flâneur

victor forissier

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on the atlas — 43

highlights — 30

  • But although the ideal larval market is oneself and one's peers, that's not the only kind. A larval market might also be regional, for example. You build something to serve one location, and then expand to others. The crucial feature of the initial market is that it exist. That may seem like an obvious point, but the lack of it is the biggest flaw in most startup ideas. There have to be some people who want what you're building right now, and want it so urgently that they're willing to use it, bugs and all, even though you're a small company they've never heard of. There don't have to be many,…
    Billionaires Build
  • I went for gameboy emulator developement then kernel developement. It was waaaay too hard for me at first but after I struggled for a few hours things becomes clearer.
    The root of burnout - Lancelot Blog
  • I started to dislike programming. Every time I had edit a file I waited for the copilot request to finish and prayed the prediction was correct so I wouldn’t have to write it by myself.
    The root of burnout - Lancelot Blog
  • I live in the command line, sometimes wake up at 3AM because I NEED to write that program which will make me understand this or that concept. I love programming. But last year, I thought I didn’t anymore.
    The root of burnout - Lancelot Blog
  • This one is different, it doesn’t always happen, but I think it’s incredibly common among startup founders, and I suspect this is the reason why a lot of founders have a kind of dead look in the eye behind the fake smile while saying: “Everything is going great, we expect to restart growing next month !”.
    The root of burnout - Lancelot Blog
  • The most obvious way to take advantage of superlinear returns for performance is by doing exceptionally good work. At the far end of the curve, incremental effort is a bargain. All the more so because there's less competition at the far end — and not just for the obvious reason that it's hard to do something exceptionally well, but also because people find the prospect so intimidating that few even try. Which means it's not just a bargain to do exceptional work, but a bargain even to try to.
    Superlinear Returns
  • “One man whose name means ‘a multitude’. That is the kabbalistic lesson: a single good man is equivalent to a multitude of good men. Because he can convince others, set up incentives, build institutions, drag the rest of the world kicking and screaming. If I had been with Abraham, I would not have stopped at ten people. I would have told God to save the city for the sake of one righteous man, and God would have done it, because one man can be a great multitude when kabbalistically necessary.”
    Unsong
  • But the trait that is most meaningful is the hardest to describe. It is the fire in the eyes, the ferocity of speech and action that is the physical manifestation of seriousness. It is the belief that God or the universe has bestowed upon you an immense task that no one else can accomplish but you. It is a holy war waged against the laws of physics. It is the burden of having to upend sometimes hundreds of years of entrenched interests to accomplish a noble goal.
    The Case for American Seriousness
  • It is the fire in the eyes, the ferocity of speech and action that is the physical manifestation of seriousness. It is the belief that God or the universe has bestowed upon you an immense task that no one else can accomplish but you.
    The Case for American Seriousness
  • “It turns out that writing about your values is one of the most effective psychological interventions ever studied. In the short term, writing about personal values makes people feel more powerful, in control, proud, and strong. It also makes them feel more loving, connected, and empathetic toward others. It increases pain tolerance, enhances self-control, and reduces unhelpful rumination after a stressful experience. In the long term, writing about values has been shown to boost GPAs, reduce doctor visits, improve mental health, and help with everything from weight loss to quitting smoking an…
    Personal Values: A Research-Backed Way to Manage Stress
  • By extension, this means that the most important factor determining success is the user experience: the best distributors/aggregators/market-makers win by providing the best experience, which earns them the most consumers/users, which attracts the most suppliers, which enhances the user experience in a virtuous cycle.
    Aggregation Theory – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
  • g [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 dra
    Curius / Onboarding
  • But surprisingly, there is a single best solution to this problem, even if you are playing against an opponent who, like Professor Quirrell, plays “one level higher than you.”
    Nash Equilibria and Schelling Points - LessWrong
  • An intermediate stratum, above the ordinary scientist but below the ordinary CEO, is that of, say, partners at a non-big-name venture capital firm. The way their aura feels to me, is that they can hold up one end of an interesting conversation, but they don't sound very original, and they don't sparkle with extra life force.
    Competent Elites - LessWrong
  • I thought this was a poor analogy, and was going to point out some flaws during the Q&A. But Steve Jurvetson, who was in line before me, proceeded to demolish the argument even more thoroughly. Jurvetson pointed out the evolutionary tradeoff between virulence and transmission that keeps natural viruses in check, talked about how greater interconnectedness led to larger pandemics—it was very nicely done, demolishing the surface analogy by correct reference to deeper biological details. I was shocked, meeting Steve Jurvetson, because from everything I'd read about venture capitalists before then…
    Competent Elites - LessWrong
  • a well-designed system makes it easy to do the right things and annoying (but not impossible) to do the wrong things. If we design our applications properly, our users should be inexorably drawn into the pit of success. Some may take longer than others, but they should all get there eventually.
    Falling Into The Pit of Success
  • Doing these tasks becomes a way of not doing the things higher up on the list. With this sort of appropriate task structure, the procrastinator becomes a useful citizen. Indeed, the procrastinator can even acquire, as I have, a reputation for getting a lot done.
    Structured Procrastination
  • Andreessen told me, “I needed Netscape to work, it had to work—it was my one-way door—so I was absolutely intolerant of anything that got in the way”—meaning, he clari fi ed, “people.” He could never relax: “I am very paranoid. And the down cycle hurt a lot more than the up cycle felt good.”
    The+Mind+of+Marc+Andreessen++The+New+Yorker.pdf
  • One of the most expressive moments of my conversation with SBF came when asking about retention. He responded, forcefully: We want to be in the position where we never lose a customer. If we lose a customer we fucked up. And I want to figure out what or why they chose a platform other than ours. And what we can do to be better.
    FTX Trilogy, Part 2: Speedrun | The Generalist
  • Maybe even more crazily, FTX relies on just a handful of engineers. How many? Six. No, that's not a typo, but the actual dev headcount shared by an FTX employee
    FTX Trilogy, Part 2: Speedrun | The Generalist
  • I approach software with a deep-seated belief that computers and software systems can be understood. … In some ways, this belief feels radical today. Modern software and hardware systems contain almost unimaginable complexity amongst many distinct layers, each building atop each other. … In the face of this complexity, it’s easy to assume that there’s just too much to learn, and to adopt the mental shorthand that the systems we work with are best treated as black boxes, not to be understood in any detail. I argue against that approach. You will never understand every detail of the implementati…
    Essays on programming I think about a lot | benkuhn.net
  • At the end of the day it’s all about building product, community and team, so that’s what we kept doing.
    Started From The Bottom - from nobody to unicorn in 3 years
  • The book actually has a story that touches on this point in a kind of hilarious way. Von Neumann’s friend, fellow European Jewish emigre, and fellow Manhattan Project physicist Stanislaw Ulam contracted a case of viral encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain. His doctors told him that he should “rest his brain”, ie avoid thinking too hard. A desperate Ulam tried to distract himself by playing solitaire, but couldn’t help wondering about the probabilities of winning. Failing to solve the problem with any statistical trick then known, he was unable to prevent himself from developing what is n…
    Book Review: The Man From The Future - by Scott Alexander
  • Although John could get lost in thought, he was far from demanding perfect silence. He reported doing his best work in chaotic environments, and at Princeton “he received complaints for regularly playing extremely loud German march music on his phonograph, which distracted those in neighboring offices, including Albert Einstein, from their work”. Most surprising, at least to me, John von Neumann was reportedly quite fun to be around - the life of the party. He used his prodigious memory not just for mathematical theorems but for an almost limitless amount of jokes and gossip. You can find a li…
    Book Review: The Man From The Future - by Scott Alexander
  • Granting that von Neumann was not a nerd, was he a psychopath? This has been a matter of more debate. His detractors called him “cold”, “calculating”, and “ruthless”, and pointed out that his game theory work, while brilliant, tended to focus on the most cutthroat scenarios (it was he who invented the term “zero-sum game”). While some of his Manhattan Project collaborators came to regret or at least agonize over their role in inventing the Bomb, von Neumann was disinclined to waste time questioning past decisions. Instead, he goaded the government to get to work building bigger, deadlier hydro…
    Book Review: The Man From The Future - by Scott Alexander
  • He had the scientist's passion for learning and discovery for its own sake and the genius's ego-driven concern for the significance and durability of his own contributions. The second was the critical importance of an environment of political freedom for the pursuit of the first, and for the welfare of mankind in general.
    Book Review: The Man From The Future - by Scott Alexander
  • Cryptographic Verification > Official Confirmation. Perhaps the most important arena in which the Network is stronger than the state is in the nature of truth itself. As incredible as it may sound, the blockchain is the most important development in history since the advent of writing itself, as it’s a cryptographically verifiable, highly replicated, unfalsifiable, and provably complete digital record of a system. It’s the ultimate triumph of the technological truth view of history, as there are now technical and financial incentives for passing down true facts, regardless of the sociopolitica…
    God, State, Network | The Network State
  • Because as Assange put it, no amount of violence can solve certain kinds of math problems. So it doesn’t matter how many nuclear weapons you have; if property or information is secured by cryptography, the state can’t seize it without getting the solution to an equation.
    God, State, Network | The Network State
  • 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
  • “I don’t care what you think about me. I don’t think about you at all.”
    The Strength of Being Misunderstood - Sam Altman