flâneur

Karthik Suresh

6 followers · 56 following · 1199 views

on the atlas — 175

highlights — 24

  • By some estimates, about 50 percent of Zimbabwe's government revenue comes from the printing of money.
    Michael Gerson - Dying Silently In Zimbabwe
  • The three hallmarks of a great investment are superior returns, low risk, and long duration
    Glenair’s Peter Kaufman on Investing and Life — Cove Street Capital
  • GRAHAM: Oh, okay. How do I do it? People are, for various reasons — for multiple reasons — they’re afraid to think really big. There are multiple reasons. One, it seems overreaching. Two, it seems like it would be an awful lot of work. [laughs]
    Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent (Ep. 186) | Conversations with Tyler
  • For example, when I first met Feynmann at Los Alamos during the WWII, I believed that he would get a Nobel Prize. His energy, his style, his abilities, all indicated that he was a person who would do many things, and probably at least one would be important. Einstein, around the age of 12 or 14, asked himself what a light wave would look like if he want at the speed of light. He knew that Maxwell's theory did not support a local, stationary maximum, but was what he ought to see if the current theory was correct. So it is not surprising that he later developed the special theory of relativity -…
    hamming advice
  • you have but one life to live. Under these circumstances it seems better to live a life in which you do important things (important in your eyes, of course) than to merely live out your life. No sense frittering away your life on things that will not even appear in the footnotes.
    hamming advice
  • After all, it wasn’t the farmers themselves who continued to define history, but the wilder chariot-men who ruled over them and lived lives of leisure and empire.
    Quit Your Job
  • Your users don’t judge your velocity based on how many lines of code you write. They judge you based on how quickly you do the things that matter.
    What working at Figma taught me about customer obsession
  • Intelligence seems simpler than we thought, just a matter of scaling things up, so human intelligence is more likely a difference in degree rather than a difference in kind/step change. Plus this suggests there's a wider range of possible intelligences out there, so in the grand scheme, human and animal intelligence will look very similar/closely related (it looked less that way when they were the only games in town. Then they were as far apart as was known to be possible).
    Broader implications of ChatGPT - Marginal REVOLUTION
  • we were originally just going to model real cities, but we quickly realized there were way too many parking lots in the real world and that our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots.
    The Philosophy of SimCity: An Interview With the Game's Lead Designer - The Atlantic
  • Xerox scanners used to have a bug that would silently replace numbers in the text of documents to make them compress better.
    Filtered for machine misunderstandings (Interconnected)
  • Politics and race also appear to influence judicial outcomes (Schanzenbach 2005; Bushway and Piehl 2001; Mustard 2001; Steffensmeier and Demuth 2000; Albonetti 1997; Thomson and Zingraff 1981; Abrams, Bertrand, and Mullainathan 2012; Boyd, Epstein, and Martin 2010; Shayo and Zussman 2011), as does masculinity (Chen, Halberstam, and Yu 2016b, 2016a), birthdays (Chen and Philippe 2018), football game outcomes (Chen 2017; Eren and Mocan 2016), time of day (Chen and Eagel 2016; Danziger, Levav, and Avnaim-Pesso 2011b), weather (Barry et al. 2016), name (Chen 2016a), and shared biographies (Chen et…
    Machine Learning and the Rule of Law — SFI Press
  • A youth smoking rate of under 2% signals the beginning of the end for the commercial tobacco industry
    Teen vaping has eliminated teen smoking: An accidental success story – Dr John's Blog
  • An estimated 37 per cent of the world’s population – or 2.9 billion people – have still never used the Internet.
    Facts and Figures 2021: 2.9 billion people still offline - ITU Hub
  • The executives were horrified. "We are not pleased with your conclusions," they wrote to Diaconis, "but we believe them and that's what we hired you for."
    How a magician-mathematician revealed a casino loophole - BBC Future
  • Highly-anticipated soccer league matches, where Indians don’t even have players or a team, have a higher viewership than the most watched American events
    Why everyone should pay more attention to India...
  • Indians have access to some of the cheapest mobile data plans in the world, and charges are $0.17 per gigabyte on average, with plans as low as 5 cents per gigabyte
    Why everyone should pay more attention to India...
  • But unlike that American super-region, whose population long ago plateaued, this part of west Africa will keep growing. By 2100, the Lagos-Abidjan stretch is projected to be the largest zone of continuous, dense habitation on earth, with something in the order of half a billion people.
    Megalopolis: how coastal west Africa will shape the coming century | Africa | The Guardian
  • It is a stretch of coastal west Africa that begins in the west with Abidjan, the economic capital of Ivory Coast, and extends 600 miles east – passing through the countries of Ghana, Togo and Benin – before finally arriving at Lagos. Recently, this has come to be seen by many experts as the world’s most rapidly urbanising region, a “megalopolis” in the making – that is, a large and densely clustered group of metropolitan centres.
    Megalopolis: how coastal west Africa will shape the coming century | Africa | The Guardian
  • For all the value I just described, the greatest value in this process isn’t in the answers — it is in the asking. Taking these meetings and listening shows proper respect for the team that’s in place.
    A Career Cold Start Algorithm
  • credential tweaking attacker can compromise 16% of user accounts that appear in a breach in less than a thousand guesses, despite the use of a C3 service
    sec22-pal.pdf
  • The benefits of agglomeration have been high with labor pools, better wages, and knowledge spillovers.
    Agglomeration · Anil Varanasi
  • We estimate an aggregate annual redistribution of $15 billion from less to more educated, poorer to richer, and high to low minority areas, widening existing spatial disparities
    Who Pays For Your Rewards? Redistribution in the Credit Card Market by Sumit Agarwal, Andrea Presbitero, André F. Silva, Carlo Wix :: SSRN
  • strong competition between universities is probably disliked by university administrations and ii) reforming existing universities is famously hard through entrenched bureaucratic decision-making and ensuing vetocracy
    Medical school is a bad choice for smart kids, or why talent sorting in Germany is flawed · Posts
  • What does it mean that China’s president, party secretary-general, Central Military Commission chairman and ‘core leader’ is a Faustian character? Probably nothing: psychologising explanations for present or past political decisions rarely add much. But if Xi is a consciously Faustian character, it would be possible to adduce personal turmoil in explanation of the sudden escalation of violence against Vietnam and India, the unprecedented diplomatic quarrels with Canada, Sweden and Australia, and the intensified confrontation with the US, as well as the sharply increased repression of Hong Kong…
    Edward Luttwak · Goethe in China · LRB 3 June 2021