flâneur

Ivy Zhang

1 followers · 3 following · 881 views

on the atlas — 172

highlights — 428

  • In the startup world, the name for this principle is "do things that don't scale." If you pay a ridiculous amount of attention to your tiny initial set of customers, ideally you'll kick off exponential growth by word of mouth. But this same principle applies to anything that grows exponentially. Learning, for example. When you first start learning something, you feel lost. But it's worth making the initial effort to get a toehold, because the more you learn, the easier it will get.
    Superlinear Returns
  • What else can we learn from these fields? In all of them you have to put in the initial effort. Superlinear returns seem small at first. At this rate, you find yourself thinking, I'll never get anywhere. But because the reward curve rises so steeply at the far end, it's worth taking extraordinary measures to get there.
    Superlinear Returns
  • Take as much risk as you can afford; if you're not failing occasionally you're probably being too conservative. Seek out the best colleagues. Develop good taste and learn from the best examples. Be honest, especially with yourself. Exercise and eat and sleep well and avoid the more dangerous drugs. When in doubt, follow your curiosity. It never lies, and it knows more than you do about what's worth paying attention to.
    Superlinear Returns
  • Choose work you have a natural aptitude for and a deep interest in. Develop a habit of working on your own projects; it doesn't matter what they are so long as you find them excitingly ambitious.
    Superlinear Returns
  • The most obvious way to take advantage of superlinear returns for performance is by doing exceptionally good work. At the far end of the curve, incremental effort is a bargain. All the more so because there's less competition at the far end — and not just for the obvious reason that it's hard to do something exceptionally well, but also because people find the prospect so intimidating that few even try. Which means it's not just a bargain to do exceptional work, but a bargain even to try to.
    Superlinear Returns
  • Indeed, the forms of exponential growth that don't consist of learning are so often intermixed with it that we should probably treat this as the rule rather than the exception. Which yields another heuristic: always be learning. If you're not learning, you're probably not on a path that leads to superlinear returns.
    Superlinear Returns
  • But the most important thresholds of all are those representing new discoveries. Knowledge seems to be fractal in the sense that if you push hard at the boundary of one area of knowledge, you sometimes discover a whole new field. And if you do, you get first crack at all the new discoveries to be made in it. Newton did this, and so did Durer and Darwin.
    Superlinear Returns
  • The most common case of exponential growth in preindustrial times was probably scholarship. The more you know, the easier it is to learn new things. The result, then as now, was that some people were startlingly more knowledgeable than the rest about certain topics.
    Superlinear Returns
  • The most obvious case of superlinear returns is when you're working on something that grows exponentially. For example, growing bacterial cultures. When they grow at all, they grow exponentially. But they're tricky to grow. Which means the difference in outcome between someone who's adept at it and someone who's not is very great.
    Superlinear Returns
  • AGI promises to generate great value in the years ahead, yet it also poses significant risks. The natural questions we should be asking in 2023 include: “Who benefits?” “Who is harmed?” “How can we maximize benefits and minimize harms?” and “How can we do this fairly and equitably?” These are pressing questions that should be discussed directly instead of denying the reality of AGI.
    Artificial General Intelligence Is Already Here
  • Stacking several neural nets together in the right way yields a model that can perform the same calculations as any given computer program.
    Artificial General Intelligence Is Already Here
  • The days are long but the decades are short.
    The days are long but the decades are short - Sam Altman
  • Do new things often. This seems to be really important. Not only does doing new things seem to slow down the perception of time, increase happiness, and keep life interesting, but it seems to prevent people from calcifying in the ways that they think. Aim to do something big, new, and risky every year in your personal and professional life.
    The days are long but the decades are short - Sam Altman
  • Tell your parents you love them more often. Go home and visit as often as you can.
    The days are long but the decades are short - Sam Altman
  • Go out of your way to help people. Few things in life are as satisfying. Be nice to strangers. Be nice even when it doesn’t matter.
    The days are long but the decades are short - Sam Altman
  • Exercise. Eat well. Sleep. Get out into nature with some regularity.
    The days are long but the decades are short - Sam Altman
  • If you think you’re going to regret not doing something, you should probably do it. Regret is the worst, and most people regret far more things they didn’t do than things they did do. When in doubt, kiss the boy/girl.
    The days are long but the decades are short - Sam Altman
  • Ask for what you want.
    The days are long but the decades are short - Sam Altman
  • Minimize your own cognitive load from distracting things that don’t really matter. It’s hard to overstate how important this is, and how bad most people are at it. Get rid of distractions in your life. Develop very strong ways to avoid letting crap you don’t like doing pile up and take your mental cycles, especially in your work life.
    The days are long but the decades are short - Sam Altman
  • Go out of your way to be around smart, interesting, ambitious people. Work for them and hire them (in fact, one of the most satisfying parts of work is forging deep relationships with really good people). Try to spend time with people who are either among the best in the world at what they do or extremely promising but totally unknown. It really is true that you become an average of the people you spend the most time with.
    The days are long but the decades are short - Sam Altman
  • Have clear goals for yourself every day, every year, and every decade.
    The days are long but the decades are short - Sam Altman
  • Don’t waste time. Most people waste most of their time, especially in business.
    The days are long but the decades are short - Sam Altman
  • Talk to people more. Read more long content and less tweets. Watch less TV. Spend less time on the Internet.
    The days are long but the decades are short - Sam Altman
  • Don’t spend time trying to maintain relationships with people you don’t like, and cut negative people out of your life. Negativity is really bad. Don’t let yourself make excuses for not doing the things you want to do.
    The days are long but the decades are short - Sam Altman
  • Life is not a dress rehearsal—this is probably it.
    The days are long but the decades are short - Sam Altman
  • Never put your family, friends, or significant other low on your priority list. Prefer a handful of truly close friends to a hundred acquaintances. Don’t lose touch with old friends. Occasionally stay up until the sun rises talking to people. Have parties.
    The days are long but the decades are short - Sam Altman
  • Think about risk the right way. Drew Houston gave a great commencement speech where he said you only have to be right once. That’s true. The risk is not getting on the path where you get to be right that one critical time.
    Advice for ambitious 19 year olds - Sam Altman
  • No matter what you choose, build stuff and be around smart people.
    Advice for ambitious 19 year olds - Sam Altman
  • But when the image was processed by a different, more open-ended algorithm that Michaeli designed
    The AI Tools Making Images Look Better | Quanta Magazine
  • The reality of publishing things on the internet is that interesting things get boosted, and boring things get ignored. So people are basically guaranteed to think your posts are much more interesting that they actually are, because they’re more likely to see your interesting posts.
    Some blogging myths
  • I think the reason I keep writing these blog posts encouraging people to blog is that I love reading people’s personal stories about how they do stuff with computers, and I want more of them.
    Some blogging myths
  • Ultimately morale is physical. You think with your body, so it's important to take care of it. That means exercising regularly, eating and sleeping well, and avoiding the more dangerous kinds of drugs. Running and walking are particularly good forms of exercise because they're good for thinking.
    How to Do Great Work
  • The people you spend time with will also have a big effect on your morale. You'll find there are some who increase your energy and others who decrease it, and the effect someone has is not always what you'd expect. Seek out the people who increase your energy and avoid those who decrease it. Though of course if there's someone you need to take care of, that takes precedence.
    How to Do Great Work
  • Don't marry someone who doesn't understand that you need to work, or sees your work as competition for your attention. If you're ambitious, you need to work; it's almost like a medical condition; so someone who won't let you work either doesn't understand you, or does and doesn't care.
    How to Do Great Work
  • One of the biggest mistakes ambitious people make is to allow setbacks to destroy their morale all at once, like a balloon bursting. You can inoculate yourself against this by explicitly considering setbacks a part of your process. Solving hard problems always involves some backtracking.
    How to Do Great Work
  • But this cycle also operates in the other direction: if you're not doing good work, that can demoralize you and make it even harder to. Since it matters so much for this cycle to be running in the right direction, it can be a good idea to switch to easier work when you're stuck, just so you start to get something done.
    How to Do Great Work
  • Quality is more important than quantity in colleagues. It's better to have one or two great ones than a building full of pretty good ones. In fact it's not merely better, but necessary, judging from history: the degree to which great work happens in clusters suggests that one's colleagues often make the difference between doing great work and not.
    How to Do Great Work
  • The young have no idea how rich they are in time. The best way to turn this time to advantage is to use it in slightly frivolous ways: to learn about something you don't need to know about, just out of curiosity, or to try building something just because it would be cool, or to become freakishly good at something.
    How to Do Great Work
  • So err on the side of starting. Which is easier when starting means starting small; those two ideas fit together like two puzzle pieces.
    How to Do Great Work
  • Being prolific is underrated. The more different things you try, the greater the chance of discovering something new. Understand, though, that trying lots of things will mean trying lots of things that don't work. You can't have a lot of good ideas without also having a lot of bad ones.
    How to Do Great Work
  • The initial versions of big things were often just experiments, or side projects, or talks, which then grew into something bigger. So start lots of small things.
    How to Do Great Work
  • Originality in choosing problems seems to matter even more than originality in solving them. That's what distinguishes the people who discover whole new fields.
    How to Do Great Work
  • Changing your context can help. If you visit a new place, you'll often find you have new ideas there. The journey itself often dislodges them. But you may not have to go far to get this benefit. Sometimes it's enough just to go for a walk.
    How to Do Great Work
  • Talking or writing about the things you're interested in is a good way to generate new ideas. When you try to put ideas into words, a missing idea creates a sort of vacuum that draws it out of you. Indeed, there's a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing.
    How to Do Great Work
  • For example, you're much more likely to have original ideas when you're working on something. Original ideas don't come from trying to have original ideas. They come from trying to build or understand something slightly too difficult.
    How to Do Great Work
  • I've never liked the term "creative process." It seems misleading. Originality isn't a process, but a habit of mind. Original thinkers throw off new ideas about whatever they focus on, like an angle grinder throwing off sparks. They can't help it.
    How to Do Great Work
  • But you never need to worry about that problem, because it's self-solving if you work on sufficiently ambitious projects.
    How to Do Great Work
  • Everyone knows to avoid distractions at work, but it's also important to avoid them in the other half of the cycle. When you let your mind wander, it wanders to whatever you care about most at that moment. So avoid the kind of distraction that pushes your work out of the top spot, or you'll waste this valuable type of thinking on the distraction instead. (Exception: Don't avoid love.)
    How to Do Great Work
  • The way to beat it is to stop occasionally and ask yourself: Am I working on what I most want to work on?"
    How to Do Great Work
  • One reason per-project procrastination is so dangerous is that it usually camouflages itself as work. You're not just sitting around doing nothing; you're working industriously on something else. So per-project procrastination doesn't set off the alarms that per-day procrastination does. You're too busy to notice it.
    How to Do Great Work