Shereen Lee

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on the atlas — 28

highlights — 46

Understanding softmax and the negative log-likelihood
Understanding softmax and the negative log-likelihood
The theologians of civil theology are "the people", asking how the gods relate to daily life and the state (imperial cult). The theologians of natural theology are the philosophers, asking about the nature of the gods, and the theologians of mythical theology are the poets, crafting mythology.
Natural theology - Wikipedia
After all, the notion of using synthetic mRNA molecules to program our bodies to produce drugs is new and unfamiliar, as is the idea that we could program plants, insects, and animals to produce engineered proteins. Cells feelmore containable than fields full of transgenic organisms. It seems like people shouldn’t be programming trees in their backyard or plants in their garden to synthesize designs for bioproducts that they download from the Internet. For biotechnologists, part of our duty is to address this fear. We need to help people imagine a future with ubiquitous biotechnology that is w…
Beyond Steel Tanks
The customer normally finds a long-term contract attractive because it permits him to judge his costs well in advance; the cost of data processing has been rising rapidly in recent years. Meanwhile, E.D.S. is able to avoid a cost-price squeeze by removing some of its personnel from a project after things begin running smoothly, and reassigning them to new projects. In fact, the company has been so adept at avoiding a squeeze that its pretax profit margin was more than 30 percent during fiscal 1968, and on some contracts the margin was as high as 50 percent.
Ross Perot: The Fastest Richest Texan Ever | Fortune
They contend that it has been able to recruit perhaps the most skillful staff of systems engineers in the country (the company has nineteen full-time recruiters, or about eighteen more than most software companies that size). They point out that E.D.S. has a reputation for accomplishing its tasks thoroughly and brilliantly, and that it has developed an unusual, and highly profitable, modus operandi.
Ross Perot: The Fastest Richest Texan Ever | Fortune
The physical world is very high bandwidth, and some of the ways cities send you messages are quite subtle.
Cities and Ambition
Wild animals are beautiful because they have hard lives.
Taste for Makers
Whatever job people do, they naturally want to do better. Football players like to win games. CEOs like to increase earnings. It's a matter of pride, and a real pleasure, to get better at your job. But if your job is to design things, and there is no such thing as beauty, then there is no way to get better at your job. If taste is just personal preference, then everyone's is already perfect: you like whatever you like, and that's it.
Taste for Makers
Whatever job people do, they naturally want to do better. Football players like to win games. CEOs like to increase earnings. It's a matter of pride, and a real pleasure, to get better at your job. But if your job is to design things, and there is no such thing as beauty, then there is no way to get better at your job. If taste is just personal preference, then everyone's is already perfect: you like whatever you like, and that's it.
Taste for Makers
A human being is destined to live in eternity and is fully known only to God. Agape is about the spiritual destiny of the individual; destiny is a spiritual drama. My destiny is my own selfhood given by God, but given not as an established reality, like a rock or a hill, but as a task lying under divine imperative…. Agape is simply the affirmation of this paradox and of this destiny underlying it. Agape looks beyond all marks of fallenness, all traits by which people are judged and ranked, and acknowledges the glory each person—as envisioned in Christian faith—gains from the creative mercy of …
A Personal Relationship with Jesus | ubcgcu
I would not give my rotating field discovery for a thousand inventions, however valuable... A thousand years hence, the telephone and the motion picture camera may be obsolete, but the principle of the rotating magnetic field will remain a vital, living thing for all time to come. NIKOLA TESLA
Nikola Tesla Quotes
All that was great in the past was ridiculed, condemned, combated, suppressed - only to emerge all the more powerfully, all the more triumphantly from the struggle. Let the future tell the truth and evaluate each one according to his work and accomplishments. The present is theirs, the future, for which I really worked, is mine. NIKOLA TESLA
Nikola Tesla Quotes - Page 5
Light REEs Scandium, lanthanum, cerium, praseodymium, neodymium, promethium, samarium, europium, gadolinium – elements 21, 57-64. Primarily produced from carbonatites and placer deposits. Large orebodies known and being exploited around the world. Heavy REEs Yttrium, terbium, dysprosium, holmium, erbium, thulium, ytterbium, lutetium – elements 39, 65-71. Primarily produced from ion-absorption clays. Resources of heavy REEs are typically rarer, smaller and less concentrated. Most of the current supply of heavy REEs originates in the 'ion adsorption clay' ores of southern China. Some of these pr…
Uranium from Rare Earths deposits - World Nuclear Association
Basically, he makes the same argument I’ve been making about AI as a machine tool for the mind.
At least five interesting things for the middle of your week (#29)
The industrial elites have lost their way. In every major profession and institution, they once commanded vast, widely-admired projects that filled their lives with meaning and endowed the entire class with an unconquerable confidence.
Notes from a nameless conference | the fifth wave
The reaching. The listening. The wondering. None of that is optimized or focused on marginal gains. No; it just is. It holds the space. It holds it wide enough and specific enough and deep enough that you can step in and say this, too, is a life and, in such saying, feel less alone for all the wanting and thinking and wondering that makes up the life of who you are.
Carrie Fountain's "The Life" - by Devin Kelly
But the flourishing of creativity and skills tells us something about what might happen at the tail end of the human skill distribution when more AI systems come online. As humans learn from AIs, they might push through blockages that have kept them stalled and reach higher.
After AI beat them, professional go players got better and more creative
“you don’t need space to do geometry,” Huh said. “That made me really fundamentally rethink what geometry is.”
June Huh, High School Dropout, Wins the Fields Medal | Quanta Magazine
The temptation to be someone else is greatest for the young. They often feel like nobodies. But you never need to worry about that problem, because it's self-solving if you work on sufficiently ambitious projects. If you succeed at an ambitious project, you're not a nobody; you're the person who did it. So just do the work and your identity will take care of itself.
How to Do Great Work
Something that grows exponentially can become so valuable that it's worth making an extraordinary effort to get it started. But since we underrate exponential growth early on, this too is mostly done unconsciously: people push through the initial, unrewarding phase of learning something new because they know from experience that learning new things always takes an initial push, or they grow their audience one fan at a time because they have nothing better to do. If people consciously realized they could invest in exponential growth, many more would do it.
How to Do Great Work
There may be some jobs where you have to work diligently for years at things you hate before you get to the good part, but this is not how great work happens. Great work happens by focusing consistently on something you're genuinely interested in. When you pause to take stock, you're surprised how far you've come.
How to Do Great Work
The trouble with planning is that it only works for achievements you can describe in advance. You can win a gold medal or get rich by deciding to as a child and then tenaciously pursuing that goal, but you can't discover natural selection that way.
How to Do Great Work
When in doubt, optimize for interestingness. Fields change as you learn more about them. What mathematicians do, for example, is very different from what you do in high school math classes. So you need to give different types of work a chance to show you what they're like. But a field should become increasingly interesting as you learn more about it. If it doesn't, it's probably not for you.
How to Do Great Work
The three most powerful motives are curiosity, delight, and the desire to do something impressive. Sometimes they converge, and that combination is the most powerful of all. The big prize is to discover a new fractal bud. You notice a crack in the surface of knowledge, pry it open, and there's a whole world inside.
How to Do Great Work
Four steps: choose a field, learn enough to get to the frontier, notice gaps, explore promising ones. This is how practically everyone who's done great work has done it, from painters to physicists.
How to Do Great Work
What are you excessively curious about — curious to a degree that would bore most other people? That's what you're looking for.
How to Do Great Work
July 2023 If you collected lists of techniques for doing great work in a lot of different fields, what would the intersection look like? I decided to find out by making it. Partly my goal was to create a guide that could be used by someone working in any field. But I was also curious about the shape of the intersection. And one thing this exercise shows is that it does have a definite shape; it's not just a point labelled "work hard." The following recipe assumes you're very ambitious. The first step is to decide what to work on. The work you choose needs to have three qualities: it has to be …
How to Do Great Work
I suspect a lot of people aren't sure what's the top idea in their mind at any given time. I'm often mistaken about it. I tend to think it's the idea I'd want to be the top one, rather than the one that is. But it's easy to figure this out: just take a shower. What topic do your thoughts keep returning to? If it's not what you want to be thinking about, you may want to change something. Notes [1] No doubt there are already names for this type of thinking, but I call it "ambient thought." [2] This was made particularly clear in our case, because neither of the funds we raised was difficult, and…
The Top Idea in Your Mind
Someone who does you an injury hurts you twice: first by the injury itself, and second by taking up your time afterward thinking about it. If you learn to ignore injuries you can at least avoid the second half.
The Top Idea in Your Mind
I'd noticed startups got way less done when they started raising money, but it was not till we ourselves raised money that I understood why. The problem is not the actual time it takes to meet with investors. The problem is that once you start raising money, raising money becomes the top idea in your mind. That becomes what you think about when you take a shower in the morning. And that means other questions aren't.
The Top Idea in Your Mind
(The reason it's hard to learn new skills late in life is not just that one's brain is less malleable. Another probably even worse obstacle is that one has higher standards.)
Is It Worth Being Wise?
The path to intelligence seems to be through working on hard problems. You develop intelligence as you might develop muscles, through exercise. But there can't be too much compulsion here. No amount of discipline can replace genuine curiosity. So cultivating intelligence seems to be a matter of identifying some bias in one's character—some tendency to be interested in certain types of things—and nurturing it. Instead of obliterating your idiosyncrasies in an effort to make yourself a neutral vessel for the truth, you select one and try to grow it from a seedling into a tree.
Is It Worth Being Wise?
The idea that a successful person should be happy has thousands of years of momentum behind it. If I was any good, why didn't I have the easy confidence winners are supposed to have? But that, I now believe, is like a runner asking "If I'm such a good athlete, why do I feel so tired?" Good runners still get tired; they just get tired at higher speeds.
Is It Worth Being Wise?
Someone like a judge or a military officer can in much of his work be guided by duty, but duty is no guide in making things. Makers depend on something more precarious: inspiration. And like most people who lead a precarious existence, they tend to be worried, not contented. In that respect they're more like the small man of Confucius's day, always one bad harvest (or ruler) away from starvation. Except instead of being at the mercy of weather and officials, they're at the mercy of their own imagination.
Is It Worth Being Wise?
At the start, forces that precede an invention merely begin to align, often imperceptibly, as a group of people and ideas converge, until over the course of months or years (or decades) they gain clarity and momentum and the help of additional ideas and actors. Luck seems to matter, and so does timing, for it tends to be the case that the right answers, the right people, the right place—perhaps all three—require a serendipitous encounter with the right problem. And then—sometimes—a leap. Only in retrospect do such leaps look obvious.
Quote by Jon Gertner: “WE USUALLY IMAGINE that invention occurs in a f...”
“Of its output inventions are a valuable part, but invention is not to be scheduled nor coerced.” The point of this kind of experimentation was to provide a free environment for “the operation of genius.” His point was that genius would undoubtedly improve the company’s operations just as ordinary engineering could. But genius was not predictable. You had to give it room to assert itself.
Review of The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation | by Javier Escribano | Medium
A clean, processed piece of writing with no bumps or snags may not trigger existential shame, but is also unlikely to emit beta elements from your body to your reader’s body, your unconscious to their unconscious—to move them.
Nuar Alsadir: The Craft of Writing Empathy ‹ Literary Hub
From this perspective, the commercial logging of natural forests does not constitute either deforestation or degradation, so long as the forest remains dominated by naturally regenerating, commercially valued tree species and the wood supply is sustained (e.g., the sustained yield forestry concept). The managed boreal forests of the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec have, on this basis, largely avoided deforestation. However, substantial areas of managed boreal forests are now dominated by early-successional and regenerating stands with less extant older forests and are now out of range…
Land | Free Full-Text | Assessing the Cumulative Impacts of Forest Management on Forest Age Structure Development and Woodland Caribou Habitat in Boreal Landscapes: A Case Study from Two Canadian Provinces
"It's still the hardest-to-execute piece of magic I've ever tried. In six months or a year, it will start to settle into my bones. In ten years, it'll be perfect.
Teller Magician Interview - Chris Jones Teller Magician Profile
This is the best trick of divine architecture— that I will exit the church and try to live better, a bit more devoutly, taking pleasure in everything, a plate of sliced potatoes fried in oil, a carafe of cheap white wine.
Saint Markella’s Cathedral and Other Poems by Madeleine Cravens
“The first step is to understand where we are. We’ve spent 40 years wandering in the desert, and we think that it’s an enchanted forest. If we’re to find a way out of this desert and into the future, the first step is to see that we’ve been in a desert.”
How Technology Grows (a Restatement of Definite Optimism)
I don’t contend that the internet is anything but amazing. But I think that the marvels of the digital world have made it harder to see how slowly everything else has moved.
How Technology Grows (a Restatement of Definite Optimism)
What are some of the things I’m looking for? For starters: energy too cheap to meter; colonies on Mars and beyond; re-forestization of our deserts; nanotechnology that lets us print basic materials; medical devices and pharmaceuticals that prevent, treat, or cure most ailments; a deeper understanding of materials; and so many other things. To make these all happen, we need to have the development of a lot more tools and machinery.
How Technology Grows (a Restatement of Definite Optimism)
We go to work in subways built in the ‘70s, guided by signals equipment put in place in the ‘20s. We’ve been moving more slowly across the planet ever since we decommissioned the Concorde, at a time when global travelers want faster access to major hubs. Are we sure that the developed world is not undergoing its own premature deindustrialization?
How Technology Grows (a Restatement of Definite Optimism)
I submit that we have two big biases when we talk about technology. First, we think about it too much in terms of tools and recipes, when really we should think about it more in terms of process knowledge and technical experience.
How Technology Grows (a Restatement of Definite Optimism)
Call me a romantic, but I’d like everyone to think more about industrial lubricants, gas turbines, thorium reactors, wire production, ball bearings, underwater cables, and all the things that power our material world. I abide by a strict rule never to post or tweet about current political stuff; instead I try to draw more attention to the world of materials. And I’d like to remind people that there are many things more edifying than following White House scandals.
Definite optimism as human capital | Dan Wang