nico λ

The contrarian’s enemy is not only random conformists. It’s also ridiculously smart people who have studied the topic in incredible depth and concluded that they’re wrong. And as we all know from certain creative offshoots of rock, paper, scissors, high-IQ mega autists beats public intellectual.

Replacing technology with household help is not a route to higher productivity. It seems more like a route out of the First World and into the Third.

So much of social media is, by design, condensed information — it’s made to be bite-size. So the internet feels faster paced. It’s been really soothing to go to a space where I’m still meeting my desire to connect with people and talk with people, but in a digital realm that’s slower, and that is allowing for a bit more vulnerability, a bit more... See more

The illusion persists because there’s so much money in it. Back in 2016, Ben Thompson wrote that Google’s AI efforts were at odds with its business model: “If a user doesn’t have to choose from search results, said user also doesn’t have the opportunity to click an ad, thus choosing the winner of the competition Google created between its... See more

Try to solve bugs one layer deeper

Imagine you have a React component in a dashboard, that deals with a User object retrieved from state, of the currently logged in user. You see a bug report in Sentry, where user was null during render. You could add a quick if (!user) return null . Or you could investigate a bit more, and find that your logout... See more

Philosophy of science has had a long-running debate about the status of such postulated entities. Two major positions have evolved: scientific realism and instrumentalism. Advocates of the former argue that these constructs truly exist. Instrumentalists are more modest and argue that such constructs should be treated as tools and evaluated on their... See more

The personal development / productivity space is littered with conflicting advice of varying utility. It attracts the intellectually promiscuous. Commitment-phobic concept sluts endlessly dabble with frameworks and tools, hoping to someday reach a moment of certainty when they’ll finally take action…99% of self-help is escapism.

In information theory, entropy measures the average unpredictability of characters in a string, expressed in bits per character. The formula to calculate entropy is straightforward: for each unique character, multiply its probability by its surprisal4, then sum this product across all characters.