flâneur

Gloria Ma

38 followers · 46 following · 4480 views

on the atlas — 407

highlights — 435

  • We also thank Charlie Wang for making data collection not fall apart
    Silent speech with ultrasound — Aleph
  • as auraless as ordering doordash
    The Dark Night of Mathematics - by Kirwin Hampshire
  • But this isn't true.
    Keep Your Identity Small
  • While early, there is now the strange habit of recording our conversations to pass to each other to talk about how we found each other’s conversations. It gives new perspectives on what would typically be considered social “dirty laundry”. It’s like a small media network with our private radio/podcast.
    Helping Alice - by DavidXYu - XY-Wise
  • While the children being cared for are raised witnessing this form of tribal solution
    Helping Alice - by DavidXYu - XY-Wise
  • whatever that line of work is
    Helping Alice - by DavidXYu - XY-Wise
  • “This may not apply to me,” Zhang said. He put his tea on the desk and looked out the window. “Still I think I have intuition,” he said. “Still I am confident of myself. Still I have some other visions.” ♦
    Yitang Zhang’s Pursuit of Beauty in Math | The New Yorker
  • “I may think socializing is a way to waste time,” Zhang says. “Also, maybe I’m a little shy.”
    Yitang Zhang’s Pursuit of Beauty in Math | The New Yorker
  • From diffidence, he often says “we” instead of “I,” as in, “We may not think this approach is so important.”
    Yitang Zhang’s Pursuit of Beauty in Math | The New Yorker
  • Now that I understand that the experience of "people are out to get me" can be a signal for something else, I just run a naive check that says "hey, am I in pain right now?"
    adrenaline injections and miracle berries
  • Luckily, the instruments are miscalibrated, not faulty
    adrenaline injections and miracle berries
  • Quick notes about my culture
    About Uli
  • Hopefully you feel that the second sentence is overwhelmingly better. It is an example of: tell people what something is instead of what it is not. Because I practice these principles when I edit my writing each month, I have also started applying these principle when I speak. I had a discussion with my technical lead on what we should focus on building this quarter, and I resisted the urge to first ramble about what we should not build. I started with what we should build. Then what we should deprioritize.
    People Who Are Naturally ___. - by Jane Zhang
  • he first word is chronos which is viewing time in measurable, sequential units: each unit of time is the same as the next. The second is kairos which is viewing time as weighted: one minute of time can be more valuable than the next.
    People Who Are Naturally ___. - by Jane Zhang
  • This is a great synecdoche for a systemic issue with self-healing in this corner of the internet: overfocus on ease at the expense of striving, when it’s often true that only striving can give you the stability required for safety in ease.
    Glute Training Can Make You Less Crazy
  • For decades, researchers have taken different approaches to this challenge. Some, like the synthetic biologist John Glass (opens a new tab) at the J. Craig Venter Institute, are stripping down bacterial cells to their smallest, barest genomes to reveal a cell’s minimum requirements to stay alive. Others, like Otto, try to build cells with molecules that differ from those found in Earth biology.
    An Artificial Cell Grows and Divides
  • With such flexibility, this kind of synthetic cell could eventually be coaxed to create new materials, such as biofuels and drugs, and help researchers study disease.
    An Artificial Cell Grows and Divides
  • The important point is how he played chess. When attacked he seldom, if ever, defended his position, rather he attacked back. Such a method of playing soon produces a very interrelated board. He would then pause a bit, think and advance his queen saying, "I ain't afraid of nothin'." It took me a while to realize that of course that is why he was able to prove the existence of good coding methods. Who but Shannon would think to average over all random codes and expect to find that the average was close to ideal? I learned from him to say the same to myself when stuck, and on some occasions his …
    Dr. R. W. Hamming's Advice on Research
  • I had a feeling about many of the people at MATS (especially the Anthropic mentors), and I struggled to put this into words. They worked incredibly hard and were endlessly motivated to do more work, but it wasn’t driven by money or stocks or promotions. I’ve now started to call this drive war mode, because it’s the best way I know to describe it. Most kinda-fun-to-do things become less interesting when you’re in war mode. It’s partially a drive to get more work done, but it’s also a reduced enthusiasm for anything else. Ambling about a book store or spending time with people you used to get al…
    MATS 9 Retrospective & Advice — LessWrong
  • Dust Theory, similar to the Ultimate Ensemble Mathematical Universe hypothesis proposed by Max Tegmark.
    Permutation City
  • Each day, often in the morning, the notetaker would open their notebook and look for a passage relevant to something they were struggling with, and then they would meditate on that—unpacking it, making the idea top of mind, ensuring it was alive in them.
    How not to forget what matters - by Henrik Karlsson
  • The answer is usually surprisingly simple, but most people never even bother to come up with a theory.
    some things I've learned about dealing with people - by Ava
  • I cook because I am supported exactly by that which I destroy. My friend Keanu Clark ‘23, who I deeply admire, wrote this very philosophical blogpost: “The Free Play of Cliché: You are what you eat”, in which he argues that we are but the rearranged and reconstituted products of what we disintegrate. It follows that the nature of existence can be defined by what we can acquire without producing ourselves.⁠09 cj: this is a pretty bold thesis Using the example of vitamins – molecules so common in our foods during the evolutionary process that we have lost the ability to synthesize them – Keanu r…
    [Guest Post] On Food and Cooking at MIT, Paradiso | MIT Admissions
  • this is only an issue if you expect yourself, or reality, to be philosophically consistent. Where did you get that expectation?
    Without hope of resolution - by Sasha Chapin
  • Writing that expresses does not automatically communicate. Expression is of course good, but it is good for you, and not necessarily others. To communicate, you must put in work to make contact with another soul.
    Yearnslop is the perversion of everything good about Love
  • I’m extremely glad that it has allowed me to solicit enough paltry attention to soothe my ego enough to keep improving at writing.
    Yearnslop is the perversion of everything good about Love
  • What I'm still not quite happy with is the mapping itself. Turns out, mapping protein folds to fashion styles is some kind of a post-singularity problem. All LLM suggestions I got basically boiled down to "make a 500x800 table and score each square". I spent so much time trying out more principled approaches, playing around with matching Qwen3 embeddings of aesthetics to ESM embeddings of clans, up to looking at the Optimal Transport method and such. In the end, nothing beats just asking Claude to look through the pairings and reassign the badly matching ones in a loop.
    Mnemonic portraits for 19,023 human genes — LessWrong
  • n particular, if you rely on an AI coding tool too heavily, it's likely that your work will have essentially zero counterfactual impact, because what you did is likely to be easily replicable by a slightly more advanced AI coding tool acting completely autonomously.
    Sara Fish • LLM Evals Research Advice
  • More succinctly articulated by Ilya Sutskever, "the models, they just want to learn".
    The Bitter Lesson is coming for Tokenization | ⛰️ lucalp
  • American philosopher and Norman E. Vuilleumier Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. He is known for his expertise on metaphysics, philosophy of science, and epistemology.[1][2][3]
    Edward_J._Hall
  • Full Stack & Operations Sits down and gets things done.
    Typst: About us
  • I was built for this
    On Being a Dad - Derek Thompson
  • You’re in this amusement park only once, and I think you might as well ride the rides.
    On Being a Dad - Derek Thompson
  • We challenge the Platonic Representation Hypothesis that models will converge to a mathematically interpretable "platonic ideal", at least not supported at this scale. Whether this holds at larger scales remains an open question.
    Cross-Model Activation Generalizability Isn't Strong (Yet) — LessWrong
  • Be very confident you’re going in the right direction, and execute well on the step you’re taking right now, without knowing exactly where you’re going.
    Beyond the Sky - Colossus
  • On Thursdays they eat Chipotle. There is no Chipotle in Singapore, so they gave the recipes to their chef, who now makes it for them.
    Beyond the Sky - Colossus
  • “I’ve read way fewer books than conventional wisdom would say is optimal,” he told me, smiling behind dark-framed glasses. “It’s very time-consuming to read a book in a way that permanently shapes who you are. The return on time is not super good.” He stretched his jaw for a moment—a habit I would come to recognize—like someone popping their ears on a plane. It is a particular hazard of writing about young technologists that they will, sooner or later, tell you they don’t read. I was grateful, then, when Yan clarified that he reads a book every other month and that he looked forward one day to…
    Beyond the Sky - Colossus
  • Perhaps go to one of the successful norm violators in your life who may already know and ask them to mentor you for a short while.
    How To Vape On Planes Without Getting Caught - Brangus
  • When someone sees me vape in public and gives me a sort of askance look, I smile warmly at them, nod, and do a semi-winking motion as if to signal, I know what I am doing and I know that you know what I am doing. I appreciate you being in on it with me.
    How To Vape On Planes Without Getting Caught - Brangus
  • A few folks have independently mentioned to me that I have a sort of area effect that makes people loosen up about taboo topics. The way that I manage this is largely by actually having an attitude that I generally know what counts as a social faux pas better than others and that most people are too conservative about this. You want to be in the position where people are looking to you to figure out what the norms are; not the other way around.
    How To Vape On Planes Without Getting Caught - Brangus
  • i've learned a bunch of specific quirks of plastics, metals, and paper/cardboard, most of which i don't readily remember but trust will come back when i need them to.
    Abhay Shukla · rcbi
  • my mind exploding when i hear something i can't begin to comprehend the making of.
    Abhay Shukla · rcbi
  • 'cuisines' as a constraining construct are fake; you can just make interesting foods.
    Abhay Shukla · rcbi
  • this research later got expanded into https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20031 Latent Introspection: Models Can Detect Prior Concept Injections
    Comments - I can never talk to an AI anonymously again
  • . One heuristic: if you notice that you're giving the same cached spiel in different conversations,
    My Writing Process
  • a feeling of wanting to run.
    joy
  • I feel I am abdicating the future.
    Top Performers are Pathologically Ambitious - by Matt Beard
  • I touch, skip, gather, rant, gossip, pace. When I go places, great volumes of language are produced, dinner is cooked, perfume is sprayed.
    Talking Enneagram 7 blues - by Sasha Chapin
  • and my surroundings become a vending machine I kick until the appropriate feeling is produced.
    Talking Enneagram 7 blues - by Sasha Chapin
  • to consider each human interaction equally informative and worthy of attention.
    My six stages of learning to be a socially normal person