flâneur

Eva L

17 followers · 15 following · 683 views

on the atlas — 159

highlights — 27

  • This is because LLMs struggle to learn permanently. Once they hit a rare problem, they now require human intervention and cleanup, which kills throughput (per Amdahl’s law), and worse, your fixes do not feed back into frozen weights.
    Guardian Angels: LLM Personalization for Productivity and Security · Gwern.net
  • Not making a decision is a decision. You usually don’t get more information when you wait.
    The Many Lives of Inkhaven 2.0 - by Sophie Kim
  • Some examples of easy-to-measure vs. hard-to-measure goals: Persuading me, vs. helping me figure out what’s true. (Thanks to Wei Dai for making this example crisp.) Reducing my feeling of uncertainty, vs. increasing my knowledge about the world. Improving my reported life satisfaction, vs. actually helping me live a good life. Reducing reported crimes, vs. actually preventing crime. Increasing my wealth on paper, vs. increasing my effective control over resources.
    What failure looks like - AI Alignment Forum
  • But the question is very much “what are autonomous swarms of superintelligent agents going to mean for our lives?” as opposed to “will we see autonomous swarms of superintelligent agents in the near future?”
    The Moving and the Still - by Dean W. Ball
  • But the question is very much “what are autonomous swarms of superintelligent agents going to mean for our lives?” as opposed to “will we see autonomous swarms of superintelligent agents in the near future?”
    The Moving and the Still - by Dean W. Ball
  • But the question is very much “what are autonomous swarms of superintelligent agents going to mean for our lives?” as opposed to “will we see autonomous swarms of superintelligent agents in the near future?”
    The Moving and the Still - by Dean W. Ball
  • “We just try to build the best product,” he said. “Something people love to use, where your opinion actually matters.”
    Shayne Coplan Speaks at Cantor Conference
  • Finally, to repeat one more time: productivity in the wrong direction isn’t worth anything at all. Think more about what to work on.
    Productivity - Sam Altman
  • And I generally try to avoid people and situations that put me in bad moods, which is good advice whether you care about productivity or not.
    Productivity - Sam Altman
  • I wrote custom software for the annoying things I have to do frequently, which is great. I also made an effort to learn to type really fast and the keyboard shortcuts that help with my workflow.
    Productivity - Sam Altman
  • I have different times of day I try to use for different kinds of work.
    Productivity - Sam Altman
  • doing non-critical things in the quickest way possible.
    Productivity - Sam Altman
  • love being around people who push me and inspire me to be better. To the degree you able to, avoid the opposite kind of people—the cost of letting them take up your mental cycles is horrific.
    Productivity - Sam Altman
  • I’ve been very fortunate to find work I like so much I’d do it for free, which makes it easy to be really productive.
    Productivity - Sam Altman
  • I’ve learned that I can’t be very productive working on things I don’t care about or don’t like. So I just try not to put myself in a position where I have to do them (by delegating, avoiding, or something else). Stuff that you don’t like is a painful drag on morale and momentum.
    Productivity - Sam Altman
  • I make sure to leave enough time in my schedule to think about what to work on. The best ways for me to do this are reading books, hanging out with interesting people, and spending time in nature.
    Productivity - Sam Altman
  • Picking the right thing to work on is the most important element of productivity and usually almost ignored.
    Productivity - Sam Altman
  • It was a half-baked plan. There was no guarantee. In fact, the only guarantee was that he’d initially be making less than he was currently making… But it was interesting, and I was interesting - so he decided on the spot: “yea, I’m down” I asked him if he needed to sleep on it, and he replied “huh? sorry I wasn’t listening, I just went to GoDaddy buying the domain so I can setup the site tonight”. Being down gives you an incredible bias for action.
    down
  • When picking a partner, the most important thing is to find someone who is “down”. Down is a slang word with many uses: “I’m down for whatever” - Someone who is flexible. You can throw any plan/idea at them, and they don’t flinch. They will roll with the punches. “Down for the cause” - This is someone who puts the team/mission needs ahead of their own. “Down to do it” - Down isn’t just a personality trait (like, ‘smart’). Down is an action word. People who are down take action now. They don’t wait. They don’t overthink. They just start, and figure things out.
    down
  • “In theory this sort of hill-climbing could get a startup into trouble. They could end up on a local maximum. But in practice that never happens. … The maxima in the space of startup ideas are not spiky and isolated. Most fairly good ideas are adjacent to even better ones.”
    How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product/Market Fit | First Round Review
  • “When a startup launches, there have to be at least some users who really need what they're making — not just people who could see themselves using it one day, but who want it urgently. Usually this initial group of users is small, for the simple reason that if there were something that large numbers of people urgently needed and that could be built with the amount of effort a startup usually puts into a version one, it would probably already exist. Which means you have to compromise on one dimension: you can either build something a large number of people want a small amount, or something a s…
    How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product/Market Fit | First Round Review
  • (At the time we had between 100 and 200 users to poll, but smaller, earlier-stage startups shouldn’t shy away from this tactic — you start to get directionally correct results around 40 respondents, which is much less than most people think.) We then emailed these users a link to a Typeform survey asking the following four questions: 1. How would you feel if you could no longer use Superhuman?A) Very disappointed B) Somewhat disappointed C) Not disappointed 2. What type of people do you think would most benefit from Superhuman? 3. What is the main benefit you receive from Superhuman? 4. How ca…
    How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product/Market Fit | First Round Review
  • Instead, Ellis had found a leading indicator: just ask users “how would you feel if you could no longer use the product?” and measure the percent who answer “very disappointed.”
    How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product/Market Fit | First Round Review
  • i’ve been thinking again about that one paragraph from kealoha wong: We are not cavemen anymore. There are no sabertooth tigers lurking in the shadows, yet most of us cling to the fears of the animals we evolved from. What are we so afraid of? We've been etching the same patterns in the same predictable places for years! Why do we live the way they tell us to? And who the hell are “they” anyway? and also about this tweet i saw recently: The basic issue with Asian parenting in the West is that it tries to forcefeed a scarcity mindset into kids obviously living in a post-scarcity society it’s ti…
    YOU CAN GET WHAT YOU WANT OR YOU CAN JUST GET OLD
  • one problem with focusing on tradeoffs is that they distract from what is truly important - it’s easy to end up in a myopia where you’re balancing two factors that are relatively unimportant because the tradeoff is legible and easy to optimize over. and of course the other problem with focusing on tradeoffs is that, when you focus on balancing two factors that are both important, it becomes harder to find outcomes that score highly on both axes because part of you stops looking as hard. your model of the pareto front becomes your model of the world. it turns out none of the tradeoffs in the pr…
    YOU CAN GET WHAT YOU WANT OR YOU CAN JUST GET OLD
  • One thing I keep coming back to is open-mindedness. I’m drawn to people who don’t take themselves too seriously. People who move through life with a certain nonchalance that makes them eager for the unconventional and unusual. These people can laugh about anything and like to have fun. … These friends expand our boxes of possible experience. Spontaneity and unconstrained eagerness feel good because they are exercises in doing without thinking too much. Having the thought I want to do this, and then immediately being able to do the thing with people you care about silences the voice of “reason”…
    Friendship
  • Do the thing. Do the thing and they might come. Don’t wait for permission. Because if you don’t do the thing, they definitely won’t come — since the thing doesn’t exist. So be crazy. Be agentic. Give yourself permission. Create a whole tech category if that’s your thing. But do the thing.
    Building community around human agency: a year in review