flâneur

Atem Aguer

4 followers · 8 following · 1160 views

on the atlas — 88

highlights — 69

  • "Yes indeed -- you are going to write about things you can drop on your foot, and people, too. Green peppers, ears of corn, windshield wipers, or a grimy mechanic changing your car's oil. No matter how abstract your topic, how intangible, your first step is to find things you can drop on your foot."
    The Secret to Good Writing: It's About Objects, Not Ideas - The Atlantic
  • Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful.
    Solitude and Leadership by William Deresiewicz
  • What we don’t have, in other words, are thinkers. People who can think for themselves. People who can formulate a new direction: for the country, for a corporation or a college, for the Army—a new way of doing things, a new way of looking at things. People, in other words, with vision.
    Solitude and Leadership by William Deresiewicz
  • But there’s one more thing I’m going to include as a form of solitude, and it will seem counterintuitive: friendship.
    Solitude and Leadership by William Deresiewicz
  • Introspection means talking to yourself, and one of the best ways of talking to yourself is by talking to another person. One other person you can trust, one other person to whom you can unfold your soul.
    Solitude and Leadership by William Deresiewicz
  • So solitude can mean introspection, it can mean the concentration of focused work, and it can mean sustained reading. All of these help you to know yourself better.
    Solitude and Leadership by William Deresiewicz
  • Leadership means finding a new direction, not simply putting yourself at the front of the herd that’s heading toward the cliff.
    Solitude and Leadership by William Deresiewicz
  • So it’s perfectly natural to have doubts, or questions, or even just difficulties. The question is, what do you do with them? Do you suppress them, do you distract yourself from them, do you pretend they don’t exist? Or do you confront them directly, honestly, courageously? If you decide to do so, you will find that the answers to these dilemmas are not to be found on Twitter or Comedy Central or even in The New York Times. They can only be found within—without distractions, without peer pressure, in solitude.
    Solitude and Leadership by William Deresiewicz
  • the idea that true leadership means being able to think for yourself and act on your convictions.
    Solitude and Leadership by William Deresiewicz
  • I try to build one or two demos per week
    My Approach to Building Large Technical Projects – Mitchell Hashimoto
  • Humans often compete over perishable rewards (status, fame, etc.) versus compounding ones (technology, teams, etc.). If you avoid this mistake, you will be unstoppable in 5+ years.
    What I Learned In 2023 - by Alexandr Wang
  • The most practical way I know how to put this principle into action is by reading and rewriting the draft. Everything has a draft, even decisions about management. Step one is not to overthink the initial inspiration. Just get it out of your head and down on paper. Now you have something you can work with, something you can mold.
    Commit to competence in this coming year
  • “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”
    Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Why I Am Now a Christian | The Free Press
  • Atheism failed to answer a simple question: What is the meaning and purpose of life?
    Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Why I Am Now a Christian | The Free Press
  • Principles are usually the byproduct of success, not the cause of it.
    principles are products of practice, not the reverse | Majd Alsado
  • The core idea is trying my best to not kid myself: when my engagement with a piece of content is active and effortful then it’s learning, when it’s passive it’s entertainment. When I create I learn. When I consume I just relax.
    How to Learn Better in the Digital Age
  • demanded an unambiguous mechanical procedure for determining whether any mathematical statement was true or false.
    Complexity Theory’s 50-Year Journey to the Limits of Knowledge | Quanta Magazine
  • Just a year later, Gödel delivered the first blow to Hilbert’s dream. He proved that a self-defeating statement like “this statement is unprovable” could be derived from any appropriate set of axioms. If such a statement is indeed unprovable, the theory is incomplete, but if it’s provable, the theory is inconsistent — an even worse outcome. In the same paper, Gödel also proved that no mathematical theory could ever prove its own consistency.
    Complexity Theory’s 50-Year Journey to the Limits of Knowledge | Quanta Magazine
  • That was the motivation for Hilbert’s second condition, completeness: the requirement that all mathematical statements be either provably true or provably false.
    Complexity Theory’s 50-Year Journey to the Limits of Knowledge | Quanta Magazine
  • consistency, was the essential requirement that mathematics be free of contradictions: If two contradictory statements could be proved starting from the same axioms, the whole theory would be unsalvageable.
    Complexity Theory’s 50-Year Journey to the Limits of Knowledge | Quanta Magazine
  • He hoped to start from a few simple assumptions, called axioms, and derive a unified mathematical theory that met three key criteria.
    Complexity Theory’s 50-Year Journey to the Limits of Knowledge | Quanta Magazine
  • If so, then P = NP: The two classes are equivalent. If that’s the case, there must be some algorithm that makes it trivial to solve enormous sudoku puzzles, optimize global shipping routes, break state-of-the-art encryption and automate the proofs of mathematical theorems. If P ≠ NP, then many computational problems that are solvable in principle will in practice remain forever beyond our grasp.
    Complexity Theory’s 50-Year Journey to the Limits of Knowledge | Quanta Magazine
  • It implies that Google Deepmind knew, and found it trivial enough to write as a throwaway sentence in a paper. It implies that I should be a lot more bullish on them, and a lot more bearish against every other wannabe foundation model org that’s still working on dense models only.
    Non-determinism in GPT-4 is caused by Sparse MoE - 152334H
  • I think that misunderstands the problem. If a partner at a law firm wants a first draft of a paper, they want to be able to shape the parameters in completely different ways to a salesperson at an insurance company challenging a claim, probably with a different training set and certainly with a bunch of different tooling.
    AI and the automation of work — Benedict Evans
  • You can rarely go to a law firm and sell them an API key to GCP’s translation or sentiment analysis: you need to wrap it in control, security, versioning, management, client privilege and a whole bunch of other things that only legal software companies know about (there’s a graveyard of machine learning companies that learnt this in the last decade).
    AI and the automation of work — Benedict Evans
  • if we make steam engines more efficient, then they will be cheaper to run, and we will use more of them and use them for new and different things, and so we will use more coal.
    AI and the automation of work — Benedict Evans
  • The Lump of Labour fallacy is the misconception that there is a fixed amount of work to be done, and that if some work is taken by a machine then there will be less work for people.
    AI and the automation of work — Benedict Evans
  • Automation plus the Jevons Paradox meant more jobs.
    AI and the automation of work — Benedict Evans
  • In reality, more specific solutions from application-focused companies will come up and be adopted first because they work, then it'll be increasingly hard to convert enterprise customers.
    LLM agents and integration dead-ends - by Nathan Lambert
  • The fact of the matter is that digital products make it uniquely easy to trick yourself into thinking that you’re learning when you are actually being entertained.
    How to Learn Better in the Digital Age
  • First, you need to know who your customers are (a more challenging question than it seems), then you have to figure out where to find them, and lastly, how to reach them efficiently and at scale.
    Minimum Viable Distribution for Startups
  • We envision that AI agents for marketing, however, will take a broader, more LAM-like approach to delivering results for marketing teams, by using an LLM interface to connect data, tools, and domain-specific agents in the pursuit of a high-level task.
    Toward Actionable Generative AI
  • The picture is more complicated in practice, however, as a great deal of manual effort is necessary to integrate an LLMs output into the complete process of, for example, conceiving of a new campaign and rolling out the results.
    Toward Actionable Generative AI
  • With that in mind, LAMs should focus on taking the reins on repetitive tasks and other busywork—the kind of thing most of us don’t want to do in the first place—that gets in the way of the kind of meaningful, high-value endeavors that we’re best at.
    Toward Actionable Generative AI
  • the process that surrounds it.
    Toward Actionable Generative AI
  • Workflows are a set of processes that we use to accomplish a goal. To make this concrete, I have a workflow around reading that includes the way I research, select, and collect reading material, from books to essays and articles, the times and places where I read them, the practices I use during and after reading. All of these processes fit together to form my reading workflow. There are a dozen or more tools I use, most of which don't interoperate in any meaningful way, and span the digital and the analog. My reading workflow spans days and weeks, and locations ranging from my office, my bedr…
    Tools embody mediums
  • AI to help us perceive, think, understand, and do more. AI that you could use like an extension of your own mind. Today, some applications of machine learning fall into this category, but they’re few and far between. Yet, I believe this is where the true potential of AI lies.
    AI is cognitive automation, not cognitive autonomy
  • For instance, if you take a model like StableDiffusion and integrate it into a visual design product to support and expand human workflows, you’re turning cognitive automation into cognitive assistance.
    AI is cognitive automation, not cognitive autonomy
  • On acceleration, a main bottleneck will be autonomy.
    What will GPT-2030 look like?
  • The core mistake the automation-kills-jobs doomers keep making is called the Lump Of Labor Fallacy. This fallacy is the incorrect notion that there is a fixed amount of labor to be done in the economy at any given time, and either machines do it or people do it – and if machines do it, there will be no work for people to do. The Lump Of Labor Fallacy flows naturally from naive intuition, but naive intuition here is wrong. When technology is applied to production, we get productivity growth – an increase in output generated by a reduction in inputs. The result is lower prices for goods and serv…
    Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz
  • build only what you need as you need it and adopt your software as quickly as possible.
    My Approach to Building Large Technical Projects – Mitchell Hashimoto
  • These aren't "minimum viable products", because they really aren't viable, but they're good enough to provide an engineer some valuable self-reflection.
    My Approach to Building Large Technical Projects – Mitchell Hashimoto
  • The goal is to get to a demo.
    My Approach to Building Large Technical Projects – Mitchell Hashimoto
  • Seeing the progression of "1 test passed", "4 tests passed," "13 tests passed" and so on is super exciting to me. I'm running some code I wrote and it's working. And I know that I'm progressing on some critical sub-component of a larger project.
    My Approach to Building Large Technical Projects – Mitchell Hashimoto
  • Selfishness doesn’t require malice or even sentience. When an AI automates a task and leaves a human jobless, this is selfish behavior without any intent. If competitive pressures continue to drive AI development, we shouldn’t be surprised if they act selfishly too.
    The Darwinian Argument for Worrying About AI | Time
  • At first, the CEO carefully monitors the work, but as months go by without error, the AI receives less oversight and more autonomy in the name of efficiency. It occurs to the CEO that since the AI is so good at these tasks, it should take on a wider range of more open-ended goals: “Design the next model in a product line,” “plan a new marketing campaign,” or “exploit security flaws in a competitor’s computer systems.” The CEO observes how businesses with more restricted use of AIs are falling behind, and is further incentivized to hand over more power to the AI with less oversight. Companies t…
    The Darwinian Argument for Worrying About AI | Time
  • You could consider this a form of epistemic learned helplessness, where I know any attempt to evaluate the arguments is just going to be a bad idea so I don’t even try. If you have a good argument that the Early Bronze Age worked completely differently from the way mainstream historians believe, I just don’t want to hear about it. If you insist on telling me anyway, I will nod, say that your argument makes complete sense, and then totally refuse to change my mind or admit even the slightest possibility that you might be right.
    [REPOST] Epistemic Learned Helplessness | Slate Star Codex
  • AI risk is string theory for computer programmers. It's fun to think about, interesting, and completely inaccessible to experiment given our current technology. You can build crystal palaces of thought, working from first principles, then climb up inside them and pull the ladder up behind you.
    Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People
  • This business about saving all of future humanity is a cop-out. We had the same exact arguments used against us under communism, to explain why everything was always broken and people couldn't have a basic level of material comfort.
    Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People
  • For all we know, human-level intelligence could be a tradeoff. Maybe any entity significantly smarter than a human being would be crippled by existential despair, or spend all its time in Buddha-like contemplation.
    Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People