flâneur

Donald

68 followers · 16 following · 3385 views

on the atlas — 395

highlights — 242

  • I believe that after a traditional education, or working in an environment with many people, curiosity is a decision requiring intent and discipline.
    Jony Ive — Letters to a Young Creator
  • This is the most important moment of the documentary. As Adams is delivering this angsty soliloquy, you can see Jerry get a look on his face like Orny is speaking Japanese to him. He quite literally cannot understand what Adams is saying and keeps repeating "what" over and over. The idea that one of his friends making money on Wall Street could relate to Adams doing comedy is quite literally incoherent to Seinfeld. He sincerely cannot fathom how these things are related.
    Seinfeld "are you still working?"
  • graspingness is not causative to greatness.
    Seinfeld "are you still working?"
  • he talks about how to him there is only one criterion for success: "are you still working?"
    Seinfeld "are you still working?"
  • The current path of AI development, pushing towards centralization and autonomy, frames human involvement as a trade-off: participation vs. capability, ownership vs. safe alignment.
    The Future Worth Building Is Human - Thinking Machines Lab
  • The technology industry has made incredible progress in teaching machines to think; what they should think about must remain with us. What is worth wanting, what is worth making, what’s the right use of the time we have.
    The Future Worth Building Is Human - Thinking Machines Lab
  • A single alignment spec suppresses creativity and diversity and stultifies progress. Free speech and free markets let new ideas, goods, and services emerge and compete, rather than averaging out the preferences that exist at a point in time.
    The Future Worth Building Is Human - Thinking Machines Lab
  • Power that needs nothing from people loses the incentive to care for their needs and values, caring instead for its own preservation
    The Future Worth Building Is Human - Thinking Machines Lab
  • AI lab offering a single model for every customer benefits by absorbing what makes each user distinct and devaluing the cultivation of specialized knowledge
    The Future Worth Building Is Human - Thinking Machines Lab
  • multimodal interaction natively, in the model itself rather than in scaffolding bolted around it
    The Future Worth Building Is Human - Thinking Machines Lab
  • The best collaborators anticipate: they learn what someone is reaching for and bring it before being asked, earning over time the right to act on their behalf
    The Future Worth Building Is Human - Thinking Machines Lab
  • This cultivation is an ongoing process that requires AI to work with people,
    The Future Worth Building Is Human - Thinking Machines Lab
  • chess, where the strongest engines are trained purely on self-play, and math
    The Future Worth Building Is Human - Thinking Machines Lab
  • The dispersion of knowledge is a collective strength; it’s the source of variety, adaptability, and resilience of the overall system. It’s the reason that free markets outperform planned economies. Central planning fails not because of insufficient intelligence, but because of the nature of productive knowledge
    The Future Worth Building Is Human - Thinking Machines Lab
  • doesn’t learn much from the work they do together.
    The Future Worth Building Is Human - Thinking Machines Lab
  • stuff we like for reference
    good video
  • By conscience he means their values, their morality, their meaning-systems; and by will he means their volition, their drive, their constant, daily intentionality. Thus: their actions are in accord with their ideals. Their desires constantly reflect their beliefs.
    Meta is Murder — The Charisma of Leaders
  • in the case of Jobs, it is not crucial that he had a system of philosophy that charted the place of design in problem-solving, problem-solving in human advancement, human-advancement in a moral context.
    Meta is Murder — The Charisma of Leaders
  • the third path most of us take: muddling through and bargaining in internal monologues about what we ought to be while compromising constantly:
    Meta is Murder — The Charisma of Leaders
  • “Leaders,” who live in accordance with their own values, or values of some community that is worldly in its intentions, such that they do not drop from society but seek to instantiate their values in it.
    Meta is Murder — The Charisma of Leaders
  • If you really believe in what you do —and Jobs seemed to believe in whatever he did, as a function of personality— you do not tire until your body is overcome.
    Meta is Murder — The Charisma of Leaders
  • there is for him or her the typical chasm between conscience and will, and as social animals, we register their confusion as we register our own. And what we seek in leaders is confidence, not confusion.
    Meta is Murder — The Charisma of Leaders
  • he was, as they say, “single-minded,” and he never seems to have suffered from distance between his values and his actions. He believed in what he did, and was perfectly content to do whatever it took to achieve his ends. It is hard to imagine Jobs haunted by regrets
    Meta is Murder — The Charisma of Leaders
  • Their existence itself feels like a contribution.
    misery is contagious, but so is joy - by maja
  • None were chasing intensity for its own sake. Their vitality came from alignment, a coherence between values and actions, body and tempo, self and world.
    misery is contagious, but so is joy - by maja
  • His energy seemed to multiply the more he gave it away.
    misery is contagious, but so is joy - by maja
  • Tells: personal rituals, recurring motifs, environments that hum with fingerprints of choice. They share work, ideas, meals, care. Their existence itself feels like a contribution.
    misery is contagious, but so is joy - by maja
  • “There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action… and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium.”
    misery is contagious, but so is joy - by maja
  • “The most pernicious thing is the person who has a calling to creative work and doesn’t act on it. They become a kind of walking shadow, haunted by what they could have done.”
    misery is contagious, but so is joy - by maja
  • This usually seems to follow a period of disillusionment, a reckoning with what they’ve inherited and what no longer fits. They’ve actively stopped chasing borrowed desires and their choices begin from the inside out.
    misery is contagious, but so is joy - by maja
  • “Talking with her is like dancing lead with a really good follow… they make you feel like their endless marvelousness is a product of your actions.” The alive make others feel more vivid by responding in full colour.
    misery is contagious, but so is joy - by maja
  • First of all, in the short term I agree with arguments that comparative advantage will continue to keep humans relevant and in fact increase their productivity, and may even in some ways level the playing field between humans. As long as AI is only better at 90% of a given job, the other 10% will cause humans to become highly leveraged, increasing compensation and in fact creating a bunch of new human jobs complementing and amplifying what AI is good at, such that the “10%” expands to continue to employ almost everyone.
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • Most people are not the best in the world at anything, and it doesn’t seem to bother them particularly much. Of course today they can still contribute through comparative advantage, and may derive meaning from the economic value they produce, but people also greatly enjoy activities that produce no economic value.
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • The artifact you end up with is real, solid, unitary, sound, and consistent; but always more disappointing than the dream, because it was a false dream, and ex falso anything can be imagined.
    Human Routers of Machine Words
  • The idea was a thousand beautiful, contradictory things at once, but the concrete reality can only be one thing.
    Human Routers of Machine Words
  • The process of communicating your ideas to another mind forces you to concretize them, make them precise, clarify your assumptions, more generally, it turns ideas from vague ghosts to solid, physical objects that can be manipulated: here you realize these ideas that seemed so solid are ill-posed or contradictory or incomplete. These failures are necessary parts of thinking, because they teach you two crucial skills: knowing which ideas to reject, and improving or otherwise transforming ideas in search of better ones. By analogy to tree search: you’re learning to discard bad nodes early, and to…
    Human Routers of Machine Words
  • If we could look inside the brain, to see the ideas “as they truly are”, we wouldn’t find beautiful hard-edged Platonic objects, we would find a nebulous, contradictory mess of memory and feeling and intuition. That’s what our ideas are: not logical sentences but dreams.
    Human Routers of Machine Words
  • People understand the idea of a famous author’s or director’s body of work, but there is no reason this concept can’t apply to everyone in some small way. I think it does.
    Breadcrumbs - by Simon Sarris - The Map is Mostly Water
  • The novice of virtue is tempted by dreams of heroic acts, just as the novice sculptor daydreams of palatial monuments, or other grand work. But the master sculptor is extraordinary not because he has been commissioned for monumental bronzes (which may never happen), but because he labors over every small detail.
    Breadcrumbs - by Simon Sarris - The Map is Mostly Water
  • I would stand, sweating and heaving in the high grass, and look at the trial beds Johanna was making. There were wild poppies and sprawling yellow-flowered bushes filled with butterflies. In a field of strawberries, our kids crawled around filling a colander to the brim. It was, objectively speaking, wonderful, sweet, life-affirming. But I just didn’t care for it. I missed Johanna.
    Love is to be invested in someone’s continual expansion
  • “One loves that for which one labors, and one labors for that which one loves,”
    Love is to be invested in someone’s continual expansion
  • This is one of the joys and challenges of love: the more skillfully you love someone, the more held, encouraged, and accepted they feel, the more they change. If you love someone well, you have to run to keep up, growing your heart to hold what they are growing into.
    Love is to be invested in someone’s continual expansion
  • We struggled because I found it hard to talk about the one thing she had on her mind. I didn’t even have the language to understand what filled her with joy (it was literally Latin a lot of the time—names of plants). Moreover, making things worse, I had recently started a blog, which occupied me a lot, and I was very insecure about that so I didn’t want to let Johanna in on that yet, and so we couldn’t talk about what I was doing either.
    Love is to be invested in someone’s continual expansion
  • You’ll figure out that an FPV drone is maybe three orders of magnitude, more versatile, more useful, more capable than artillery…Basically, I think a good way to think about an FPV drone is like an iPhone of warfare.
    All non-drone militaries are obsolete
  • now you…have a drone, you pick [up] your smartphone, you say, “We are here. The bad guys are here. Go and get them.” And the drone goes up, flies in a given direction, localizes itself on the map, finds the dedicated area where they, the bad guys are supposed to be, sees the bad guys, bombs them, return…watches…does a damage assessment, returns back, sits down, and then you can pick it up and watch the video[.]
    All non-drone militaries are obsolete
  • I was talking to some Ukraine pilot group, and they told me like there was this Russian guy. He was just like Rambo…He shot down like seven FPV drones. They couldn’t…get him. They finally got him, but it was like nothing they’ve seen before, right?…Average non-Rambo will just die.
    All non-drone militaries are obsolete
  • A single team of some 10 Ukrainians, acting as the adversary, counterattacked the NATO forces. In about half a day they mock-destroyed 17 armored vehicles and conducted 30 “strikes” on other targets…
    All non-drone militaries are obsolete
  • Last year, Ukraine produced 4 million FPV drones. Ukraine is not the most industrious nation in the world. China can produce 4 billion of these FPV drone
    All non-drone militaries are obsolete
  • Interestingly, the U.S. is still #2 here — albeit a distant second. But worryingly, the U.S.’ traditional allies — Germany, Japan, France, Korea, etc. — make very few drones at all.
    All non-drone militaries are obsolete
  • As it turns out, L. sanfranciscensis (later reclassified as Fructilactobacillus sanfranciscensis) is really quite common in many traditional sourdough cultures and is adapted to moist and maltose-rich environments.
    Pan Francisco and the Sourdough Lineage