Andrei Stoica

A modern darling of edutainment that is a big public success would be Duolingo. Their focus on gamification is deeply studied and widely appreciated. In an interview the founder was asked about the conflict between gamification/engagement and education. To which Luis (founder and ceo of Duolingo) responded they always pick gamification/engagement i... See more

“The essence of commitment is making a decision. The Latin root for decision is to ‘cut away from,’ as in an incision. When you commit to something, you are cutting away all your other possibilities, all your other options.”

– The Lombardi Rules, Rule #6 – Be Totally Committed

In today's browsers, it is possible to run parallelized code with the help of so-called web workers. The event loop of an individual browser window is, however, still only handled by a single thread.

The historian and biographer extends this backwards in time. Now youth find models of honor not only among the living but among dead. To study the great men of a community’s past is to study what greatness means in that community. That I think is half the purpose of these biographies of Roosevelt and Rockefeller, Feynman and Oppenheimer, Licklider ... See more

sam altman as elfbars a thread 🧵 https://t.co/r5mmReUaqv

When the pandemic hit, Cowen and Collison, the founder of Stripe, set up a separate grant programme to fund research. The pair had raised and spent millions before larger bodies managed to respond. One large grant went to Anne Wylie, who developed saliva tests for covid-19. Though Wylie was a researcher at the Yale School of Public Health, and atta... See more

I’ve been going deep on antimemetics – or why some ideas spread slowly, or don’t spread at all. It feels like after we got social media, we came up with a bunch of principles around “virality” and “memes” and then never revisited them again.

But ideas don’t spread the same way they did in the early days of Web 2.0. Now, we sometimes deliberately kee... See more

Prestige outlives institutional health

Peaceful, integrated, and long-lasting institutions are often seen as healthy and likely to endure. However, it is precisely these conditions that allow their gradual hollowing-out and descent into dysfunction to remain unnoticed.

The ancient nature of such institutions might signify the presence of a fully-aut... See more