flâneur

Kasra Koushan

5 followers · 2 following · 889 views

on the atlas — 21

highlights — 53

  • The analogy for AI would be for the model to dig into its own weights and training data and change what it learned from that data. Currently there is no good way to do that, which is why developing models is so expensive
    On the unconscious and AI - by Ludwig Yeetgenstein
  • We say that LLMs “hallucinate” when they make false claims, but in fact they are always hallucinating, whether or not their output can be verified to be true.
    On the unconscious and AI - by Ludwig Yeetgenstein
  • The way I now like to view LLMs and generative AI models is as the universal unconscious.
    On the unconscious and AI - by Ludwig Yeetgenstein
  • Humans are pretty bad at predicting what exactly will make us happy and even worse at admitting when our desires shape-shift.
    falling into life - by Nix 🕊 - starting from nix
  • You can’t design a path with an imperfect world. The map always melts.
    falling into life - by Nix 🕊 - starting from nix
  • Our whole lives we search for significance only to find that we can’t predict where it’ll come from next.
    falling into life - by Nix 🕊 - starting from nix
  • When you are especially good at people-pleasing, rarely does anyone ever say: hey, do you need anything? because to do so would be to place your needs above theirs. Some (conscious, aware) people *might* do this but more often than not, people are more preoccupied with their own needs and desires than yours. This is especially true if you’ve accidentally surrounded yourself with people who expect you to prioritize them over yourself.
    you might disappoint people (and that's okay) - by Isabel
  • Hierarchical architectures are a strong inductive bias in learning and we have reason to believe they are prominent in brain neural networks.
    So how does learning work?
  • Compared to what we know at the synaptic level, there is still very little clarity on what happens at a network level in order for learning to occur.
    So how does learning work?
  • Synaptic plasticity can be thought of as the atomic subunit of learning. We discovered this fairly early on, as scientists in the late 1800s found that an adult and a baby have roughly the same number of neurons. In other words, new knowledge could not be the result of new neuron production, and information must instead be contained in the connections between neurons.
    So how does learning work?
  • I suspect this is all an outgrowth of some underlying trait of mine, which is that I am a person who is difficult to cajole. If I sternly tell myself to do something, I will refuse myself within a few days. This has advantages and disadvantages. The disadvantage is that I spent a lot of time flaking out of jobs, not doing particularly well at school, and, generally, underachieving.
    What maximum productivity looks like for me
  • The problem remains: we are still producing an unbearable volume of information; we still need some way to sort through it. The regime of the hipster was an inefficient way of sorting it; it died. The regime of the nerd was an overefficient way of sorting it; it is dying.
    Numb at the Lodge
  • People used to like superhero stories for a very simple reason. We are boring and frustrated; we’d like to be more than what we are, but instead everyone is somehow less than themselves. You can feel your existence fraying away at its edges. Whatever life should have been, it isn’t this: not plasterboard bureaucracies staffed by people with irritating vocal tics; not slow-withering marriages, not hair falling out, cartilage wearing thin, dreams unfulfilled, places unseen, books unwritten and unread; not Netflix automatically queuing up the next episode; not this couch, this laundry, this glum …
    Numb at the Lodge
  • They are pure. The deep, profound, almost spiritual purity of a four-month-old puppy, astounded and delighted by a pile of its own shit.
    Numb at the Lodge
  • A kind of inverted snobbery; a snobbery against value as such. It’s not enough that the things they like are, by definition, globally hegemonic, blotting out any other form of mainstream cultural production—if there is even one person who still tries to consider things by some measure of quality, it’s like a needle sticking sharp in their side, a constant tiny unbearable pain.
    Numb at the Lodge
  • For the last decade, mass culture has been nerd culture, and a nerd is someone who likes things that aren’t good.
    Numb at the Lodge
  • He poured out half the juice and replaced it with vodka, before discovering that this cranberry juice was the unsweetened kind, and that drinking even a sip of it instantly dessicated your mouth and made your tongue convulse and sent sharp waves of acid pain zipping horribly through your mucous membranes and into your brain.
    Numb at the Lodge
  • But these algorithms tend to work in a very particular way. At best, they present you with a caricature of yourself that you then have to conform to. At worst, their processes of cumulative reinforcement serve you up the exact same bilge as everyone else, but shrouded in the aura of individuality.
    Numb at the Lodge
  • Around the turn of the century, the world contained around 50 exabytes of data: from the first Mesopotamian documents pressed into clay tablets, through five thousand years of books and pamphlets and diaries, to Shrek. Today, there’s around 65 zettabytes. A zettabyte is a thousand exabytes; an exabyte is a billion gigabytes. (Every word ever spoken by anyone who ever lived would come up to about 5 exabytes: a rounding error. One molecule of DNA contains about a gigabyte and a half: the instructions for building you take up about as much data as Shrek in 1080p.) Almost all the information ever …
    Numb at the Lodge
  • They flourished in a brief gap: after we started producing impossible volumes of information, but before we had the technological means of efficiently processing it.
    Numb at the Lodge
  • For decades athletes had failed to run a mile in less than 4 minutes — until, in 1954, Roger Bannister did it. Almost immediately after (well, 46 days actually), another runner did it. Then, within a year, three runners broke the 4-minute mark in a single race. Once it was known that running a mile under 4 minutes was possible, it became a common achievement.
    Crazy Science Idea: Tell People Something Is Possible When You Actually Have No Clue
  • We talked for about thirty minutes. I’d mentioned that I often could hear her out of my window - was her dog’s full name? She could barely stop laughing to explain. I’m not sure I could convey to you what it was like to make her laugh. Sympathetic joy, maybe, in a way I’d never really experienced it except maybe when interacting with young children. Happiness for her happiness that had nothing to do with me and counted more than mine ever did.
    The Quiet, Creeping Deaths of Stability - by Jamie Ryan
  • That first night we talked I was nervous - I may have even been shaking a little bit, a subtle tremor in my hands and voice. With another person I think it would have ruined the interaction - the awkward, halting conversations I was used to having - but she wasn’t put off by at it all. She was curious about me, as she seemed to be about almost everyone. I could tell she was very sensitive. Good natured; even a little rambunctious. She knew how to meet me in conversation in a way that I’d never felt before.
    The Quiet, Creeping Deaths of Stability - by Jamie Ryan
  • The ambitious person is in a value-stasis: they are not trying to grasp new values, they are acting with the values they already have. They take themselves to know what they should strive for and take steps to get there. The researcher who wants to find the cure for cancer is an ambitious person, for example. But he is not an aspirant. The aspirant is someone who recognizes that the values they currently have are lacking in some way. They want to move themselves toward a better valuational condition.
    aspiration - by idil - by Zeus, maybe!
  • The thing is, when we are anxious to figure things out, we opt for easy answers. And it’s true that some values are a lot easier to appreciate from the outside than others, especially when they are values everyone agrees to. I don’t have to question whether earning a lot of money would be a valuable thing to do—I do have to question the value of pursuing philosophy. The same is true for a path that many around me are pursuing, like the finance/consulting route, medical school, or law school. If everyone is doing it, affirming its value doesn’t just fall on me: I can relieve myself of the respo…
    aspiration - by idil - by Zeus, maybe!
  • That’s why figuring out how we want to live requires aspiration: we have to realize that we have a limited grasp of what is valuable and stay open to discovery and change to be able to appreciate new values. We have to embrace being lost and explore things whose value we are not certain of, hoping that we can learn as we go.
    aspiration - by idil - by Zeus, maybe!
  • The “you have to try it and see” property is also counter-intuitive; it implies that your initial idea often doesn’t matter except as a starting point. This concept is often taken to mean “ideas don’t matter”, which is not what I’m saying here. It’s more like: the idea determines what maze you’re exploring, which is important — if you start out trying to find a cure for diabetes you’re unlikely to end up working on a payroll SaaS company, for example — but it’s going to change as you go along and learn more about reality.
    puzzles - Nabeel S. Qureshi
  • Scientist-brain is unreasonably thorough and wants to check every single case; is very curious about things and willing to follow that curiosity, but doesn’t have a natural check on this process; and prefers working on things that are interesting to them, finding it extremely painful if this is not the case. This is great when you are doing science, because you need the ‘driver’ to be curiosity, and small details matter.
    puzzles - Nabeel S. Qureshi
  • But it’s possible that from Newton’s perspective, both of these kind of questions were equally mysterious, and for all he knew he could find answers to both kinds by trying really hard! [3] Before Newton, maybe people were more confident about the theological questions – (“yes, obviously the soul is immortal”) – than about the physical kind – (“well, I have no idea what makes the planets move!”). Newton made the mysterious banal.
    puzzles - Nabeel S. Qureshi
  • Real life is not this clean; frequently you dive into an idea maze and the answer turns out to be “it’s too hard for these structural reasons, and unless you fix these structural reasons there isn’t a sufficiently scalable thing here” or something like that — this seems to be the fate of a lot of startups that tackle sectors like education or health, for example. This can be painful and suck up years of people’s lives.
    puzzles - Nabeel S. Qureshi
  • This is one thing that makes founding hard: what drives you to search is blind faith that a solution is possible, but you also have to know when to call off the search, and it’s hard to calibrate when to do this because the feedback signal is sparse.
    puzzles - Nabeel S. Qureshi
  • This is another area where I find that the personality of founders diverges from some smart engineers or scientists I’ve known: the scientist/engineers are good at analyzing the idea and finding reasons it won’t work (witness the negative Hacker News comments in virtually every successful startup launch, e.g. Dropbox), because that’s how they’re trained to think. This skeptical mindset is adaptive in the engineering and science context — you have to find all the weak points in a system or theory, or else you’re not doing your job right.
    puzzles - Nabeel S. Qureshi
  • The Bayesian answer to underdetermination involves, instead of treating hypotheses as only either central or auxiliary, dealing with them in a “graded manner”, each hypothesis—every link in Godfrey-Smith’s “complicated conjunction of statements”—taking credit in proportion to how much of the data it’s “responsible” for. Since more central hypotheses take responsibility for more evidence, they tend to be epistemically dug in, and are harder to dislodge than relatively more auxiliary hypotheses.
    Book Review: What Makes Us Smart - by Amanuel Sahilu
  • why I fell in love with cognitive science to begin with, that it wasn’t so much for improving how I think as for uncovering general mechanisms of thought.
    Book Review: What Makes Us Smart - by Amanuel Sahilu
  • Effective persuasion requires an abundance of patience, along with caution not to touch the live-wire that is most people’s deeply held beliefs.
    Book Review: What Makes Us Smart - by Amanuel Sahilu
  • The type of person I’m assuming we’re looking for here is 1) someone that you will find fascinating to talk to after you’ve talked for 20,000 hours, 2) you feel comfortable with them talking through the hardest and most painful decisions you will face in your life, and 3) the conversation is wildly generative for both of you, in that it brings you out, helps you become.
    Looking for Alice - by Henrik Karlsson - Escaping Flatland
  • But when Gertrude Stein declined to label her desire as lesbian, she was, as I understand it, saying something like this: thinking in categories would interfere with my ability to freely pattern-match for the particular type of individual I resonate with.
    Looking for Alice - by Henrik Karlsson - Escaping Flatland
  • The human default is sleepwalking.
    In praise of blowing up your life - by Sasha Chapin
  • When I left home, I was searching for beauty. Now, having received adequate reassurance that it’s all around, I can stop looking, satisfied with the knowledge that it exists wherever I choose to find it.
    juice, egg, bagel
  • I’m attempting to reintroduce myself to San Francisco in a way that begets optimism instead of tight-jawed determination. I’m trying to construct a life that bolsters my mirth and sincerity, and my feeling of oneness with the world.
    juice, egg, bagel
  • Recently, life has been hectic, one thing after another in a coursing stream. Certainly, it's mostly good news, even some gems worthy of celebration. But I haven't taken the time to absorb any of it. As a result, things feels unreal and sensorily dim, like hearing a story about myself as a child that I have no personal recollection of.
    juice, egg, bagel
  • This can occur as a result of feeling time-constrained, pressured to take on as much as possible, or pushed by hustle culture/FOMO/misapplied zeal to do several things poorly instead of one thing well.
    juice, egg, bagel
  • This intuition about love as a physical force is completely absent from our culture (except maybe in Interstellar, where it makes a deus ex machina appearance). But it’s the core mechanic of the medieval world.
    Reviving the Discarded Image - by Santi Ruiz
  • But though neither statement can be taken literally, it does not follow that it makes no difference which is used. On the imaginative and emotional level it makes a great difference whether, with the medievals, we project upon the universe our strivings and desires, or with the moderns, our police-system and our traffic regulations.
    Reviving the Discarded Image - by Santi Ruiz
  • Eternity is quite distinct from perpetuity… perpetuity is only the attainment of an endless series of moments, each lost as soon as it is attained. Eternity is the actual and timeless fruition of illimitable life.
    Reviving the Discarded Image - by Santi Ruiz
  • If anything, they were a more literary society than we are today. It’s a counterintuitive position, as we’re far more likely to be literate than your given 12-century Briton. But Lewis means literary in a slightly different manner: the written word was accorded far more respect and authority than it is now.
    Reviving the Discarded Image - by Santi Ruiz
  • “The geocentric universe is not in the least anthropocentric.” We often get this wrong about the medievals, assuming they thought Earth was central because it’s special. But it’s not, at all. “If we ask why, nevertheless, the Earth is central, Chalcidius has an unexpected answer. It is so placed in order that the celestial dance may have a centre to revolve about - in fact, as an aesthetic convenience for the celestial beings.” Earth is here to be a mechanical pivot point for far greater beings.
    Reviving the Discarded Image - by Santi Ruiz
  • 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 h
    Curius / Onboarding
  • It takes time to grieve and it is far easier to process Bob's death when you can talk about it with Bob.
    A Protocol for Dying - Hintjens.com
  • As a young person, though, I think the best thing you can do is to ignore all of that and simply observe the older people working there. They are the future you. Do not think that you will be substantially different. Look carefully at how they spend their time at work and outside of work, because this is also almost certainly how your life will look. It sounds obvious, but it’s amazing how often young people imagine a different projection for themselves.
    Moxie Marlinspike >> Blog >> Career Advice