flâneur

Izu Elechi

4 followers · 1 following · 265 views

on the atlas — 17

highlights — 32

  • A year from now, will it matter?
    Notes to self
  • Simple heuristic: If you’re evenly split on a difficult decision, take the path more painful in the short term.
    Notes to self
  • Self-discipline is the greatest form of self-love.
    Notes to self
  • Ultimately, your desire to create must be greater than your fear of it.
    Notes to self
  • Не чекай чуда, чуди сам.
    Notes to self
  • Anything you say before the word “but” does not count.
    Notes to self
  • Are the things that are upsetting you a product of imagination or reality?
    Notes to self
  • If you don’t allow yourself to feel, you’re procrastinating truth.
    Notes to self
  • There is simply no adventure quite as grand as committing to tell the truth about everything. — someone
    Notes to self
  • Here’s the core mechanic of softmax: it forces a choice among competing alternatives, whether it’s particles picking an energy state or consumers choosing a car.
    Attention Is Off By One – Evan Miller
  • To learn the skill of mending is to also gain unconsciously the skill of building, to understand the very urge to build. If we never mend, we not only risk building less but building in perverse ways.
    That which is unique, breaks - by Simon Sarris
  • Love and effort create magnificent places. Genius inhabits them. People go to them because they know such places and landscapes offer consolation of the soul, and the soul is not fooled by substitutes.
    That which is unique, breaks - by Simon Sarris
  • The question is: “why is that important to you?”
    Try Asking People Why Things Matter to Them
  • Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.
    A Nihilist’s Guide to Meaning | Melting Asphalt
  • As far as we know, we and our societies take the prize for being the most complex structures the universe has yet evolved. And thanks to our ingenuity, there are more things deserving of study on the surface of one planet (Earth) than in the entire rest of the known universe. I don't mean to boast, but we're kind of the life of the party here.
    A Nihilist’s Guide to Meaning | Melting Asphalt
  • the energy rate density for humans and modern human society are approximately a million times greater than for stars and galaxies. For example, the Sun emits a vast luminosity, 4x1033 erg/s (equivalent to nearly a billion billion billion watt light bulb), but it also has a huge mass, 2x1033 g; thus each second an amount of energy equaling only 2 ergs passes through each gram of this star. In contrast to any star, more energy flows through each gram of a plant's leaf during photosynthesis, and much more (nearly a million times) rushes through each gram of a human brain while thinking (~20W/1350…
    Big History
  • But David Graeber goes further and says many modern jobs are actually bullshit: Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul.
    A Nihilist’s Guide to Meaning | Melting Asphalt
  • But I think it's more accurate to say that fame enhances meaning, perhaps by acting as a scaling factor. The more people who watch and listen to you, the greater your influence; every impression is another arrow pointing outward from your life. Now, if your work is meaningless to start with, then multiplying it by fame won't get you any extra meaning. But if your work does influence the world in a meaningful way, then you'll want it to reach as many people as possible.
    A Nihilist’s Guide to Meaning | Melting Asphalt
  • many people would sooner suffer in reality than live a lie, however beautiful it may be. This is why meaning can't be modeled as simply another piece of the "pleasure" package.
    A Nihilist’s Guide to Meaning | Melting Asphalt
  • a life in the machine has no meaning, at least from the perspective of someone standing outside it. To choose the tank would be to render your real life a causal dead-end
    A Nihilist’s Guide to Meaning | Melting Asphalt
  • pleasure is a strictly subjective experience. You can close your eyes and bliss out as hard as you like, and the pleasure you experience will be no less valid because it's "just in your mind." Meaning, on the other hand, is entangled with external reality, making it possible to be wrong about it. And thus the pursuit of true meaning requires an outward orientation to the world.
    A Nihilist’s Guide to Meaning | Melting Asphalt
  • people can actually be wrong about their feelings of meaning. You might think your job is meaningful, but if a friend disagrees, he probably has an objective basis for doing so. He might tell you, "Actually, your job has no real effect on the outcomes you actually care about." This would be a disagreement about facts, not axiomatic values or subjective feelings.
    A Nihilist’s Guide to Meaning | Melting Asphalt
  • the meaning of a thing is defined by its connections to other meaningful things
    A Nihilist’s Guide to Meaning | Melting Asphalt
  • Regardless, the more densely or strongly connected something is to the rest of the meaning "soup," the more meaningful it will be perceived to be.
    A Nihilist’s Guide to Meaning | Melting Asphalt
  • Both meaning and beauty are experiences we seem to crave, and the fact that all humans have these cravings suggests that they're adaptive.
    A Nihilist’s Guide to Meaning | Melting Asphalt
  • So: meaning isn't a substance, but rather a feeling. In this way, it's a lot like beauty.
    A Nihilist’s Guide to Meaning | Melting Asphalt
  • Existence, he says, is fundamentally playful. It's less like a journey, and more like a piece of music or a dance. And the point of dancing isn't to arrive at a particular spot on the floor; the point of dancing is simply to dance.
    A Nihilist’s Guide to Meaning | Melting Asphalt
  • When you talk about people you like, or rather when you talk about that thing that happens between you—you have to transform a very complex impression into a string of words. Some relationships can easily be compressed into a compelling string of words. This is usually because they conform to some sort of trope of how romance should look. In my experience, great relationships are harder to compress into a sensible string of words. And the problem is this: we are social creatures. If people look at you with a confused, or even worried, expression when you tell them about your lover, you will li…
    Looking for Alice - by Henrik Karlsson - Escaping Flatland
  • Givers think that conversations unfold as a series of invitations; takers think conversations unfold as a series of declarations. When giver meets giver or taker meets taker, all is well. When giver meets taker, however, giver gives, taker takes, and giver gets resentful (“Why won’t he ask me a single question?”) while taker has a lovely time (“She must really think I’m interesting!”) or gets annoyed (“My job is so boring, why does she keep asking me about it?”).
    Good conversations have lots of doorknobs
  • ReAct (Yao et al. 2023) integrates reasoning and acting within LLM by extending the action space to be a combination of task-specific discrete actions and the language space. The former enables LLM to interact with the environment (e.g. use Wikipedia search API), while the latter prompting LLM to generate reasoning traces in natural language. The ReAct prompt template incorporates explicit steps for LLM to think, roughly formatted as: Thought: ... Action: ... Observation: ... ... (Repeated many times)
    LLM Powered Autonomous Agents | Lil'Log
  • Clone stuff you like, from scratch, to see how they work.
    Learn In Public
  • What you do here is to have a habit of creating learning exhaust:
    Learn In Public