flâneur

Nathan Chiu

12 followers · 10 following · 889 views

on the atlas — 101

highlights — 64

  • So, I’m going to walk through one of the anti-patterns I see in AI tooling and fix it by taking an evidence-based teaching process and imagining it augmented with AI. The teaching process, by the way, is: Explain, Demonstrate, Guide, Enhance.
    Stop Building AI Tools Backwards | Hazel Weakly
  • I’m getting this from here, which goes into much more detail about the math than I can manage. What I’ve managed to extract: Bayes’ theorem, as always, is the mathematical rule for determining how much to weigh evidence. The brain is sometimes called a Bayesian machine, because it has to create a coherent picture of the world by weighing all the different data it gets – everything from millions of photoreceptors’ worth of vision, to millions of cochlear receptors worth of hearing, to all the other sense, to logical reasoning, to past experience, and so on. But actually using Bayes on all this …
    God Help Us, Let’s Try To Understand Friston On Free Energy | Slate Star Codex
  • The discovery that the only human motive is uncertainty-reduction might come as a surprise to humans who feel motivated by things like money, power, sex, friendship, or altruism. But the neuroscientist I talked to about this says I am not misinterpreting the interview. The claim really is that uncertainty-reduction is the only game in town.
    God Help Us, Let’s Try To Understand Friston On Free Energy | Slate Star Codex
  • “Following my interests,” he said simply. It sounded awfully cutesy for someone so accomplished. I said that there is an idiosyncratic magic to the way he follows his interests, which is that they’re not just an input; Kelly turns his interests into an output that he can share with others. When I asked if I was onto something, I learned that Kelly doesn’t think in outputs. For him, doing is part of learning. “I don’t really pursue a destination,” he said. “I pursue a direction.”
    Flounder Mode - Colossus
  • “Following my interests,” he said simply.
    Flounder Mode - Colossus
  • They seemed to always have invitations to exclusive gatherings and job offers in their inbox. Several started companies, and rumor had it that some had term sheets before investors even opened their decks. I didn’t only feel jealous of their work; I felt unqualified to do it. That stung.
    Flounder Mode - Colossus
  • Kelly would say it’s good to have an ‘illegible’ career path—it means you’re onto interesting stuff.
    Flounder Mode - Colossus
  • Put another way: Herzog mapped the actual landscape and found the shortest path to his specific goals.2 Working in a goal-directed way, he gathered the information he needed; he found people who could help him; and he learned the necessary skills,3 duct-taping one solution after the other until he had the film he wanted. Then he went on to the next project.
    On agency - by Henrik Karlsson - Escaping Flatland
  • If you read interviews and biographies of people with high agency, you can get plenty of examples of them asking the equivalent of this question and finding simple, creative solutions to complicated problems. Since it is hard to say anything general about what it means to find a simple solution, I recommend looking at plenty of examples to get a feel for what it means to act in this way.
    On agency - by Henrik Karlsson - Escaping Flatland
  • I’m not sure why Herzog, at 14, growing up among the ruins of a bombed out Munich, could imagine himself directing a film, but he could. He was agentic enough to realize that the fact that kids until then had never been allowed to make films was just a problem, and thus could be presumed solvable. Herzog’s puberty was late—he looked like a young child until he was sixteen—so he assumed the producers would never take a bet on him if they saw him; he would have to make and negotiate deals over letter and telephone.
    On agency - by Henrik Karlsson - Escaping Flatland
  • The impact of an essay is how much it changes readers' thinking multiplied by the importance of the topic. But it's hard to do well at both. It's hard to have big new ideas about important topics. So in practice there's a tradeoff: you can change readers' thinking a lot about moderately important things, or change it a little about very important ones. But with younger readers the tradeoff shifts. There's more room to change their thinking, so there's a bigger payoff for writing about important things.
    The Shape of the Essay Field
  • There's a continuum of surprise. At one extreme, something you read can change your whole way of thinking. The Selfish Gene did this to me. It was like suddenly seeing the other interpretation of an ambiguous image: you can treat genes rather than organisms as the protagonists, and evolution becomes easier to understand when you do. At the other extreme, writing merely puts into words something readers were already thinking — or thought they were.
    The Shape of the Essay Field
  • No problem is too small or too trivial if we can really do something about it.
    What Problems to Solve - By Richard Feynman
  • What is also useful to keep in mind is the tendency to recreate your primary family life in the workplace. So if you had critical controlling parents who never valued you and everything you ever did was worthless, then you'll tend to select for those places and it is often done outside of awareness. Was your primary family spent being valued and appreciated? Then you'll select for that and when people start to not value you, you'll intervene earlier to correct for it and you'll have the skills to do that. Did your parents respect your boundaries growing up? Were you able to erect strong bounda…
    If you are useful, it doesn't mean you are valued | Hacker News
  • instead of asking people for approval to go do something, you can just tell them what you intend to do
    Impact, agency, and taste | benkuhn.net
  • raphies, 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 r
    Curius / Onboarding
  • Am I the same way? I try extremely hard to constantly test myself, if my predictions are wrong it’s clear I don’t understand. If I can’t build it I don’t understand. I’ll frequently read comments saying I don’t understand, but when I engage with these people they can’t explain what my world model gets wrong. A different meta world model? Or are they just idiots? To anyone who wants to supersede rationality, you better understand how to steelman every rationality argument. If I want to succeed, I believe I have to change who I am, and I’m not sure if that’s possible. I believe I’ve been making …
    Death of the Visceral | the singularity is nearer
  • I believe that love of others, love of vocation, love of nature are the best ways to connect to oceanic feeling.
    entry points - by Ava - bookbear express
  • I believe in the aliveness present in all things. I want to write every day and read books and to be in love and live near all my friends and work on what I know to be true and good. For me, that’s salvation—that’s ambition.
    entry points - by Ava - bookbear express
  • I don’t think our culture does a great job at making good marriages seem possible and aspirational, or parenthood seem desirable and fulfilling, or finding a true vocation seem achievable.
    entry points - by Ava - bookbear express
  • I don’t think most of the women who lived in the past and couldn’t vote and couldn’t get married to the person they loved and couldn’t use birth control had such a great time. I think they had a really bad time. But I do believe there’s a way in which culture in the past offered people easier entry points into meaning, and that’s what people today are nostalgic for.
    entry points - by Ava - bookbear express
  • I would say that what was lacking was religion, but the truth is that I’m sure I would’ve chafed under the strictures of any Abrahamic religion; I know enough Chinese-Christian kids (my cousins, for one!) to predict all the ways I would’ve rebelled. Instead, I’d say that what I was looking for throughout my childhood and adolescence and young adulthood was what Romain Rolland called “oceanic feeling” in a letter to Freud in 1927: “the sensation of eternity, of ‘being at one with the external world as a whole.’” In other words, I was looking for the presence of God. The feeling, not the narrati…
    entry points - by Ava - bookbear express
  • Managing relationships with n people means something closer to: you both have some experience with them and also understand how they socially relate to everyone else. That is, you know 150 people when you can competently predict how any two of them would interact in paired-off social circumstances without you.
    Dunbar's Number is Quadratic
  • Nonplussed, she asked me why anyone would care about which books I was reading. I told her that it didn’t matter, because I do.
    Re: Do people IRL know you have a blog? – Lars-Christian.com
  • A person's identity is always tied to their role in the broader world that they are operating in, and over a decade, not only does a person change, but so does the world around them.
    The end of my childhood
  • Learning that some folks can produce so much value with crappy code. I've seen entire teams burn so much money by overcomplicating projects. Bikesheding about how to implement DDD, Hexagonal Architecture, design patterns, complex queues that would maybe one day be required if the company scaled 1000x, unnecessary eventual consistency that required so much machinery and man hours to keep data integrity under control. Some of these projects were so late in their deadlines that had to be cancelled. And then I've seen one man projects copy pasting spaghetti code around like there's no tomorrow tha…
    Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment? | Hacker News
  • The dissemination of information is key. The incorporation of stakeholder inputs into product development is key. All of these things necessitate that people talk to one another. Leave the legal team out of a new feature exploration, and you may find out too late what you want to do isn’t accounted for in your terms of service. Forget to call the accounting team, and they may later discover the negative margin impact of your idea.
    Productivity Versus Alignment
  • Similarly, when psychologists Helga and Tony Noice surveyed actors on how they learn their lines, they found that actors search for meaning in the script, rather than memorizing lines.
    How Actors Remember Their Lines | The MIT Press Reader
  • Given a list of common nouns to read, people recall more words on a surprise memory test if they previously attended to the meaning of each word than if they focused on each word’s font or sound.
    How Actors Remember Their Lines | The MIT Press Reader
  • A friend I’ve met through my Discord, Denys, told me that his friend has this theory that every few years, half of your dreams die. People give up on their dreams because they realize that they can no longer achieve them.
    Measuring personal growth
  • You mean you’re not getting closer to answers?! [Laughs.] No. That’s what I’m banking on! No, my answer is that questions are beautiful. You just think more about life, the brevity of it, the complexity of it, the incredible richness that enters into it accidentally or intentionally. There’s something about youth that is wonderful: You really do think you’re immortal. Then you find out that there is a shelf life. The date approaches. That shapes your conception of life. It gives it a dramatic arc that is hard to anticipate so long as your body is not telling you that this is true.
    Marilynne Robinson Considers Biden a Gift of God - The New York Times
  • I find these transitions lovely. Somebody notices a limitation in themselves, something they lack or have misunderstood, something they need to learn or unlearn—and then they learn it, and discover, on the other side, a richer world
    On limitations that hide in your blindspot
  • A just culture encourages self-reporting of errors in order to gather as much data about those errors as possible. In contrast, an organization without a just culture will be left unaware of its own vulnerabilities because employees hide their mistakes for fear of retribution. Such an organization will discover those vulnerabilities only when they result in consequences that are impossible to hide.
    Why You’ve Never Been In A Plane Crash—Asterisk
  • But no matter how well the gene therapy works, the researchers recognize that Aissam may never be able to understand or speak a language, Dr. Germiller said. The brain has a narrow window for learning to speak beginning around ages 2 to 3, he explained. After age 5, the window for learning spoken language is permanently shut.
    Gene Therapy Allows an 11-Year-Old Boy to Hear for the First Time - The New York Times
  • “There’s no sound I don’t like,” Aissam said, with the help of interpreters during an interview last week. “They’re all good.”
    Gene Therapy Allows an 11-Year-Old Boy to Hear for the First Time - The New York Times
  • Turns out, unfathomable tragic loss isn't very hard. It's easy, in fact. Easy in the same way that falling off a cliff is "easy"–gravity does all the work for you.
    Losing my son
  • The trick is to collide your mental model with the outside world as often as possible.
    Think more about what to focus on - by Henrik Karlsson
  • defusion is about seeing thoughts as real, but not necessarily true, and about choosing to give weight to the thoughts that help us move toward the lives we want to live.
    How To Do Hard Things - No Small Plans - Every
  • The first time I read this definition was eye-opening, because it solved two problems I’ve been thinking about for a long time. First, how come when there is a written strategy, it’s almost always irrelevent to the situation at hand? Second, how come so many people talk about needing strategy, but there’s almost never anything written down? The reason most written strategies don’t apply is because they’re actually visions of how things could ideally work, rather than accurate descriptions of how things work today. This means they don’t help you plot a course through today’s challenges to the d…
    Writing an engineering strategy. | Irrational Exuberance
  • Thou shalt not engage with active candidates. After all, in this market, strong candidates aren’t looking. Good recruiters build relationships so that when a good candidate does decide to enter the market, the recruiter is there, behind the next doorway, ready to spring! Engineering time is expensive, so it’s critical to do as much top-of-funnel filtering as possible to make sure that it’s spent on the right candidates.
    I've been an engineer and a recruiter. Hiring is broken. Here's why... and what it should be like instead. - Aline Lerner's BlogAline Lerner's Blog
  • They’re relentlessly resourceful. There should be things in their history, whether it’s on or off the résumé, which conveys that they’re able to make things happen, against all odds. If there is a wall in their way, they’ll go over it, under it or become friends with it. They just make things happen and leave you wowed. Any time you have that “Wow!” kind of feeling you need to just hire the person.
    Keith Rabois on the Role of a COO, How to Hire and Why Transparency Matters | First Round Review
  • The analogy of an editor is great, because what an editor does is not the work product. Think about a reporter. The reporter writes the story. The editor may ask clarifying questions. The editor may simplify and extract things, edit things out or leave things in, or occasionally reorganize things that require follow-up. But, fundamentally, editing is the role.
    Keith Rabois on the Role of a COO, How to Hire and Why Transparency Matters | First Round Review
  • Finding those barrels that you can shoot through — someone who can take an idea from conception to live and it’s almost perfect — are incredibly difficult to find. This kind of person can pull people with them. They can charge up the hill. They can motivate their team, and they can edit themselves autonomously. Whenever you find a barrel, you should hire them instantly, regardless of whether you have money for them or whether you have a role for them. Just close them.
    Keith Rabois on the Role of a COO, How to Hire and Why Transparency Matters | First Round Review
  • COO at an early-stage company: an emergency room doctor. Just like in the ER, there’s always something broken at a start-up, it’s incessantly chaotic. There can be issues that seem to be just a cold, but they can actually be fatal if you don’t address and fix them early on
    Keith Rabois on the Role of a COO, How to Hire and Why Transparency Matters | First Round Review
  • Looking back, the best experiences were when the interviewer wanted me to succeed, was emphatic, and presented me with a problem that reflected how I would solve problems in the real world without gotchas.
    How to hire engineering talent without the BS · Jesal Gadhia
  • So I want to call it out: where we are today is bullshit. As engineers, we can, and should, and will do better. We can have better tools, we can build better apps, faster, more predictable, more reliable, using fewer resources (orders of magnitude fewer!). We need to understand deeply what we are doing and why. We need to deliver: reliably, predictably, with topmost quality. We can—and should–take pride in our work. Not just “given what we had…”—no buts!
    Software disenchantment @ tonsky.me
  • It helps me understand who our customers are in a really visceral way—in a way that I wouldn’t get by just reading the CRM notes.
    Scalability is overrated - by Waseem Daher
  • However, the second piece is something we have never done before, which is designing the interface between the client and the service so that the underlying data model is not exposed to or relied upon by the client.
    The Distributed Computing Manifesto | All Things Distributed
  • This means that there is a very tight coupling between the applications and the data model, and data model changes have to be accompanied by application changes even if functionality remains the same
    The Distributed Computing Manifesto | All Things Distributed
  • But like even that, is that legibility is that literacy? I don’t know.
    A Conversation on Technological Literacy | the art of technology