Shubham Shah

2 followers · 19 following · 1068 views

on the atlas — 127

highlights — 35

The increasing capability of AI has made it easier for people like Price or van Doorn, with less mathematical training, to solve puzzles, while making those puzzles less interesting to people like Alon who have devoted a lifetime to understanding them.
Why the Legendary Erdős Problems Are Falling to AI | Quanta Magazine
Progress is certainly empirical.
2025 letter | Zhengdong
There’s no reason it had to be this way, but now we can hint at one—progress improves on itself.
2025 letter | Zhengdong
The more details we get, the shakier that 15 year trend looks—it’s got stubborn persistence, but it looks held together more by the eleventh-hour toil of a bunch of nerds than by the inexorable will of the universe.
2025 letter | Zhengdong
I can’t say I was a good candidate for the conviction of graduate school. A Real Job, on the other hand, lacked the mysteries of research, which by then I knew I needed to keep life interesting.
2025 letter | Zhengdong
Meta's vision is to bring personal superintelligence to everyone. We believe in putting this power in people's hands to direct it towards what they value in their own lives. This is distinct from others in the industry who believe superintelligence should be directed centrally towards automating all valuable work, and then humanity will live on a dole of its output.
Personal Superintelligence
When, one day, a translation engine writes an artistic novel in verse in English, using precise rhyming iambic tetrameter rich in wit, pathos, and sonic verve, then I’ll know it’s time for me to tip my hat and bow out.
The Shallowness of Google Translate - The Atlantic
It is surprising how much edge “let me google that” gives you, 26 years after Google was released.
6 lessons I learned working at an art gallery
What you see in the biographies of great artists, great writers, great anything is that they are good at figuring out where the vectors align. They are able to keep track of their values and be attuned to themselves, and at the same time be cold-headed about how the world works: not shaping themselves to fit the world, but figuring out how to position what they do so that it becomes possible.
6 lessons I learned working at an art gallery
If we want to make the world a better place, we can’t just think about the lofty stuff: we have to get our hands dirty and make sure the economic engine works.
6 lessons I learned working at an art gallery
Two truths approach each other. One comes from inside, the other from outside, and where they meet we have a chance to catch sight of ourselves. —Tomas Tranströmer
Relationships are coevolutionary loops - by Henrik Karlsson
This, day after day, was how we grew a home.
Relationships are coevolutionary loops - by Henrik Karlsson
But was there a solution? It was hard to tell, but this wasn’t necessarily a disadvantage. The hardness of the problem might even be a good thing, I figured: it would force us to be more creative. When you write classical poetry, as I liked to do, you impose strict rules on yourself to deliberately make it harder to say what you want—and this is what makes poetry come alive. W.H. Auden, the British poet, praised metrical rules because they “forbid automatic responses, force us to have second thoughts, free from the fetters of Self.” The same thing is true for relationships, I reasoned: I could…
Relationships are coevolutionary loops - by Henrik Karlsson
This is what I infer when I see someone who is comfortable in their unique strangeness, too. There probably exists someone who enabled that evolution of personality. A parent, a friend group, a spouse. It is rare for people to come into themselves if no one is excited and curious about their core, their potential. We need someone who gives us space to unfold.
Relationships are coevolutionary loops - by Henrik Karlsson
When I meet a person who is truly, profoundly themselves, I sometimes think of a letter Charles Darwin sent to Joseph Hooker in January 1862 after receiving a package of orchids. “Good heavens,” Darwin wrote about the Angraecum sesquipedale, an orchid from Madagascar with a nectary as long as his forearm, ”what insect can suck it?” There must exist a pollinator moth with a tongue longer than any that has ever been observed, he conjectured later. The moth and the orchid must have evolved in dialogue. This is what I infer when I see someone who is comfortable in their unique strangeness, too. Th…
Relationships are coevolutionary loops - by Henrik Karlsson
All commands are requests, some with consequences for non-compliance.
Whatever you want - by ftlsid - cybermonk
Coming up with a response to how do you feel about…? is a lot like checking the color of a traffic light. It’s obvious that I’m not meaningfully in control of my feelings; I’m just the messenger. And abandoning the responsibility for managing emotions allows them to become properly complex, to interact and grow into structures that are terrifying and paradoxical and utterly free.
I am - by ftlsid - cybermonk
Textbooks in particular provide a way of connecting with our shared humanity. Pretty much anything you can wonder about, someone has asked questions about it before. Someone has thought of arguments, has written up a Wikipedia page. Knowing this makes me feel connected, not just to everyone alive today but to all the people who have ever existed. We’ve created (and are continuing to create) this global body of knowledge together.
Textbooks as a preventative for depression - by Kasra
The first hour of the Social Network is about making a CRUD app seem like sexy, the second is a Lifetime drama about a divorce improbably involving two heterosexual men.
Don't Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice | Kalzumeus Software
People who are skilled in negotiation make more than those who are not.
Don't Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice | Kalzumeus Software
Status in well-run businesses generally is awarded to people who successfully take credit for doing one of these things. (That can, but does not necessarily, entail actually doing them.)
Don't Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice | Kalzumeus Software
Engineers are hired to create business value, not to program things:
Don't Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice | Kalzumeus Software
There is great bounty in remaining sensitive to context
Welcome, ghosts - by Simon Sarris - The Map is Mostly Water
. There is a large danger in over-engineering your plan, and failing to respond to local conditions.
Welcome, ghosts - by Simon Sarris - The Map is Mostly Water
If you create a good product or process, and don’t constrain yourself too tightly, it will have other uses that you will discover later.
Welcome, ghosts - by Simon Sarris - The Map is Mostly Water
This is our pub, do you realize?
Welcome, ghosts - by Simon Sarris - The Map is Mostly Water
Knowledge and understanding will disseminate the truth: when you have few responsibilities, there is a lingering feeling of sprightly stagnation. Further, a growing languidness befalls your spirit, your vital force stifled by staticity. Such a fatigue is symptomatic of carrying too weightless a burden. Its corollary is a touch of an apparently sunken soul, leaving you in a state that could be compared to aimless wandering. An unabating laziness subdues your functioning, stripping you of your charge and turning you into a sufferer with a loser’s disposition, a victim of your own inadequacy.
A Bolt of a Man - The Art of Prudence
Man can, if providence permits, keep fluttering for the rest of time, in an attempt to guard his childlike and fanciful youth and undergo a drawn out and wonderful ‘freedom’, but such extrication from mature duty is no bolt for liberty, or happiness, or fulfilment, or significance, if that’s what man sincerely stands in need of to flourish.
A Bolt of a Man - The Art of Prudence
The same principle holds across all domains. People who launch successful companies, develop relationships with people they never would have otherwise met, apply to grants/internships/funding and so forth. So when there’s so much to gain and so little to lose, the question should never be why, it should always be why not?
Aim to get rejected often
a rejection did not say anything about who I am as a person or what my future would look like.
Aim to get rejected often
In fact, everything that Max did, from touching a spider, to trying to run across the road was his system for figuring out the inner workings of the world. And he was fine with looking stupid because he was fearless. And more importantly, because nothing was going compromise his ability to figure out why things are the way that they are.
Curiosity needs courage
That’s not to say that we have to pursue a goal purely for the end goal itself. In fact, we often pursue goals because of all of the tangential side benefits in addition to the actual goal. Like learning to become a better strategist in your quest to become a chess champion. Or a faster runner in your quest to make it to the NFL. However, being honest with yourself, like a muscle, is something that can only be strengthened by use.
Distinguishing goals from chores
It’s generally pretty easy to distinguish our chores from our goals, that is the “have to” from the “want to.” It’s often much harder to distinguish our true goals from those we pursue for reasons that are tangential to the goal itself.
Distinguishing goals from chores
I think this is an important distinction to make since in most instances, when we say “I want to do something,” we really mean some meta-variant of “I want to” like “I want to want to” or “I want to be seen wanting.”
Distinguishing goals from chores
Starting [at a young age] he’s read everything that he could find about business.
Curius / Onboarding