if you if you divide the YC up into little bits where each startup is part of a pod of 70 startups, then it's just like they were back in 2012 when there were 70 startups.
some bits of AI are way across the finish line, some bits are like maybe in the middle of it. Who knew the line had dimension? The finish line is actually this sort of smear. And I think the best answer you can give is like we're on the smear.
I think you're gonna have a hard time coping with the new reality if the only thing you loved about programming was the mechanical bits of putting the right logical constructs together to produce something other people told you to produce. Because that mechanical process is under threat. If you are, as you just mentioned, excited about building things, I don't think you're under threat at all.
But if you're digitizing the physical world, you're treating atoms like bits. And you're like, well, I know that CPU manipulates the bits. What manipulates atoms? That's manufacturing or digitized manufacturing.
in Silicon Valley, there's a common mantra to move fast and break things. However, when you're dealing with atoms instead of bits, breaking things is not really okay. So, the thing you have to do is to move fast and ship safely.
The key thing is to make hardware development look more like software development to reduce the cost of iteration both in the world of bits and in the world of atoms.
Now, it can also make your memory worse because you're realizing I want to I'm taking this photo so I don't need to remember it later. And so, you could see it going both ways, but that selection process is important.
the council does not simply keep the best bits from everyone. It keeps a minority of the good ideas, while peer review seems to give consensus ideas an extra push.
Which of those two people are going to reproduce, find a mate, all of these sorts of things? I think the answer is kind of clear, right? It's the second one that has the preference for other people.
In fact, multiple analyses we do suggest that the genome is vibrating with natural selection, and uh there's all sorts of weaker effects that are there that would be picked up in larger studies even than we've done. Uh and that uh in fact, almost every position in the DNA is uh correlated to a position that in being dragged in one way or the other uh by natural selection. Instead of being quiescent, natural selection is everywhere.
So we're talking about strong measurable selection coefficients on the order of half a percent or more in this study and all of those are going to work in small populations or large populations. It's not going to be affected by the population size.
It may still be the case, and I guess it is, that immune traits are the most selected category, but is not at all the case, and in fact, we can prove it's not the case that behavioral traits are not selected.
But I think it's highly likely that if natural selection was pushed pushed any of these traits in more in one direction than it is, the mean would move.
And really from a statistical point of view, what happens at these times of migration is there's just huge fluctuations in frequencies, and these are extremely uninformative times for looking and detecting natural selection.
But if you know anything about my obsession with selection bias, you can predict the outcome: when you expand access from a population that excludes more students to one that excludes fewer, you’re very likely to see declining performance.
Tony's Chocolonely Lil Bits (in Milk Caramel Sea Salt and Cookie Mix), which single-handedly got me through this work year. I shudder to think how many bags of these I ate, but I can barely finish an essay without one.
I approach spirituality as a social scientist who believes that whether or not God exists, spirituality is a deep part of human nature, shaped by natural selection and cultural evolution, and central to human flourishing and self-transcendence.
Gold by Rumi and Haleh Liza Gafori. Poetry, 112 pages. A vibrant selection of poems by the great Persian mystic with groundbreaking new translations by Haleh Liza Gafori, an American poet of Persian descent. Read 1–2 poems before bed each night and thank me later.
I think the power and money corrupted him in the end as well, but I also think that there’s something fundamentally anti-human about people who want to build utopias or paradises or heavens, because what they’re saying is, “I like humans apart from the bad bits.”
Whereas with text, it's already sort of been abstract into those bits that we as humans care about. So the representations are already there and they're not just good representations. They actually like focus in on what really matters.
You're dominant in contests, particularly with conspecifics. If you're trying to win a territory or win mating rights, bigger things usually beat up smaller things. So there's going to be selection favoring them. But then big things don't usually do well in extinction events, so that tends to reset the clock by killing off the big stuff, and then smaller stuff does better again.
So a lot of the problem is mere herding: If every other top engineering program is using the GRE, it’s too weird to require a different test even if the alternative test is a far superior selection mechanism.
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.
So what he concluded was that he called remembering an imaginative construction, meaning that we don’t replay the past, we imagine how the past could have been by taking bits and pieces that come up in our heads.
Well, I like to say there’s no such thing as true or false memories. It’s like Johnny Rotten from the Sex Pistols, he had a saying that’s like, “I don’t believe in false memories any more than I believe in false songs.” And so the basic idea is that we have these memories that reflect bits and pieces of what happened, as well as our inferences and theories.
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.
The Nasty Bits, by Anthony Bourdain. I read this book not too long before Anthony Bourdain died. I remember really enjoying his voice, his style, his sense of flair.
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.
when plague finally diminished in Europe, not because of any advance in medicine, but because fourteen generations of exposure gave natural selection time to work
Half of the appeal here comes from the delightful bits of math this channel covers, often with novel ways of presenting otherwise extremely complicated topics to make them easier.
A guide to procrastination: why we do it, how we do it, and a number of tips and strategies to help overcome it. Overall a dry read, but there are a few bits I found useful.
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