Ben Brooks

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Write some meaty emails
More people should write « the jsomers.net blog
9 months 10 years The growth rate of lithium mining in the mid-2010s
Olivine weathering - Works in Progress
Unfortunately, most startup milestones are communicated through fundraising announcements, where big numbers are often used as a proxy for success and maturity.
Startup childhood - by Dalton Caldwell - Dalton's Substack
managing your psychology is basically THE HARD PROBLEM in LIFE.
Visakan Veerasamy on Twitter: "in the 5+ years I worked for my ex-boss Dinesh, he constantly, casually-yet-intensely would ask me about my goals & desired outcomes "what do you want to get out of this?" "how will you measure your progress?" "what's the next step?" "what's the limiting factor?"" / Twitter
You can only be a 3-year-old colt on the first Saturday in May one time in your life
Kentucky Derby Live Updates: Scratch of Favorite Forte Shakes Up Already Chaotic Derby - The New York Times
Cashflow allows you to pay them and there’s enough work to keep them busy Product is suffering/customers are complaining Turning down work due to lack of time Daily bookkeeping or paperwork is piling up Using more than one freelancer or contractor because of the volume of work
When Should I Hire My Startup Employees? - NEXT Studios
following the gradient of aliveness
Choosing a career path when you’re uncertain
There will be no acqui-hire
What I Learned Building Whist (Phil)
What do you say to a father with a sick child
The Age of AI has begun | Bill Gates
GPT-4 was used in the following ways: to help us iterate on LaTeX formatting; for text summarization; and as a copyediting tool.
gpt-4.pdf
Can you explain this meme?
gpt-4.pdf
The first AGI will be just a point along the continuum of intelligence. We think it’s likely that progress will continue from there, possibly sustaining the rate of progress we’ve seen over the past decade for a long period of time.
Planning for AGI and beyond
In tech, where talent plays an outsized role in returns, one very rational strategy is to simply “block” talent from being competitive by paying them a lot of money to not start companies. If the best of the best are grinding away at the next big thing, that’s a huge existential risk to some of these large companies.
Why big tech companies need so many people - by JR 🦀
Today this is a thimbleful of emissions abatement. You know, that's how it starts,
Concrete traps CO2 soaked from air in climate-friendly test | Reuters
However, Democrats did an especially good job of translating votes into seats. How? Republicans ran up the score in uncompetitive races while Democrats eked out tight ones. A big part of the story is candidate quality. In many swing states and districts, Republicans offered voters far-right, inexperienced and/or scandal-plagued candidates, turning off independent voters. It may also have been that Democrats did a better job of directing financial and other resources to the highest-stakes races. Differences on the margin mattered: Democrats won four of the six Senate races and four of the five …
How Our 2022 Midterm Forecasts Performed | FiveThirtyEight
First of all, if you didn’t know about SELECT FOR UPDATE, there’s a good chance your code is wrong.
Stack: It's not you, it's SQL
A bureaucratized action, even if it is an impressive action, is not a sign that the player is alive.
Live versus Dead Players. This is an excerpt from the draft of my… | by Samo Burja | Medium
The method works by generating a pseudo-random blacklist of tokens that are barred from appearing as s ( t ) . The black- list generator is seeded with the prior token s ( t − 1) , enabling the blacklist to be reproduced later without access to the entire generated sequence.
[2301.10226] A Watermark for Large Language Models
The soft blacklist rule adaptively enforces the watermark in situations where doing so will have little impact on quality, while almost ignoring the watermark rule in the low entropy case where there is a clear and unique choice of the “best” word.
[2301.10226] A Watermark for Large Language Models
by contrast, fields like applied cryptography have the property that progress is almost independent of compute - having a large datacenter won’t help you come up with new protocols, and the world’s best supercomputers will struggle to invert hash functions or factor large numbers in the same way your personal computer does. this lack of asymmetry is why it’s possible for independent researchers to be as productive as researchers in established labs
i wish we’d grown up on the same advice - by vincent huang
Just knowing what directory a file is in does not determine what package Python thinks it is in.
python - Relative imports for the billionth time - Stack Overflow
Python provides very few facilities for enforcing things such as private or read-only data. The pythonic philosophy is that "we're all consenting adults": in this case this means that "the function shouldn't change the data" is part of the spec but not enforced in the code.
Emulating pass-by-value behaviour in python - Stack Overflow
he is fully content to woodshed up on Mount Olympus
Jerry Seinfeld Intends to Die Standing Up - The New York Times
As human beings it is our right (maybe our moral duty) to reshape the universe to our preferences
Nat Friedman
Starting [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 draw back on now for more than 70 years worth of data.
Curius / Onboarding