flâneur

Nima Pourjafar

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on the atlas — 28

highlights — 16

  • I remember a conversation we had a year or so before his death, walking in the hills above Pasadena. We were exploring an unfamiliar trail and Richard, recovering from a major operation for the cancer, was walking more slowly than usual. He was telling a long and funny story about how he had been reading up on his disease and surprising his doctors by predicting their diagnosis and his chances of survival. I was hearing for the first time how far his cancer had progressed, so the jokes did not seem so funny. He must have noticed my mood, because he suddenly stopped the story and asked, "Hey, w…
    Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine - The Long Now
  • "We have noticed in nature that the behavior of a fluid depends very little on the nature of the individual particles in that fluid. For example, the flow of sand is very similar to the flow of water or the flow of a pile of ball bearings. We have therefore taken advantage of this fact to invent a type of imaginary particle that is especially simple for us to simulate. This particle is a perfect ball bearing that can move at a single speed in one of six directions. The flow of these particles on a large enough scale is very similar to the flow of natural fluids." This was a typical Richard Fey…
    Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine - The Long Now
  • The game of Life is an example of a class of computations that interested Feynman called [cellular automata]. Like many physicists who had spent their lives going to successively lower and lower levels of atomic detail, Feynman often wondered what was at the bottom. One possible answer was a cellular automaton. The notion is that the "continuum" might, at its lowest levels, be discrete in both space and time, and that the laws of physics might simply be a macro-consequence of the average behavior of tiny cells
    Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine - The Long Now
  • Fortunately, he was right. When we put together the chips the machine worked. The first program run on the machine in April of 1985 was Conway's game of Life.
    Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine - The Long Now
  • Quantum chromodynamics is a theory of the internal workings of atomic particles such as protons. Using this theory it is possible, in principle, to compute the values of measurable physical quantities, such as a proton's mass. In practice, such a computation requires so much arithmetic that it could keep the fastest computers in the world busy for years. One way to do this calculation is to use a discrete four-dimensional lattice to model a section of space-time. Finding the solution involves adding up the contributions of all of the possible configurations of certain matrices on the links of …
    Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine - The Long Now
  • Say we wanted to look up the word "fruit" in our previous example, how do we choose which "key" is the best match? It's obviously not "chair", but both "apple" and "banana" seem appropriate matches. It's hard to choose one or the other, fruit feels more like a combination of apple and banana rather than a strict match for either. So, let's not choose. Instead, we'll do exactly that, take a combination of apple and banana. For example, say we assign a 60% meaning based match for apple, a 40% match for banana, and 0% match for chair. We compute our final output value as the weighted sum of the v…
    An Intuition for Attention | Jay Mody
  • Notice, we don't use explicitly labelled data. Instead, we are able to produce the input/label pairs from just the raw text itself. This is referred to as self-supervised learning. Self-supervision enables us to massively scale train data, just get our hands on as much raw text as possible and throw it at the model
    GPT in 60 Lines of NumPy | Jay Mody
  • When we don’t know something, there are really two different categories that that lack of knowledge can be in. There are known unknowns, that is, things that we know that we don’t know. And there are unknown unknowns, things that we don’t know and that we don’t know that we don’t know
    Choose Boring Technology
  • If you go up to a developer and say, “hey, what would make you happy?” you often get highly specific answers. “I would be happy if I could write Clojure at work,” they’ll say, “so you should let me do my work in Clojure.” I don’t discount that when they do this, developers are genuinely describing some kind of endorphin-rich experience they have had at some point. However, I am skeptical that the state that they’re describing is the highest level of spiritual attainment possible.
    Choose Boring Technology
  • For some reason, a lot of smart college students end up with the idea that “solving hard technical problems” is the best thing they can do with their life. It’s a common refrain in Hacker News comments, job ads and interview questions. Why does this happen? Probably because that’s the only thing they’ve been rewarded for over the past 15 years. School is a closed-world domain—you are solving crisply-defined puzzles (multiply these two numbers, implement this algorithm, write a book report by this rubric), your solution is evaluated on one dimension (letter grade), and the performance ceiling (…
    You don’t need to work on hard problems
  • Momentum is needed to bring you to a world-class level, and deepens over time. Put this way: your goal is not “find the perfect topic”, but choose a topic that will lead to interesting things, then pursue it with increasing fervor built from reading books in the field and talking to people in the field. This is a nice reframing of commitment, for the commitment-phobes of us.
    Conviction is the Scarcest Resource: Essays About Gaining Real Conviction
  • Try to have conviction on every level of the thing you’re doing: inspiration at the 10 year goal, interest in the subject and opportunity on the 1-3 year time frame, people you’d enjoy working with over months, interest in the day to day skills and activities, etc.
    Conviction is the Scarcest Resource: Essays About Gaining Real Conviction
  • Forget what’s best. Focus on what interests you most. What engages you when you aren’t trying to be “productive”? Remember that it’s possible to enjoy things deeply and that repetition and stagnation can lead to wasted time.
    Conviction is the Scarcest Resource: Dialogues About Conviction
  • Focus and Commitment In college, it’s fine to have phases where you do not to feel focused enough – your goal is to try different things. Even then, shipping one at a time will be more productive and fun Now that you’re post college in a field, you need to be hungrier, stop maximizing optionality Remaining in this zone, where you even are doing 2 projects, is not like 100% going into 50%, it’s like 1000% is splitting into 50-50 You can beat anyone with focus: this is the superpower No one’s committed ‒ everyone else doing random shiny crap: i.e. mutual X could be brilliant but he can’t choose …
    Conviction is the Scarcest Resource: Dialogues About Conviction
  • I think its sort of like, you have to order your interests so that you go super deep on one do something big, then completely retract and go super deep on another, and so on you’ve done the first step of be curious about a lot of things but now you need to switch modes a bit, and choose which of ur interests ur best timed in it’s sort of an unintuitive switch/mode you’re gonna screw yourself if you do two things at once or are constantly pining for some other interest, and not do anything big in either like, I don’t expect to be doing zk for 10 years – I hope that in 5 years or whatever im sic…
    Conviction is the Scarcest Resource: Dialogues About Conviction
  • Starting [at a young age] he’s read everything that he could find about business. The subject that interests him, he’s read newspapers, biographies, trade press. He went over to his grandfather who was a grocer and he read the progressive grocer magazine, and he read articles on how to stock a meat department... What he’s really done is he’s created this immense vertical filing cabinet in his brain of layers and layers and layers of files of information that he can draw back on now for more than 70 years worth of data.
    Curius / Onboarding