flâneur

Dhruvik Sanjay Parikh

43 followers · 25 following · 3693 views

on the atlas — 58

highlights — 46

  • People talk a lot about the importance of keeping your youthful dreams alive, but it's just as important to keep your youthful questions alive
    How to Do Great Work
  • ambition is a phenomenon where almost all the error is in one direction
    How to Do Great Work
  • Knowledge expands fractally
    How to Do Great Work
  • If you think about it, it’s kind of amazing that the largest operating system humanity has ever seen only exists to protect an advertising business two layers further up the stack.
    julian.digital
  • Startups are judged on the last 6-18 months
    What I Learned Building Whist (Phil)
  • PMF is always explainable — All the best ideas can be explained very simply
    What I Learned Building Whist (Phil)
  • You have to do the thing you actually enjoy doing, not the thing you find conceptually exciting
    having fun - by Ava - bookbear express
  • As core models become more powerful and costly to build, it pushes more academics towards building on top of them -- which is a trend I see in NLP and vision, the two spaces I've been active in. This in turn influences the problems academics study, spend time thinking about, and discussing at conferences. This trend means there are fewer papers about how to build these systems being presented at conferences (of course there are other factors for this too!).
    Why I chose OpenAI over academia: reflections on the CS academic and industry job markets (part 2) - Rowan Zellers' blog
  • I fret much more over picking the right word in this sentence than in my record being broken
    What I Think About LeBron Breaking My NBA Scoring Record
  • He feared mathematics would distract Pascal from less intrinsically rewarding pursuits, such as literature, much like modern parents fear TikTok.)
    Childhoods of exceptional people - by Henrik Karlsson
  • Nothing happens because there’s not enough real activity and challenge: You’re not in contact with the experimental guys. You don’t have to think how to answer questions from the students. Nothing!
    The mystery of the miracle year - by Dwarkesh Patel
  • Every happy and sad moment ever experienced by any human was, or will be, experienced by you
    The Egg
  • made this whole universe for you
    The Egg
  • Your soul is more magnificent, beautiful, and gigantic than you can possibly imagine. A human mind can only contain a tiny fraction of what you are. It’s like sticking your finger in a glass of water to see if it’s hot or cold. You put a tiny part of yourself into the vessel, and when you bring it back out, you’ve gained all the experiences it had
    The Egg
  • How do fundamental research groups at companies make business sense?
    10 More Notes – Raffi Hotter
  • In a way, the annoying South African dude on Twitter and the notorious lying woman posing as female Steve Jobs did/do one thing well: They've both gone all-in; mega bold and despite the odds stacked against them.
    The terrible things I'd do with your money
  • (Update 02/16/22 5:47 PM Site was temporarily down because of too much traffic, hopefully it won't happen again.)
    Google Search Is Dying | DKB
  • Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fashion
    The Tyranny of Stuctureless
  • The next year, your competitor's product gets just a little bit better, and you give up the new bottom of your market, and your margins and profits further improve. This cycle repeats, year after year. (We call this "retreating upmarket.")
    202012 - apenwarr
  • the space is hopelessly obsessed with a kind of self-admiration that prioritizes building increasingly complex castles of bullet points and textual syntax instead of building something that the average human in the world wants to use to improve their lives or be more thoughtful.
    latest | linus.zone
  • The second more interesting implication is that if there isn't a ready market in demand of what you've just built, you haven't innovated. You've perhaps discovered or invented something interesting, but innovation, at least by this definition, requires some impact on society which isn't possible without large-scale transformative adoption.
    latest | linus.zone
  • We seem to have a political (public) imagination so shallow that it cannot conceive of what to even do with children, especially smart children. We fail to properly respect them all the way through adolescence, so we have engineered them to be useless in the interim. We do not need children to work, that is abundantly clear, but by ensuring there is nothing for them to do we are also sure to destroy more onramps towards making meaningful contributions to the world.
    The Most Precious Resource is Agency - by Simon Sarris - The Map is Mostly Water
  • Second, it could sit quietly and calculate, falsely reassuring its human handlers that it had no intention of taking over the world.
    Superintelligence FAQ - LessWrong
  • scientists have found that smarter people are more likely to get brain cancer, possibly because they’re already overclocking their ability to grow brain cells.
    Superintelligence FAQ - LessWrong
  • The crazier, screwed up and more challenging the world you live in, the more opportunity there is to discover who you are and what you're made of.
    Nostalgia, the Curse of Getting Older, and the Power of Now - Oxygen Buzz
  • Rachel delivers a killer line: "Deep down you may still be that great kid you used to be. But it's not who you are underneath, it's what you do that defines you." Bruce is left staring in awe. She's so right. No matter how noble his thoughts and desires to help the world, his life is worthless unless he takes action.
    Welcome to the Cosmos
  • Through compelling pavilions and exhibits, awe-inspiring art and architecture, and incredibly immersive experiences, we can design a physical space where everyone can feel, touch, and see the future. We can take advantage of our existing digital infrastructure and the latest virtualization technologies to deliver a complementary experience that spreads the future to billions of people, allowing voices from all walks of life to participate in the conversation. We can build a new World's Stage — the intellectual equivalent of the Olympics — where heroes and role models are created, where dreams …
    It's time to build: A New World's Fair
  • And what does it mean to be contrarian? It does not mean simply doing the opposite of what the majority does – that’s just consensus thinking by a different guise, a minus sign before the conventional wisdom. The problems of reactive contrarianism are the same as those of following the herd. The most contrarian thing to do is to think independently.
    What Happened to the Future?
  • the various strains of wokeism on the left and Trumpism on the right cannot truly fill the spiritual void
    America Without God
  • By definition, if the proof of work is the same, you're not really creating a new status ladder game, and so there isn't a real compelling reason to switch when the new network really has no one in it.
    Remains of the Day
  • It may be that Silicon Valley never comes to be dominated by old money, and I'd consider that a net positive for the region. I'd rather the most productive new work be rewarded consistently by the marketplace than a bunch of stagnant quasi-monopolies hang on to wealth as they reach bloated scales that aren't conducive to innovation. The same applies to social networks and multi-player video games. As a newbie, how quickly, if you put in the work, are you "in the game"? Proof of work should define its own meritocracy.
    Remains of the Day
  • We have no such methods for measuring the values and movement of social capital, at least not with anywhere near the accuracy or precision. The body of research feels both broad and yet meager. If we had better measures besides user counts, this piece and many others would be full of charts and graphs that added a sense of intellectual heft to the analysis. There would be some annual presentation called the State of Social akin to Meeker's Internet Trends Report, or perhaps it would be a fifty page sub-section of her annua
    Remains of the Day
  • But if your goal is to minimize model uncertainty, you should be infinitely curious, spending your entire life having crazier and crazier experiences in a way that doesn’t match the behavior of real humans. Peterson’s claim – that our goal is to balance these two – seems more true to life
    Book Review: Twelve Rules For Life
  • And a lot of them – especially the second – center around Peterson’s idea of Order vs. Chaos. Order is the comfortable habit-filled world of everyday existence, symbolized by the Shire or any of a thousand other Shire-equivalent locations in other fantasies or fairy tales. Chaos is scary things you don’t understand pushing you out of your comfort zone, symbolized by dragons or the Underworld or [approximately 30% of mythological objects, characters, and locations]. Humans are living their best lives when they’re always balanced on the edge of Order and Chaos, converting the Chaos into new Orde…
    Book Review: Twelve Rules For Life
  • Almost every social network of note had an early signature proof of work hurdle. For Facebook it was posting some witty text-based status update. For Instagram, it was posting an interesting square photo. For Vine, an entertaining 6-second video. For Twitter, it was writing an amusing bit of text of 140 characters or fewer. Pinterest? Pinning a compelling photo.
    Signaling as a Service
  • These unheralded helpers can turn a half-baked vaccine into an effective one, or stretch a scarce vaccine supply during a pandemic
    The Tree That Could Help Stop the Pandemic
  • A document obtained by InvestigateWest shows that Fitzsimmons in May 2018 established a system that enabled the appointees to intervene and, if necessary, consult their superiors before politically sensitive reports went out. It mandated that those addressing topics of greatest sensitivity
    The Trump administration is burying dozens of studies detailing the promise of renewable energy
  • Which is why he had forced himself out of bed to come to our conference, knowing his brief but symbolic presence might have an effect. Sure enough, when he walked into the East Room, the hundred and fifty people who were present erupted into lengthy applause. His remarks were short; his baritone didn’t boom quite as loudly as it used to when he’d roared on the Senate floor. By the time we’d moved on to the third or fourth speaker, Vicki had quietly escorted him out the door.
    Read an Exclusive Excerpt from Barack Obama’s New Memoir, “A Promised Land”
  • Good work is not done by "humble" men. It is one of the first duties of a professor, for example, in any subject, to exaggerate a little both the importance of his subject and his importance in it.
    Early Work
  • Build a network of people you will work with for the rest of your life. Read about the X Club (Darwin and Huxley) and the PayPal Mafia. Optimism, ambition and genuine niceness are great attributes in these types of groups. A good way to seed one is to set up a recurring dinner club with 5-6 people, or a chat group.
    Advice for ambitious teenagers -
  • find this to be one of the most frustrating parts of writing this blog: how do I signal the things I still need to learn without the Arrogance Police descending on me? This is different from the case with a specific teacher – here there’s just me projecting my confusions out into the void to see if anyone answers. And every so often I do flatter myself that I’ve discovered a flaw in my betters’ reasoning, so it’s less obvious when I mean to imply that and when I don’t. Next time this h
    Socratic Grilling
  • you, so I’m sure I’m just misunderstanding this, but the thing you just said seems really confusing to me, and I’m not saying it’s not true, but I can’t figure out how it possibly could be true, which is my fault and not yours, but could you please try to explain it differently?” With a great teacher, all of this is assumed, and you don’t need the disclaimers, and you can just say “What? That makes no sense,” and expect the teacher to try again.
    Socratic Grilling
  • interpreting an attempt to explore dissonance as a status grab that needs to be knocked down is absolutely fatal for that skill. Instead, you need to think of it as Socratic grilling – like Socratic questioning, but a little harsher and more confrontational in order to get to the point more quickly.
    Socratic Grilling
  • interpreting an attempt to explore dissonance as a status grab that needs to be knocked down is absolutely
    Socratic Grilling
  • good scientist or a good anything-else-that-requires-independent-thought. And interpreting an attempt to explore dissonance as a status grab that needs to be knocked down is absolutely
    Socratic Grilling
  • noticing your confusion”. But that depends on an even more important proto-skill of wanting things to make sense. If you lose that skill – if it stops bothering you and seeming
    Socratic Grilling