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Adam Mastroianni x.com
Look at me, a dummy who can’t even reliably taste the difference between alkali metal salts
The the words it uses that this site has seen least often elsewhere. Posts are matched on those words alone — nothing here is a summary of this one.
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19 September
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Their words
It's not a blanket case against recycling: recycled metals are still valuable, but plastics mostly aren't.
18 September
14 September
13 September
9 September
8 September
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korrents.com
In an age of abundant information, a person's judgment, taste and perspective are their primary value as a writer.Their words
Information is ridiculously abundant. Your judgment, taste, and perspective are literally all you have to work with now.
7 September
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Their words
especially with AI now I'd say anyone can try, and non-technical people with the best ideas, creativity/taste and understanding of whatever cultural zeitgeist we're in can win
29 August
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Their words
VO2 max, the peak of our triangle, is one of the strongest predictors of all cause mortality at any age, reliably predicts the physical activities we can take part in in our daily lives, and slowly decreases as we age.
26 August
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Their words
The other thing I'd say is that most organizations don't know what they want. They don't know how to make it better. They're not bottlenecked on implementation. They're bottlenecked on ideas. They're bottlenecked on vision. They're bottlenecked on taste. And if you don't have those element in excess of your implementational capacity, it doesn't help. So you can make a lot of shitty ideas come true, then what?
24 August
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korrents.com
Original human-written text that has not been touched by AI is becoming increasingly valuable.Their words
Anyway, the bottom line is that human-written language reliably untainted by AI is becoming valuable.
17 August
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Their words
We took stock of the whole literature and asked is this really true? Is Ecman's claim really true? Can you tell how someone feels from their facial expression? And the answer is well not nearly as well as you would think and in general not.
16 August
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korrents.com
Most advice people give is shaped by survivorship bias and cannot be reliably generalized to others.Their words
Almost every piece of advice that you hear is basically entirely filled with survivor bias.
14 August
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Their words
making intelligence cheap does not automatically make “agency” cheap. people are constrained by time, money, confidence, health, education, institutions, family, geography; a model does not magic any of that away. there’s a perfectly believable future where these tools mostly compound the advantage of people who already have the skill, taste, money and the spare time to use them well.
12 August
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Their words
Something intertwined with this story, which I stumbled upon when thinking about agents, is how your pace of understanding won't increase by using agents.
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Their words
kind of going back to this reliability question, we took this policy and we ran it not just once, but we ran it for 13 hours straight. Uh and we basically wanted to evaluate is this policy not only good at making a latte once, but can it do so reliably to the extent that it would be needed to be useful in the real world?
11 August
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Their words
In short, RLVR gives us no reason to expect the normative representations learned in pre-training will acquire motivational force over a given action, especially when post-training repeatedly selects trajectories for terminal task success.
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Mixed onrcmnd.app
Clean CodeTheir words
Clean Code is another standard recommendation, but that one wasn't for me. There are useful design principles in there worth studying, but the book as a whole is too narrow and a bit too dogmatic for my taste. Your mileage might vary.
9 August
6 August
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Their words
If you keep adding deadlines without also checking whether the workload itself is sustainable, you risk what I call Obliger-rebellion-the point where an Obliger who has met, met, met, and met expectations suddenly snaps and refuses to meet any more.
From one piece On the Perils of Self-Assessing... 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Could this phrase or sentence or paragraph or section be improved, even a little? That is, can I make myself (on this very localized turf) make myself dislike it less?
On the Perils of Self-Assessing...georgesaunders.substack.com
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korrents.com
A first draft should not be graded good or bad; it is only the material that taste then gets to act on.Their words
Just don’t do it. Accept it, whatever it is, as a starting place in the long game of exerting your taste on your own prose.
On the Perils of Self-Assessing...georgesaunders.substack.com
5 August
31 July
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korrents.com
Startup opportunities are not fleeting; Silicon Valley has reliably had a surfeit of them for decades.Their words
You know, in hindsight, I think that um that was a a poor intuition. Uh it's been pretty robustly and reliably the case over many decades in Silicon Valley has a surfeit of opportunities.
30 July
From one piece Jeff Dean: The 1% Rule for Building in AI 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
When agents do the building, the scarce skill is taste: choosing which problem is worth the time at all.Their words
Yeah, I mean I think it's really having incredibly good taste in what you ask your agents to work on, right? That is the the crux of you know from my background uh a research problem. You know, a researcher can have all the tools and all the techniques, but often most of the battle is what problem are you gonna spend your time on?
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Their words
Um, another way you can get more experience for yourself is to just write down a bunch of things you think might be important in the next 12 months. And maybe you pick one of them to work on, but go back and evaluate in 12 months of these other things, which ones actually seemed important or which ones did other people in the world go out and and create and which ones did they did not seem to do yet.
28 July
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Their words
I think startups are really like the main thing that keeps the economy from becoming stagnant. Um I think companies do just like drift towards suckiness and startups will continue to be important forever.
14 July
11 July
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korrents.com
Thunderbolt's official wake-from-sleep certification does not guarantee the feature works reliably in practice.Their words
At this point, I had pretty much given up and filed Thunderbolt's "wake from sleep" promise in the "unreliable" folder, right next to Bluetooth Pairing.
9 July
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korrents.com
AI tends to flatten outputs toward sameness, so personal taste and perspective become the main way to stand out.Their words
AI flattens everything it touches. The way you stand out is by getting clearer about what you really want, your taste, your perspective, your opinions.
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Their words
you've got these other generalists doing design, you've got engineers doing design, product staff doing design, but I'm actually pretty long on design or designers because they tend to have taste and I think that is something that is much more difficult to imagine being automated away.
5 July
From one piece If You Want Taste, You're Gonna Have to Eat 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
AI has made ability nearly free, making taste the main bottleneck separating good creators from mediocre ones.Their words
As AI has allowed more and more people to create things, the biggest differentiation, the biggest skill people are lacking, is taste itself.
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korrents.com
Taste is not about consensus or criticism, but the courage to value what genuinely resonates with you.Their words
Taste isn't consensus. It's not judgment first, either. It's easy to be a critic. Curiosity has to come first, because without curiosity you never broaden your horizons.
30 June
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Rishi Dandelion GingerTheir words
Rishi Dandelion Ginger. Extraordinary and surprising. And most things taste better mixed with tonic.
29 June
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korrents.com
AI models default to generic, lowest-common-denominator output unless a user actively pushes back against them.Their words
If the user doesn't actively push back against the AI model, then they get the generic output, the lowest common acceptable denominator of aesthetics and taste.
26 June
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korrents.com
Models have no research taste yet, which is why they complement researchers rather than replace them.Their words
one thing I see for research in particular is they don't have very good research taste right now and so I think they're actually a very good complement to researchers
16 June
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Their words
When you break that, when you overthrow the ruler, when you dissolve the republic, when you put in a new thing, it doesn't have that same staying power. And so, it's very common when there's one regime change for there to then be five regime changes rapid-fire over and over.
7 June
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Their words
crema is composed of lots of carbon dioxide, fines, oils, and bitter compounds.
6 May
3 May
2 April
26 March
From one piece Why tech bros are obsessed with "taste" 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
The online ecosystem has become so degraded that it has impaired people's ability to exercise taste.Their words
Another conclusion might be that the online ecosystem has become so polluted-so fragmented, deceptive, overstimulating, ersatz-that it has warped our ability to exercise taste at all.
Why tech bros are obsessed with "taste"kylechayka.substack.com
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korrents.com
AI companies promote themselves around 'taste' because their products are unappealing outside tech circles.Their words
A.I. companies need to associate themselves with taste precisely because their tools are not very palatable, much less cool, to anyone outside of Silicon Valley.
Why tech bros are obsessed with "taste"kylechayka.substack.com
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korrents.com
Tech's embrace of 'taste' is an attempt to dress anti-humanist technology in humanist branding.Their words
We might call what's going on now "taste-washing," an attempt to give anti-humanist technologies a veneer of liberal humanism.
Why tech bros are obsessed with "taste"kylechayka.substack.com
25 March
13 February
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korrents.com
GPT-based AI systems can now reliably automate around 80% of data acquisition and verification work.Their words
The GPT systems have gotten so good that they can do a reliable 80% of the work I used to do when it comes to data acquisition and verification.
When Long-Term Investments Finally Pay Offthebootstrappedfounder.com
12 February
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Their words
Some other comparison is like, Opus is like the coworker that is a little silly sometimes, but it's really funny and you keep him around. And Codex is like the, the weirdo in the corner that you don't wanna talk to, but is reliable and gets shit done.
9 February
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korrents.com
Craftsmanship, taste, and human judgment remain valuable in software development despite AI-assisted coding tools.Their words
There is value in good taste, there is value in craftsmanship, and there is value in human judgment.
9 December 2025
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Their words
There’s a consistent history of transformational technologies generating excessive enthusiasm and investment, resulting in more infrastructure than is needed and asset prices that prove to have been too high. The excesses accelerate the adoption of the technology in a way that wouldn’t occur in their absence.
28 November 2025
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korrents.com
Dripper diameter, with other brew variables held fixed, does not change extraction or taste — only batch size.Their words
changing the dripper diameter, keeping all other important variables fixed, has no impact on the brew mechanics and the resulting cup, in an "idealized" scenario
26 November 2025
25 November 2025
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Their words
The Roman Empire, therefore, is actually not necessary for keeping industry going.
20 November 2025
3 November 2025
16 October 2025
From one piece Figma’s CEO: Why AI makes design, craft, and quality the new moat for startups | Dylan Field 4 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
I think the best, you know, designers on the product side can turn it on and off. They can go, I have my own taste. I know what I like. And then, okay, you're going for this. And that might be different than what I like, but I can match it brand as well.
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korrents.com
A lot of people can match a framework for taste; almost nobody can create one, and creating one is the rare skill.Their words
I think that for those who can create and then articulate a framework around what is taste for us that is really a important skill and uh then I think people can a lot of people can basically match a framework not many people can create the framework.
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Their words
It's just this loop of okay, I'm having an experience of any sense. Maybe I'm looking at art, maybe I'm hearing music, maybe I'm literally eating food and tasting something, you know, but like do I like it? Do I not like it? Why?
+ 1 more
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Their words
And there is something about judgment in there too. you know, uh, implied in taste is that some things are good and some things are bad. So, I think you have to be willing to lean into that yourself in terms of uh, being high judgment.
7 October 2025
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korrents.com
As AI lowers the barrier to building software, personal taste becomes a more valuable differentiator.Their words
But along with the question of what you're willing to maintain, as the barriers to creation drop the value of taste will only increase.
5 October 2025
1 October 2025
19 August 2025
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Their words
My model is that research requires a mix of skills. The day-to-day coding and execution is crucial. But there's also a set of harder-to-learn conceptual skills, collectively called research taste. These skills take a long time to gain because they have poor feedback loops, but they take very little time to use.
31 July 2025
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Their words
But the one thing that they valued were all the artisans, everybody who had a skill. And that skill could be making a pot. It could be hammering out a metal plate. It can be weaving carpets, it can be translating or just reading and writing. Every person with a skill was spared.
25 July 2025
23 July 2025
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Their words
So picking the right question is the hardest part of science and making the right hypothesis. And that's what today's systems definitely they can't do. So I often say it's harder to come up with a conjecture, a really good conjecture than it is to solve it.
24 June 2025
7 June 2025
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Their words
And good luck getting to “alignment” or “safety” without reliabilty.
3 June 2025
12 May 2025
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korrents.com
Nobody can reliably predict when market drops will occur, how deep they'll go, or when they'll end.Their words
You can't predict when they happen, how deep they'll go, or when they will recover.
1 May 2025
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korrents.com
Large language models cannot reliably self-correct their own mistakes without external feedback.Their words
this self-correction capability turns out to not exist intrinsically among LLMs and does not easily work out of the box, due to various failure modes
19 April 2025
From one piece Impact, agency, and taste 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
People who can be trusted to make something inevitable are really rare, and are typically the bottleneck for how many different things a team or company can do at once.
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korrents.com
Different people's areas of strongest judgment or taste rarely overlap much with each other.Their words
it's quite rare for different people's "zone of best taste" to overlap very much.
3 April 2025
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Their words
I see this as a totally fair question that totally misses the point of what “alignment” was trying to refer to: whether we’d be able to reliably steer advanced systems towards anything at all.
31 March 2025
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Their words
The short, and very much un-sweet, vision of a tariff-bound economy is that it is stochastic. We can observe it, measure it, analyze it, but we cannot really predict it.
25 March 2025
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Their words
Good taste: taste is the ability to distinguish excellence from mediocrity. The hand can never consistently produce better than the eye can discern.
The Death of Product Development as We Know itlg.substack.com
3 February 2025
From one piece DeepSeek, China, OpenAI, NVIDIA, xAI, TSMC, Stargate, and AI Megaclusters | Lex Fridman Podcast #459 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
And for that reason, there's physical constraints to things like AGI, like recursive improvement to kill us all type stuff. For the physical reasons and for how humans have figured things out before, I'm not too worried about AI takeover.
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Their words
The more progress that AI makes or the higher the derivative of AI progress is, especially because NVIDIA's in the best place, the higher the derivative is, the sooner the market's going to be bigger and expanding and NVIDIA's the only one that does everything reliably right now.
17 December 2024
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Likedrcmnd.app
OHTO MS01 all-metal drafting pencilTheir words
OHTO MS01 all-metal drafting pencil
16 December 2024
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Mixed onrcmnd.app
First, Break all the RulesTheir words
Gallup interviewed thousands of high-performing teams and managers and found a dozen of things each of these teams had in common. While the insights are good, the content itself was quite dry for my taste.
30 June 2024
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Likedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
The Dark Lord's DaughterTheir words
Mind candy fantasy for younger readers, in which Mr. and Mrs. Middle America's beloved adoptive daughter turns out to be from Somewhere Else, which comes calling. It's very fluffy, which I was in the mood for, and Wrede is always reliably enjoyable.
19 June 2024
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Their words
I think if we can achieve that amount of inference compute, where it leads to a dramatically better answer as you apply more inference compute, I think that will be the beginning of real reasoning breakthroughs.
26 March 2024
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korrents.com
Shame is used as a tool of cultural coercion because it reliably makes people shrink and stop taking action.Their words
shame has been sharpened into a tool for cultural coercion and compliance. That what people have figured out is that shame is a is a soft spot on almost everybody. And if you press that spot, people will shrink. They will run away. It is particularly used against women, but it is used against large numbers of people to cause them to not take an action.
3 February 2024
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Likedrcmnd.app
ArabsTheir words
3000 years of factual Arab history, and personal insights from this Oxford Brit who lived in Yemen for 37 years, translates classical Arabic, and clearly cares a lot. Huge and thorough but really wonderful for those with the interest. I loved his writing style and poetic asides. Read my notes here for a taste. What a great book.
23 January 2024
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Their words
The trouble with Xi Jinping is that he is 60 percent correct on all the problems he sees, while his government’s brute force solutions reliably worsen things.
12 January 2024
28 September 2023
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Lovedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
CuckooTheir words
It turns out that a breakthrough rice cooker is a bargain, even if it seems expensive at first. The Cuckoo is an extraordinary device. It comes in many shapes and colors, most of them will not be to your taste, but persist until you find one.
19 August 2022
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Steam DeckTheir words
The Steam Deck was my first taste of PC gaming in a handheld form factor and I love the snot out of my deck.
1 December 2021
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Mixed onrcmnd.app
A Random Walk Down Wall StreetTheir words
A fine intro to investing if you think you can reliably beat the market or that active trading is a good use of energy. If you're already bought in on index funds though, you won't find much here.
1 February 2021
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Their words
In people living their normal lives, circulating insulin level, and the insulin response to carbohydrate, don’t reliably predict who will gain weight and who won’t.
7 February 2020
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
The Bhagavad GitaTheir words
Fantastic, many similar ideas to Stoicism and Virtue Ethics, though with more mystical elements thrown in. Would highly recommend it as a “first taste” of eastern religion.
4 December 2018
17 August 2016
Nothing matches.
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