flâneur

Matthew Pak

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on the atlas — 80

highlights — 13

  • in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.
    This is Water by David Foster Wallace (Full Transcript and Audio) - Farnam Street
  • A 2010 census showed 82.44% of Chinese men aged 20-29 had never married, fifteen percentage points above women in the same bracket. Demographers projected 29-33 million surplus males in the coming decades.
    You Are Not The One - Chinese Dating Dystopia
  • For their six-month anniversary, he bought her a gold necklace. She posted it on Xiaohongshu. Comments: “So lucky,” “He really loves you,” “Where is mine lol,” “What brand,” and approximately 400 variations of those four responses. The post got 8,000 likes. He looked at those 8,000 likes and felt, for the first time in his adult life, the unmistakable sensation of having done something right. He is not manipulated. He is not being used. He just lives in a country that digitized romance before it finished industrializing it, and the result is a kind of sincerity that would be unrecognizable in …
    You Are Not The One - Chinese Dating Dystopia
  • Wang Wei sent her a sports car last Tuesday. It cost him 500 RMB, which is roughly one-seventh of his monthly rent. She said his username, “WangWei198769” and smiled at the camera. His heart melted. He took a screenshot. For a moment, a brief moment, he experienced what he imaged it was like to be wealthy, and happy. He is not confused about the nature of this transaction. He is very clear about what it is. He just can’t think of a better use for 500 RMB that produces that specific feeling. The factory worker’s calculus: a real girlfriend requires an apartment he can’t afford, a car he can’t a…
    You Are Not The One - Chinese Dating Dystopia
  • Eighty percent of the parents in Zhongshan Park in Beijing are looking for husbands for their daughters. This is counterintuitive. China has a surplus of men, until you understand that educated urban women need partners who outrank them, and outranking an educated urban woman in 2026 requires credentials that barely exist in sufficient quantity.
    You Are Not The One - Chinese Dating Dystopia
  • I’ve come to believe that post-training is where the next frontier of AI progress happens, especially for subjective / hard-to-measure capabilities like emotional intelligence, taste, humor, creative judgment. Base models are increasingly capable. The question is whether we know how to unlock what’s already in them and how to invent entirely new behaviors to teach them. Objective capabilities have clear benchmarks. Subjective ones require a different craft: intuition about data, feel for what’s working, methods we’re still inventing. This is the frontier that matters, and almost nobody is work…
    Things I learned at OpenAI - by Karina Nguyen - sémaphore
  • If another team hands over something and says, “hey, this is the image resize service, here’s how to use it to resize your images”... I’m not going to go and read every line of code that they wrote. I’m going to look at their documentation and I’m going to use it to resize some images. And then I’m going to start shipping my own features. And if I start running into problems where the image resizer thing appears to have bugs or the performance isn’t good, that’s when I might dig into their Git repositories and see what’s going on. But for the most part I treat that as a semi-black box that I d…
    Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I’d like
  • All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist or understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty…
    Why I Write | The Orwell Foundation
  • With more years behind me, however, I now consider opportunity to be less important than the preparation to seize the moment. In Chinese, we say, “the stars align, the conditions are favorable, but most of all, the person is ready.” (天時地利人合) There’s another great quote, “the more I practice, the luckier I get.” You get the gist.
    what i talk about when i talk about running | MIT Admissions
  • IB headcount industry-wide is tiny. There are probably more SWEs at the main five BigCos (Google, FB, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft) than there are people working in IB globally. Google alone probably hires about as many new grad SWEs in the US as all of the BB/EB IB Analyst classes combined. We're talking about a pretty exclusive career path here despite how casual a lot of users are about getting in - fact is, you have better odds of getting into a decent Tech company (which is still damn competitive by the way) than you do of getting into an Analyst class at a bank (especially if you're a non…
    Career path in IB : r/FinancialCareers
  • I tell it to shut up until I give it an explicit command to write me code. I don't want it randomly writing code before it has the full picture. It just fucks up memory. Then I tell it the general purpose / goal of the code. I provide it with the relevant variables I want to be using, as well as any other relevant things (databases I pull from or whatever). I provide it with my logic. I literally write out. Something like; I want to achieve my goal x by doing the following steps; I want to retrieve data in this way, then I want to apply logic xyz to the data, finally I want to visualise my res…
    How in the heck are people actually using ChatGPT for programming? : r/ChatGPT
  • For instance, when I suggested that we “force” half of the people to become smokers, I must have been talking about starting with a sample of non-smokers, and then forcing them to become smokers. While this sounds like the kind of solid, evil experimental design that a mad scientist would love, it might not be a very sound way of investigating the effect in the real world. For instance, suppose that smoking only causes lung cancer when people have poor diets, and suppose also that people who normally smoke do tend to have poor diets. However, since the “smokers” in our experiment aren’t “natur…
    2. A brief introduction to research design — Learning Statistics with Python
  • Since the nuclear stalemate became apparent, the governments of East and West have adopted the policy that Mr. Dulles calls 'brinkmanship'. This is a policy adapted from a sport that, I am told, is practiced by some youthful degenerates. This sport is called 'Chicken!'. It is played by choosing a long, straight road with a white line down the middle and starting two very fast cars toward each other from opposite ends. Each car is expected to keep the wheels on one side of the white line. As they approach each other, mutual destruction becomes more and more imminent. If one of them swerves from…
    Chicken (game) - Wikipedia