flâneur

Manh Duc Hoang

4 followers · 7 following · 903 views

on the atlas — 46

highlights — 43

  • This is it. Right now. There is no future version of your life more real than the one you’re living.
    A simple plan for living - by Yew Jin Lim - What YJ Thinks
  • This is where thinking harder makes things worse. Your brain craves narrative, so it invents complexity where there isn’t any. It latches onto whatever’s loudest, constructs stories from limited information, and gives your fears more weight than they deserve. You aren’t analyzing the task. You’re building a case for why it’s terrifying.
    A simple plan for living - by Yew Jin Lim - What YJ Thinks
  • So, no. I don’t ‘hate’ the algorithm because it is a reflection of who I am. I hate it because it has the power to manipulate the kind of person I could become.
    your phone is the reason you have no identity - by jc 💌
  • Not metrics. Principles. “Don’t interrupt the user unless they explicitly asked you to.” “Don’t put buttons where they’ll be accidentally pressed.” “Don’t optimize for engagement when engagement means annoyance.”
    My Fitbit Buzzed and I Understood Enshittification
  • Labor implications cut across class lines but hit working people hardest. The gig economy depends on workers whose attention spans have been systematically fragmented. Platform-mediated work requires constant connectivity, responsiveness. Uber drivers, DoorDash deliverers, TaskRabbit workers maintain continuous partial attention to multiple apps. They live in chronic nervous system activation that makes traditional labor organizing nearly impossible.
    Your Anxiety Is Someone Else's Quarterly Earnings
  • You want people to hate you for the simplicity of your idea. They could have done it too. But you were the one who executed it well.
    Why Over-Engineering Happens - Yusuf Aytas
  • architecture became less about solving today’s problems and more about defending against imaginary futures
    Why Over-Engineering Happens - Yusuf Aytas
  • Appendix 1: System Prompt
    Augmented Coding: Beyond the Vibes - by Kent Beck
  • Basically, there’s little downside in being over-optimistic about the impact of AI, but there’s a major downside in being a little too pessimistic. If optimism is overstated, then people just spent too much time and effort on tools that get used less than predicted.
    Microsoft is dogfooding AI dev tools’ future
  • How do I become better at negotiation? This could be a post in itself. Short version: a) Remember you’re selling the solution to a business need (raise revenue or decrease costs) rather than programming skill or your beautiful face. b) Negotiate aggressively with appropriate confidence, like the ethical professional you are. It is what your counterparty is probably doing. You’re aiming for a mutual beneficial offer, not for saying Yes every time they say something. c) “What is your previous salary?” is employer-speak for “Please give me reasons to pay you less money.” Answer appropriately. d) …
    Don't Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice | Kalzumeus Software
  • describe yourself by what you have accomplished for previously employers vis-a-vis increasing revenues or reducing costs.
    Don't Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice | Kalzumeus Software
  • Wanting to want something is what makes it stand out from the crowd. So this second-order desire (of not just wanting but wanting to want) could be thought of as the screening mechanism for direct desire infection. We screen out desires we do not want to have.
    Can you stop yourself being infected with other peoples’ desires? | Aeon Essays
  • Thems are also frequently viewed as more homogeneous than Us, with simpler emotions and less sensitivity to pain. For example, whether in ancient Rome, medieval England, imperial China, or the antebellum South, the elite had system-justifying stereotypes of slaves as simple, childlike, and incapable of independence.
    Why Your Brain Hates Other People - Nautilus
  • Crucially, in humans the insula not only mediates such sensory disgust, but also moral disgust
    Why Your Brain Hates Other People - Nautilus
  • Crucially, in humans the insula not only mediates such sensory disgust, but also moral disgust
    Why Your Brain Hates Other People - Nautilus
  • Us and Them is deeply hard-wired in our brains, with an ancient evolutionary legacy
    Why Your Brain Hates Other People - Nautilus
  • It is a fundamentally dehumanizing technology because it treats us as less than what we are: creators and apprehenders of meaning. It reduces the amount of intention in the world
    Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art | The New Yorker
  • skill is how well you perform at a task, while intelligence is how efficiently you gain new skills
    Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art | The New Yorker
  • Not all writing needs to be creative, or heartfelt, or even particularly good; sometimes it simply needs to exist.
    Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art | The New Yorker
  • However, interestingly, the effects of a healthy diet showed a far more significant response compared to sugar intake.
    Eating Less Sugar May Slow Signs of Biological Aging
  • they’re just there as a back stop to protect against data that’s wildly wrong.
    Postgres: Boundless `text` and Back Again — brandur.org
  • there’s no technical advantage of specifying columns as varchar(n) compared to just using bound-less text
    Postgres: Boundless `text` and Back Again — brandur.org
  • I don’t believe in regular checkups. If there is something wrong with me I’d rather not know about it, because then I would only worry about it and aggravate the condition.
    Henry Miller: The Wisdom of Age Constitutes the Ability to Accept Reality
  • in every domain, there are ways for work to be objectively more well-crafted. And this you should strive toward. You should study well-crafted work. But second, what you focus on should fit your strengths too, and the bent of your curiosity
    Scraping training data for your mind - by Henrik Karlsson
  • You can either do it very actively, as Nielsen does, using spaced repetition to deeply read key papers. Or, you can simply allow the papers (or the gardens, or whatever the input is) to linger in your presence and trust that they will imprint themselves on you.
    Scraping training data for your mind - by Henrik Karlsson
  • Why? Isn’t addiction just the extreme version of normal wanting? Apparently not. None of these anti-addictive drugs affect wholesome rewards like the feeling of a job well done or a child’s smile. Just drug addictions, and a few compulsive behaviors like porn and gambling. Maybe the job well-done and the child’s smile get implemented partly through some system other than dopamine (oxytocin?), or maybe these medications lop off some extreme part of the reward distribution that only addictive drugs ever reach in real life. But why? Why did God give your brain a special lever that only porn and c…
    Why Does Ozempic Cure All Diseases? - by Scott Alexander
  • A map in Go grows when one of two conditions is met: either there are too many overflow buckets, or the map is overloaded, meaning the load factor is too high. Because of these 2 conditions, there are also two kinds of growth: One that doubles the size of the buckets (when overloaded) One that keeps the same size but redistributes entries (when there are too many overflow buckets).
    Go Maps Explained: How Key-Value Pairs Are Actually Stored
  • Your milieu is not the same as your sister’s. It is an ever-shifting, individual configuration of information flows. The Twitter feed you have curated is a milieu. Your friend group (which is not the same as the friend groups of the other people in that group!) is a milieu. It is by changing your milieu that you change yourself.
    First we shape our social graph; then it shapes us
  • You are always internalizing the culture around you. Even when you wish you didn’t. So you better surround yourself with something you want inside—curate a culture.
    First we shape our social graph; then it shapes us
  • Let the nerds keep their lunch money, and you rule the world.
    How to Make Wealth
  • Venture capitalists have a list of danger signs to watch out for. Near the top is the company run by techno-weenies who are obsessed with solving interesting technical problems, instead of making users happy.
    How to Make Wealth
  • Here, as so often, the best defense is a good offense. If you can develop technology that's simply too hard for competitors to duplicate, you don't need to rely on other defenses. Start by picking a hard problem, and then at every decision point, take the harder choice.
    How to Make Wealth
  • A big company is like a giant galley driven by a thousand rowers. Two things keep the speed of the galley down. One is that individual rowers don't see any result from working harder. The other is that, in a group of a thousand people, the average rower is likely to be pretty average.
    How to Make Wealth
  • To get rich you need to get yourself in a situation with two things, measurement and leverage. You need to be in a position where your performance can be measured, or there is no way to get paid more by doing more. And you have to have leverage, in the sense that the decisions you make have a big effect
    How to Make Wealth
  • Ozempic combined with health tracking enabled by smart devices will probably enable anyone to be as fit as they want (which is why I think long luxury brands, beauty/cosmetics, plastic surgery and travel - all things that can be used to reflect status/taste as a mechanism of differentiation)
    Hyper Individualization - by Sophie
  • And the concept of ‘hard work’ is a religion. We bow to the altar of profits or whatever, and that shapes how we work - but maybe we can work smarter? We must ask if our current work models are smart and sustainable, especially given our technological capabilities.
    The TikTok Girl is Right: Modernity and the 9-to-5
  • To develop a theory of change, you need to start at the end and repeatedly ask yourself, “Concretely, how does one achieve that?
    Theory of Change (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought)
  • In our downtime outside of work, documentation urges us to track our sleep, diet, exercise routine and mood. We turned life-enriching habits into another form of work out of the guilt of not working, which certainly applies to reading.
    Why I Refuse To Track How Many Books I've Read
  • Unlike a book or a full-length film, short-form content lacks narrative and it has no gaps for us to take stock. Reels/Tiktoks follow one another in rapid succession, displacing any possibility of experiencing duration. As a result, time is fractured into sudden interruptions, producing what Han called a diffused anxiety as a result of a lack of narration.
    Crawling Back To Reading From Scrolling...
  • When I’ve reached 60-80% of the thing being as good as I want, I’ve probably done enough.
    Lessons learned in 35 years of making software – Jim Grey
  • Someone who already knew how to do it could have done it faster and better, for sure, but I got it done. We all have to start somewhere when we learn how to do something.
    Lessons learned in 35 years of making software – Jim Grey
  • “It sometimes seems as if the modern worker spends more time talking about work than actually working.”
    White-Collar Work Is Just Meetings Now - The Atlantic
  • 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