It feels like companies simultaneously scale teams too quickly (before they know what they want to scale), and companies struggle to build at anywhere near a big enough scale. Strange to have both problems!
The most obvious problem is that Marco Rubio continues to hold both the Secretary of State and national security advisor positions. This has been going on for nearly 18 months now and it's obviously not working well at all.
There is something powerful and strange about how LLMs diffuse knowledge and capabilities, while perhaps also nudging us all simultaniously and independently toward building the same things.
And that's why when kids get to algebra and they start to struggle, the issue is not the algebra. The issue is the third grade math facts they didn't learn. And the way to fix the problem is not pound them with more algebra. It's to go fix the third grade problem.
Omarchy is not going to adopt a formal Code of Conduct because those turned out to be struggle-session processes in the last turning. But we are going to play nice. We're going to be courteous, professional, and composed in our direct interactions with users, competitors, and even haters. Because that's what's going to pave the path to the win.
So it's strange because it's also perhaps the major software release that I've worked on the least in terms of lines of code. I have the least number of personally hand-chiseled lines of code in Quattro than I've had in any major release I've ever done. And yet, I am insanely proud of what we've accomplished.
This is a very strange book, and I can’t say I liked it very much, but there is some useful philosophy inside (and perhaps a lot if you or someone you know is struggling with low self-esteem).
Nuclear energy is the safest form of energy empirically. If you look at the amount of power generated versus the amount amount of deaths, um it's even safer than solar, which is very strange because how does someone die from solar? that actually most solar is installed on roofs and people sometimes die falling off of a roof installing solar and if you add those deaths up it is actually a higher death per energy than the totality of nuclear energy in the world.
my expectation is what we would see from then is that the rate of problematic behavior would decrease uh and would just keep decreasing and decrease at a pretty fast rate while simultaneously the worst things that the AIS would sometimes do would get more extreme, more egregious, and more scary.
I think one of the things that makes science the company very special is that it has both of those cultures and is able to integrate them and we're able to simultaneously do some really cool research that I think is really at the edge of the Overton window while simultaneously running clinical trials in six countries now with an approved medical device in Europe and clinical trial results in the New England Journal of Medicine.
And up until now that like could only really happen if one of those people in that family that community or that school was like really really into computers. But now it's possible for everybody to have situated software.
I think the case of TLA+ and most, not all, but most formal methods, they shine the most in highly computational domains, where most of the problems are highly technical and not like business embedded.
Even if you're doing hard ones, if you look at the work of people like uh Gloria Mark, the things like crossword and sudoku, they're less of like a true cognitive challenge, right? It's it's almost has more of like a meditation meditative like effect, right? Which can be a good thing, right? So you're focused but not challenged really.
Justin Gest, Democratic Drain: Global Migration and the Struggle for Democracy is a political economy argument that widespread immigration can drain home countries of their democracy supporters to some extent.
We do live in a world where information is really cut up, but we also live in a world where you can have access to more information than you ever could. And that's even more true now with LLMs.
With that disclaimer out of the way, this is a great book, which simultaneously illuminates some very, very important phenomena, and is very well-written.
I simultaneously feel like I'm talking to an extremely brilliant PhD student who's been like a systems programmer for their entire life and a 10-year-old.
I think a lot of the people coming out of knowledge work are just anti-AI. And those people are going to struggle. I'm sorry, but if you're anti-AI at this point, it's like being anti-the the sun. You're going to have to go live underground, right?
Playground by Richard Powers is a strange and wonderful novel set (mostly) on a remote atoll in French Polynesia that follows the tangled lives of an environmental advocate, a sculptor, a tech entrepreneur, and a brilliant bookworm trying to escape the grinding poverty of Chicago's South Side. The richly drawn characters drive the story, but what I love most about the book is that it's a love letter to the ocean with prose that comes closer than anything else I've read to capturing what it feels like to, for example, dive a thriving coral reef.
the average athlete who's taking a few million dollars more to move his wife and kids from one family, one city that they loves him and that he loves to some strange place where everybody's going to be unhappy.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (season three). Maybe didn’t enjoy this quite as much as the previous two season, but I love spending time with these people and look forward to doing more of that when season four drops. (B+)
it seems like struggle is a part of life, either you do it earlier or you do it later. And it’s true, that’s such a good point that competition does seem to be a really powerful driver of skill development
So Spinosaurus is a super weird and exaggerated version of what was already a kind of super weird group of theropods. So Spinosaurus is properly strange. And then, as you kind of hinted at, super controversial as well, because various papers have claimed it's a diver or a really good swimmer, and I think the evidence for that is very weak at best.
I think the element of podcasting or audio books that is about information gathering, that part might be removed, or that might be more efficiently and in a compelling way done by AI. But then it’ll be just nice to hear humans struggle with the information, contend with the information, try to internalize it
I sometimes also struggle explaining to people, articulating, why I believe meeting in person for world leaders is powerful. It just seems naive to say that, but there is something there in person
I knew that our competition was not going to be startups. It was incumbents. And I also knew that incumbents generally struggle with speed because by definition they have massive scale and usually entrenched architecture.
My second book is about the science of productivity, and how to succeed with less stress and struggle, to get more done without sacrificing what we care about most.
Mind candy portal fantasy, in which Our Protagonist's struggles to escape back to Mundania are rather complicated by her growing recognition that her life there sucked, actually, and maybe fighting strange beasts and stranger people isn't so bad in comparison...
The best tooling in the world will struggle to make up for "regularly losing a day debugging your environment," and so getting that aspect right can easily outweigh almost any other decisions you make.
Theft of Fire offers a plausible and realistic universe. The characters, Marcus Warnoc and Miranda Foxgrove, are not mere archetypes; they are complex, flawed, and deeply human. Their struggle to trust one another and overcome their own demons is a powerful allegory for the modern human condition.
Songs arise out of suffering, by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation and, well, as far as I know, algorithms don’t feel. Data doesn’t suffer.
It was in such a place that I found the book The Court and the Castle by Rebecca West. It's a strange little book but a brilliant one, provocative and cunning.
By contrast, humans can generally perform a new language task from only a few examples or from simple instructions - something which current NLP systems still largely struggle to do.
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.