Verona Teo

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on the atlas · 26

highlights · 28

Sometimes it’s okay to let beautiful things go unburned. Sometimes it’s okay to let thoughts sit on the shelf of the mind for some length of time before we put them to ‘use’ in our writing. Sometimes what seems like not using a thing or a thought is actually a matter of figuring out a better use for that thing or that thought than I might have originally imagined.
Day 3 of #1000wordsofsummer 2023 - by Jami Attenberg
Many of those who place a friendship at the center of their life find that their most significant relationship is incomprehensible to others.
The People Who Prioritize a Friendship Over Romance - The Atlantic
the quest for the best — or for the hack that will actually make some part of our life less cumbersome — throws a veil of dissatisfaction over our days.
The Optimization Sinkhole - by Anne Helen Petersen
And once in a blue moon, when we’re alone in our rooms, we’ll realize we’ve lived very little with little to say.
Why Is It So Hard To "Write What You Know"?
We love the narrative of experiences, not the experiences themselves.
Why Is It So Hard To "Write What You Know"?
Metaphysical Animals shows us that we can find more value in the world when we expand our attention beyond ourselves and out to others. It also offers insight into how philosophy should be conducted: with company.
Evil and Loneliness: Why You Should Do Philosophy with Friends
I realized the missing ingredient in the current conception of a great or cool place is time.
#116: Emma Chamberlain’s “deeply personal” Los Angeles home
When digital photography replaced film, we swapped problems of arguable virtue—intention, discernment, patience—and replaced them with unmitigated paranoia, disassociation, and self-interest.
#146: The problem with “being present” - by Haley Nahman
Maybe without the ability to capture my life in this way, I’d have accepted that this much of life isn’t meant to be captured.
#146: The problem with “being present” - by Haley Nahman
It’s a much gentler way into creativity, and a more honest way too.
Prompt 236. The Open Palm
Through the commitment to busyness and its organization, we inscribe and reinscribe a certain understanding of time onto our children, onto each other, onto ourselves. We discipline our messy, distracted, inquisitive, emotive selves into the most valuable possible forms of human capital possible. We suggest that sort of regimentation is not only possible (just organize harder!) but aspirational.
The Diminishing Returns of Calendar Culture
But that itself, sometimes referred to as a “monochronic” understanding of time, is no more or less “natural” than other ways of conceiving of time, like “polychronic” culture, which understands time as dynamic, flexible, and filled with several tasks at once, each of which will take the time that they need. Monochronic cultures may be more “efficient” in their use of time, but in their treatment of time as a commodity, they lose the richness that comes with allowing tasks, conversations, and interactions to move forward at a more natural and sustainable pace.
The Diminishing Returns of Calendar Culture
“many of those who place a friendship at the center of their life find that their most significant relationship is incomprehensible to others.”
You'd Be Happier Living Closer to Friends. Why Don't You?
The joy can come from pride in crafting a beautiful sentence, or landing on an important idea, or finding a hidden part of your soul in the process of putting the words on the page.
1000words — JAMI ATTENBERG
When I go home I will go to a parade, some parties. Tomorrow I will rest. The thing I see again, know again, is the feeling of being happy in a pure way. I forgot my troubles for a while and while they did not disappear when I returned to them they were lessened. Now there is a new spaciousness within me.
How Do You Want to Exist in the World - by Jami Attenberg
Surround yourself with differently free people.
Don’t Surround Yourself With Smarter People
The trick is to surround yourself with people who are free in ways you’re not.
Don’t Surround Yourself With Smarter People
To put it simply, attention is the act of being human and a defence of ethics.
How To Cultivate Attention In Our Distracted World
I’m content to just satisfy my curiosity.
An Applied Mathematician Strengthens AI With Pure Math | Quanta Magazine
How do I discuss homology when you have points sampled from a manifold instead of the manifold itself?
An Applied Mathematician Strengthens AI With Pure Math | Quanta Magazine
“When I encountered them later in my education, it felt like meeting an old friend.”
An Applied Mathematician Strengthens AI With Pure Math | Quanta Magazine
We can both avoid overfitting and take advantage of conditioning via ‘context distillation’, where we finetune a model p θ ( X ) with a loss given by L ( θ ) = D KL ( p 0 ( X | C ) || p θ ( X )) (2.1) where p 0 is the initial model, the context C is fixed, and the data X is drawn from a large corpus of text, such as the original pre-training distribution.
[2112.00861] A General Language Assistant as a Laboratory for Alignment
But finetuning also behaves differently from prompting – finetuning changes the model’s expectations for the data distribution P ( X ) , bringing it closer to the distribution of the prompt P ( C ) , whereas prompting instead asks the model for the distribution P ( X | C ) , where C is the context.
[2112.00861] A General Language Assistant as a Laboratory for Alignment
prompting imposes a prior, while finetuning alters the model’s expectations for the underlying data distribution.
[2112.00861] A General Language Assistant as a Laboratory for Alignment
e devised a new mode of expression, a language that deals with the "conceptual content" and that he came to call "Begriffsschrift". b This ideography is a "formula language", that is, a lingua characterica, a language written with special symbols, "for pure thought", that is, free from rhetorical embellishments, "modeled upon that of arithmetic", that is, constructed from specific symbols that are manipulated according to definite rules
frege begriffsschrift
The core of the procedure just described is the following: Something is true for the natural numbers exactly when the corresponding statement holds for all simple infinities (i.e., is a semantic consequence of the Dedekind-Peano axioms). What, then, are the natural numbers? They are those mathematical objects whose properties are determined by all arithmetic truths; we “abstract away” from everything else in terms of a logical procedure. Moreover, this procedure can be spelled out, precisely and consistently, in terms of “structural abstraction principles” (cf. Linnebo & Pettigrew 2014, Reck 2…
Dedekind’s Contributions to the Foundations of Mathematics (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
By philosophical critics, Dedekind’s procedure is often interpreted as follows: As his language of “abstraction” and “creation” suggests, he is appealing to psychological processes. And the resulting entities—“the real number” and “the natural numbers”—must then be psychological or mental entities (existing in people’s subjective consciousness).
Dedekind’s Contributions to the Foundations of Mathematics (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Savor the subtle insights which really do occur regularly in research. Think of it like cultivating a much more sensitive palate.
Cultivating depth and stillness in research | Andy Matuschak