flâneur

Ahmed Saheed

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on the atlas — 99

highlights — 99

  • cast your mind, instead, to any friends who are soon to set off on summer adventures. In what condition do you expect to find them when they return? They may speak of their travel as though it were transformative, a “once in a lifetime” experience, but will you be able to notice a difference in their behavior, their beliefs, their moral compass? Will there be any difference at all?
    The Case Against Travel | The New Yorker
  • The single most important fact about tourism is this: we already know what we will be like when we return. A vacation is not like immigrating to a foreign country, or matriculating at a university, or starting a new job, or falling in love. We embark on those pursuits with the trepidation of one who enters a tunnel not knowing who she will be when she walks out. The traveller departs confident that she will come back with the same basic interests, political beliefs, and living arrangements. Travel is a boomerang. It drops you right where you started.
    The Case Against Travel | The New Yorker
  • “It’s about being forced to sum up. Looking at your life. Asking yourself if you’ve truly lived it. Asking yourself what you’ve really got to leave behind. This is something everybody has to face. It’s hard to face. But if you face it now, and make whatever changes you need to make, you’re going to have a shot at dying peaceful.
    Joan Didion’s Notes on Therapy | The New Yorker
  • In order to make machines significantly easier to use, it has been proposed (to try) to design machines that we could instruct in our native tongues. this would, admittedly, make the machines much more complicated, but, it was argued, by letting the machine carry a larger share of the burden, life would become easier for us. It sounds sensible provided you blame the obligation to use a formal symbolism as the source of your difficulties. But is the argument valid? I doubt.
    E.W.Dijkstra Archive: On the foolishness of "natural language programming". (EWD 667)
  • you can't think well without writing well, and you can't write well without reading well. and i mean that last "well" in both senses. you have to be good at reading, and read good things.
    The Need to Read
  • Pick a language that most programmers consider weird but whose median user is smart, and then focus on the differences between this language and the intersection of popular languages. What can you say in this language that would be impossibly inconvenient to say in others? In the process of learning how to say things you couldn't previously say, you'll probably be learning how to think things you couldn't previously think.
    Weird Languages
  • . But if you stay stuck at a certain point where you continue to avoid or look away from parts of you, it is unfair to expect someone else to pin down and embrace those parts of you, because you are not revealing them in a way that allows them to.
    let yourself be loved - by Isabel - Mind Mine
  • To let yourself be loved, you need to look at and accept the parts of you that feel unlovable to you. The parts that you have hidden, that you wish weren’t a part of you. Because if you don’t look at them, how could you expect anyone else to see and accept them in you?
    let yourself be loved - by Isabel - Mind Mine
  • When you shift from striving for requirements or metrics in the person you want to be with, to looking for a mutual openness to letting the relationship blossom, the way you see love changes. It is no longer a calculation or formula about making yourself a better magnet for high-value partners. It is now about shaping yourself into someone capable of creating a meaningful, lasting relationship. Someone who has accepted themselves fully and is willing to let themselves be loved.
    let yourself be loved - by Isabel - Mind Mine
  • . Our identity is who we want to be, who we wish we were, not who we are. But to be loved fully, we need to let every nook, cranny and crevice of our emotional being be seen
    let yourself be loved - by Isabel - Mind Mine
  • But why is it so hard to reveal yourself honestly to someone?
    let yourself be loved - by Isabel - Mind Mine
  • I hope that after reading this blog, you will appreciate freedom because it is when you are deprived of it that you really know the value
    Before You Begin – A Convict's Tale
  • Next time, before you plunge into alcohol, or make appeals to loved ones, friends, psychotherapists or to any other of the many life-affirming practices, remember that almost all constructions of meaning – from work to sport to opening our hearts to Jesus – are inherently illusory. An alternative to running away from life through illusion is to explore an illusion-free space for as long as possible, so as to become more capable of bearing the reality of a disillusioned and concrete life.
    The voice of sadness is censored as sick. What if it’s sane?
  • Some studies suggest that existential suffering and mental distress is rising worldwide, but particularly in modern Western culture. Perhaps we chase happiness precisely because it is no longer attainable?
    The voice of sadness is censored as sick. What if it’s sane?
  • For Freud, the goal was helping patients to accept and reflect on the hell that life is. Not in any beyond, but here on Earth.
    The voice of sadness is censored as sick. What if it’s sane?
  • there are thousands of articles about how Facebook (budget: $20 billion) works and how it might be good or bad. But there is relatively little analysis of the most important institutions in our society: government departments. How is the Department of Agriculture (budget: $150 billion) organized and how effective or not is it? How about the Department of Energy (budget: $32 billion)? And why are not those questions paramount in the minds of policymakers?
    Work on these things
  • You can do more than you think We are tied down by invisible orthodoxy The laws of physics are the only limit
    Nat Friedman
  • No room for mediocre people (can pay more, too!)
    Nat Friedman
  • The goal is not to avoid mistakes; the goal is to achieve uncorrelated levels of excellence
    Nat Friedman
  • Given its size, Dublin compares surprisingly favorably to Berlin or London as a tech hub.
    Blog · Patrick Collison
  • In Silicon Valley, a failed start-up with good founders will often be bought by one of the tech giants; In Ireland, that same start-up is likely to simply fail. This matters not only because founders are less likely to want to start companies, but also because it’s harder to attract capital and to convince employees to join.
    Blog · Patrick Collison
  • Heuristic: do your friends at school think your path is a bit strange? If not, maybe it's too normal.
    Advice · Patrick Collison
  • Make things. Operating in a space with a lot of uncertainty is a very different experience to learning something.
    Advice · Patrick Collison
  • Above all else, don't make the mistake of judging your success based on your current peer group. By all means make friends but being weird as a teenager is generally good.
    Advice · Patrick Collison
  • Make friends over the internet with people who are great at things you're interested in. The internet is one of the biggest advantages you have over prior generations. Leverage it.
    Advice · Patrick Collison
  • simulated annealing algorithms work as follows. The temperature progressively decreases from an initial positive value to zero. At each time step, the algorithm randomly selects a solution close to the current one, measures its quality, and moves to it according to the temperature-dependent probabilities of selecting better or worse solutions, which during the search respectively remain at 1 (or positive) and decrease towards zero.
    Simulated annealing
  • This notion of slow cooling implemented in the simulated annealing algorithm is interpreted as a slow decrease in the probability of accepting worse solutions as the solution space is explored. Accepting worse solutions allows for a more extensive search for the global optimal solution
    Simulated annealing
  • a probabilistic technique for approximating the global optimum of a given function. Specifically, it is a metaheuristic to approximate global optimization in a large search space for an optimization problem. It is often used when the search space is discret
    Simulated annealing
  • Simulated annealing can be used for very hard computational optimization problems where exact algorithms fail;
    Simulated annealing
  • Stochastic optimization methods also include methods with random iterates
    Stochastic optimization
  • On the other hand, even when the data set consists of precise measurements, some methods introduce randomness into the search-process to accelerate progress.[7] Such randomness can also make the method less sensitive to modeling errors. Another advantage is that randomness into the search-process can be used for obtaining interval estimates of the minimum of a function via extreme value statistics.[8][9] Further, the injected randomness may enable the method to escape a local optimum and eventually to approach a global optimum. Indeed, this randomization principle is known to be a simple and e…
    Stochastic optimization
  • In digital communications, a digital signal is a continuous-time physical signal, alternating between a discrete number of waveforms,[3] representing a bitstream. The shape of the waveform depends the transmission scheme, which may be either a line coding scheme allowing baseband transmission; or a digital modulation scheme, allowing passband transmission over long wires or over a limited radio frequency band. Such a carrier-modulated sine wave is considered a digital signal in literature on digital communications and data transmission,[11] but considered as a bit stream converted to an analog…
    Digital signal
  • I still value irrational things for emotional reasons
    ways of thinking about people - by Ava - bookbear express
  • The only way I could figure out how to interact with anyone was through reading. Which means that even as an adult I’m stuck thinking of things through a novelistic lens
    ways of thinking about people - by Ava - bookbear express
  • The most useful skill you can acquire as a human is the ability to help other people feel safe. That requires an understanding and an attentiveness to their needs, a genuine commitment to their lived experience. A common prerequisite is feeling safe yourself first. If you don’t feel safe, your anxiety will bleed through. You’ll project things onto other people; your relationships will be corrupted by projection and ego.
    safety - by Ava - bookbear express
  • I’ve always been very curious and experimental, but my ability to experiment rigorously was hugely limited by my fear of failure.
    safety - by Ava - bookbear express
  • personally I think romantic relationships are just extensions of friendships. Before I ever had a partner I had female friends who showed me what love meant. Turning, turning, always turning towards you; wanting to talk all day; sharing everything
    safety - by Ava - bookbear express
  • Like everybody, I grew up with a secret unspoken belief that way deep down I was different from everyone else. That I would go on to achieve great things with my life. I'm 20 years old, and if the rest of my 20s went by in a blur of startups and ever increasing salary -- I'd feel like I had wasted my potential.
    Why I Left Tech to Pursue Art | LiamHz
  • The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.
    pacing - by Ava - bookbear express
  • As Apollo astronaut Jim Lovell said, "We just decided to go." The Moon landings weren't miraculous, or fated. They weren't convenient. They were incredibly dangerous and by no means guaranteed to end in success. But we did it. We went there. And I say "we" because that journey, perhaps more than any other in history, was a journey of humanity as a whole. Our *species* advanced. From that momentous day in 1969, we were no longer confined to the Earth; we could venture out, *in* *person*, and walk upon other worlds.
    FQXi Community
  • But this post isn’t about how to get good at things. It’s about how people always assume I’m interested in the end result—the wonderful thing they’ve made—when what I’m really interested in is the process.
    effort - by Ava - bookbear express
  • esides that: find small (2-3 day) project ideas that require you to learn max. 1 new technology or idea, and build lots of such projects. Iteration speed is most important. To build lots of small projects, you can’t pick projects that are too large (because you’ll give up), and you can’t pick things that require you to learn 3 new things at once b/c you’ll get stuck too often and give up. I learned everything I know now by building many small projects quickly, incrementally picking up new skills. From talking to others, this seems like the best way I know how to learn programming.
    Thoughts on the software industry | linus.coffee
  • Iteration speed is most important
    Thoughts on the software industry | linus.coffee
  • What I believe now is that “the right thing” is not something that you can evaluate based on how it looks or how practical it is or even the end result. It’s just a feeling. Not a conviction or a belief, since once you start intellectualizing it everything gets fucked up: just a feeling in your body. If you’ve felt it you would never doubt its existence.
    stamina - by Ava - bookbear express
  • Hold on tightly and stay aboard. How’s that for a good maxim to live by?
    stamina - by Ava - bookbear express
  • So the algorithm for minimizing this function is to compute this gradient direction, take a step downhill, and repeat that over and over.
    3Blue1Brown - Gradient descent, how neural networks learn
  • All that matters for you and me right now is that in principle, there exists a way to compute this vector, which tells you both what the “downhill” direction is, and how steep it is.
    3Blue1Brown - Gradient descent, how neural networks learn
  • so the negative of the gradient, -\nabla C−∇C, gives the downhill direction.
    3Blue1Brown - Gradient descent, how neural networks learn
  • the length of that gradient vector is an indication for just how steep that steepest slope is.
    3Blue1Brown - Gradient descent, how neural networks learn
  • Naturally enough, taking the negative of that vector gives you the direction to step which decreases the function most quickly.
    3Blue1Brown - Gradient descent, how neural networks learn