I think three of us have total conviction about the scaling law. That that I think we do. I do think the exact architecture choices and data mixtures is where the the devils are in the details.
The cabin is a classic literary setting. It's the getaway spot where characters can flee to escape their troubles or journey to in order to find new ones.
I think the the key thing is you need to develop conviction in a set of beliefs that nobody else um agrees with. Like, I think if you look at all the most successful companies in the world, um they were started at a time long before the sort of like core idea was popular.
is find the things that you can develop like reasonable conviction in that people decide like the conventional wisdom is they're just wrong. And be okay with it taking a long time and having people be like very you know, very frustratingly wrong and dismissive.
And what I had to learn was the reason that people come to me with those out of proportion responses is because that's what they need. They need a hero or they need a villain. and their need for a hero or a villain has nothing to do with me. If it wasn't me, they'd be contacting you. They'd be contacting somebody else. It really doesn't have anything to to do about me.
Comparing this to The Fifth Season, it is striking how different two fantasy novels about worlds over-supplied with natural disasters, and the people with the psychic gifts to stop those disasters with their minds, can be in tone and execution. This is immensely fluffier, but it has no pretensions to be anything except candy, and succeeds as such.
by listing out all these jobs to be done, you know, really for the for the community journey and for advertisers as well, it became very clear where we could use agents, where we needed to be very focused in terms of building cross-functional teams around those jobs supported by AI tools.
So I would, if I was to redo it today, or for any aspiring hero shooter makers out there, I would actually downplay the team factor, and try to put more focus on individual contribution.
Breakneck by Dan Wang takes you on a fascinating journey through China's engineering state, juxtaposing it against America's lawyerly society in an effort to reveal what each country should learn from the other. I've been a keen reader of Dan's personal blog for many years and am delighted to report that this book, his first, features everything I love most about his writing: his unbounded curiosity, thoughtful analysis, compelling storytelling, self-awareness, offbeat sense of humor, and insights born of lived experience.
Then you need a metag game, which for Duolingo is kind of like the path, but it's also the leaderboard, achievements, kind of long-term things that you're going to strive to such that you have like long-term, I guess, motivation uh to continue doing the thing. And then the profile is also critical because you build up a profile over time. It's a reflection of your investment inside the product experience. And so when you nail those three things, you can end up with a long-term learning journey that can be quite successful.
So think about this. If your brain is this most valuable tool you have in your journey to success and happiness, why would you destroy this tool for short-term pleasure? This sounds ridiculous.
You don't even need to predict the future that well. If you just live in everyone else's relative future, which really is just a couple of um high conviction high courage uh update to beta clicks. It's not that hard to live in the future.
The journey is better than the destination. Everyone's heard this. Just take one second to apply what that means. That means forever starting from now, you are only going towards a place that's worse.
A short but 'pathless' journey through stepping off the conventional path a year after graduating, daring to ask the questions that linger below the surface. A big inspiration for deciding to write my book!
Ben's personal reflections on reinventing himself at "midlife" (though relatable at any age). I love how he leaned into a new version of himself without dramatically blowing up his life.
A nice personal + historical deep dive into finding your dharma by embracing both your gifts and limitations in service of something greater than yourself.
Audiobooks is what got me started on my reading journey. I've since switched to the Kindle for the majority of my reading but I keep Audible specifically for biographies.
Audiobooks is what got me started on my reading journey. I've since switched to the Kindle for the majority of my reading but I keep Audible specifically for biographies.
And I don’t feel that that can be a coincidence. I feel that what we are looking at is an inheritance of an idea, a legacy that’s been passed down from a remote common source to cultures all around the world, and that has taken on a life of its own within those cultures.
Evil Does Not Exist (Japan) 3.7 This is turning out to be an outstanding year for Japanese films. As is so often the case with films from Asia, it begs to be seen on the big screen. Hard to summarize—imagine if Apichatpong Weerasethakul had directed Local Hero. Warning—his films always start slow, and build to a strong second half.
I'm convinced that it's not possible to teach anyone a language. A good teacher can help you on this journey – but they cannot give the language to you on a silver platter.
I particularly appreciated The Journey of Humanity because it is an ambitious and deep story about the past tens of thousands of years of economic development that is also well grounded in a growing economics literature into the deep origins of growth
Paul Strathern’s terrific book Mendeleyev’s Dream traces that journey all the way back to ancient Greece, when people first started questioning why the world is the way it is.
I found myself unexpectedly (and perhaps dangerously) inspired by Miller's discussion of the 15-acre plot of land he and his wife bought outside Nashville, where they're carefully cultivating the forest, planting extensive gardens, and organizing retreats.
Part autobiography, part startup + life philosophy, and part product book, I could have categorized this in a few sections. However, the strength of this book is clearly the advice and insights for how Scott's 7+ year journey led to a fantastically successful exit to Adobe for his startup, Behance. The middle of the book is a great mix of anecdotes and tactical things you can apply if your startup is in "the Messy Middle" to turn the corner for your product.
If you care about privacy, or want to understand what the NSA and CIA really do to monitor Americans, this book is an important read. It explains from beginning to end how Snowden became the privacy hero he is today, why he decided to leak the information, and how he did it. It's an interesting and important read, but also probably 100 pages too long.
Paypal survived the dot com crash to become a massively successful company. They also led to the Paypal Mafia, the most famous group of people formerly of the same company that went on to do other successful things. I wanted to know the story of the company and this book covers the good, the bad and the ugly of their journey to success.
I've never read a book before that captures the journey of going from meh to amazing when building a product. This book does it. Part Apple / Steve Jobs pron, part memoir, and part product insights, this book is a great read on how the iPhone came to be and how they solved really hard problems. For anyone that remarks "Apple isn't what it used to be," this book helps you see what made the difference then.
A foundational conviction of this project is that progress is a trend with definite, substantive causes, and that it can continue far, far into the future.
Naysayers will have a lot to object about Rand. But Roark embodied integrity. Integrity is more complicated than Rand presents. I don’t think the hardest questions are in here. But Roark is a good guide for many decisions life will throw at you even if he is an incomplete (or possibly just unfinished) hero.
This is about the craft of software development, and thinking about how to produce good code. As the name suggests, it's a very pragmatic and hands-on book. It really helped me on my journey as a software engineer, to be able to write quality code day in and day out, and be confident that it's going to work correctly.
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one
sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at
korrents.com.
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said.
The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in
korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who
else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public
statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
About the English under a post
Some people here publish in a language other than English. Where they
do, this site shows a machine translation beneath the post, in
this typeface — the site's own, not theirs.
The post itself is never changed, moved or hidden: what is set in the
serif above is exactly what the person published, and it is what to
quote them on. A translation can be wrong in ways that matter,
especially about tone.
Only the post's own words are translated. A quoted post, a linked
article and a belief on korrents.com
are left in their original language.