flâneur

Zhenghong Lieu

0 followers · 1 following · 243 views

on the atlas — 5

highlights — 9

  • So, if you have done something cool, or you have studied something for a long time, or you have thought something interesting, and you are writing it up, and you are at a loss how to get started, try to extract out the key phrase. What do you find yourself ranting about to people repeatedly? What does the Wikipedia entry miss that frustrates you? How would the world be different if this were not true? If you were telling a friend in a rush why you were excited to write this down, what would you say? Just say that! Just… start with the interesting part first. When writing, your first job is thi…
    First, Make Me Care, by Gwern · Gwern.net
  • Beyond the obvious horror of ‘everything in life is gambling now’ and ‘it should be frictionless to control a swarm of impossible-to-detect bots for any purpose at all’, there’s a theme here. It seems like half the startups coming out of Silicon Valley these days are just “We found a way to monetize undermining the social contract!” In fact, that applies to most of the news I’m reading about, and it’s ultimately what fascinates me about so much of what’s going on right now. I take pains not to be a luddite. I don’t think technology is evil, and I don’t think a RETVRN to some imagined, idyllic …
    Does the social contract even exist any more?
  • Greed is not the only form of selfishness. Lots of harm can come from cowardice, laziness, resentment, and many other motives. Furthermore, greed itself can come in many forms: greed for social status can often be just as harmful as greed for money or power. As someone raised in my gentle Canadian upbringing, this was a major update: I felt like I had been taught to believe that greed for money and power is the root of most evils, and if I made sure I was not greedy for those things (eg. by repeatedly fighting to reduce the portion of the ETH supply premine that went to the top-5 "founders") I…
    The end of my childhood
  • the claim I’d make here is that many of these undergrads are stuck in flatland. they’re operating within some plane of legibility, adopting its goals and markers of prestige, maybe occasionally acknowledging the existence of other planes at points where they intersect. but they never quite realise that the plane they live in isn’t the only plane in the world — and, importantly, never explicitly make the choice to inhabit that particular plane as opposed to any other.
    escaping flatland: career advice for CS undergrads
  • for a given scene, you can think of these as mapping out a plane of legibility in the space of things you could do with your life. so long as your actions and goals stay within the plane, you’re legible to the people in your scene: you gain status and earn the respect of your peers. but step outside of the plane and you become illegible: the people around you no longer understand what you’re doing or why you’re doing it. they might think you’re wasting your time. if they have a strong interest in you ‘doing well’, they might even get upset.
    escaping flatland: career advice for CS undergrads
  • one way to characterise a scene is by what it cares about: its markers of prestige, things you ‘ought to do’, its targets to optimise for. for the traders or the engineers, it’s all about that coveted FAANG / jane street internship; for the entrepreneurs, that successful startup (or accelerator), for the researchers, the top-tier-conference first-author paper… the list goes on.
    escaping flatland: career advice for CS undergrads
  • judging by salaries alone, the best Cambridge CS grads are probably worth millions of pounds in generated value… yet they can often be bought for little more than the price of a fancy dinner and a pack of swee
    escaping flatland: career advice for CS undergrads
  • notably, a few firms — particularly in quantitative trading — have put enough effort into maintaining presence and visibility in Cambridge that they’ve positioned themselves as both the default option and the prestigious option. they host fancy dinners and high-quality nerdy events, hand out unlimited merch, and sponsor all the technical societies;3 once, they even mailed small care packages of sweets to all first-year CS students just before their exams.
    escaping flatland: career advice for CS undergrads
  • Each person needs to consume some fixed amount of resources each year — food, energy, water, earth metals, … — to live as well as your average American coastal elite. So I’d like to propose a new unit: 1 vita = {annual energy, clean water, protein, transport, m² climate-controlled indoor space, compute, communications bandwidth, consumer-durables flow}, each specified at 2025 “coastal-elite” service levels.1 I am very excited about AI increasing the vitae available to us. If we live in a world with 10 VPP, I’m not at all worried about whether I personally am employed or not, because I can rely…
    Vitae per person (VPP): a new metric of civilizational resource