flâneur

Jonathan Xu

109 followers · 35 following · 3469 views

on the atlas — 94

highlights — 80

  • Everyone operates between these poles of selflessness and self-interest. It’s in that space that motivations emerge and decisions get made.
    Making Sense of Moral Change—Asterisk
  • More specifically, while both are activated when resolving conflicts and catching errors, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex assists in memory and other executive functions, while the anterior cingulate cortex is used to select an appropriate response and allocate attentional resources.
    Stroop effect - Wikipedia
  • I now rarely crave attention from people who don’t have a real interest in getting to know me.
    San Francisco, I love you?
  • I strongly needed to figure out how to untie my self-worth from my project.
    Here's to the fools who dream
  • So you make a call, you stand behind it, and you commit yourself to learning and adapting as much as you can. Remember that decisions are usually just the starting line. The racer is not sitting still at the start until the perfect strategy and route are evident. No, they’re going to hit the gas with the best plan they have, and then work hard to adapt along the way.
    There are Only Two Types of Decisions | by Judd Antin | One Big Thought | Medium
  • Why did Wikipedia and change.org become two of the most popular Web sites in the world while his Web sites were failures? He had previously believed that if you came up with a great idea people would use it. But he realized now that you couldn’t expect people to come to you; you had to pull them in.
    The Darker Side of Aaron Swartz | The New Yorker
  • there are two types of people: people who make the right decision and people who make the decision right
    Optionality
  • What if instead of getting really good at forcing yourself to do things you don’t like, you got super good at reimagining the things you get no joy out of to be things, that you do get joy out of? Your life is driven instead, to Simone Weil, by a true desire, to do the thing. Your life is driven by joy, rather than self-denial.
    Simone Weil
  • They are putting themselves in a state where the opinions of others do not bother them and where they reach a heightened sensitivity for the types of questions worth asking — they’ve developed their taste as a form of conviction
    Taste is a guide for what is worthwhile
  • What you should do is the option that actually seems best when you're done weighing your options, regardless of whether or not it has a "should" label attached. You can't figure out which action actually seems best by slapping "should" labels on options willy-nilly and then feeling bad when you ignore them.
    Not because you "should"
  • When you pay it forward, you never know when it will come back around.
    Thirty Observations at Thirty
  • just because someone’s always busy, and lives to an old age, doesn’t mean they’ve lived long. They’ve just existed long.
    Life Is Not Short
  • All these—the sort of people that lived in these houses, and all those damn little clerks that used to live down that way—they’d be no good. They haven’t any spirit in them—no proud dreams and no proud lusts; and a man who hasn’t one or the other—Lord! What is he but funk and precautions? They just used to skedaddle off to work—I’ve seen hundreds of ’em, bit of breakfast in hand, running wild and shining to catch their little season-ticket train, for fear they’d get dismissed if they didn’t; working at businesses they were afraid to take the trouble to understand; skedaddling back for fear the…
    The Project Gutenberg eBook of The War of the Worlds, by H. G. Wells
  • It is, after all, often in coming to terms with excessive external limitations in society that individuals retreat into themselves, pretending to themselves that they do not really desire the worldly goods or pleasures they have been denied. Moreover, the removal of desires may also be an effect of outside forces, such as brainwashing, which we should hardly want to call a realization of freedom.
    Positive and Negative Liberty (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
  • If you write in an unclear way about big ideas, you produce something that seems tantalizingly attractive to inexperienced but intellectually ambitious students
    How to Do Philosophy
  • Cathy O'Neill, in her book Weapons of Math Destruction (Crown), described the pattern of how the privileged are processed by people, whereas the poor are processed by algorithms
    03_ethics.ipynb - Colaboratory
  • We have entered the age of automation overconfident yet underprepared. If we fail to make ethical and inclusive artificial intelligence, we risk losing gains made in civil rights and gender equity under the guise of machine neutrality.
    03_ethics.ipynb - Colaboratory
  • We have entered the age of automation overconfident, yet underprepared. If we fail to make ethical and inclusive artificial intelligence we risk losing gains made in civil rights and gender equity under the guise of machine neutrality.
    Cognitive Bias in Machine Learning | by Maureen McElaney | Center for Open Source Data and AI Technologies | Medium
  • Too many of us live without fully engaging our minds, waiting for that moment when our real lives begin.
    long effort - by Nicole - startingfromnix
  • Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.
    Microsoft Word - Weil1952d.doc
  • If someone thinks school is a stupid waste of time that inefficiently teaches technical skills, that’s all school will be to them.
    How Tech Hype is Ruining College Students in Tech
  • Guy de Maupassant supposedly ate lunch in the tower's restaurant every day because it was the one place in Paris where the tower was not visible
    Eiffel Tower
  • Prior to the Eiffel Tower's construction, no structure had ever been constructed to a height of 300 m, or even 200 m for that matter,[11] and many people believed it was impossible.
    Eiffel Tower
  • When my sons are grown up, I would ask you, O my friends, to punish them; and I would have you trouble them, as I have troubled you, if they seem to care about riches, or anything, more than about virtue; or if they pretend to be something when they are really nothing,—then reprove them, as I have reproved you, for not caring about that for which they ought to care, and thinking that they are something when they are really nothing.
    Encyclopædia Britannica - Great Books Of The Western World - Volumes 1-54 : Encyclopaedia Britannica : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
  • How can we choose a preconditioner that will give us these benefits? A good first guess is one that makes your data decorrelated and whitened. In the case of images this means doing gradient descent in the Fourier basis, with frequencies scaled so that they all have equal energy.
    Feature Visualization
  • We can also define interesting directions in activation space by doing arithmetic on neurons.
    Feature Visualization
  • Then I knew that not by wisdom do poets write poetry, but by a sort of genius and inspiration; they are like diviners or soothsayers who also say many fine things, but do not understand the meaning of them. The poets appeared to me to be much in the same case; and I further ob¬ served that upon the strength of their poetry they believed themselves to be the wisest of men in other things in which they were not wise.
    Encyclopædia Britannica - Great Books Of The Western World - Volumes 1-54 : Encyclopaedia Britannica : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
  • And I swear to you, Athenians, by the dog I swear!— for I must tell you the truth—the result of my mission was just this: I found that the men most in repute were all but the most foolish; and that others less esteemed were really wiser and better.
    Encyclopædia Britannica - Great Books Of The Western World - Volumes 1-54 : Encyclopaedia Britannica : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
  • people who approach hard choices without knowing what they want usually end up adopting the values of the loudest voices in their lives
    unicorns – A Slice of My Mind
  • We both have always positioned ourselves in relation to other existing entities and ideologies (in America’s case, declaring independence from Great Britain and in my own, renouncing regular jobs).
    commitments - by Molly Mielke - Mind Mud
  • Launching a startup in 2016 is akin to assembling an alt-rock band in 1996 or protesting the Vietnam War in 1971—an act of youthful rebellion gone conformist.
    Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny
  • Many of today's problems exist because humanity as a species is still very nascent.
    kanjectures
  • Research, I realized, is what happens as a byproduct when you try to understand something and hit the bounds of what humanity currently knows.
    Research as Understanding
  • Be careful not to discover a career before you’ve discovered yourself.
    Moxie Marlinspike >> Blog >> Career Advice
  • As a young person, though, I think the best thing you can do is to ignore all of that and simply observe the older people working there. They are the future you. Do not think that you will be substantially different. Look carefully at how they spend their time at work and outside of work, because this is also almost certainly how your life will look. It sounds obvious, but it’s amazing how often young people imagine a different projection for themselves. Look at the real people, and you’ll see the honest future for yourself.
    Moxie Marlinspike >> Blog >> Career Advice
  • synchronous vs asynchronous
    Some Notes – Raffi Hotter
  • crying is one of the few authentic emotions we have left
    Some Notes – Raffi Hotter
  • Perhaps eventually everyone converges to solving the same hard problem, Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) just so they can make a competitive short video app or To-Do list or grammar checker.
    All Roads Lead to Rome: The Machine Learning Job Market in 2022 | Eric Jang
  • In the first place if you do some good work you will find yourself on all kinds of committees and unable to do any more work.
    You and Your Research
  • So I started restricting my meetings to early morning or right after lunch, not doing more than three meetings on any given day, and not doing blocks with meetings more than once every other day.
    The making of OpenAI - Greg Brockman
  • The best test of whether it's worthwhile to work on something is whether you find it interesting.
    How to Work Hard
  • Put simply, the Kolmogorov Complexity of some function is the length of the shortest possible program which can produce exactly the same outputs as the function for all given inputs.
    Machine Learning, Kolmogorov Complexity, and Squishy Bunnies
  • the subjects who reported having the happiest lives were those with strong family ties, close friendships, and rich romantic lives
    Why Life Has Gotten More Comfortable but Less Happy - The Atlantic
  • The audio track runs for one minute and 43 seconds before it restarts. On Facebook or Reddit, that time would pass in an instant. On Zombocom, which offers nothing to click but a mute button and nothing to watch but the strobing pinwheel, it feels like an eternity.
    The internet’s most useless website is a well of deep wisdom - Experience Magazine
  • The audio track runs for one minute and 43 seconds before it restarts. On Facebook or Reddit, that time would pass in an instant. On Zombocom, which offers nothing to click but a mute button and nothing to watch but the strobing pinwheel, it feels like an eternity.
    The internet’s most useless website is a well of deep wisdom - Experience Magazine
  • If you’re forever looking around for validation, you’ll never be able to make anything that’s completely your own. Because you don’t even know what you think.
    run your own race - by Ava - bookbear express
  • I suspect founders may increasingly be able to resist, or at least postpone, turning into managers, just as a few decades ago they started to be able to resist switching from jeans to suits.
    Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule
  • Don't your spirits rise at the thought of having an entire day free to work, with no appointments at all?
    Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule
  • A government that collects money from all its citizens and businesses each year has never built a system to distribute money to us when it’s needed most.
    IT’S TIME TO BUILD
  • At first it may seem cool to get paid for doing easy stuff, after paying to do hard stuff in college. But that wears off after a few months. Eventually it gets demoralizing to work on dumb stuff, even if it's easy and you get paid a lot.
    Why to Not Not Start a Startup