flâneur

Rona Wang

72 followers · 38 following · 3005 views

on the atlas — 149

highlights — 225

  • They could only manage to love themselves and they taught themselves over the course of their careers to love themselves more intensely and more fully. That’s not a criticism. Those were the set terms. The fulfillment of the voice was the essence of their artistic project.
    Winning the Game You Didn’t Even Want to Play: On Sally Rooney and the Literature of the Pose ‹ Literary Hub
  • New hardforks may introduce new precompiled contracts.
    EVM Codes - Precompiled Contracts
  • Precompiled Contracts There is a small set of contract addresses that are special: The address range between 1 and (including) 0x0a contains “precompiled contracts” that can be called as any other contract but their behavior (and their gas consumption) is not defined by EVM code stored at that address (they do not contain code) but instead is implemented in the EVM execution environment itself. Different EVM-compatible chains might use a different set of precompiled contracts. It might also be possible that new precompiled contracts are added to the Ethereum main chain in the future, but you …
    Introduction to Smart Contracts — Solidity 0.8.27 documentation
  • A simple example: Solidity has poor support for string manipulation functions. But we could add them as pre-compiles to have such functions with a lower gas fee as it would cost to provide such functions with Solidity. This is possible because every pre-compile defines its own gas costs that will be used to pay for the execution eventually.
    WTF is a pre-compile?. The term “pre-compiles” is currently… | by Hagen Hübel | Medium
  • An excellent example of pre-compiles are cryptographic functions in Solidity: they are not built-in in the Solidity compiler. Instead, they are part of the internal Virtual Machine of Ethereum and just exported in a way that Solidity can execute them.
    WTF is a pre-compile?. The term “pre-compiles” is currently… | by Hagen Hübel | Medium
  • On the grand scale of life. These events are not important. I am not important. There are “the big things” that you have no control over that will cause you pain. The other stuff? The small things; ask yourself. Are they really that important to take up your personal space in your head, knowing that they make you feel bad? This is the part where you have control that you can avoid. Letting go of the relentless thoughts in your head, the rehashing of events that have already happened, and are in the past, allows you to end unnecessary suffering.
    Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional. Let pain go
  • An hour and a half of Powerpoint fails to teach anything specific, and 90 minutes of chalk talk can put a whole lecture hall to sleep. I won’t describe the eldritch horror of 90 minutes of live coding.
    My Brief Stint as an Undergrad Lecturer - Jerome Fisher Program in Management & Technology
  • Only teaching math leads to students who aren’t familiar with the cutting edge (thus, unemployable students). Only teaching “hot” models ensures class material will be outdated and ungeneralizable within a few years, (thus, soon-to-be-unemployable students).
    My Brief Stint as an Undergrad Lecturer - Jerome Fisher Program in Management & Technology
  • “Most people have done all that they’re ever going to do. They raise a family, they earn a living and then they die. Most people don’t work on their dreams; why? One is because of fear — the fear of failure. What if things don’t work out? And the fear of success: What if they do and I can’t handle it? Most people get comfortable. They stop growing, they stop working on themselves, they stop stretching. They stop pushing themselves and they end up becoming very cynical about life and they throw in the towel on themselves, on their families and on their dreams.”
    Most People - @visakanv's blog
  • why is competence rare? my theory: status regulation → social homeostasis. Unless you’re lucky enough to be born/chance into circumstances where competence is encouraged, or truly seek it, for most people, developing real competence is antisocial
    Most People - @visakanv's blog
  • That's why I hate fights. You never do your best work in a fight, because fights are not sufficiently general. Winning is always a function of the situation and the people involved. You don't win fights by thinking of big ideas but by thinking of tricks that work in one particular case. And yet fighting is just as much work as thinking about real problems. Which is particularly painful to someone who cares how their brain is used: your brain goes fast but you get nowhere, like a car spinning its wheels.
    Mean People Fail
  • As a young child, your aptitude for acquiring a language or learning an instrument is at its peak. Accordingly, as a professional, your early 20s are the most formative stage. It is absolutely critical to make the most of this time because the pace of learning grows slower and more incremental as you age, whether we care to admit it or not.
    The Case Against Work-Life Balance: Owning Your Future - Shyam Sankar
  • You need purpose. And I can state categorically that the purpose you discover, with all the sacrifice that entails, will be more motivating and meaningful than the one handed to you in the form of some glamorous project that, realistically, will succeed or fail regardless of your involvement.
    The Case Against Work-Life Balance: Owning Your Future - Shyam Sankar
  • As Bertrand Russell, the early 20th century British philosopher put it – the good life is a life inspired by love and guided by knowledge.
    Advice For New College Grads
  • The amount of happiness you experience in life is inversely proportional to how much frustration you experience, and frustration is all about unmet expectations.
    Advice For New College Grads
  • Recall we discussed the leveling and importance game: Wanting to change the world hits the sweet spot because it shows how important one is (you can afford worrying about the planet and not your rent), while also highlighting one’s empathy (wanting to take care of the less fortunate).
    The Hypocrisy of Elites - by Erik Torenberg
  • Things that lure you into wasting your time have to be really good at tricking you. An example that will be familiar to a lot of people is arguing online. When someone contradicts you, they're in a sense attacking you. Sometimes pretty overtly. Your instinct when attacked is to defend yourself. But like a lot of instincts, this one wasn't designed for the world we now live in. Counterintuitive as it feels, it's better most of the time not to defend yourself. Otherwise these people are literally taking your life. [2]
    Life is Short
  • Arguing online is only incidentally addictive. There are more dangerous things than that. As I've written before, one byproduct of technical progress is that things we like tend to become more addictive. Which means we will increasingly have to make a conscious effort to avoid addictions — to stand outside ourselves and ask "is this how I want to be spending my time?"
    Life is Short
  • I used to be rattled hard by negative feedback, and I would to twist and bend to try and accommodate everyone, and that actually often made things worse.
    Are you serious? - by visakan veerasamy
  • One of the stupidest things I’ve repeatedly seen smart people do – I call this Advanced Stupid – is that they get so fixated on trying to optimize something complicated, that they forget to optimize for survival, and then they get knocked out of the game. Like having a startup trying to do something complicatedly clever, and then running out of money. The thing here is to study the failure conditions – how and why have past players failed to do what you’re trying to do? – and be conscientious about avoiding that.
    Are you serious? - by visakan veerasamy
  • Everyone is optimistic when times are good. The thing to look out for is who keeps going when the going gets tough.
    Are you serious? - by visakan veerasamy
  • AI-powered document editors, then, among other tools, use all that training data to make it even easier to write outcome-oriented garbage that moves us further and further from the truth of ourselves and each other as beautiful, complex, experiencing beings.
    Internet as Practice - by Dan Hunt - Becoming Storyless
  • People don’t criticize others who aren’t doing anything. So if you’re receiving some criticism, it likely means that you’re doing something that’s at least worthy of attention.
    How to Stop Worrying & Start Living by Dale Carnegie: Summary & Notes - Calvin Rosser
  • Just for today I will be happy. This assumes that what Abraham Lincoln said is true, that “most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.” Happiness is from within; it is not a matter of externals.
    How to Stop Worrying & Start Living by Dale Carnegie: Summary & Notes - Calvin Rosser
  • Think of yourself as an early investor in an asset class that is not yet publicly traded. It's your job to increase the value of the asset in order to attract investment from other people.
    Failsafe | Permissionless Apprentice
  • “Most knowledge workers avoid the uncomfortable strain of deliberate practice like the plague, a reality emphasized by the typical cubical dweller’s obsessive email-checking habit – for what is this behavior if not an escape from work that’s more mentally demanding?
    So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport: Summary & Notes - Calvin Rosser
  • To get people onboard with your mission, you need a compelling frame. A book about helping college students find a meaningful career will sell fewer copies than one that says “follow your passion is bad advice.” They can be the same book, but the second frame is a more compelling way to have people engage with your ideas.
    So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport: Summary & Notes - Calvin Rosser
  • “The point at which you have acquired enough career capital to get meaningful control over your working life is exactly the point when you’ve become valuable enough to your current employer that they will try to prevent you from making a change.” This is the period where you might get caught in golden handcuffs or a specific identity that keeps you from living the life you want. This is the point where you would be wise to listen to the calls of “courage culture.”
    So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport: Summary & Notes - Calvin Rosser
  • One way to tell whether you're wasting time is to ask if you're producing or consuming. Writing computer games is less likely to be a waste of time than playing them, and playing games where you create something is less likely to be a waste of time than playing games where you don't.
    How to Do Great Work
  • That's one reason nerds have an advantage in doing great work: they expend little effort on seeming anything. In fact that's basically the definition of a nerd.
    How to Do Great Work
  • One reason per-project procrastination is so dangerous is that it usually camouflages itself as work. You're not just sitting around doing nothing; you're working industriously on something else. So per-project procrastination doesn't set off the alarms that per-day procrastination does. You're too busy to notice it. The way to beat it is to stop occasionally and ask yourself: Am I working on what I most want to work on?" When you're young it's ok if the answer is sometimes no, but this gets increasingly dangerous as you get older.
    How to Do Great Work
  • That's the key: consistency. People who do great things don't get a lot done every day. They get something done, rather than nothing.
    How to Do Great Work
  • Just as we overestimate what we can do in a day and underestimate what we can do over several years, we overestimate the damage done by procrastinating for a day and underestimate the damage done by procrastinating for several years.
    How to Do Great Work
  • A lot of standup comedy is based on noticing anomalies in everyday life. "Did you ever notice...?" New ideas come from doing this about nontrivial things. Which may help explain why people's reaction to a new idea is often the first half of laughing: Ha!
    How to Do Great Work
  • The factors in doing great work are factors in the literal, mathematical sense, and they are: ability, interest, effort, and luck. Luck by definition you can't do anything about, so we can ignore that. And we can assume effort, if you do in fact want to do great work. So the problem boils down to ability and interest. Can you find a kind of work where your ability and interest will combine to yield an explosion of new ideas?
    How to Do Great Work
  • It's ok to want to impress other people, but choose the right people. The opinion of people you respect is signal. Fame, which is the opinion of a much larger group you might or might not respect, just adds noise. The prestige of a type of work is at best a trailing indicator and sometimes completely mistaken. If you do anything well enough, you'll make it prestigious. So the question to ask about a type of work is not how much prestige it has, but how well it could be done.
    How to Do Great Work
  • What should you do if you're young and ambitious but don't know what to work on? What you should not do is drift along passively, assuming the problem will solve itself. You need to take action. But there is no systematic procedure you can follow. When you read biographies of people who've done great work, it's remarkable how much luck is involved. They discover what to work on as a result of a chance meeting, or by reading a book they happen to pick up. So you need to make yourself a big target for luck, and the way to do that is to be curious. Try lots of things, meet lots of people, read lo…
    How to Do Great Work
  • This story isn’t about generative AI. If we pretend that it is, we lose focus on the real problem, which is Twitter wrecking a critical integrity feature of the platform.
    How to Prepare for the Deluge of Generative AI on Social Media | Knight First Amendment Institute
  • A clock generator is an electronic oscillator that produces a clock signal for use in synchronizing a circuit's operation. The signal can range from a simple symmetrical square wave to more complex arrangements. The basic parts that all clock generators share are a resonant circuit and an amplifier.
    Clock generator
  • In computing, the clock rate or clock speed typically refers to the frequency at which the clock generator of a processor can generate pulses, which are used to synchronize the operations of its components,[1] and is used as an indicator of the processor's speed. It is measured in the SI unit of frequency hertz (Hz).
    Clock rate
  • The most common FPGA architecture consists of an array of logic blocks called configurable logic blocks (CLBs), or logic array blocks (LABs), depending on vendor, I/O pads, and routing channels.[1] Generally, all the routing channels have the same width (number of signals). Multiple I/O pads may fit into the height of one row or the width of one column in the array.
    Field-programmable gate array
  • All my lawyer had to do was send a memo on official letterhead and my mother’s debts in death dropped 90 percent. More than a quarter of a million dollars was erased in an instant—an accounting that five weeks of my pleading, bargaining, reasoning, denying, uploading, scanning, begging, faxing, and crying had not been able to extract.
    The Paris Review - America’s Dead Souls - The Paris Review
  • My only familiarity with the subject was the old saying about the IRS, which I now know can be applied to America’s debt-for-profit system writ large: they go after the poor because the rich have money to fight back.
    The Paris Review - America’s Dead Souls - The Paris Review
  • CUDA C++ extends C++ by allowing the programmer to define C++ functions, called kernels, that, when called, are executed N times in parallel by N different CUDA threads, as opposed to only once like regular C++ functions.
    CUDA C++ Programming Guide
  • A kernel function is a GPU function that is meant to be called from CPU code (*). It gives it two fundamental characteristics:
    Writing CUDA Kernels — Numba 0.57.0+0.g4fd4e39c6.dirty documentation
  • In CUDA, the code you write will be executed by multiple threads at once (often hundreds or thousands). Your solution will be modeled by defining a thread hierarchy of grid, blocks and threads.
    Writing CUDA Kernels — Numba 0.57.0+0.g4fd4e39c6.dirty documentation
  • It’s important to understand that the validation you may initially feel from a viral post is impermanent. Social media increases our dependency on the approval of others. We become addicted to their attention and their positive feedback, but the highs are short-lived. As soon as our five minutes of fame fade, our self-esteem crashes back to its default level. Our insecurities may even increase, particularly if we’ve posted something vulnerable.
    Are You a Digital Narcissist?
  • Hold yourself to ambitious absolute standards in morals and productivity — write them down on post-it notes. You have an obligation to use yourself well, your time is valuable, and there are right and wrong ways to spend it.
    Mimetic - Brian Timar
  • Make sure your job has clear price signals for success and failure. Be suspicious of roles that compensate you with status or non-financial rewards.
    Mimetic - Brian Timar
  • When a teenager or preteen does something harmful in a suburb (I say teen bc this is often where lifelong carceral cycles begin for Black and Brown communities), White communities bend over backwards to find alternatives to incarceration for their loved ones to 'protect their future,' like community service or rehab or restorative measures. Why don't we treat Black and Brown people the same way? Why doesn't the criminal system care about Black teens' futures the way they care for White teens' futures? Why doesn't the news use Black people's graduation or family photos in stories the way they d…
    Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez