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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

How can we learn to become proactive? I don’t know of any easy way. One powerful way is to be inspired by examples of proactive people.

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.

most people’s problems are not software-shaped, and most won’t notice even when they are.

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Impact, Agency, and Taste

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

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

an American daydream

"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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

AI: Markets for Lemons, and the Great Logging Off

Scientific paper PDF viewer on arXiv

Speaking from personal experience, however, it feels clear that for our brains, the act of reading and reflecting on a book is not all that different

In between gods, looking for work - Gazetteer SF

But I have begun to come around on this: art—or at least good art—is defined by its non-instrumentality. Art is not useless, but it is use-agnostic, a

But true art is disinterested. True art doesn’t care to be appreciated, obsessed over with, or owned. It holds a certain self-respect that knows enoug

But busyness has a way of stealing creativity from you. Generative work, like art and writing, requires long periods of nothingness: it’s only in that

Like many — dare I say, most — people in their early 20s, I find it hard to shake the feeling that my life is a pinball machine of relationships and o

reating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as

First there’s the ecstasy of getting started, and then the incredible sense of having gained some momentum, and then... there you are. Squarely in the

obsessionally attached, non self-aware mind-wandering with no interrupt mechanisms (Ctrl-Z for you programmers), is bad.

I’ve always believed the best early-stage founders are artists – they're obsessive about new and unusual things, they feel compelled to bring creation

if you create titles, people start coveting them, and this ends up creating competitive politics inside the company that undermines internal unity. Be

The cost of this was that the company often felt like there was no clear strategy or direction, more like a Petri dish of smart people building little

During my visit to China, high-speed rail was one of the most visible expressions of modernization, progress, and technology. In California, taking th

These are just a few examples and I love that my work is amorphous and ever changing. It ebbs and flows as my life moves, priorities change, interests

Put most simply, heartfelt intensity is a variety of intrinsic motivation. Not the thing a person is motivated to do but the drive underneath it all t

That thing that compels you all to obsess over the details others overlook, and do it with gusto — that’s heartfelt intensity.

Very importantly, this notion of ‘showing up with heartfelt intensity’ is not to be confused with working hard. Probably more importantly, it’s not at

I know that people are too eager to recommend their current lifestyle and disavow their developmentally important previous decisions.

Listening is a neglected social skill. But I know that an even more neglected social skill is candor.

She said, “I trust you’ll figure it out.” Which I’m sure was well-intentioned, but just to be clear, that line didn’t help. It says two things:  1. Th

I know what makes people grow more reliably than anything else. It is: taking on a difficult project with some amount of public accountability. This c