flâneur

Jason Ernst

0 followers · 11 following · 882 views

on the atlas — 58

highlights — 47

  • On average, every extra minute of effort spent in review provides more and more benefit. This is in sharp contrast with most experiences in life, where we run into diminishing returns. For instance, ordinarily if you increase the amount of time you spend reading by 50%, you expect to get no more than 50% extra out of it, and possibly much less. But with the mnemonic medium when you increase the amount of time you spend reading by 50%, you may get 10x as much out of it. Of course, we don’t quite mean those numbers literally. But it does convey the key idea of getting a strongly non-linear retur…
    How can we develop transformative tools for thought?
  • writing about music is like dancing about architecture
    How can we develop transformative tools for thought?
  • Clearly Marcus Aurelius didn’t have generalized anxiety disorder. Who are these people whose own minds offer them quiet and relaxation? How did they get these minds? Where can I get one? Can I have one right now?”
    Stoic philosophy, finding a meaningful life, and the cancer treatment struggle « The Story's Story
  • Adversity forces us to rise to its challenge, but abundance allows us to discover who we might become, and that is a different sort of adventure.
    Toward a shallower future - by Noah Smith - Noahpinion
  • I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.
    Toward a shallower future - by Noah Smith - Noahpinion
  • Once, in the 1990s, I heard a conservative pundit claim that young Americans had become soft and weak because they had never had to face adversity like the World War 2 generation did. I asked my grandfather what he thought of that. After uttering something unprintable, he said: “I did that [stuff] so you wouldn’t have to.”
    Toward a shallower future - by Noah Smith - Noahpinion
  • Yes, Antarctica is an edge case! Yes, 750 ms / 10% packet loss / 40 kbps is rather extreme. But the South Pole was not uniquely bad. There are entire commercial marine vessels that rely on older Inmarsat solutions for a few hundred precious kbps of data while at sea. There’s someone at a remote research site deep in the mountains right now, trying to load your app on a Thales MissionLink using the Iridium Certus network at a few dozen kbps. There are folks behind misconfigured routers, folks with flaky wifi, folks stuck with fly-by-night WISPs delivering sub-par service. Folks who still use di…
    Engineering for Slow Internet
  • If you’re an app developer reading this, can you tell me, off the top of your head, how your app behaves on a link with 40 kbps available bandwidth, 1,000 ms latency, occasional jitter of up to 2,000 ms, packet loss of 10%, and a complete 15-second connectivity dropout every few minutes?
    Engineering for Slow Internet
  • Similarly, I let them talk as much as they want about work culture or whatever. These are the endless gyrations of the great tree structure, rustling in the wind. Actually remove the staff that no one works to work with or who terrorize their subordinates and I'll know you're serious about performance. Reward people for staying, and I'll know you're serious about valuing people. Anything short of that is less than worthless, because you've wasted valuable time I could have been listening to music.
    Your Organization Probably Doesn't Want To Improve Things — Ludicity
  • I quote the above because it is very funny, and because the only thing that has brought me clarity is totally ignoring anything management says unless I have a very good reason to believe the person I am speaking to has intelligence, integrity, and has come to terms with the fact that large organizations are inherently dysfunctional, which happens rarely.
    Your Organization Probably Doesn't Want To Improve Things — Ludicity
  • Is there any chance a team with people like that is going to produce good results? Obviously not. Do most teams at large organizations have at least one person like that? Sweet merciful Christ, in both my first, second, and perhaps even third-hand experience, whatever that means, it's possible that half of all teams consist entirely of that person.
    Your Organization Probably Doesn't Want To Improve Things — Ludicity
  • My sins will echo for eternity, and I will be damned if I let anyone else get away with what I have. I will send you straight to hell and meet you there.
    I Will Fucking Dropkick You If You Use That Spreadsheet — Ludicity
  • Having your team type in import openai does not mean that you are at the cutting-edge of artificial intelligence no matter how desperately you embarrass yourself on LinkedIn and at pathetic borderline-bribe award ceremonies from the malign Warp entities that sell you enterprise software5.
    I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again — Ludicity
  • How stupid do you have to be to believe that only 8% of companies have seen failed AI projects? We can't manage this consistently with CRUD apps and people think that this number isn't laughable? Some companies have seen benefits during the LLM craze, but not 92% of them. 34% of companies report that generative AI specifically has been assisting with strategic decision making? What the actual fuck are you talking about? GPT-4 can't even write coherent Elixir, presumably because the dataset was too small to get it to the level that it's at for Python3, and you're admitting that you outsource yo…
    I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again — Ludicity
  • Most organizations cannot ship the most basic applications imaginable with any consistency, and you're out here saying that the best way to remain competitive is to roll out experimental technology that is an order of magnitude more sophisticated than anything else your I.T department runs, which you have no experience hiring for, when the organization has never used a GPU for anything other than junior engineers playing video games with their camera off during standup, and even if you do that all right there is a chance that the problem is simply unsolvable due to the characteristics of your …
    I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again — Ludicity
  • Most of the advice my students got was nonsense. Anything from "paragraphs should be less than a hundred words" to "why are your paragraphs shorter than a hundred words?". The real reason that you always ask tutors for advice is because you are trying to make them have to overcome cognitive dissonance if they want to grade you lower than the amount you were aiming for. At the very least, how could a student do worse after seeking advice? What would that say about the advice giver? Heck, this would work on me and I'm the main distributor of this trick! The course is actually filled with materia…
    Breaking My University's Machine Learning Competition — Ludicity
  • Great empires, communities, and societies are not solo undertakings, they cannot be achieved by inner work. They require the attention of strong persons who refuse to discount the external world.
    Stoicism is Not Enough - by Simon Sarris
  • So the fewer people you can hire, the better.
    How to Start a Startup
  • More generally, design your product to please users first, and then think about how to make money from it.
    How to Start a Startup
  • Unless you're in a market where products are as undifferentiated as cigarettes or vodka or laundry detergent, spending a lot on brand advertising is a sign of breakage
    How to Start a Startup
  • When everyone feels they're getting a slightly bad deal, that they're doing more than they should for the amount of stock they have, the stock is optimally apportioned.
    How to Start a Startup
  • So if you want to win through better technology, aim at smaller customers
    How to Start a Startup
  • It's worth trying very, very hard to make technology easy to use
    How to Start a Startup
  • Why couldn't they get more funding? Probably because the product was a dog, or never seemed likely to be done, or both.
    How to Start a Startup
  • If you work your way down the Forbes 400 making an x next to the name of each person with an MBA, you'll learn something important about business school.
    How to Start a Startup
  • And what I discovered was that business was no great mystery. It's not something like physics or medicine that requires extensive study. You just try to get people to pay you for stuff.
    How to Start a Startup
  • look at something people are trying to do, and figure out how to do it in a way that doesn't suck.
    How to Start a Startup
  • best way to solve a problem is often to redefine it.
    Ideas for Startups
  • take a luxury and make it into a commmodity
    Ideas for Startups
  • The way to kill it is to redefine the problem as a superset of the current one.
    Ideas for Startups
  • Let me repeat that recipe: finding the problem intolerable and feeling it must be possible to solve it. Simple as it seems, that's the recipe for a lot of startup ideas.
    Ideas for Startups
  • Work on things that interest you and increase your options, and worry later about which you'll take.
    What You'll Wish You'd Known
  • The fact that there's no market for startup ideas suggests there's no demand. Which means, in the narrow sense of the word, that startup ideas are worthless.
    Ideas for Startups
  • We need to level up humans, because our descendants will either conquer the galaxy or extinguish consciousness in the universe forever. What a time to be alive!
    Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny
  • he paperclip maximizer
    Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny
  • you want to invest in messy, somewhat broken companies. You can treat the warts on top, and because of the warts the company will be hugely underpriced
    Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny
  • One, make something people want”—a phrase of Graham’s, which is emblazoned on gray T-shirts for the founders—“and, two, all you should be doing is talking to your customers and building stuff.”
    Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny
  • something like Idea times Product times Execution times Team times Luck, where Luck is a random number between zero and ten thousand.
    Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny
  • prefer ten people loving what you make to ten thousand liking it
    Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny
  • How to Start a Startup”—together with Steven Blank’s “The Four Steps to the Epiphany” and Eric Ries’s “The Lean Startup
    Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny
  • Democracy only works in a growing economy.
    Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny
  • Bricks — actual bricks, not stacks of cash — are another common savings mechanism, especially for working-class Argentinians. The value of bricks is fairly stable, and they’re useful to a family building out their house. Argentina doesn’t have a mortgage industry, and thus buying a pallet of bricks each time you get a paycheck is an effective way to pay for your home in installments.
    Inside the crypto black markets of Argentina
  • But everybody knows Mensans are dorks and this is a club for underachievers.
    The Mensa fallacy - by Emil O. W. Kirkegaard
  • A first search on the problem showed several results of academic papers attempting to map the IPFS network, and existing implementations of libp2p network crawlers. So others had already approached this problem before. It was my turn now to see if I managed to follow their steps.
    @adlrocha - How I built an IPFS crawler with libp2p
  • /usr/share/applications/
    How to create desktop shortcut launcher on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish Linux - Linux Tutorials - Learn Linux Configuration
  • atom --in-process-gpu
    error handling - Failure to launch Atom on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS - Ask Ubuntu
  • I use Draft by Slite to have a ‘scratch space’ in my new tab page where I have my running list of todos, temporary thoughts, and things to read in the next little bit. It’s my Apple Notes for my laptop. I use Curius to keep a backlog of things that are interesting but not interesting enough for me to read at this exact moment.
    Networked Thought