were surprised by progress in language models in 2022 and 2023.
From one piece Age of Invention: Does History have a Replication Crisis? 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Historical myths are especially zombie-like. Even when disproven, they just. won’t. die.
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Their words
But I’ve become increasingly worried that science’s replication crises might pale in comparison to what happens all the time in history, which is not just a replication crisis but a reproducibility crisis.
25 August 2023
24 August 2023
23 August 2023
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Finite and Infinite GamesTheir words
It’s an oddly written, extremely concise, very thought-provoking book. It definitely needs to be re-read 2-3 times. Make sure you’re thinking on the plane of infinite play.
19 August 2023
From one piece Seth Explains Consciousness 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
It is unclear whether a digital emulation of a person could ever be conscious, even in principle.Their words
But it is not clear at all that such a being could even exist in principle.
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korrents.com
Free will does not require violating the laws of physics, yet the subjective experience of it is real and meaningful.Their words
There is no "spooky free will" that violates the laws of physics in our common model of them, but the experience of free will certainly exists and is informative.
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korrents.com
Color as perceived is not an objective property of objects, but a construct generated by the perceiving brain.Their words
Redness is not "objective" in the sense of being "in the object", it only exists in the models generated by the sort of brains which are hooked up to eyes.
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Being YouTheir words
I highly recommend that you read Being You, and then that you spend a good while thinking about it.
18 August 2023
17 August 2023
16 August 2023
From one piece What does it mean to “trust science”? 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Physics, chemistry and biology can point out problems, but we need history, economics and philosophy to solve them.
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korrents.com
There is no capital-S Science that can stand as an authority; there is only reasoning done systematically.Their words
There is no capital-S Science—a new authority to substitute for God or King.
-
Their words
Even in that case, though, what we should trust is not the particular output of the scientific process at any given time. It can make wrong turns. Instead, we should trust that it will find the truth eventually, and that it is our best and only method for doing so.
15 August 2023
12 August 2023
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Their words, before
Reading the book had not changed my fundamental belief that, in balance, we were on a good trajectory with AI research: good for science and good for society with expected positive impacts in many domains.
Their words now
I now believe that I was wrong and short-sighted to ignore that dual-use nature. I also think I was not paying enough attention to the possibility of losing control to superhuman AIs.
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Their words
Instead of decades to centuries, I now see it as 5 to 20 years with 90% confidence.
11 August 2023
From one piece The Myth of the Individual 2 beliefs · terryreal.com
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Their words
Neurobiologists tell us that it takes two things to unlock and open up a neural pathway. The first is that the implicit must be made explicit. Sometimes you need help seeing what you don't see. But you must be open to the feedback. Second, there must be some sort of recoil, a sense of discrepancy, of "Oh no, I'm not sure I really want to keep doing that."
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korrents.com
Character is not fixed: therapy works because habitual neural pathways can re-form, sometimes within minutes.Their words
In my practice, I have seen that opening neural pathways can lead to profound change, to brand-new traits and behavior, sometimes in a matter of minutes.
10 August 2023
From one piece I work in the music industry and there is a lot of excitement around ChatGPT... what's wrong with making things faster and easier? 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
The struggle of making something is not an obstacle in front of the work; it is where the meaning comes from.Their words
It is our striving that becomes the very essence of meaning.
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Their words
ChatGPT is fast-tracking the commodification of the human spirit by mechanising the imagination. It renders our participation in the act of creation as valueless and unnecessary.
7 August 2023
5 August 2023
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korrents.com
You cannot make America build subways ten times cheaper while only ever talking to Americans.Their words
You can’t change the United States from a country that builds subways for $2 billion/km in New York and $1 billion/km elsewhere to a country that does so for $200 million/km if all you ever do is talk to other Americans.
4 August 2023
2 August 2023
1 August 2023
28 July 2023
From one piece Microincentives and Enshittification 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Ranking first in a search has become near enough to being true, which is why search and spam are permanently at war.Their words
Google’s the first — and often the last — place we go to for answers, so snagging top billing in a Google search results page is, approximately speaking, equivalent to being “true.”
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Their words
The only way for Google Search to grow is to make itself worse.
23 July 2023
18 July 2023
17 July 2023
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Unshackled: A Practical Guide For Highly-Skilled Immigrants To Thrive In The United StatesTheir words
breaks down how legal immigration works in America in a way that is friendly, accessible, and human
16 July 2023
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korrents.com
It is too early to know whether robotaxis are safer than human drivers where it counts, in fatal crashes.Their words
It is too early to know whether current robotaxi technology is safer than human drivers for fatalities.
AV Safety and the False Dilemma Fallacysafeautonomy.blogspot.com
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.
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.
+ 2 more
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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.
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.
23 June 2023
22 June 2023
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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
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