nico λ

Part of our problem is we have this one word “science” to describe radically different fields. There is a massive gulf between the science of something like Physics and the science of Psychology.

For me, my anxiety and emotional state improved when I realized I got a lot of joy and contentment from the _process_ of learning new things, and trying to gauge my improvement always meant comparing myself to others.

Unless you are one of a tiny handful of businesses who know exactly what they're going to use AI for, you do not need AI for anything - or rather, you do not need to do anything to reap the benefits. Artificial intelligence, as it exists and is useful now, is probably already baked into your businesses software supply chain. Your managed security... See more

By putting the database changes inside of a transaction, we can ensure that we either get all of the records or none of the records. We call that an atomic transaction: it happens completely or not at all.

Foreman feared “an Internet-dependent population is being drained of its ‘inner repertory of dense cultural heritage’ by outsourcing all information and connection to a vast web that spreads us wide and thin and is accessed by the touch of a button.”

I usually think of contrarianism as being wrong most of the time but helping on the margin because it brings light to positions that are underrated due to social conformity factors. I think most meta-contrarians would admit that they’re wrong most of the time. It would be quite silly to take the meta contrarian point and think you are right most of... See more

Make debugging easier

There’s so many little tricks I’ve acquired over the years on making software easier to debug. If you don’t make any effort to make debugging easy, you’re going to spend unacceptable amounts of time debugging each issue, as your software gets more and more complex. You’ll be terrified to make changes because even a couple new... See more

We psychiatrists tend to start our first sessions with some variant of the question: “What would you like to change?” People often list negative goals: to be less depressed, stop using drugs, feel less anxious, etc. It’s a start, but we often need more. There is a helpful reframing found in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: no dead person’s goals.... See more

All across our culture, you’ll find people eager to abandon the fundamental task of our lives, fostering and maintaining human connection, so that they can fall deeper into a pit of hedonistic distraction forever. You send an email a large language model wrote for you to spare yourself a minute of mental activity at the end of a long day working... See more