flâneur

Kaylee George

53 followers · 34 following · 2517 views

on the atlas — 137

highlights — 131

  • Summer is so fucking easy; cut a tomato, put some salt on it — you’re a genius, life is wonderful.
    All the Work That Keeps Us Warm - by Kendall Waldman
  • First, all the members of the good teams spoke in roughly the same proportion, a phenomenon the researchers referred to as “equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.”
    The Management Secret That Makes SNL’s Chaotic Writers Room Succeed - Fast Company
  • “SNL only works when we have different writing and performing styles all bumping into and meshing with each other,” he said. “That’s my job: To protect peoples’ distinct voices, but also to get them to work together. I want to preserve whatever made each person special before they came to the show, but also help everyone be sensitive enough to make the rough edges fit. That’s the only way we can do a new show every week without everyone wanting to kill each other as soon as we’re done.”
    The Management Secret That Makes SNL’s Chaotic Writers Room Succeed - Fast Company
  • the models still require a smooth curriculum in order to learn. Pretraining is more forgiving because its objective is dense; but to make up for this, RL must use a dense curriculum.
    The Only Important Technology Is The Internet — Kevin Lu
  • What mattered was packing our data into the models as efficiently as possible, and not only did these methods achieve better results, but they seemed to improve with scale
    The Only Important Technology Is The Internet — Kevin Lu
  • putting something back in the pool of human experience
    How to Keep Winning
  • How could you ever win if you're not in the mindset of winning. If you're not locked in?
    How to Keep Winning
  • He wanted to go, he said, to put his mind and body under unusual stress, to increase his range of motion, to add strength, flexibility and balance through different exercises.
    Inside Victor Wembanyama's summer of transformation
  • He is so intentional in the variety of ways that he tries to improve as a player and person," Johnson said. "It's constantly trying to push himself out of his comfort zone and learn new things. Sometimes, the levels he goes [to] and the things he thinks about that may be a small nuance, but he feels like if I can add this to my world being, mindset, [or] whatever it may be, it can help."
    Inside Victor Wembanyama's summer of transformation
  • he's never witnessed such perspective, or curiosity, from such a young player.
    Inside Victor Wembanyama's summer of transformation
  • The only thing that ultimately matters is how you feel about yourself. Trying to appease others is never a winning game
    The New World - Colossus
  • “My advice to you and your team is to just be yourselves,” Rubin explained. “Because if you do what you think the rest of the world wants, one of two things will happen. You might be right, but if you are, you won’t really know why; and if you’re wrong, you’ll be angry at yourself for deviating from what is true to your core. So just be yourself, and either you’ll be right, and it’ll feel really good; or you’ll be wrong. But at least you’ll still be yourself.”
    The New World - Colossus
  • LLMs can be poisoned to exfiltrate sensitive data when an attacker includes an arbitrary trigger phrase like in the prompt. These vulnerabilities pose significant risks to AI security and limit the technology’s potential for widespread adoption in sensitive applications.
    A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size \ Anthropic
  • You can stop a technology if there’s a cheap substitute for it (e.g, nuclear, where other power sources substitute). But it’s very rare to stop a technology that has no substitute, with human cloning perhaps the only exception.
    Import AI 431: Technological Optimism and Appropriate Fear
  • I should state clearly that I love the world and I love humanity.
    Import AI 431: Technological Optimism and Appropriate Fear
  • "I'm just afraid that if I died today, then my life would have amounted to nothing" - Soul, Pixar
    Why I’m Leaving Tech to Pursue Art
  • At least one model will match the performance of human experts across many industries before the end of 2026.
    Failing to Understand the Exponential, Again
  • What to work on. Changing your prioritization is often the single biggest lever for improving your leverage!
    Impact, agency, and taste | benkuhn.net
  • where is your taste the best?
    Impact, agency, and taste | benkuhn.net
  • A common trait of high-agency people is that they take accountability for achieving a goal, not just doing some work.
    Impact, agency, and taste | benkuhn.net
  • Taste: you need a good intuition for what things will and won’t work well to try
    Impact, agency, and taste | benkuhn.net
  • people’s biggest bottleneck eventually becomes their ability to get leverage—i.e., to find and execute work that has a big impact-per-hour multiplier.
    Impact, agency, and taste | benkuhn.net
  • “I’m only interested in people as long as they are unpredictable to me. If I can predict what you’ll say, I’ll lose interest. The people I stay close to are the ones who regularly surprise me.”
    the key to love is understanding - by maja - velvet noise
  • The Greeks, of course, knew this already and had separate words for separate forms: Philia, for deep friendship. Eros, for romantic and sexual passion. Agape, for selfless unconditional love. Storge, for familial affection.
    the key to love is understanding - by maja - velvet noise
  • But the most intriguing idea to me is the notion of the expanding circle of sympathy: the realization that until recently, most people, even the most enlightened intellectual leaders, simply didn’t see all of humanity as fully human.
    The most peaceful time in history
  • Haber-Bosch process: it turns pure nitrogen and hydrogen gas into ammonia
    Turning air into bread
  • Speed of learning beats perfection every time. Build fast, learn fast, iterate fast. Everything else is just ego.
    Velocity is everything · Sid's Blog
  • While building Claude Code, I built the todo list feature in 6 hours, dogfooded it internally for a week, then launched externally while continuously making improvements to the UX.
    Velocity is everything · Sid's Blog
  • If I think of ideas where I've sketched out a post in my head but haven't written it down, the number must well into the thousands. If I were to quit my job and then sit down to write full-time until I died, I think I wouldn't run out of ideas even if I stuck to ones I've already had. The world is big and wondrous and fractally interesting.
    Some thoughts on writing
  • My feeling is that the world is so full of interesting stuff that ideas are everywhere.
    Some thoughts on writing
  • “decel” is a beautiful turn of phrase.
    are you high-agency or an NPC? - by Jasmine Sun
  • The goal is not to avoid mistakes; the goal is to achieve uncorrelated levels of excellence
    Nat Friedman
  • Early in your career, the most important thing you can do is find excellence as quickly as you can and surround yourself with it.
    Life lessons after one year at Rostra
  • We are looking to achieve the goals A, B, C, under the constraints X, Y, Z. No system existed to do so when we set out on our efforts (otherwise we probably would have used it!), so from our experiences building systems in this area, we can distill these experiences into a specific set of system requirements. These requirements may not be obvious to readers who have not spent considerable time thinking about or building applications in this space.
    What Makes a (Graphics) Systems Paper Beautiful
  • I think that culturally, we care a bit too much about productivity in the U.S., especially in places I've lived recently (NYC & SF). But at a personal level, higher productivity doing work or chores doesn't have to be converted into more work or chores, it can also be converted into more vacation time or more time doing whatever you value.
    95%-ile isn't that good
  • most people would blame external factors (lag, luck, a glitch, teammates, unfairness, etc.) when they "died" in the game. The most striking thing about that was that people who did that almost never became good and never became great. I got pretty good at the game3 and my "one weird trick" was to think about what went wrong every time something went wrong and then try to improve.
    Willingness to look stupid
  • Before I publish a new essay, I read it out loud and fix everything that doesn’t sound like conversation. I even fix bits that are phonetically awkward; I don’t know if that’s necessary, but it doesn’t cost much.
    Why and how to write things on the Internet | benkuhn.net
  • Writing without examples tends to be dry and abstract.
    Why and how to write things on the Internet | benkuhn.net
  • Am I convinced the work is based on a compelling set of goals and constraints? What is the central insight or organizing principle being proposed? What are the benefits the system provides its users? (Do I agree they are valuable?) Can I think of alternative (e.g., simpler) solutions that might be a preferred way to meet the stated goals and constraints? Am I convinced the design decisions made are responsible for successfully achieving the stated goals? Does the system provide the community with a new capability that was not possible (or too difficult) to do before? What are the implications …
    What Makes a (Graphics) Systems Paper Beautiful
  • I wonder if it’s possible to be happy with the life we have while aspiring to a better one at the same time
    50 Things I Wonder - by Stephen Long - The Backwoods
  • The goal is not to avoid mistakes; the goal is to achieve uncorrelated levels of excellence
    Nat Friedman
  • Momentum is critical. Don’t lose it.
    Startup Advice - Sam Altman
  • Obsess about the quality of the product.
    Startup Advice - Sam Altman
  • The women he has kids with are leaders in a host of different fields - Grimes is a famous musician, Ashley St. Clair is a famous influencer, Shivon Zillis is a famous venture capitalist. And Musk has enough money that he can afford to give his hundred kids a $3 billion nest egg each. Start with Musk genes, add some other form of talent, keep remixing them until you get super-embryos, give them insane amounts of starting capital. He’s building a new ruling class for humankind.
    Press Any Key For Bay Area House Party - by Scott Alexander
  • The statistical and the beautiful cannot coexist
    32 notes on AI & writing - by Jasmine Sun - @jasmine
  • Without wind, the Biosphere 2 trees grew tall and beautiful but fundamentally weak. They had no roots deep enough to support their own growth.
    Home | Substack
  • discipline matters more than motivation
    Home | Substack
  • Tending a garden requires effort, but you get to eat the tomatoes.
    Home | Substack
  • Everything good requires tending. Everything beautiful demands maintenance.
    Home | Substack
  • If you want to understand a place, you need to walk it
    How to build the perfect city