flâneur

Krish Shah

73 followers · 38 following · 5151 views

on the atlas — 79

highlights — 85

  • his brain of layers and layers and layers of files of information that he can draw back on now for more than 70 years worth of data.
    Curius / Onboarding
  • Operate all you want, doc tors: your pat ient is already
    A Mathematician's Lament
  • ust because something happens to have practical consequences, doesn ’ t mean that ’ s what it is about . Music can lead armies into battle, but that ’ s not why people write symphonies.
    A Mathematician's Lament
  • works of mathematics are subj ect to critical appr aisal; that one can have and develop mathematical taste .
    A Mathematician's Lament
  • Many a gradua te stude nt has com e to grief when they discove r, after a decade of being told they were “good at math,” that in fact they have no real mathematical talent and are just very good at follow ing directions . Math is not about follow ing directions , it’s about making new directions .
    A Mathematician's Lament
  • By conc entrating on what , and leaving out why , mathematics is reduc ed to an empty shell. The art is not in the “truth” but in the expl anation, the argum ent.
    A Mathematician's Lament
  • “To tell you the truth, most stude nts just aren’t very good at music. They are bor ed in class, their skills are terrible, and their hom ework is barely legible. Most of them coul dn’ t c are less about how impor tant music is in toda y’s world; they just want to take the minimum num ber of music cour ses and be done with it. I gue ss there are just music peopl e and non - music peopl e.
    A Mathematician's Lament
  • As for the primary and second ary school s, their mission is to train stude nts to use this langua ge — to jiggl e sym bol s around according to a fixed set of rules: “Music class is where we take out our staff paper, our teacher put s som e not es on the bo ard, and we copy them or transpos e them into a different key. We have to make sure to get the clefs and key sign atures right , and our teacher is very picky about makin g sure we fill in our qua rter - not es com pletely. One time we had a chrom atic scale probl em and I did it right , but the teacher gave me no credit because I had the …
    A Mathematician's Lament
  • How doe s a painter know where to put his brush? Inspiration, expe rience, trial and error, dum b luck.
    A Mathematician's Lament
  • none of the hundreds of teachers, parents, principals, and district administrators I spoke with stand with the system. They were the system, yet did not support it. The biggest obstacle to progress is mere inertia.
    What comes after the Industrial-Education Complex?
  • At a recent all-Bryan meeting, all the Bryans shared their experiences with this unconventional new routine.
    Bryan Johnson
  • A belief is something that you think to be true, while an alief is something that you feel to be true
    Jiminy Cricket Must Die | David R. MacIver
  • He defines “conscience” as “reflexive judgment about things that matter”, and argues that these voices of conscience are not intrinsic, but learned as part of our moral development through our membership in communities of practice – English speakers, Python programmers, etc.
    Jiminy Cricket Must Die | David R. MacIver
  • because often it feels people are looking for permission.
    Learning to walk through walls - by David R. MacIver
  • Yes, that does sound like a problem. Have you tried solving it?
    Learning to walk through walls - by David R. MacIver
  • When my eyes are open I should see the physical world with the possibility of overlaid information, and when my eyes are closed I should see the informational world, which can use completely different metaphors and interactions.
    Max Hodak - The vanishing computer
  • Once you can extract motor information and write visual information, all you need is a small block of compute with a battery and radios in your pocket. The computer effectively vanishes.
    Max Hodak - The vanishing computer
  • The beautiful aspiration is not to be surrounded by machines, but for technology to disappear into nature.
    Max Hodak - The vanishing computer
  • While it’s extraordinarily difficult to reach into the brain, all of the information that flows in or out goes through only a handful of nerves in the head and spine. These form the complete “API” of the body: if you can connect to them with single-unit resolution — still extremely difficult — you can provide exactly the same senses and motor surface that your nose, eyes, ears, hands and so on d
    Max Hodak - A Science corporation
  • Because of this intervening cleverness, science is “hard” and often advances serendipitously, but improving technology has steadily transferred more and more content from the realm of science to the realm of engineering, just as similar progress produced a conveyor belt from natural philosophy to modern science during the Enlightenment.
    Max Hodak - A Science corporation
  • Consider the following interpretation of the dichotomy between science and engineering: if you can directly see and manipulate the things you’re dealing with, you’re doing engineering, and if not — you need to ask clever indirect questions to get at what you’re really interested in — you’re doing science.
    Max Hodak - A Science corporation
  • Outstanding experts can suggest problems that are perfect next intellectual steps for you.
    Advice for ambitious teenagers -
  • While it is true that BCI could be enhanced by additional neuroscience research, waiting until we have a complete understanding of the brain before building BCI-based therapies would be no less folly than if our predecessors had withheld the polio vaccine until the sequencing of the human genome was completed.
    The Neurotechnology Age. Brain-computer interfaces exist today… | by Matt Angle | Medium
  • Today our brains can only interact with the outside world through our bodies. They are encased in bone like a wartime command center with no windows and one door.
    The Neurotechnology Age. Brain-computer interfaces exist today… | by Matt Angle | Medium
  • Where some people measure progress in answers-right per test or tests-passed per year, we are more interested in ‘Sistine-Chapel-Ceilings per Lifetime.’ ‍
    Primer | Mission
  • In the 4.5 billion years of Earth’s existence, humans have been here for 200,000 years, far under one percent of the history of the planet. Further shaving down that fraction of a percent, modern civilization only formed 6,000 years ago, and the Industrial Revolution began under 300 years ago. The internet, in its initial form as ARPANET, is 53 years old, and the World Wide Web is 33. By every standard possible, we are only in the nascent stages of history.
    Kernel | Editor’s Note
  • we should do everything we can to help smart Twentysomethings have an annus mirabilis. We should free them from rote menial work, prevent them from being overexposed to the current paradigm, and give them the freedom to explore far-fetched ideas without arbitrary deadlines or time-draining obligations.
    The mystery of the miracle year - by Dwarkesh Patel
  • How terrifying would it be if that was true? Is it possible that Thompson was burdened by responsibilities his entire life, and then in a brief moment of freedom did some of the most important work anyone has ever done?
    The mystery of the miracle year - by Dwarkesh Patel
  • During his miracle year, Einstein was a patent clerk, Newton was a college student dismissed for quarantine, and Darwin was a trust fund kid who had just finished a long voyage aboard the HMS Beagle and still didn’t know what to do with his life.
    The mystery of the miracle year - by Dwarkesh Patel
  • If you’re working on the right problem at the right time, you’re going to come up with a lot of important solutions really quickly.
    The mystery of the miracle year - by Dwarkesh Patel
  • It is funny we can access the entire universe each 6 months on a whim.
    Inhale one reality, exhale another. Life after an Ego Death experience
  • I used to despise day traders who just are moving money around, but then I realized we are all just moving energy around.
    Inhale one reality, exhale another. Life after an Ego Death experience
  • Sense of awe was constant- like looking off a cliff or the first time one enters Yosemite - that split moment of awe that eventually wears off- except this was a continuous feeling.
    Inhale one reality, exhale another. Life after an Ego Death experience
  • It is complicated further still because during the journey I would think not only in first and third person, but also in the royal “we” as in all of society- everyone that has or will live
    Inhale one reality, exhale another. Life after an Ego Death experience
  • “Ego Death” is not what most people expect, and even people who have dabbled in the space usually misinterpret an “Ego Death” experience. Ego in this context refers to the “concept” of self, and in an ego death journey, the concept of identity, even the concept of a human, is obliterated and is replaced with the feeling of universal empathy to an infinite degree.
    Inhale one reality, exhale another. Life after an Ego Death experience
  • Data on the web today is mostly treated as second-class to applications. In this form, data is contextual – it only makes sense in the context of what you can do in an application. At its best, developers and companies expose this data in the form of an API, not allowing you to actually access the underlying data but rather only giving you a limited range of actions or verbs that you can perform on it. This is known as verb-based interoperability and it creates a form of n-to-n problem where every app needs to know what the APIs of another app are to even begin to interoperate.
    Rhizome Philosophy
  • Differential neurotechnology development is the project of preemptively creating the most beneficial or risk-reducing neurotechnologies before any others.
    Cause Area: Differential Neurotechnology Development - EA Forum
  • I like to think of reading as a form of travel through idea-space, a textbook being a long roadtrip.
    Textbooks as a preventative for depression - by Kasra
  • To borrow words from Robin Sloan: While it is okay to share this link, I want to underscore that I am sending it specifically to you with the hope that you will really think about it! At such a primordial stage, a proposal like this doesn’t need diffuse, drive-by attention. It needs, instead, close consideration and generous imagination.
    Rhizome Proposal
  • the source of hardness might be a blockchain. The reason a smart contract will operate the way it was programmed is that blockchains provide very high assurances that this will happen, by creating incentives for people to maintain the network and making it extraordinarily expensive to censor or stop its function.
    Atoms, Institutions, Blockchains — Josh Stark
  • Casts are descriptions of some future state of the world. A cast is hard if that future state of the world is very likely to turn out to be true.
    Atoms, Institutions, Blockchains — Josh Stark
  • “Hardness” is defined as the capacity of a system to make something very likely to be true in the future. Hardness is most useful where it is customizable or programmable - where humans can choose something specific we want to be true in the future.
    Atoms, Institutions, Blockchains — Josh Stark
  • This is the problem that blockchains solve. They are a new source of hardness, with new strengths and weaknesses, which make them a suitable complement to address the limitations of Atoms and Institutions.
    Atoms, Institutions, Blockchains — Josh Stark
  • We built institutions - groups of humans who work together, who behave in predictable ways over long periods of time. We learned to design these institutions to become very reliable - so that we could give an instruction to an institution, and be sure that those instructions would be followed - even years, decades, or centuries later.
    Atoms, Institutions, Blockchains — Josh Stark
  • I believe that a similar situation exists today with respect to blockchains. A new technology has forced us to reconsider things we thought we understood. But instead of books, telephones, and voices, this time it is money, law, and government.
    Atoms, Institutions, Blockchains — Josh Stark
  • The modern idea of information is a recent invention. It was not until the 1940s that new communications technologies pushed people working on the cutting edge to articulate that there was something universal underlying sound, electromagnetic waves, symbols on paper, and much more.
    Atoms, Institutions, Blockchains — Josh Stark
  • my new colleagues are so, so kind, but at the end of the day I just feel like no one has any standards.” He looked down at his coffee for a moment. “I’m afraid I’m never going to see my best work again.”
    What I Miss About Working at Stripe - Every
  • But she jumped back in. “I guess I am surprised. But it’s mostly because you’re the third person to mention that same thing to me today.”
    What I Miss About Working at Stripe - Every
  • You should trade being short-term low-status for being long-term high-status, which most people seem unwilling to do. A common way this happens is by eventually being right about an important but deeply non-consensus bet
    The Strength of Being Misunderstood - Sam Altman
  • The Boltzmann brain thought experiment suggests that it might be more likely for a single brain to spontaneously form in a void (complete with a memory of having existed in our universe) rather than for the entire universe to come about in the manner cosmologists think it actually did.
    Boltzmann brain