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ai8
Ben Cuan

2503.07341

Encyclical Letter of His Holiness Leo XIV Magnifica Humanitas (15 May 2026)

values79
Ben Cuan

A vision is not something you develop overnight. You need to work at it, putting time aside for the process, and learning to integrate it into your ev

those who practice with the old ball end up bowling fastest with the new one.

do not waste time saying you don't have time.

We live in a world obsessed with doing things. We’ve invented incredible tools -- machines, robots, now AI. But a much more important and interesting

cool stuff21
Ben Cuan

CivLab · SF Gov Graph

silicon valley3
Ben Cuan

The two most insular cities I’ve lived in are San Francisco and Beijing. They are places where people are willing to risk apocalypse every day in orde

Hourglass economy in Silicon Valley - Wikipedia

agency8
Ben Cuan

Impact, Agency, and Taste

climbing2
Ben Cuan

Chris HarmstonJul 16, 1999, 12:00:00 AM7/16/99DeleteYou do not have permission to delete messages in this groupCopy linkReport messageShow original

design1
Ben Cuan
rationality5
Ben Cuan

Power comes from having something to protect.

Historically speaking, science won because it displayed greater raw strength in the form of technology, not because science sounded more reasonable.

Now there are those who say: "How dare you suggest that anything should be valued more than Truth? Must not a rationalist love Truth more than mere

You can't just pick out a Cause like that because you feel you need a hobby. Go looking for a "good cause", and your mind will just fill in a standar

space7
Ben Cuan

an American daydream

inspiration37
Ben Cuan

"Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply m

Two steps! The first step is totally meaningless. You can have one good day and sink back into your old patterns like it’s nothing. You need 2 good da

research20
Ben Cuan

institutions have long memories, so changes that you make in your environment will stick around for a long time. This means that once something is wor

Richard Hamming describes setting aside time each week for “Great Thoughts”, time in which he would focus on and discuss with others only things that

Besides textbooks, I recommend reading PhD theses of researchers whose work interests you. PhD theses in ML usually are ordered as follows: (1) introd

What is research taste?A particularly important and fuzzy type of skill is called research taste. I basically think of this as the bundle of intuition

health3
Ben Cuan

They found that participants who consumed larger amounts of methyl adaptogen foods, such as turmeric, rosemary, garlic, berries, green tea, and oolong

The Adolescence of Technology33
Ben Cuan

Ultimately, I think of all of the above interventions as ways to buy time. In the end AI will be able to do everything, and we need to grapple with th

We simply need to break the link between the generation of economic value and self-worth and meaning. But that is a transition society has to make, an

the last few years should make clear that the idea of stopping or even substantially slowing the technology is fundamentally untenable. The formula fo

Its creation was probably inevitable the instant humanity invented the transistor, or arguably even earlier when we first learned to control fire. If

ml eng3
Ben Cuan

Beyond A Single AI Cluster: A Survey of Decentralized LLM Training

memes25
Ben Cuan

“ “Change is the only constant in life,” said the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who probably didn’t envision the remarkable lifespan of the second-gen

Music2
Ben Cuan
writing34
Ben Cuan

In other words, writing as identity. And identity formation is hard! It requires a great deal of invisible labor and discipline. In fact, the common t

Why So Few Matt Levines?

community10
Ben Cuan

The third and deepest kinds of friendship, according to Aristotle, are friendships of virtue. That is, you like a person because of their character. T

learning1
Ben Cuan

To avoid knowledge shields the US military, when it does accelerated training programs, avoids sequential curriculums and instead exposes soldiers to

bay area culture3
Ben Cuan