flâneur

Eowyn Dean

20 followers · 15 following · 1629 views

on the atlas — 46

highlights — 404

  • Vitamin K2 as MK-7 is unique because it impacts arterial calcification, and no other compound (drug or vitamin) has been shown to do this.
    Growing Evidence of a Proven Mechanism Shows Vitamin K2 Can Impact Health Conditions Beyond Bone and Cardiovascular - PMC
  • The main thing I think of is how to convert emotional involvement online to actual actions in the real world. If you go on social media and see something you dislike, the actions you have access to are to complain with a reply, repost, retweet, or whatever. I think those are bad actions. I would love an action that is like, "Open a chat room with 10 or 20 other people for what you could do about it," or "Send an email to my MP about this specific issue," or "Build a small script for me and tell me what the phone number of my MP is so that I can contact them." I think there are a lot of such in…
    ClearerThinking.org Podcast | Is AI going to ruin everything? (with Gabriel Alfour)
  • a map’s biases do service to one need, but distort everything else. Meaning, they misinform and confuse those with different needs.
    Frank Chimero · What Screens Want
  • Giving is more joyous than receiving, not because it is a deprivation, but because in the act of giving lies the expression of my aliveness” (Art, p.18).
    Is Love An Art? | Issue 85 | Philosophy Now
  • Why do we have to teach startups this? Why is it counterintuitive for founders? Three reasons, I think. One is that a lot of startup founders are trained as engineers, and customer service is not part of the training of engineers. You're supposed to build things that are robust and elegant, not be slavishly attentive to individual users like some kind of salesperson. Ironically, part of the reason engineering is traditionally averse to handholding is that its traditions date from a time when engineers were less powerful — when they were only in charge of their narrow domain of building things,…
    Do Things that Don't Scale
  • That initial fragility was not a unique feature of Airbnb. Almost all startups are fragile initially. And that's one of the biggest things inexperienced founders and investors (and reporters and know-it-alls on forums) get wrong about them. They unconsciously judge larval startups by the standards of established ones.
    Do Things that Don't Scale
  • How many NP-complete problems could be rendered “fun” to solve by hand with a sufficiently charming interface? Well, many problems started as games and were only later observed to be NP-complete. This includes n-Queens completion, Nonograms and LaserTank. People empirically find these fun, so I guess we should classify them as fun.
    Integer programming easily encloses horse
  • Agentic Engineering Patterns isn’t exactly a book, but it’s kind of book-shaped. I’ll be publishing it on my site using a new shape of content I’m calling a guide. A guide is a collection of chapters, where each chapter is effectively a blog post with a less prominent date that’s designed to be updated over time, not frozen at the point of first publication. Guides and chapters are my answer to the challenge of publishing “evergreen” content on a blog. I’ve been trying to find a way to do this for a while now. This feels like a format that might stick.
    Writing about Agentic Engineering Patterns
  • This attention scarcity stems from architectural constraints of LLMs. LLMs are based on the transformer architecture, which enables every token to attend to every other token across the entire context. This results in n² pairwise relationships for n tokens.
    Effective context engineering for AI agents \ Anthropic
  • Effectively wrangling LLMs often requires thinking in context — in other words: considering the holistic state available to the LLM at any given time and what potential behaviors that state might yield.
    Effective context engineering for AI agents \ Anthropic
  • Academia is so cutthroat that anyone who righteously gives up an advantage will be outcompeted by someone who has fewer scruples. What we have here is a collective action problem. Fortunately, we have an organization that exists for the express purpose of solving collective action problems. It’s called the government. And as luck would have it, they’re also the one paying most of the bills! So the solution here is straightforward: every government grant should stipulate that the research it supports can’t be published in a for-profit journal. That’s it! If the public paid for it, it shouldn’t …
    The one science reform we can all agree on, but we're too cowardly to do
  • Universities are always trying to save money by canceling journal subscriptions, so academics often have to rely on bootleg copies.
    The one science reform we can all agree on, but we're too cowardly to do
  • The political scientist James C. Scott once wrote that many systems only “work” because people disobey them. For instance, the Soviet Union attempted to impose agricultural regulations so strict that people would have starved if they followed the letter of the law. Instead, citizens grew and traded food in secret. This made it look like the regulations were successful, when in fact they were a sham.
    The one science reform we can all agree on, but we're too cowardly to do
  • To put those costs in perspective: if the federal government cut out the publishers, it would probably save more money every year than it has “saved” in its recent attempts to cut off scientific funding to universities.
    The one science reform we can all agree on, but we're too cowardly to do
  • To the question, "how can I abandon what is in my soul?", I say, "Is that all that is in your soul?".
    How to Make a Living as an Artist
  • There’s no reason at all to believe that for any arbitrary abstract topic, one can always “find the fun” which implicitly teaches it.
    Exorcising us of the Primer | Andy Matuschak
  • It’s true that in some games, players end up developing certain skills or understandings along the way. But that doesn’t mean we can make a great game that teaches anything. You’re seeing the survivors. These games’ designers tried and discarded dozens of gameplay ideas in search of something aesthetically compelling. Then, only after they’d satisfied the primary constraint of making something fun, or beautiful, or whatever, the designers figured out how to ensure people would learn what they need as they play.
    Exorcising us of the Primer | Andy Matuschak
  • could we make a game so fun that people will play it without even realizing that they’re learning? Apart from the issues of authoritarianism and isolation we’ve already discussed, I believe this aspiration cannot succeed for most topics. This perspective doesn’t take seriously how games work as a form. Advocates of this approach are satisfied with making mediocre games: games which can’t compete on their own merits as games
    Exorcising us of the Primer | Andy Matuschak
  • It’s easy to get stuck on the wrong problems because we have such strong theories about the things we should care about. But we don’t really get to pick the things that bug us. Why are some people annoyed by crooked picture frames while other people get annoyed by securities fraud, or bland chicken parmesan, or inefficient assembly lines? I dunno man, people are crazy.
    Thank you for being annoying - by Adam Mastroianni
  • If you have a productivity problem, you’re either not annoyed enough, you’re annoyed by something you can’t actually control, or you’re annoyed in the bad way, the kind that makes you want to skip town rather than dig in.
    Thank you for being annoying - by Adam Mastroianni
  • being in the presence of your annoyances without being in control of them is a recipe for insanity. That’s like working at the Museum of Slightly Crooked Pictures, where all the frames are wonky but you’re not allowed to straighten them.
    Thank you for being annoying - by Adam Mastroianni
  • Fun fades, but irritation is infinite.
    Thank you for being annoying - by Adam Mastroianni
  • People can’t bump into you if they don’t know you exist.
    Book notes: Second Act by Henry Oliver - jdilla.xyz
  • You need to be around people that expand your idea of what’s possible through words and actions.
    Book notes: Second Act by Henry Oliver - jdilla.xyz
  • Yes, things are bad. No, it’s not your fault. Unfortunately, the world was under no obligation to straighten itself out by the time you arrived. These are the problems we got.
    Use this magic bullet to shoot yourself in the foot
  • the only way out is to pick one
    Use this magic bullet to shoot yourself in the foot
  • “we do not know enough to be pessimistic”. We won’t know that our problems are solvable until we solve them, we won’t solve them until we try, and we won’t try until we believe.
    Use this magic bullet to shoot yourself in the foot
  • 7. Be cautious about joining high-demand groups if you have nowhere else to go.
    Why Are There So Many Rationalist Cults?
  • Although apparently compassionate, this pattern meant that many researchers got everything from Leverage: sense of purpose and meaning, work, therapy, friendship, romance, food, housing, and routine life maintenance. Connections to the outside world often faded. Some researchers, after they left, found themselves helpless in the wider world.
    Why Are There So Many Rationalist Cults?
  • The vulnerable people particularly attracted by the Sequences are especially likely to not have enough work ethic or mental health to be able to contribute.
    Why Are There So Many Rationalist Cults?
  • Unlike agency or taking ideas seriously, I feel no compunctions about warning against very long, stressful conversations alternating between broader theories of human psychology and specific processing of the group members’ emotions. That kind of conversation is neither fun nor productive. If you’re having a tense conversation about feelings for ten hours, you might not be in a cult, but something has gone wrong
    Why Are There So Many Rationalist Cults?
  • people who are drawn to the rationalist community by the Sequences often want to be in a cult
    Why Are There So Many Rationalist Cults?
  • we're not doing a great job of figuring out why we're not doing the best job of figuring new things out.
    The Low Hanging Fruit Of Invention
  • Google Search effectively controls the epistemology of the world
    Google-fu and Scihub-jutsu
  • The long tail of the internet could no longer be found from a simple search.
    Google-fu and Scihub-jutsu
  • professionally curious about a few topics and idly curious about many more
    How to Do Great Work
  • hanging 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. [16] It also helps to travel in topic space. You'll have more new ideas if you explore lots of different topics, partly because it gives the angle grinder more surface area to work on, and partly because analogies are an especially fruitful source of new ideas.
    How to Do Great Work
  • The Arthurian legend has always sat on the threshold of faërie with hybrid characters like Merlin and Morgana le Fey (fey=fairy). It is a hybrid world, as Dr. Dimble explains, combining the Druidic and the Christian, the Magic and the Moral. Some texts blend the two, so that Arthurian knights contend not just with giants and dragons, but with the ambivalent world of faërie (such as the “Sir Orfeo” poem translated by J.R.R. Tolkien, or the Welsh tradition).
    Why is Merlin in That Hideous Strength? - A Pilgrim in Narnia
  • It intends to disenchant modern students of certain notions–like medieval folk thought the world was flat or the universe was very small–while providing these students with the medieval view of the universe, their cosmology. It is a tremendously accessible book, once you get past the fact that Lewis references hundreds of works of literature that you may not have heard of.
    C.S. Lewis’s Faerie Lecture, and a Prince Edward Island Folktale - A Pilgrim in Narnia
  • not as a second brain, but as a workspace
    I Deleted My Second Brain
  • There is no finish line in the pursuit of knowing
    I Deleted My Second Brain
  • Merlin Donald, in his theory of cognitive evolution, argues that human intelligence emerged not from static memory storage but from external symbolic representation: tools like language, gesture, and writing that allowed us to rehearse, share, and restructure thought. Culture became a collective memory system - not to archive knowledge, but to keep it alive, replayed, and reworked.
    I Deleted My Second Brain
  • I stopped wondering and started processing.
    I Deleted My Second Brain
  • the insight was never lived
    I Deleted My Second Brain
  • The map swallows the territory.
    I Deleted My Second Brain
  • what got me here won’t get me where I need to be next.
    I Deleted My Second Brain
  • in a really great relationship or friendship, you should be able to state your needs without explanation.
    50 things I know - by Sasha Chapin - Sasha's 'Newsletter'
  • straightforward descriptions of what the world looks like from a certain point
    50 things I know - by Sasha Chapin - Sasha's 'Newsletter'
  • address the fundamental sense of lack that they are triggering.
    50 things I know - by Sasha Chapin - Sasha's 'Newsletter'
  • You might be breathing too high up in your chest. To correct this instantly, pretend you’re breathing through your asshole.
    50 things I know - by Sasha Chapin - Sasha's 'Newsletter'