Lesson Two: Life Doesn’t Need to Be Exhausting https://t.co/5iviwzvI4A It’s easy to assume that if you’re not tired, you’re not working hard enough. I don’t think that’s true. In this article, I share a different way of looking at effort.
Happier couples tend to give each other the benefit of the doubt. Rather than assuming "My partner doesn't care," they're more likely to consider that the other is tired, distracted, overwhelmed or simply unaware of the impact of their behavior.
I think the agents were right to presume causal grading. It turned out to be wrong, but it’s a mistake you are clearly supposed to make here, in response to a mistake by OpenAI where they failed to implement properly.
I'm so incredibly tired of seeing low-effort AI-designed web pages. I basically bounce off any new product immediately when I see it (never get a chance to judge the product itself). Lots of thin lines, glowy styles, inconsistent fonts, lots of monospace.
Um, and while this generally improves the reliability of the model, uh, people eventually get tired and it's hard to get really, really high reliability with a person that's manually tuning this. And so what would be even better is if the AI system itself can iterate on the scenario in which you want it to have higher reliability where it on its own automatically seeks out places where it needs more data, where it needs more supervision.
rather than mapping PMs to teams where you kind of assume that the PM will always do that, we tend to map them to kind of problems or kind of like core projects.
I genuinely believe that if you took an open weights model from 2025 and built a pentest harness for it, it could do this kind of sandbox escape and scan/hack in most networks. This is only surprising because you assume OpenAI has sounder sandboxes.
There are things that we naturally take pleasure in—such as friendship, sex, and Italian food—and while we can become sick of anything if continually exposed to it in large doses, we don’t get tired of these things if they are properly distributed in time.
some people think either uh frontier AI gets commoditized and we all enjoy the benefits, but there might be some risk because like it's the market's really competitive and cutthroat, or um things are safer because there's a big gap between the leader and the laggard, but that means that the leaders get fantastically wealthy. No, like you could just have a relatively big gap, but it's a public company ownership and it's widely distributed.
here prices are adjusting in this interesting way that too many macro models don't allow for, right? So, that what what a what's happening is what would be called investment specific technical change where yeah, the price of capital is like falling relative to the price of consumption instead of like the standard doing the standard macro thing of saying there's just output.
I think technology leaders think that folks will just blindly adopt uh new technology as it comes out and I think we're going to enter a period of time where there's going to be a huge amount of societal pushback on a lot of the changes that are coming uh with AI.
we just assume that there's no upper bound on how long it might take for a message to go over the network. So, you send a message, it might arrive within 100 microseconds, or it might take 10 years.
it's very easy to assume that your clocks are correct and most of the times the clocks are pretty correct but we just can't rely on it because actually they're just not precise enough uh on the whole.
Like I I write books and as much I wish that books as a format will be like will survive. I do think that people don't read books the same way anymore.
It's working too hard, right? But that actually isn't burnout. That's just like getting tired. Another piece that's super critical to burnout is not having your values aligned.
I think that might be what saves us. I think the fact that no, you can't have one engineer and have him do a thousand projects because after three hours of that he's going to literally pass out in a corner.
There's There's nothing preventing longer context from working. You just have to train at longer context and then learn to to serve them at inference. And both of those are engineering problems that we are working on and that I would assume others are working on as well.
A House of Dynamite. A very tough watch, but I thought this was fantastic as a tour of some of the different kinds of people who hold the fate of every single person on the planet in their hands every damn day. They’re tired, stressed, distracted, at cross-purposes with themselves, set in their ways, more celebs than leaders, and mediocre. And none of them have ever seen Dr. Strangelove? (A)
I would assume it will because it’s so anticipated, and anticipation is the best driver of early sales, as we saw with GTA4 versus Red Dead Redemption one.
take prompting and as an engineer, there's a range of prompting abilities. uh the way you discretize and split up your task matters. And if you assume that uh a model can do more than it can do, then you're going to have a bad time.
One exception is that Grammarly was a different type of product in that you install it and you don't proactively open it every day. So that was kind of interesting to me because I assume that you should always just focus on existing user retention. But for a product like Grammarly, it's actually the activation, installation, aha moment that's really really critical and will carry the user for a very very long time.
I believe this is the right answer. We're often being manipulated by politicians, by corporate leaders to make a choice from two suboptimal options. And then when we are forced to make this choice and we make this choice, it's almost as if it's something that we have to assume responsibility for. I don't think we should be buying into that.
Even if we assume all three of these crashes were Waymo’s fault, that would still mean that a large majority of the 38 serious crashes were not Waymo’s fault.
Many people assume that they need to keep their jobs forever, because it is their source of health insurance. The good news is, this is usually not true.
We ought to be especially careful in the cases where what we delegate to a device, app, agent, or system is an aspect of how we express care, cultivate skill, relate to one another, make moral judgments, or assume responsibility for our actions in the world
You should ALWAYS have as few employees as possible. Always. Hiring more people should never be the first lever you reach for, it’s what you do after exhausting your other options.
Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint (Germany, 2019, CC) 3.6 When thinking about the most overlooked female artist, Artemesia Gentileschi often comes to mind. This documentary makes a persuasive case for Hilma af Klint. To my eyes, her most appealing works are not the large scale abstractions, rather it’s the small Klee-like gems that stand out. Don’t assume that if you have seen a half dozen of her most famous works that you have any conception of her overall career.
We're advocating that companies handle risk from scheming models in a similar way–striving to ensure that they'll be safe even if their alignment efforts fail to prevent models from scheming.
I’d say for humanity, it’s both a tribute to the ability of discovery and the ability of really believing in things so that you have the confidence to go look for them, but it’s also a cautionary tale that you don’t want to assume things before they’ve been actually found.
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.
The Reading List email is sponsored by Hiya , the pediatrician-approved superpowered chewable vitamin created by two dads tired of children’s vitamins that cause more problems than they solve.
I may have I may be an investor. I have a track record of calling the market right in the last five times. People say, "Wow, he really knows what he's talking about." But there are lots of people who are trying to predict which way the market is going to go. And some of them are going to get it right by chance. And people assume it's because they know what they're what they're doing, and in fact they're just the lucky ones.
I did not know I needed a device until I bought two of these. These screen bars are used to mount on top of your screens and make sure your eyes get less tired
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