flâneur

Chinhai Hour

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on the atlas — 31

highlights — 99

  • The kind of discomfort that takes you to a new place always has a quality of uncertainty. You can’t know the exact pains you’ll experience. You cannot get guarantees of how much discomfort will yield how much reward. This uncertainty around the new route will make the mind go “Ugh, no, let’s go any way but this way!”
    The Route You’re Looking for is Straight Through the Woods
  • Entering new territory requires new forms of discomfort. You might already be accustomed to the discomfort of doing a lot of cardio, or working late nights. But saying no to needy clients is a deep, untrodden wood for you.
    The Route You’re Looking for is Straight Through the Woods
  • Taking the long and fake detour can be such a trap. You can walk a thousand miles looping around the same paths to avoid a one-mile trudge through the woods.
    The Route You’re Looking for is Straight Through the Woods
  • none of your paths reach places you haven’t been, because they were all created only by your own feet.
    The Route You’re Looking for is Straight Through the Woods
  • I'm pathologically optimistic about people's ability to change.
    Relentlessly Resourceful
  • Instruct Claude to address each issue one by one, fixing and verifying before checking it off and moving to the next
    Claude Code Best Practices \ Anthropic
  • Paste specific URLs alongside your prompts for Claude to fetch and read. To avoid permission prompts for the same domains (e.g., docs.foo.com), use /permissions to add domains to your allowlist.
    Claude Code Best Practices \ Anthropic
  • Claude can infer intent, but it can't read minds. Specificity leads to better alignment with expectations.
    Claude Code Best Practices \ Anthropic
  • Letting Claude run arbitrary commands is risky and can result in data loss, system corruption, or even data exfiltration (e.g., via prompt injection attacks). To minimize these risks, use --dangerously-skip-permissions in a container without internet access. You can follow this reference implementation using Docker Dev Containers.
    Claude Code Best Practices \ Anthropic
  • Like humans, Claude's outputs tend to improve significantly with iteration. While the first version might be good, after 2-3 iterations it will typically look much better. Give Claude the tools to see its outputs for best results.
    Claude Code Best Practices \ Anthropic
  • Steps #1-#2 are crucial—without them, Claude tends to jump straight to coding a solution. While sometimes that's what you want, asking Claude to research and plan first significantly improves performance for problems requiring deeper thinking upfront.
    Claude Code Best Practices \ Anthropic
  • Ask Claude to implement its solution in code. This is also a good place to ask it to explicitly verify the reasonableness of its solution as it implements pieces of the solution.
    Claude Code Best Practices \ Anthropic
  • I was then, and am still, fascinated by the way in which two incompatible experiences are still connected by time. You could be sad and despairing on a Monday morning, and be laughing that afternoon. In a matter of hours, the awfulness – real as it was – has somehow evaporated and been replaced by an entirely different experience.
    You Can Get There From Here
  • I was then, and am still, fascinated by the way in which two incompatible experiences are still connected by time. You could be sad and despairing on a Monday morning, and be laughing that afternoon. In a matter of hours, the awfulness – real as it was – has somehow evaporated and been replaced by an entirely different experience.
    You Can Get There From Here
  • most things are much less scary when you trust that you’ll let yourself stop if you really want to.
    Trust develops gradually via making bids and setting boundaries — LessWrong
  • Part of the problem is that CS fundamentals instruction tends to happen in undergrad computer science courses.
    How different is a B.S. in Computer Science from an M.S. when it comes to recruiting? - Aline Lerner's BlogAline Lerner's Blog
  • When you notice yourself flinching away from something that seems like an obviously good idea, that’s often because it was associated with coercion in the past. Burnout, for example, can come as a result of piling on more and more internal coercion to do work, until any type of work starts to trigger a flinch reflex.
    Conflicts between emotional schemas often involve internal coercion — LessWrong
  • Like external conflicts, internal conflicts are typically wasteful and destructive. Because of this, people who face serious internal conflict can’t be viewed as coherently pursuing any set of goals—as in the examples above, they often carry out self-destructive behavior which is detrimental towards all their goals, and which undermines their ability to trust themselves in the future.
    Conflicts between emotional schemas often involve internal coercion — LessWrong
  • the more articulate parts of ourselves are using them to castigate other parts, in order to control their behavior
    Conflicts between emotional schemas often involve internal coercion — LessWrong
  • counterproductive strategies often get stuck in self-reinforcing feedback loops
    We learn long-lasting strategies to protect ourselves from danger and rejection — LessWrong
  • On iPad, avoid putting custom content or controls in the center of the status bar or too close to the bottom corners. The system displays controls in these areas when people use multitasking or Stage Manager.
    Layout | Apple Developer Documentation
  • On iPad, consider placing controls on the sides of the screen in landscape orientation. When controls are on the left and right sides of the screen, people can reach them easily with both hands while they’re holding the device.
    Layout | Apple Developer Documentation
  • letterboxed or pillarboxed appearance
    Layout | Apple Developer Documentation
  • if you can’t display all the items in a large collection at once, you need to indicate that there are additional items that aren’t currently visible.
    Layout | Apple Developer Documentation
  • It’s important to remember that when you start from scratch there is absolutely no reason to believe that you are going to do a better job than you did the first time. First of all, you probably don’t even have the same programming team that worked on version one, so you don’t actually have “more experience”. You’re just going to make most of the old mistakes again, and introduce some new problems that weren’t in the original version.
    Things You Should Never Do, Part I – Joel on Software
  • The idea that new code is better than old is patently absurd. Old code has been used. It has been tested. Lots of bugs have been found, and they’ve been fixed.
    Things You Should Never Do, Part I – Joel on Software
  • There’s a subtle reason that programmers always want to throw away the code and start over. The reason is that they think the old code is a mess. And here is the interesting observation: they are probably wrong. The reason that they think the old code is a mess is because of a cardinal, fundamental law of programming: It’s harder to read code than to write it.
    Things You Should Never Do, Part I – Joel on Software
  • We’re programmers. Programmers are, in their hearts, architects, and the first thing they want to do when they get to a site is to bulldoze the place flat and build something grand. We’re not excited by incremental renovation: tinkering, improving, planting flower beds.
    Things You Should Never Do, Part I – Joel on Software
  • You might suppose the foundation would be a shallow read of a large number of papers. In fact, to really grok an unfamiliar field, you need to engage deeply with key papers – papers like the AlphaGo paper. What you get from deep engagement with important papers is more significant than any single fact or technique: you get a sense for what a powerful result in the field looks like. It helps you imbibe the healthiest norms and standards of the field. It helps you internalize how to ask good questions in the field, and how to put techniques together. You begin to understand what made something l…
    Augmenting Long-term Memory
  • Many papers contain wrong or misleading statements, and if you commit such items to memory, you're actively making yourself stupider.
    Augmenting Long-term Memory
  • Put another way: if a paper is so uninteresting that it's not possible to add 5 good questions about it, it's usually better to add no questions at all.
    Augmenting Long-term Memory
  • I will find a new article (or set of articles), and typically spend a few minutes assessing it. Does the article seem likely to contain substantial insight or provocation relevant to my project – new questions, new ideas, new methods, new results? If so, I'll have a read.
    Augmenting Long-term Memory
  • This is important: I find Anki works much better when used in service to some personal creative project.
    Augmenting Long-term Memory
  • And so using Anki in this way gives confidence you will retain understanding over the long term. This confidence, in turn, makes the initial act of understanding more pleasurable, since you believe you're learning something for the long haul, not something you'll forget in a day or a week.
    Augmenting Long-term Memory
  • One, I was trying to simply identify the most important ideas in the paper. What were the names of the key techniques I'd need to learn about? Second, there was a kind of hoovering process, looking for basic facts that I could understand easily, and that would obviously benefit me. Things like basic terminology, the rules of Go, and so on.
    Augmenting Long-term Memory
  • First, if memorizing a fact seems worth 10 minutes of my time in the future, then I do it** I first saw an analysis along these lines in Gwern Branwen's review of spaced repetition: Gwern Branwen, Spaced-Repetition. His numbers are slightly more optimistic than mine – he arrives at a 5-minute rule of thumb, rather than 10 minutes – but broadly consistent. Branwen's analysis is based, in turn, on an analysis in: Piotr Wozniak, Theoretical aspects of spaced repetition in learning.. Second, and superseding the first, if a fact seems striking then into Anki it goes, regardless of whether it seems …
    Augmenting Long-term Memory
  • Despite the fact that I'd thought little about AlphaGo or reinforcement learning in the intervening time, I found I could read those followup papers with ease. While I didn't attempt to understand those papers as thoroughly as the initial AlphaGo paper, I found I could get a pretty good understanding of the papers in less than an hour. I'd retained much of my earlier understanding!
    Augmenting Long-term Memory
  • expectation of progress towards a goal is key to motivation. we are not motivated if don’t know next step. we are not motivated if we don’t know what the goal is
    lifehacks - Alexey Guzey
  • When you try to make such rules precise, you quickly get lost in a morass of exceptions and caveats and special cases. It seems hopeless.
    Neural networks and deep learning
  • Energy conservation, according to Noether, comes from translation symmetry in time. Similarly, momentum conservation is due to translation symmetry in space. And conservation of angular momentum, the property that allows ice skaters to speed up their spins by hugging their arms close to their bodies, emerges from rotational symmetry, the idea that physics stays the same as we spin around in space.
    In her short life, mathematician Emmy Noether changed the face of physics
  • Deliberate practice is different. It entails considerable, specific, and sustained efforts to do something you can’t do well—or even at all. Research across domains shows that it is only by working at what you can’t do that you turn into the expert you want to become.
    The Making of an Expert
  • It's hard to turn a complex problem into doable tasks without some idea of what you want the world to look like when you've completed those tasks.
    The Shadow Question - LessWrong
  • because your attempts to consider alternatives are quashed by fear
    From fear to excitement - Richard Ngo, LessWrong
  • You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.
    Text of J.K. Rowling’s speech – Harvard Gazette
  • So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.
    Text of J.K. Rowling’s speech – Harvard Gazette
  • When you’re thinking in detail about what you really want, you’re much better at aiming towards it.
    From fear to excitement - Richard Ngo, LessWrong
  • if you don’t have consistent scheduled time for your top goals, you don’t have top goals
    lifehacks - Alexey Guzey
  • everything has an MVP & final version. MVP can usually be done in 10% of the time with a timer for 5-10-15 minutes & ensures you don’t get stuck. what’s the mvp of your current top goal?
    lifehacks - Alexey Guzey
  • risks are less risky than you think. take as many as you can.
    lifehacks - Alexey Guzey
  • reflect on your day at the end of it and write down what you learned
    lifehacks - Alexey Guzey