flâneur

Alex Wang

8 followers · 17 following · 1414 views

on the atlas — 105

highlights — 47

  • This problem is not easy to fix, but it’s not impossible either. I’ve mostly fixed it for myself. 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 det…
    Reality has a surprising amount of detail
  • To make matters worse, if you’d used a glass pot instead of a metal one, the water would boil at a higher temperature. If you cleaned the glass vessel with sulfuric acid, to remove any residue, you’d find that you can heat water substantially more before it boils and when it does boil it boils in little explosions of boiling and the temperature fluctuates unstably.
    Reality has a surprising amount of detail
  • How does anyone get any work done inside a web browser?
    #232 | writing on a wall
  • It’s made up of individual ingredients known or suspected to fight sepsis, and in a retrospective study, 0% of Marik’s patients died of sepsis (although 8% died from their underlying illness), compared to half in the ~control group. But a retrospective study isn’t enough; we need the gold standard, a randomized control study.
    An Opportunity to Throw Money at the Problem of Medical Science – Aceso Under Glass
  • While I am proud of the work that I did on the project, and I know I put all my effort into it, that it really is the best I could do, I still felt a wave of emotion when I got that email.
    the marathon of a lifetime
  • Taking an authoritarian position, Fitzhugh argued that "All government is slavery", and that "No one ought to be free."[37] And yet he, like other proslavery theorists, believed that "slavery ultimately made democracy work",
    Pro-slavery ideology in the United States
  • Fried my friend's computer. Probably because he was a dirty pleb who brewed it with tap water.
    sorbier
  • "Almond flavoured—?"
    Incomplete two-word sentences with which to end your life
  • If Mr Brancusi called this a fish it would be then to you a fish? If he called it a fish I would call it a fish. If he called it a tiger it would change your mind to a tiger? No.
    The Case of Constantin Brancusi vs the United States of America: an extract
  • politicallyExposedPersonIncludedIndicator: boolean // "Does this report include information about an individual who // you have determined to be a politically exposed person (PEP)?"
    vmfunc- the watchers: how openai, the US government, and persona built an identity surveillance machine that files reports on you to the feds
  • so what do you do? well, we looked. found source code on a government endpoint with the door wide open. facial recognition, watchlists, SAR filings, intelligence codenames, and much more.
    vmfunc- the watchers: how openai, the US government, and persona built an identity surveillance machine that files reports on you to the feds
  • But it’s nei­ther. It’s poorly rea­soned, con­tra­dicts com­mon sense, and like all faulty analo­gies, leads to faulty con­clu­sions. Ty­pog­ra­phy isn’t in­vis­i­ble. By em­brac­ing that fact rather than deny­ing it, we can cre­ate bet­ter typography.
    Drowning the Crystal Goblet | Butterick’s Practical Typography
  • death from disease is the reason so many of these endless forms can coëxist. The outcome of mortality from disease is reduced competition between plant species
    Coëxistence
  • Please respect our TACOS.
    Terms & Conditions of Service - NearlyFreeSpeech.NET Web Hosting
  • It is well known by medicinal chemists (Beall (2014)) that many categories of natural compounds, such as polyhydroxylated natural phytochemicals, polyphenols, flavonoids, and so on are highly reactive in ways that confound assay results; some are naturally fluorescent or colorful, others have a propensity to trap catalysts used in various assays, redox cyclers may naturally produce hydrogen peroxide in common assay conditions
    Milky Eggs » Blog Archive » Lifespan extension: separating fact from fiction
  • Implicitly, people seem to accept that the risk-reward profiles of fasting, etc. are within the acceptable range.
    Milky Eggs » Blog Archive » Lifespan extension: separating fact from fiction
  • A core principle of my process of evaluation is that well over 50% of modern biological research is literally fake (fabricated from whole cloth), essentially fake (p-hacked or otherwise selectively presented), or so incompetently executed as to be pure noise.
    Milky Eggs » Blog Archive » Lifespan extension: separating fact from fiction
  • Most importantly, you can only be 50%+-focused on one thing at a time—or zero, in bad cases
    Attention is your scarcest resource | benkuhn.net
  • not realising that you can just do things. You don’t need permission, you usually don’t need a credential, you don’t need to solve all your personal problems first.
    What's stopping you?
  • You cannot allow other people to decide what you want from life.
    What's stopping you?
  • So we are likely getting more lead, more omega-6 (and relatively less omega-3), and less lithium than people in 1850. If there has been an increase in crime and other undesirable/impulsive behaviors, I think these biological insults are at least as worthy of examination as political changes that have occurred during that time.
    Proposed Biological Explanations For Historical Trends In Crime | Slate Star Codex
  • It's over, AI skeptics. I've depicted myself as the god of Abraham, you as the devil, and Dwarkesh Patel as Dwarkesh Patel.
    What Is Man, That Thou Are Mindful Of Him?
  • The use of stories about models "lying, cheating and stealing to reach goals" or "stop themselves being turned off" are intentionally deceptive, as these models can (and clearly are) being prompted to take these actions. To be abundantly clear, the manipulative suggestion here is that these models are autonomous or conscious in some way, which they are not.
    The Hater's Guide To The AI Bubble
  • a fictional concept that Meta's chief AI scientist says won't come from scaling up LLMs.
    The Hater's Guide To The AI Bubble
  • Any and all stories about AI replacing jobs are intentionally manipulative attempts to boost stock valuations and suggest that models are capable of replacing human workers at scale.
    The Hater's Guide To The AI Bubble
  • The term "agent" is one of the most egregious acts of fraud I've seen in my entire career writing about this crap, and that includes the metaverse.
    The Hater's Guide To The AI Bubble
  • So what you’re saying is, people like chatbots for stuff they don’t know about, but the same chatbots in a different package are just unreliable for stuff the people do understand?
    MIT on enterprise AI: 95% failure, 5% spam — from 100% crypto bros – Pivot to AI
  • Heaven is a set of gradually increasing but attainable challenges.
    50 things I know - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions
  • “Every strange thing you’ve ever been into, every failed hobby or forgotten instrument, everything you have ever learned will come back to you, will serve you when you need it. No love, however brief, is wasted.”
    50 things I know - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions
  • We all need to come down from our peaks. For us to truly learn something, we need to abandon our views about it. Because the act of coming down from the peak forces us to do three things Understand the limits of our thinking: As we come down, and shed our views, we start seeing our field of knowledge more objectively, and understand that there are limits to our thinking, even though we are experts. Open space for contemplation: Once we come down, and make our way to another peak, we start walking, which opens the space for contemplation. Isolate ourselves from our ego: Once we have stripped ou…
    How to live an intellectually rich life - by Utsav Mamoria
  • Consistency over Flashes of Brilliance. Repeatability over Spontaneous Genius.
    How to live an intellectually rich life - by Utsav Mamoria
  • When I first read Blindsight 10 years ago, I didn't understand how scramblers felt about human slop. But now I do. I feel it every time I read AI text outside of the privacy of my own chatroom.
    It's rude to show AI output to people | Alex Martsinovich
  • But if you believe life is benign, you're going to see lots of evidence for it. If you think life is malign, you're going to see lots of evidence for it.
    Why So Many Smart People Aren’t Happy
  • Explanatory categories are seductive and powerful—it’s dangerous to give someone a sticky, sense-making concept, if they don’t have the meta-skills necessary to keep that concept in check, make sure it doesn’t overtake and overpower their actual observations.
    Truth or Dare - by Duncan Sabien - Homo Sabiens
  • My mindset going into a conversation used to be “what do we have in common?” Now, it’s “what can I learn about you?
    The strangers project - Alex Chueh
  • Because I viewed conversations more as knowledge exchanges than vehicles for deepening personal relationships, I treated innocuous classroom chats about sneakers or Guardians of the Galaxy more casually. Thus, although I was pleasant and affable, my tenth-grade friendships were held back by my own apathy.
    The strangers project - Alex Chueh
  • Can the concept be represented by another emoji or sequence, even if the image is not exactly the same?
    Guidelines for Submitting Unicode® Emoji Proposals
  • Keep up some kind of a minimum with other things so that society doesn’t stop you from doing anything at all.
    Richard Feynman
  • (Think back to 2020, and what it would have sounded like to have something close to AGI by 2025, versus what the last 5 years have actually been like.)
    The Gentle Singularity - Sam Altman
  • Self-consciousness is a stoppage because it is like interrupting a song after every note so as to listen to the echo, and then feeling irritated because of the loss of rhythm.
    The Finger and the Moon
  • my best friends are people with dreams i want to see come to fruition and that is the bond that permanently etches us together. even if we slowly stop talking, there is not a single world where i do not root for them. i make this intentionally known in every hour, in the way i treasure time together, and in carving out my life to be with others. this is my world of infinite love for my friends and there is no other way i’d like it.
    friendships, play, and love | arielle lok
  • I think being bored is an important feeling that we’ve lost and I’d love to learn how to be bored again.
    how to get smart again - postcards by elle
  • Now, we frequently consume ideas one-directionally: a small number of people produce the content, and the rest of us consume it.
    sorbier
  • The conversations weren't real, my friends felt, they just dragged on over the years like tiresome drips from a sink. Both friends had come to the same conclusion: maybe a pre-scheduled video call, say once every week or two weeks, was the way to go.
    sorbier
  • In modern times, while licensing practices are usually argued to in some way protect members of the public (e.g. by ensuring quality standards), it usually can also be argued that these practices have been engineered to limit the number of 'outsiders' who gain entrance to a given field.
    Guild - Wikipedia
  • “For many Americans, political opinions are a substitute for personal checks,”
    Can one person make a difference? I wanted to find out. | Vox
  • Starting [at a young age] he’s read everything that he could find about business. The subject that interests him, he’s read newspapers, biographies, trade press. He went over to his grandfather who was a grocer and he read the progressive grocer magazine, and he
    Curius / Onboarding