flâneur

Karan MJ

15 followers · 43 following · 2370 views

on the atlas — 221

highlights — 39

  • we often know how to make something, but not what to make.
    The pharma industry from Paul Janssen to today: why drugs got harder to develop and what we can do about it | Alex’s blog
  • RNA therapeutics are now coming into their own as well. Small interfering RNA — a technology capable of silencing production of specific proteins for long periods of time — is now finding multiple clinical applications. Inclisiran, a single injection that robustly knocks down PCSK9 and lowers cholesterol, only requires a single injection every 6 months compared to every 2 weeks for alirocumab. The adaptability of mRNA allowed the COVID-19 vaccines to be designed in two days on a computer after the virus sequence was made public. It’s easy to forget that prior to the pandemic it wasn’t clear th…
    The pharma industry from Paul Janssen to today: why drugs got harder to develop and what we can do about it | Alex’s blog
  • The sense that new drugs only have modest incremental benefit over drugs already widely considered as successful, such as Lipitor, and treatment effects on top of already effective treatments are smaller than treatment effects versus placebo.
    Eroom's law
  • Aristocratic tutoring was not focused on measurables. Historically, it usually involved a paid adult tutor, who was an expert in the field, spending significant time with a young child or teenager, instructing them but also engaging them in discussions, often in a live-in capacity, fostering both knowledge but also engagement with intellectual subjects and fields.
    Childhoods of exceptional people - by Henrik Karlsson
  • You can't skip the first five years of learning and expect to survive the next twenty.
    The machines are fine. I'm worried about us.
  • The problem isn't that we'll decide to stop thinking. The problem is that we'll barely notice when we do.
    The machines are fine. I'm worried about us.
  • We all know that time estimates are likely incorrect. The Navy developed the Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) method in the 1950s to try and account for this estimation error. Estimated_Task_Duration = (Optimistic_Estimate + 4 x Most_Likely_Estimate + Pessimistic_Estimate) / 6 Or in short form: E = (O + 4L + P) / 6 E: Estimate O: Optimistic L: Most Likely P: Pessimistic This approach gives a weighted average giving the most likely (L) estimate a four times advantage. This gives a better estimate than just using the most likely estimate. This is especially true when you start stac…
    Project Planning: Scheduling & Estimating Activity Duration - Robots For Roboticists
  • We must develop products that are so good, and so clearly better than what came before, that the world will have no choice but to buy them, tariffs or no tariffs.
    Overcoming India's technological cowardice
  • if every 3D edge in your model requires the creation of a C# object to store its ID, then the software is now using up more significantly memory than is required to efficiently store that information.
    Zoo CAD Engine Overview | Zoo
  • The process of doing research is chaotic, and the software should embrace that. Stream-of-consciousness notes, quick observations, voice memos — all fair game. No need for templated write-ups and rigid structure. The system should automatically extract key concepts and methods, making them discoverable without manual tagging. We have seen early versions of this idea: communities like OpenLabNotebooks tried to normalize transparency in day-to-day science. But the friction remains – logging entries still feels like a chore, and finding relevant past work is often harder than it should be. That i…
    Real Time Science
  • Your brain's worth billions. Build empires, not apps. While the world obsesses over the next GPT wrapper, we'll forge the next industrial revolution. This isn't a pipe dream. It's an imperative.
    UK's elite hardware talent is being wasted.
  • the goal is to be the voice of care and not the voice of judgement.
    boundaries (of others)
  • The best way to protect secrets is to never reveal them.
    Hiding Secrets in Android Apps
  • The best way to protect secrets is to never reveal them.
    Hiding Secrets in Android Apps
  • so we wrote our own high-performance serverless runtime based on gVisor
    Lambda on hard mode: Inside Modal's web infrastructure | Modal Blog
  • It’s important that our detection system is based on runtime program analysis. Twenty years ago Paul Graham observed that with email spam it is message itself, the data, that is an abuser’s Achilles heel. Spammers can steal email addresses, miners can steal credit cards. Both can change their metadata. But they cannot change their data. The message must scam, the program must mine.
    How to catch crypto miners using syscall signatures | Modal Blog
  • I don’t want to get to know people unless I’m going to keep knowing them.
    what can we expect from friendship? - by Ava
  • We have built up an instinctive habit of looking things up and seeing how other people have done it before trying it for ourselves. But the downside is that this habit it that it primes our brains to value our work in the context of the taste of others rather than of our own
    Taste is a guide for what is worthwhile
  • EEG signals have two types: scalp EEG and intracranial EEG (iEEG). Scalp EEG signals are usually collected with electrodes placed on the scalp using some sort of conductive gel after treating the scalp area with light abrasion in order to decrease the impedance resulting from dead skin cells.
    EEG seizure detection and prediction algorithms: a survey | EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing | Full Text
  • I've always liked Hamming's famous double-barrelled question: what are the most important problems in your field, and why aren't you working on one of them? It's a great way to shake yourself up. But it may be overfitting a bit. It might be at least as useful to ask yourself: if you could take a year off to work on something that probably wouldn't be important but would be really interesting, what would it be?
    The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius
  • This world is a child's playground before me A spectacle unfolds day and night before me
    Ghalib
  • The prison of life and the bondage of sorrow are the same Why should man be free of sorrow before dying?
    Ghalib
  • Researching to figure out what you are researching… is still research
    Here's to the fools who dream
  • Do not strive to uncover all of the answers right now. The answers can’t be given to you because you haven’t been able to live with them. What matters is to live everything. So live the questions for now. Perhaps then you will gradually, without noticing it, live your way into the answers, one distant day in the future.
    Creativity requires solitude | DKB Show
  • One cold winter's day, a number of porcupines huddled together quite closely in order through their mutual warmth to prevent themselves from being frozen. But they soon felt the effect of their quills on one another, which made them again move apart. Now when the need for warmth once more brought them together, the drawback of the quills was repeated so that they were tossed between two evils, until they had discovered the proper distance from which they could best tolerate one another. Thus the need for society which springs from the emptiness and monotony of men's lives, drives them together…
    Hedgehog's dilemma
  • one is recommended to use moderation in affairs with others both because of self-interest, as well as out of consideration for others.
    Hedgehog's dilemma
  • Do whatever — but make it uncomfortable (like leaving prison!) and make it count.
    Moxie Marlinspike >> Blog >> Career Advice
  • Once you start working full time, though, it’s just One Long Semester that you’re expected to attend for the rest of your life.
    Moxie Marlinspike >> Blog >> Career Advice
  • Be careful not to discover a career before you’ve discovered yourself.
    Moxie Marlinspike >> Blog >> Career Advice
  • but the simpler lesson I draw from it as an individual is just be careful what job you take, because your job will change you.
    Moxie Marlinspike >> Blog >> Career Advice
  • WiFi+blockchain+assassination market+facial recognition CNNs+social networks+self-driving cars+ride-sharing. (A simpler version would just be legally requiring or paying car manufacturers like Tesla to run Bloom filters in the background on facial embeddings, and phoning home to the police/​security agencies. This would sell well in China & the UK.) Priority orders would be executed by drones. The Samsung Android app will be named “Death Note”.
    Startup Ideas · Gwern.net
  • An SDK for hacking smartphone speakers into emitting infrasound⁠, bypassing any OS limitations; can sell to Hacking Team for use on dissidents^Wcriminal-terrorists.
    Startup Ideas · Gwern.net
  • 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
  • Don’t chase status. Status without substance doesn’t work for long and is unfulfilling
    The days are long but the decades are short - Sam Altman
  • How do you know that what you’re doing is cool?” I find that almost anytime I try to do something because I think other people think it’s cool, I fail. Whereas if I do something that I truly care about, my enthusiasm attracts people. There are many things I didn’t think were cool until I met someone who was passionate about it
    How to build meaningful relationships after college
  • The whole future lies in uncertainty – live immediately.7
    Life Is Not Short
  • Life is long enough for you to achieve your wildest dreams. You’re just so busy wasting it that you get to the end without living much of it.1
    Life Is Not Short
  • When you meet those people, work with them. I’ve both experienced firsthand and heard from others that following this advice – working with the people who bet on you – is more valuable than simply working at the right company with the right brand name on the right project.
    Bet on the sprinters | thesephist.com
  • So find the sprinters around you, and help them out and work together before anyone else notices them. You might not get the rush of standing next to titans of industry or the big, famous names in your field today, but if you’re patient enough to grow and learn alongside them for a few years, you’ll find yourself surrounded by the people everyone else now wants to be around. This is how you build a truly valuable personal network – not just by knowing the people who are already successful, but more importantly, by helping the right people before anybody else will.
    Bet on the sprinters | thesephist.com