Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) by Gerald Jay Sussman and Hal Abelson. SICP is my all-time favourite programming book. It's also where I learned about the power of wishful thinking when coding. SICP uses wishful thinking as a design tool: write code as if the abstraction already existed. Pretend. Then, once the ideal abstraction has taken shape, you go ahead and implement those functions. This meta-level is what made SICP so valuable. Ultimately, it's a book that teaches how to think about code and problem solving. I'm tempted to even say that SICP is more a work of art than a pure coding book, but I won't go there. A beautiful book.
This is a little bit different than actually literally I vector centrality but it's very similar and so we call this technique IGEN reviews and I've become convinced that this is more or less the right way to do performance reviews.
You can give it a Bash tool so it can ripgrep its way through the codebase. You can give it some queryable codebase index, an LSP server, a vector database. In the end it doesn't matter much. The bigger the codebase, the lower the recall. Low recall means that your agent will, in fact, not find all the code it needs to do a good job.
and even if you take a generous interpretation of 128 * 8 gig transfers, you're at 128 gigabytes a second for the same shoreline versus 2 and a half terabytes a second. There's a there's an order of magnitude difference in bandwidth per edge area.
Because it's like okay we got these numbers and the numbers go up. It's like no, the fact that you still have to choose which things you look at is an art, not a science. And your interpretation of if the number went up 5%, is that good? Is that not good? Is also an interpretation and is an is an art, not a science.
At one extreme, something you read can change your whole way of thinking. The Selfish Gene did this to me. It was like suddenly seeing the other interpretation of an ambiguous image: you can treat genes rather than organisms as the protagonists, and evolution becomes easier to understand when you do.
I think there's this whole idea, I call it a denial of attention. I think there's an entire attack vector that's going to be happening. We're using LLMs to generate fake bug reports, fake all these things to just actually effectively to demotivate and hurt open source maintainers.
The scale word gets a lot of attention in this. The interpretation that I use is effectively to avoid adding the human priors to your learning process. And if you read the original essay, this is what it talks about is how researchers will try to come up with clever solutions to their specific problem that might get them small gains in the short term while simply enabling these deep learning systems to work efficiently, and for these bigger problems in the long term might be more likely to scale and continue to drive success.
FLOP is the vector that the government has cared about historically, but the other two vectors are arguably just as important. And especially when we come to this new paradigm, which the world is only just learning about over the last six months: reasoning.
Many of them try to pretend the measurement problem isn't there. Go to enormous lengths like the many-worlds interpretation, literally inventing an infinite number of unobservable parallel universes to avoid the thing that quantum mechanics is telling them, which is that measurements matter.
There is an algorithm called BM25 precisely for this, which is a more sophisticated version of TF-IDF. TF-IDF is term frequency times inverse document frequency, a very old-school information retrieval system that just works actually really well even today. And BM25 is a more sophisticated version of that, that is still beating most embeddings on ranking.
So my interpretation of reality is if you fold it up, all that bifurcation of many worlds, and you just fold it into the structure that is you, and you just said you are all of those many worlds and your history converged on you, but you’re actually an object exists that was selected to exist, and you’re self-consistent with the other structures. So the quantum mechanical reality is not the one that you live in. It’s this very deterministic, classical world, and you’re carving a path through that space. But I don’t think that you’re constantly branching into new spaces. I think you are that space.
If you think about how we teach quantum mechanics to our students, the Copenhagen interpretation, it’s a God-awful mess. No one’s going to accuse that of being very beautiful. I’m a fan of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and that is very beautiful in the sense that fewer ingredients, just one equation, and it could cover everything in the world.
It just predicts what you are likely to re-Tweet and like, and linger on. That’s what all these algorithms do. It’s what Tik-Tok does, it’s what all these recommendation engines do. And it turns out that the thing that you are most likely to interact with is outrage. And that’s a quirk of the human condition.
A lot of people have raved about this book in Silicon Valley, so I wanted to see what it was all about. It's a great interpretation of the history of man. Unfortunately, it has about 10% of the citations it deserves for the subject matter. I found it a really interesting set of ideas for how to think about how we evolved. I felt there was some inaccuracies, but appreciate having the perspective of an expert.
This is what I wish I learned from in my freshman year of college. The part of it about linear algebra is one of the best linear algebra resources out there, and remainder shows you how those tools apply to non-linear mathematics.
A unique thinker with strong opinions presented as indisputable fact. More surprisingly interesting ideas than almost any book I've ever read. Extremely thoughtful, but occasionally abruptly concludes with an unsupported point. It has a conservative “this is how it is” certainty. It’s a broad collection of thoughtful insights on life, mixed with a lot of Bible interpretation.
I internet in Chrome, email in Inbox, slideaphone in Keynote, work-chat in Slack, friend-chat on Hangouts/Adium, tweet about squirrels in Tweetbot, and verb all the things in real life.
I internet in Chrome, email in Inbox, slideaphone in Keynote, work-chat in Slack, friend-chat on Hangouts/Adium, tweet about squirrels in Tweetbot, and verb all the things in real life.
There's also a Wacom tablet as well for when I do digital paintings but lately my art has been leaning towards a more graphic vector style so it doesn't get quite as much love.
On the go: An 11" MacBook Air with 4 gigs of RAM, which is perfect for client emergencies when I'm traveling, for working on small vector projects and for working on typefaces, which don't require a massive screen.
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