Tanuj

Digital books are just mechanically exported by publishers and always look like the ugly sister of the beautiful paper book.

You want to start with a problem or question when you’re reading. And again you want to read books together in groups, and you want one of the early books to make the whole thing real or emotionally vivid to you. If you travel to a place that’ll do it automatically, but if you’re not traveling you want the book to do it, so your early book choice... See more

By using hundreds of written notes as training data, we can configure a model to learn to be the note-taker, to internalize their thought patterns, to adopt their writing style and interests, to approximate their mannerisms and responses. After several months of disciplined note-taking, the aligned model becomes powerful enough to accurately... See more

Anyone trying to apply science via technology must reason through contingencies, constraints, and behavior in specific circumstances. Questions like What is most appropriate and desired in this context? arise. Science focuses on necessity and universality; technology focuses on contingencies and specificities. Thus, technology does not just follow... See more

we should directly tie the success of our technologies to how much they enable our humanity (as in, our positive human characteristics), and use this criteria to evaluate past, present and future technologies.

You might also hope that the important details will be obvious when you run into them, but not so. Such details aren’t automatically visible, even when you’re directly running up against them. Things can just seem messy and noisy instead.

To the extent that the web has been difficult to kill, it is because it is evolvable. The web started as a way for scientists to share papers, and then evolved into new niches, including e-commerce, wikis, flash games, blogs, web apps, streaming video, social media, office suites, chat apps, design tools... It keeps finding new fits, and changing... See more