It's isn't just to people with ADHD that this happens. Some tasks inherently take a certain amount of time. An appointment that breaks the afternoon into two blocks of time could leave you with no block long enough to complete a task.
foundation is ostensibly a sci-fi series about empires, psychohistory, and hard technology, but really it's about individuals with extreme agency and puzzle-solving ability having wildly outsized impact on a universe that would otherwise just sit there waiting to decay
The best way is to be strong, sovereign, hard-working and deeply competent. Ideally with an uncanny ability to start ambitious infrastructure projects and finish them on budget and on time. Shout-out to our nuclear energy sector for nailing that. Do that and every other problem melts away.
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.
We talked in an earlier chapter about Resistance being the strongest at the finish line. It is. Resistance knows we’re about to defeat it. It summons all its genius and all its power to stop us.
Why are we surprised? Even if you're a good programmer, if you finish a job and you ask your also very good peer to review it, you're gonna end up with better code. Of course you're gonna end up with better code. So build that into your process.
Linux conquered everything else. All the AI infrastructure that everyone runs off, it's all running on Linux. All the systems, all the servers, everything is Linux. So it was kind of a curiosity that the desktop and the personal computers we were using really hadn't been captured, but clearly it was just waiting for this moment. Linux spent the time from '91 to now waiting for agents to fully flourish as an end user operating system.
It would also help if your manager said, "Well done for getting that bit done." Right? That's that's also a motivation pull to think, "Yeah, actually I don't need to get the whole piece done to get the reward of somebody identified that as a positive thing to have done."
You have to persevere. And that's the other really important part of motivation. You know, we know a lot of people who start things and then we also know the non-competers, the people who are always so energetic but actually don't finish, right? So, it's almost as important to be able to finish and complete as initiate actions.
it's just been sitting there in legislation for like 40 years and no one's really taken advantage of it except for one government program here or there where they want to, you know, do a NASA space reactor or something like that. But it has from a legal perspective been waiting for an administration to say, "Hey, this might be a way to accelerate nuclear R&D."
But when I think about all the goals I have in my life right now—finish this Substack, get the house ready for some visitors, prepare a course for next year, write a paper, etc.—none of it is driven by an appreciation of my mortality.
there's a difference between belief and hope. Hope is confidence without basis. Hope is just, you know, it's it's a prayer, but it's but it's it's not it's not founded in anything that your your lived experience.
Now, I post things like, "Hey, I'm adopting the zero token architecture." People like, "What's zero token architecture?" as like instead of burning tokens, you learn things and you think for yourself and just complete tasks.
Another thing that's really cool is you can contribute to the Linux kernel without contributing to the Linux kernel, right? because you might take a Rust language feature we need and implement it and now you've contributed to the Linux kernel indirectly
Um, there's just too many interesting ways of combining things. There's too many sort of deep ideas waiting to be uh, discovered and when it you know, not only we, but but nobody ever is going to to discover most of them. So, choices about how to make how to do the exploration actually matter quite a bit.
People will sometimes talk about um you know, a theory of everything as a potential goal for for physics. And and then there's this presumption somehow that physics is done once you get there. And of course, this is this is not true at all if you think about computer science.
You know, obviously, we patch our games and that’s where we fix a lot of bugs, but if you really wanna run a game like Overwatch or World of Warcraft successfully, you need master level engineers who have architected the client and server in such a way that you can hotfix the game on a dime.
I think the thing that feels the most compelling for me is just like the experience of the transplant patient. It's really I think constricting. It's like you're waiting for a life-changing surgery and you have no idea when it will even be scheduled
The audience is waiting for you to get through this thing because they know nothing's going to happen. Like whatever's on that page, that's what's going to happen.
somehow if you take your deadlines seriously, that's the key. You take the deadlines deadly seriously and you just refuse to violate them. Um then you're serious when you establish them and you your mind just finishes when it needs to finish.
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.
It turns out that simply getting people into temporary shelter—often derided by the homelessness-industrial complex as a band-aid—significantly reduces both social and individual harms of unsheltered homelessness.
This was just because Hitler was afraid of the power of his army high command, and convinced by Goering's morphine-high vision that he would stop it with the air force, which he couldn't.
But because we don't know the answer to that, to me, a much more useful way to think about it is not how much data do we need to get before we're fully done, but how much data do we need to get before we can get started, meaning before we can get uh a data flywheel that represents a self- sustaining uh and ever growing data collection.
I totally agree. Sometimes I take too long to come to that conclusion, but I will proudly say, as most theoretical physicists should, that I kill most of my ideas myself.
It doesn't actually care about the craft. But when you work with an intern or you work with somebody else, they care. When they factor something, they actually go over and go, "Oh yeah, this is actually kind of bad. I'm going to come back to that." They finish this, they go back over here and they make this even better. They actually care about the thing itself.
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