One unpopular position I’ve stuck to over the years is that a strong bureaucracy is good. I don’t mean “bureaucracy” as in red tape and regulation; I mean a competent, empowered civil service that can perform crucial government functions efficiently and well using in-house expertise. This is also called state capacity.
So long as Canada is irrevocably plugged into the US economy, military and other arrangements, it's liable to get stuck with choices that run counter to its national interests.
I think for me, let's go back to the first principle of intelligence. Intelligence is not sitting there stuck and just seeing something or interpreting something when it comes to space and physical space, right? It's really this uh closing the loop between seeing and experiencing and interaction.
A big-enough random reversible circuit is plausibly a secure cryptographic permutation, a big-enough random irreversible circuit degenerates into having only a few possible outputs.
if I was stuck in this traffic every day in a car, I would go insane. No amount of self driving would change that. We need ACs, but the US badly needs to warm up to public transportation.
we find that the performance on held out tasks decreases dramatically. Whereas if we um just take out a random 20% of the data that's less diverse than the most diverse subset, the performance um only decreases a little bit. And so this suggests that actually having really diverse data plays an important role in enabling it to generalize to new tasks.
Now, the good news is that in my experience, it's very difficult to actually get stuck. Um, you can get yourself into trouble and the action space is always larger than it appears.
You don't need slash goal, you don't need slash loop. These help, but really all you need is give the model the task, give it a way to verify the output of its work so it doesn't get stuck, and it will just go.
the whole industry is is kind of stuck in this world where they make a lot of money because it is this way. But there's zero reason why it should cost 2 or 3%. Just zero.
I am a Philistine, because I thought this was just OK. There were some good poems, quite a few which I found boring, and absolutely nothing that has stuck in my memory even a few weeks later.
The moment you ship something, you're stuck supporting it forever. And by supporting, it means any future feature you build is going to like interact with it. So you still have to be very conservative with what you put out there. It's hard to undo anything. Just cuz we can ship 10 times more doesn't mean we have 10 times as many good ideas to ship out there.
I mean funnily enough I mean spending time stuck is incredibly important. Um and and I sort of you know, I that used to just be annoying. Now it seems like oh, this is actually um uh uh maybe even the most important part of the whole process.
Meanwhile, others like Spotify and Netflix leverage their dominant positions in the market to coerce creators to abandon open podcasts entirely, in favor of proprietary formats that require listeners to be on those platforms — locking in both creators and their audiences so they are stuck as they begin the enshittification process.
Um and then they can kind of suggest random things and it it but it it it um often I find that trying to chase them down and make them work and find they don't work, it wastes more time than it saves.
if you've always stuck to two programming languages because of the overhead of learning a third, go and learn a third right now. And don't learn it, just start writing code in it.
We show that equilibrium generically occurs at neither the Harberger nor Glaeser-Luttmer benchmark. Cost-minimizing suppliers drive allocations to vertices, not interiors. Corners are not an assumption but an outcome about what cost-minimizing suppliers choose. The correct benchmark is corners, not random, and corners generate qualitatively different welfare properties: losses far larger than either efficient or random distributions, and discontinuous jumps from small parameter perturbations.
but ice sort of forms through a process of random nucleation and then extension. And this is cool because you can uh modulate the like sort of nucleation the rate of nucleation and extension to then modulate the probability of ice formation.
GPT 5.2 goes till end of August whereas Opus is stuck in mid-March - that’s about 5 months. Which is significant when you wanna use the latest available tools.
If you're a paper towel demon and feel guilty about it, I can't recommend these enough. Perfect for cleaning counters and random floor messes (talking to parents).
Dead Weight by Emmeline Clein: Certain parts of this book really stuck with me and changed how I think, like the chapter on the psychological effects of restriction.
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy: Made the random choice to listen to this and loved the experience (especially for getting through some of the boring parts, sorry). Shout out Maggie Gyllenhaal.
If you're stuck on a rock in the middle of nowhere, and you somehow haven't discovered the glory of Starlink, maybe just stick to your old full-disk backup ways.
If you do too much exploration, you can have your team feel a little bit too scattershot, just trying a 100 different random ideas. What's the through line? What's the strategy? How do you pattern match, you know, successes across them? And if you do too much in exploitation, which is often the MMO of growth teams, it can lead to this like saturation and stagnation where you're just locally maximizing a thing.
If you’re stuck in a depressive cycle, even when you really, really, really, really don’t want to do anything, to do something. Try to make progress because the good feeling comes on the end of that. The whole point is to do first and then feel, not feel and then do.
Tweets from 1765-1799 by a 4’9” hunchback physicist, friends with Goethe and Kant, admired by Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, etc. Such wonderful random thoughts, beautiful perspectives on thinking for yourself, observing nature, language, freedom, philosophy, religion, and more. Hundreds of initial insights, especially inspiring because they’re undeveloped.
I think that sedentary armies, sedentary civilizations, they get stuck in ways, this is how we do it. And we're going to make it a little faster, we're going to make it a little bigger, a little stronger but this is how we think. Genghis Khan had no set way to think and, when he encountered the first walled cities around 1209 after founding his nation in 1206, he went out on these raids and I really think there were raids not wars at first.
And this is important, so yes, you should expect legs or jointed sticks, how many joints they're going to be? Anybody's guess. Do you expect humanoids, things with a sensing apparatus on top of a shoulder with two arms and two legs? That's probably a pretty random set of occurrences that led to that.
They could have shipped ChatGPT for example, I heard, in 2019. And they never shipped it because they were so stuck in bureaucracy. But they had everything. They had the data, they had the tech, they had the engineers and they didn’t do it.
Physics hardly even acknowledges that the universe is random at its base. We like to think we live in a deterministic universe and everything’s deterministic. But I think that’s probably an artifact of the way that we’ve written down laws of physics since Newton invented modern physics and his conception of motion and gravity, which he formulated laws that had initial conditions and fixed dynamical laws.
It’s the fact that you’re a deterministic structure living in a random background. And also, all of that selection bundled in you allows you to select on possible futures. So that’s where your will comes from.
a new relationship is like fresh powder. It is new and shiny and exciting but it will not be a new relationship for long. And then you're still stuck with an old relationship and the question is will your old relationship a year from now be better than your old relationship that you currently have is? And if the answer is yes then yes sunk costs completely apply. But if the answer is no then what you're really doing is shopping for novelty not ignoring sunk costs.
Friedman’s focus on the money supply has not held up, as Samuelson suggested, but the alternative Keynesian macro models recommended by Samuelson in the same interview have not done better and they were not outperforming simple random walk models of predicting the macroeconomic future.
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.
So they have explored genetic sequence space far more thoroughly than eukaryotes ever did because they’ve had twice as long at least, and they’ve got much larger populations, and they never got around this problem. So why can’t they? It seems as if you can’t solve it with information alone. So what’s the problem? The problem is structure.
Consequently if everything else about our understanding of Sparta is made less exceptional, is made more like a normal Greek polis, we are still stuck with this absolutely wildly high percentage of enslaved persons in this society.
So we we want people, that's the way we break out of fixation, is we notice the anomalies. The way we get stuck in fixation and making fixation errors is we explain away the anomalies, hold on to the original wrong impression until it's far too late.
I’m currently stuck in a loop where, at least in science, I’m only going to read The Beginning of Infinity and The Fabric of Reality over and over again until I understand them fully.
I’m currently stuck in a loop where, at least in science, I’m only going to read The Beginning of Infinity and The Fabric of Reality over and over again until I understand them fully.
I often code late into the night, when I know I shouldn't, and I've used Flux for years now to protect my eyes from the brightness of a glaring monitor. Again, this has been replaced by OSX Night Shift but I've just stuck with Flux.
I'm currently on a late 2016 MacBook Pro, 13", with a Touch Bar. I deeply regret the MBP - 1: dongle life, 2: the lack of a physical escape key makes coding in emacs very difficult, 3: the keys on the butterfly keyboard are constantly too loose or totally stuck, 4: so much beach ball.
Editing for the books usually happens in either Word or Pages; I have no love for either, but Word plays nicely with InDesign, so we're a little but stuck with it for now.
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