flâneur

Alyssa Yu

16 followers · 20 following · 1299 views

on the atlas — 94

highlights — 201

  • https://github.com/anonymous-anuthor/SD-STGCN
    Source detection on networks using spatial temporal graph convolutional networks | IEEE Conference Publication | IEEE Xplore
  • Reaction-diffusion dynamics on graphs is structurally equivalent to the message- passing neural network ansatz.
    [2006.11913] Finding Patient Zero: Learning Contagion Source with Graph Neural Networks
  • The direction for improvement is clear: seek detail you would not normally notice about the world. When you go for a walk, notice the unexpected detail in a flower or what the seams in the road imply about how the road was built. When you talk to someone who is smart but just seems so wrong, figure out what details seem important to them and why. In your work, notice how that meeting actually wouldn’t have accomplished much if Sarah hadn’t pointed out that one thing. As you learn, notice which details actually change how you think.
    Reality has a surprising amount of detail
  • This means it’s really easy to get stuck. Stuck in your current way of seeing and thinking about things. Frames are made out of the details that seem important to you. The important details you haven’t noticed are invisible to you, and the details you have noticed seem completely obvious and you see right through them. This all makes makes it difficult to imagine how you could be missing something important.
    Reality has a surprising amount of detail
  • If you’re a programmer, you might think that the fiddliness of programming is a special feature of programming, but really it’s that everything is fiddly, but you only notice the fiddliness when you’re new, and in programming you do new things more often.
    Reality has a surprising amount of detail
  • Once you see purpose through that lens, you will realize that your objective isn’t to do what you’re passionate about; your objective is to pursue your purpose passionately.
    35 Essential Life Lessons Everyone Should Learn Early on in Life — OMAR ITANI
  • Happiness is not a paradise island we must go looking for. No. Happiness is a deep-rooted rose of contentment that you carry with you everywhere you go — and you are the one who chooses whether or not to water it every morning upon waking up.
    35 Essential Life Lessons Everyone Should Learn Early on in Life — OMAR ITANI
  • you owe nothing to your younger self, but you owe everything to your present self
    35 Essential Life Lessons Everyone Should Learn Early on in Life — OMAR ITANI
  • I benefited from a sort of psychological portfolio effect—diversifying the things I was working towards reduced the risk that comes from putting all your motivational eggs in one basket.
    The Case for a Varied Life - by Tommy Blanchard
  • To be bored is to be undistracted, and only then is one free to dream, just as it’s only when the world goes dark that we see the galaxy.
    26 Useful Concepts for 2026 - by Gurwinder - The Prism
  • As Walt Whitman said, “If you want to know where your heart is, look to where your mind goes when it wanders.”
    26 Useful Concepts for 2026 - by Gurwinder - The Prism
  • “Badly played chess is kind of like badly played life. Real problems are dealt with poorly or not at all, while much effort is expended on avoiding imaginary danger. Rather than dealing with the reality of the situation, you act as if you were playing the game you wish you were”
    aug-oct update - by vincent huang - a slice of my mind
  • Proactively make introductions - If friend A and friend B can get value from each other, introduce them. It’s a 30-second email for you, and it may change their lives forever.
    How to engineer luck - by George Mack - High Agency
  • Devotion is desire transmuted across time into love. It is an elevation of attention; a singleness of purpose, but in service to something greater than ourselves. Ramanujan’s pure devotion to god and to math seem indistinguishable, in both the hints and anecdotes that remain as a record of his life, and especially in his dreams.
    The Mystery of Ramanujan's Dreams - by Kristin Posehn
  • It is remarkable that this dream unfolds in a seamless flow of blood, grace, attention, writing, and math, and perhaps for Ramanujan they were inseparable. You do not achieve a dream like that by accident.
    The Mystery of Ramanujan's Dreams - by Kristin Posehn
  • In their remarks, English mathematicians were careful to stress that Ramanujan was rational and rigorous—characteristics that were worthy, in their eyes, of conventional respect, while Ramanujan’s devout practice as a Hindu was glossed over, as if this were merely a set of odd behavioral codes he happened to scrupulously observe.
    The Mystery of Ramanujan's Dreams - by Kristin Posehn
  • 11. They question the question - Before rushing to answer your question, they question whether it’s the right question to answer. They know the right answer to the wrong question is worse than no answer to the right question.
    How to spot high agency people - by George Mack
  • 16. An infinite number of reframes - When they can’t bend external atoms in the physical world, they bend the neurons in their head instead. Charlie Munger was an obsessive reader. After a failed surgery, he was left blind in one eye with a strong likelihood of going fully blind. When asked how he would cope not being able to read, he replied in the blink of his one eye: “I’ve always wanted to learn braille.”
    How to spot high agency people - by George Mack
  • 6. Stop making decisions. Start making experiments - Retire the word decision from your vocabulary. Never use the D-word again. Replace it with experiment. Daniel Kahneman won a Nobel Prize for his work on decision-making and concluded that the biggest lesson was that decision-making theory didn’t make him a better decision-maker.
    10 ideas for overthinkers - by George Mack - High Agency
  • Doestovsky described the overthinking trap as an illness: “I swear to you that to think too much is a disease, a real, actual disease.”
    10 ideas for overthinkers - by George Mack - High Agency
  • If you're the dumbest person in the room, you'll always be learning something new. You don't gain anything from being the smartest person in the room - if you think you are, find a new room."
    "Always be the dumbest person in the room." : r/aftergifted
  • I think this discipline, to look with imagined love, can be a form of democratic tenderness. You keep sketching halos until they become easier to see. We become what others imagine us as. Or as the saying goes, I am not me. I am not what you think I am. I am what I think you think I am. Which is to say, our sense of self is a collaborative fiction, drafted in the space between your gaze and my interpretation of it, and love has a way of making that fiction more generous, more daring, more alive. Each act of seeing draws up another hidden self from the depths
    some parts of you only emerge for certain people - by maja
  • If you can train yourself to ask “is there a better way to do this?” at random intervals ten times a day, you will become unstoppable.
    50 things I know - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions
  • If it’s really the path, you’ll find it more than once.
    50 things I know - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions
  • In Anthropic’s second year, OpenAI introduced generative AI to the world with ChatGPT, but Anthropic took a different path. Rather than focus on consumer applications, Amodei decided Anthropic would sell its technology to businesses. There were two benefits to this strategy. If the models were useful it could be lucrative, and the challenge would prod the company into building better technology.
    The Making Of Dario Amodei - by Alex Kantrowitz
  • The only way to get a good model of the world inside your head is to bump into the world, to let the light and sound impinge upon your eyes and ears, and let the world carve the details into your world-model. Similarly, the only method I know of for finding actual good plans is to take a bad plan and slam it into the world, to let evidence and the feedback impinge upon your strategy, and let the world tell you where the better ideas are.
    Dive in
  • “i guess i don’t believe you understand your feelings as well as you say you do,” i said instead. “you’re really smart, but the problem is that smart people can rationalize anything, you know? you can convince yourself of feelings or desires that aren’t really there. like, you always seem so self-assured in a way that doesn’t feel real to me”
    ALIGNMENT - by vincent huang - a slice of my mind
  • Most of my close friends today are, directly or indirectly, people I met through the project. Though seemingly improbable, I think it makes sense. If you’re friends with someone because you happened to live on the same street or take the same high school classes, those attributes aren’t good predictors of whether you’ll enjoy talking to each other ten years down the road. But if your basis for friendship is “we really enjoyed talking to each other,” that’s much more durable. It’s very unlikely that six months from now we will hate talking to each other.
    The strangers project: an FAQ - Alex Chueh
  • When I look back on my life, I find that a lot of the most joyful moments where when I was psychologically, emotionally, spiritually in that sweet spot between certainty and uncertainty, knowing and unknowing, even sense and nonsense, and let’s also say seriousness and unseriousness. And when I look back at the dreariest times, I was often way too sure of myself, way too fixated on some particular idea of how things are supposed to be, what I’m “supposed to be reading”, what I’m “supposed to be writing”. That’s a kind of hell, a kind of self-tyranny that I’ve occasionally lapsed into. And I kn…
    the joy of browsing - by visakan veerasamy
  • the feeling of effort doesn’t mean that you’re Actually Trying.
    Maybe you’re not Actually Trying - by Cate Hall
  • What is respected is continuing to participate in building the future even after your career has reached maturity—it is a flex to say, for example, that you sponsored someone’s research if it turns out to be important.
    Everyone here is in a cult - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions
  • In the Bay, we optimize. Being interested in the casual or the slow reads as unserious. Speedrun enlightenment! Don’t die! See you in the desert!
    Everyone here is in a cult - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions
  • In New York, where I lived for three years, it’s obvious that there is no one way to “win,” culturally. If you’re out for a walk in any central area, you’ll encounter many people who find your whole set of priorities absurd, who basically do not respect the prizes you’re striving for.
    Everyone here is in a cult - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions
  • A friend of mine once said: “If you put behavior into the world, you get behavior out.” It’s a lovely truism that isn’t always true. But the more you can make it true for your lovers, friends, customers, whatever, the more they will tend to have fun.
    What the humans like is responsiveness - by Sasha Chapin
  • However, I see far too many people feeling guilt and shame about not having pushed far enough along the quality line. They feel guilty about not putting effort towards their job (which they hate); they feel guilty about not being a good enough friend (when they are nearly at breakdown themselves); they feel guilty about not fulfilling their parent's expectations (which are ridiculous and uninformed). In order to replace guilt and shame with intrinsic motivation, it is first necessary to break the slacker/tryer dichotomy. If you've got to feel guilty, please feel guilty about missing your own t…
    Half-assing it with everything you've got
  • What I am saying is, don't conflate the quality line with the preference curve. Don't get confused when the teacher labels one quality-point "pass" and another "fail," for these are just labels, and your deeper goals are likely only tangentially related to those labels. Remember what you're trying to achieve, identify your quality target, and aim for that: no higher, no lower.
    Half-assing it with everything you've got
  • Seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain. It is not in the moment of their forming, but in the moment of their producing motor effects, that resolves and aspirations communicate the new 'set' to the brain.
    The best general advice on earth « the jsomers.net blog
  • Advising people and writing are fundamentally different types of work. When people come to you with a problem and you have to figure out the right thing to do, you don't (usually) have to invent anything. You just weigh the alternatives and try to judge which is the prudent choice. But prudence can't tell me what sentence to write next. The search space is too big.
    Is It Worth Being Wise?
  • "Wise" and "smart" are both ways of saying someone knows what to do. The difference is that "wise" means one has a high average outcome across all situations, and "smart" means one does spectacularly well in a few.
    Is It Worth Being Wise?
  • Who continued to dress in jeans and t-shirts, to drive the old car they had in grad school, and so on? If you did that in New York, people would treat you like shit. If you walk into a fancy restaurant in San Francisco wearing a jeans and a t-shirt, they're nice to you; who knows who you might be? Not in New York.
    Cities and Ambition
  • When governments decide how to allocate resources, political deal-making causes things to be spread out geographically. No central goverment would put its two best universities in the same town, unless it was the capital (which would cause other problems). But scholars seem to like to cluster together as much as people in any other field
    Cities and Ambition
  • It's in fields like the arts or writing or technology that the larger environment matters. In these the best practitioners aren't conveniently collected in a few top university departments and research labs — partly because talent is harder to judge, and partly because people pay for these things, so one doesn't need to rely on teaching or research funding to support oneself. It's in these more chaotic fields that it helps most to be in a great city: you need the encouragement of feeling that people around you care about the kind of work you do, and since you have to find peers for yourself, y…
    Cities and Ambition
  • In DC the message seems to be that the most important thing is who you know. You want to be an insider.
    Cities and Ambition
  • No matter how determined you are, it's hard not to be influenced by the people around you. It's not so much that you do whatever a city expects of you, but that you get discouraged when no one around you cares about the same things you do.
    Cities and Ambition
  • When you walk through Palo Alto in the evening, you see nothing but the blue glow of TVs. In Cambridge you see shelves full of promising-looking books. Palo Alto was probably much like Cambridge in 1960, but you'd never guess now that there was a university nearby.
    Cities and Ambition
  • Readers are simply more willing to tolerate a lightspeed jump from belief X to belief Y if the writer himself (a) seems taken aback by it and (b) acts as if they had no say in the matter---as though the situation simply unfolded that way. Which is precisely what the phrase "it turns out" accomplishes, and why it's so useful in circumstances where you don't have any substantive path from X to Y. In that sense it's a kind of handy writerly shortcut or, as pg would probably put it, a hack.
    “It turns out” « the jsomers.net blog
  • It starts becoming so deterministic, it stops being luck. The definition starts fading from luck to destiny. To summarize the fourth type: build your character in a certain way, then your character becomes your destiny.
    How to get lucky and land top 1% career opportunities
  • This mental model implies that to maximize your odds of getting lucky, you need to both Do (aka hustle and create) and Tell (aka make the world aware of what you are doing). The ideal combination of doing and telling leads to proportionally greater opportunities coming your way, hence you will appear “more lucky” to those around you. In other words, you can “create” your own luck.
    How to get lucky and land top 1% career opportunities
  • Luck is a taboo word for the well-educated professional, because leaving things “up to chance” is synonymous with “lack of preparation”.
    How to get lucky and land top 1% career opportunities
  • To me it seems now that the more important and sustainable quality to prioritize is beauty. What do I envision in a world that is beautiful to me, that makes me want to keep living in it? Writing that moves me, friends to love, care for the billions of other forms of life that share this planet with us. In the end I care less about “solving problems” and more about making sure that beautiful things live on into the future.
    the compass - by Kai - golden blue