flâneur

Deor R

2 followers · 1 following · 917 views

on the atlas — 37

highlights — 50

  • the fetishization of long working hours
    on and off - by Ava - bookbear express
  • They want solidity and certainty: the validation that they’re working on the right thing, loving the right person, not wasting time. That the outcome will always be good, will always get better. That they have not lost the plot.
    on not knowing - by Ava - bookbear express
  • where I’m naturally drawn in certain directions but I don’t know why.
    on not knowing - by Ava - bookbear express
  • I don’t always know how I feel, I don’t always know what I want, and many things around me feel nebulous and uncertain.
    on not knowing - by Ava - bookbear express
  • “A man who is possessed by his shadow is always standing in his own light and falling into his own traps... living below his own level."
    you have what you want - by Ava - bookbear express
  • Like, hey, maybe you were super boring and maybe you did overreach, but if you want to calibrate accurately, you have to center your own behavior.
    run your own race - by Ava - bookbear express
  • My hope is to be like that in every important emotional encounter: to express my needs clearly, to be as honest as possible, and to make it clear what’s okay and what isn’t. This is incredibly freeing, because it means I judge myself by my own standard of behavior in every relationship, and not by the other person’s response.
    run your own race - by Ava - bookbear express
  • Not in the sense that I did anything to upset him, but because it felt like he was always assessing everything around him to see if it conformed to his standard of good taste. What you worked on, what you read, whom you were friends with, whom you dated, what you tweeted about, etc were all up for scrutiny, and it wasn’t particularly nice scrutiny.
    run your own race - by Ava - bookbear express
  • The delta between literally-zero-maintenance and not zero is staggeringly large, basically because nobody reliably has willpower.
    Zero-effort habits | benkuhn.net
  • We believe strongly that a blame-free culture of ownership, automation, and learning from our mistakes is the best way to achieve our goals.
    Software Engineer - Auth Platform
  • Bring value sooner rather than later (focus on the incremental)
    Manhattan, our real-time, multi-tenant distributed database for Twitter scale
  • if a customer causes a problem, the problem should be limited to that customer and not spread to others
    Manhattan, our real-time, multi-tenant distributed database for Twitter scale
  • Developers should be able to store whatever they need on a system that just works.
    Manhattan, our real-time, multi-tenant distributed database for Twitter scale
  • If a map were to represent the territory with perfect fidelity, it would no longer be a reduction and thus would no longer be useful to us.
    Mental Models: The Best Way to Make Intelligent Decisions (~100 Models Explained)
  • to tyrannize yourself in an attempt to remove all observed flaws
    bookbear express
  • a relationship should make you feel good basically all the time
    bookbear express
  • To wear someone else’s fantasy like a second skin is liberation from having your own. To chase after what you can never enjoy is a way of avoiding the question of what to do when you get it.
    bookbear express
  • what we try to control controls us
    bookbear express
  • tend to seek out situations where they feel in control
    bookbear express
  • For ex: someone really liking you is a good and joyous thing, right? Well, I personally have always reacted by being super alarmed. Like: why does he like me? What’s going to go wrong? Can I trust him? My instinct is to try to scramble for control. I’m a paranoid person by nature. Luckily, paranoia and fixation are great for optimization. I think about problems and their solution a lot, circling around potential blind spots and failure points. Everything is mapped out in flow charts—I’m gunning for Plan A but totally prepared for Plan C. And working out D and E and F. I like this about my brai…
    bookbear express
  • I want fear to be my ultimate motivator, my root of courage, my mortal reminder. I
    fear perspectives
  • Whatever you have stopped noticing is the meaning of where you are and probably of who you are, too.
    small rooms - by Helena Fitzgerald - Griefbacon
  • To infer the floor from seeing the floor is to step back into the unseen causes of experience. It may seem like a very short and direct step, but it is still a step.
    Making Beliefs Pay Rent (in Anticipated Experiences) - LessWrong
  • "Rationality for its own sake, for the sake of existential risk."
    We're already in AI takeoff - LessWrong
  • For example, Why is the sky so blue and beautiful? It must have been made like that just for me. It was made beautiful so that I would enjoy looking at it. Except it's the other way around. The sky was not made to fit our sense of beauty, the sky was here before us, we have a sense of beauty that evolved to fit the sky because the sky happened to be blue! In a sense the sky caused us to be what we are (creatures who mostly agree that a blue sky is beautiful).
    The map is not the territory - Lesswrongwiki
  • The map is not the territory metaphorically illustrates the differences between belief and reality. The phrase was coined by Alfred Korzybski. Our perception of the world is being generated by our brain and can be considered as a 'map' of reality written in neural patterns. Reality exists outside our mind but we can construct models of this 'territory' based on what we glimpse through our senses.
    The map is not the territory - Lesswrongwiki
  • This problem is not easy to fix, but it’s not impossible either. I’ve mostly fixed it for myself. The direction for improvement is clear: seek detail you would not normally notice about the world. When you go for a walk, notice the unexpected detail in a flower or what the seams in the road imply about how the road was built. When you talk to someone who is smart but just seems so wrong, figure out what details seem important to them and why. In your work, notice how that meeting actually wouldn’t have accomplished much if Sarah hadn’t pointed out that one thing. As you learn, notice which det…
    Reality has a surprising amount of detail
  • This means it’s really easy to get stuck. Stuck in your current way of seeing and thinking about things. Frames are made out of the details that seem important to you. The important details you haven’t noticed are invisible to you, and the details you have noticed seem completely obvious and you see right through them. This all makes makes it difficult to imagine how you could be missing something important.
    Reality has a surprising amount of detail
  • Surprising detail is a near universal property of getting up close and personal with reality.
    Reality has a surprising amount of detail
  • Ultimately, I’d end up with a broad base of tacit knowledge and heuristics that were richer than anything I could get from reading books or talking to people. At that point, I’d finally be able to build the conviction I needed to make good calls.
    No one can teach you to have conviction | benkuhn.net
  • You spend about 100x more time thinking about how you’ll avoid ever making that type of mistake again, i.e., digesting what you’ve learned and integrating it into your overall decision-making.
    No one can teach you to have conviction | benkuhn.net
  • Overall, I probably did a pretty bad job. But, importantly, I was able to see my mistakes play out in the real world. Instead of modeling what other people would tell me to do, I built a model of the problem directly. So when I got negative feedback, it wasn’t “Mentor X thinks this plan is bad” but “the world works differently than you expected.”
    No one can teach you to have conviction | benkuhn.net
  • I’m left holding the bag, closing our 2015 books with a god-awful combination of raw Postgres queries and janky half-baked Twitter Bootstrap UIs. I spend 20 hours a week on the phone with our auditors, explaining our terrible decisions. Somehow, improbably, I am not bored.
    You don’t need to work on hard problems
  • College, 2012—Internship recruiting season. “What are you looking for in your internship?” the recruiter asks. “I’d like to solve hard technical problems,” I reply. I end up at Jane Street writing software to calculate numeric integrals of a function that is costly to evaluate. (They don’t tell me what the function is—it’s too secret for interns.)
    You don’t need to work on hard problems
  • When I’m curious about what someone’s saying, I often do repeat things back to them in my own words. But it’s because I’m genuinely curious, not because I’m checking off the “reflect words” box in my “be a good listener” checklist. That means I do it in a way that sounds like my natural speech, instead of mimicking them like a chatbot.
    To listen well, get curious
  • Cargo cult science is a pseudoscientific method of research that favors evidence that confirms an assumed hypothesis. In contrast with the scientific method, there is no vigorous effort to disprove or delimit the hypothesis.[1] The term cargo cult science was first used by physicist Richard Feynman during his 1974 commencement address at the California Institute of Technology.[1]
    Cargo cult science
  • sometimes it feels like i'm going to get everything i want since everything is going to change. but at the same time, maybe nothing will. maybe i already have everything i need.
    a different kind of senioritis
  • yet, i stayed in the same place for it all. my older relatives keep asking me which university i will be studying at this fall. my answer is the same each time: i don't know. i don't yet know which city i'll be living in, the same way i don't know who i will be four months from now.
    a different kind of senioritis
  • That means that moving quickly is an advantage that compounds. Being twice as fast doesn’t just double your output; it doubles the growth rate of your output. Over time, that makes an enormous difference.
    Be impatient | benkuhn.net
  • In order to win, we should operate at a faster tempo or rhythm than our adversaries—or, better yet, get inside [the] adversary’s Observation-Orientation-Decision-Action time cycle or loop … Such activity will make us appear ambiguous (unpredictable) thereby generate confusion and disorder among our adversaries—since our adversaries will be unable to generate mental images or pictures that agree with the menacing, as well as faster transient rhythm or patterns, they are competing against.
    Be impatient | benkuhn.net
  • That night when I got home I told the Gotham Gal “I met Danny Meyer today and he gave me his card and said I could call him whenever I need a table.” To which she replied “go there for lunch tomorrow.” And I told her “I don’t have a lunch tomorrow.” She said “Get one. He will remember who you are tomorrow but won’t next month.”
    Be impatient | benkuhn.net
  • They realized that if search is fast, you’re more likely to search.
    Be impatient | benkuhn.net
  • There is no delay between thought and action, no opportunity to lose the impulse to find something out. The projected cost of googling is nil. It comes to feel like an extension of your own mind.
    Be impatient | benkuhn.net
  • The BBC found they lost an additional 10% of users for every additional second their site took to load. DoubleClick by Google found 53% of mobile site visits were abandoned if a page took longer than 3 seconds to load. … When AutoAnything reduced page load time by half, they saw a boost of 12-13% in sales.
    Be impatient | benkuhn.net
  • [Y]ou have to be decisive. Indecisiveness is a startup killer. Mediocre founders spend a lot of time talking about grand plans, but they never make a decision. They’re talking about you know I could do this thing, or I could do that other thing, and they’re going back and forth and they never act. And what you actually need is this bias towards action. The best founders work on things that seem small but they move really quickly. But they get things done really quickly. Every time you talk to the best founders they’ve gotten new things done. In fact, this is the one thing that we learned best …
    Be impatient | benkuhn.net
  • It’s become common wisdom that launching (and iterating) quickly is a major factor behind whether startups succeed.
    Be impatient | benkuhn.net
  • “50%+ focus” is roughly when something becomes the top idea in your mind. It’s when you start caring enough to think about it in the shower. It’s when you start habitually asking “how could this go faster?” It’s when you get relentlessly resourceful. It’s around when you start annoying your coworkers and/or significant other, although that part is avoidable with practice.
    Attention is your scarcest resource | benkuhn.net
  • The output of knowledge workers is extremely skewed based on focus. The productivity tiers seem to be: <10% focused on the job at hand: meaningful risk of getting fired. 10-50% focus: “meets expectations,” gets regular raises. 50%+ focus: superstar, 10x engineer, destined for greatness.
    Attention is your scarcest resource | benkuhn.net
  • kinda insane how much mindshare apple pay has gotten, I work in a cafe that doesn't take it and people come in asking for it literally every day. pretty sure this is the american wechat
    alicemazzy · Twitter · kinda insane how much mindshare apple pay has gotten, I work in a cafe...
  • Starting [at a young age] he’s read everything that he could find about business. The subject that interests him, he’s read newspapers, biographies, trade press. He went over to his grandfather who was a grocer and he read the progressive grocer magazine, and he read articles on how to stock a meat department... What he’s really done is he’s created this immense vertical filing cabinet in 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