flâneur

Walter Smith

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on the atlas — 35

highlights — 29

  • Everything happens for a reason, and all you need is time to understand that God moves in ways we don’t always need to comprehen
    How to Trust God With Your Love Story - Cleopatra
  • From his infancy, Scougal was raised with religion. From his youth, Scougal spent his free hours in reading, meditation and prayer. He especially enjoyed studying the historical passages of the Old Testament.
    Henry Scougal
  • Scarcity teaches dependence; abundance tests gratitude
    The Rhythms of a Woman's Life - by Emily Foster
  • Philippians 4 says, “I have learned, in whatever situation I am, to be content.” Paul frames this as something learned, not assumed.
    The Rhythms of a Woman's Life - by Emily Foster
  • The church desperately needs older women. Younger women need discipleship, practical wisdom, encouragement, help with children, and examples of how to love husbands, love children, and manage households.
    The Rhythms of a Woman's Life - by Emily Foster
  • Singleness allows a person to be less divided in attention to the Lord.
    The Rhythms of a Woman's Life - by Emily Foster
  • God made the world beautiful. He filled creation with color, fragrance, music, mountains, flowers, sunsets, and stars
    The Rhythms of a Woman's Life - by Emily Foster
  • Scripture reminds us that youthful beauty is fleeting. Beauty fades, skin wrinkles, and strength weakens. My husband likes to say that we start like grapes but finish like raisins.
    The Rhythms of a Woman's Life - by Emily Foster
  • One of the strange things about human nature is that we often long desperately for the very things we later take for granted.
    The Rhythms of a Woman's Life - by Emily Foster
  • biblical tradition is full of figures who act under radical uncertainty, leave behind security without any guarantee of return, and pursue callings at enormous personal cost. Abraham leaves without a destination. Joseph endures catastrophic failure before any vindication arrives. Paul builds something new in every city he enters, usually at the cost of his physical safety and social standing.
    Evangelicals Don’t Produce Leaders. They Produce “Cubicle Men.”
  • The longevity space is having a moment. Personalities like Bryan Johnson are breaking into the mainstream. Startups like Function Health are normalizing $500/year preventative blood tests. And VCs are piling into the category; last year, investment in longevity tech doubled to $8.5 billion.
    The Longevity Land Grab | Will Ventures
  • 6. If we had an expectation for our young people to marry young, this would help head off unrealistic standards from developing. The longer men and women live apart from one another, the easier it is to get crotchety, or even persnickety. This affects many areas of life, but one of them is the area of evaluating the looks of others as though one were a refined and discriminating connoisseur of feminine pulchritude. But you can’t actually become a real connoisseur by walking briskly through every restaurant in town.
    7 Reasons Young Men Should Marry Before Their 23rd Birthday | Blog & Mablog
  • “I know several godly, hardworking and attractive homeschool guys who have been rejected by as many as a dozen fathers. I respect their tenacity. Getting turned down by courtship fathers is tough on guys because the fathers are rarely gentle or kind.”
    Why Courtship Is Fundamentally Awed | Blog & Mablog
  • It’s a wonder, then, that anything ever gets done inside of living cells, for they are very fast and crowded places.
    Biology is a Burrito - by Niko McCarty - Asimov Press
  • There has been coalescence around a new term called "virtual cell."1 The virtual cell is a banner definition that captures a federated set of research directions on modeling parts of cells.2 This has led to new funding calls,3 competitions,4 and discussion about what is a virtual cell (and what is it good for).5 The term is a bit vague and has led to some pushback.6 For example, some mean virtual cell to be a "high-fidelity simulation"7 and others are interested in machine learning models for a cell8.
    diffuse.one
  • In January, Superpower began offering members access to peptides that are legal in the United States. This includes GLP-1 medications, SS-31 (for more energy), sermorelin (for anti-aging), and tesamorelin (for body recomposition). Marchione expects this list to grow as federal oversight loosens: In late February, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced on the "Joe Rogan Experience" podcast that the FDA would remove restrictions on 14 different peptides, as part of a broader agenda to make every American "the CEO of his own health."
    Inside Superpower, a Peptide Startup Making People Hotter, Smarter - Business Insider
  • helping/investing/working for the company right in front you, not a mutual fund of all companies with that characteristic!
    Why I doubted Facebook could build a billion dollar business, and what I learned from being horribly wrong at andrewchen
  • The concrete lesson to be learned from this is: In the modern era, business models are a commodity. I never want to hear about people asking, “But what’s their business model?” because in a world where you can grow a userbase of 1 billion in a few years, displaying remnant ads and getting a $0.25 CPM will do. Or just throw some freemium model on it, and monetize 1% of them. If you can build the audience, you can build a big business.
    Why I doubted Facebook could build a billion dollar business, and what I learned from being horribly wrong at andrewchen
  • While I was doing these calculations after my meeting, Yahoo was also doing a similar analysis on the value of Facebook for their ill-fated attempt at buying the company. I would first read about it in the WSJ, but later saw this fascinating slide on Techcrunch.
    Why I doubted Facebook could build a billion dollar business, and what I learned from being horribly wrong at andrewchen
  • In Scenario B, the market leader often captures a disproportionate share of the upside.
    If You're Not First, You're (Maybe? Potentially? Probably?) Last
  • In Scenario C, the asymmetry cuts the other way just as hard. If the market fails to materialize at scale, the leader is of course going to suffer. But the odds that it goes to literal zero are much smaller than its competitors
    If You're Not First, You're (Maybe? Potentially? Probably?) Last
  • These markets tend to have the fattest and most asymmetric tail
    If You're Not First, You're (Maybe? Potentially? Probably?) Last
  • Metacognition and dynamic planning
    If AGI Means Everything People Do... What is it That People Do?
  • There’s a huge disconnect between AI performance on benchmark tests, and its applicability to real-world tasks. It’s not that the tests are wrong; it’s that they only measure things that are easy to measure. People go around arguing that AIs which can do everything people can do may arrive as soon as next year2. And yet, no one in the AI community has bothered to characterize what people actually do!
    If AGI Means Everything People Do... What is it That People Do?
  • Just to avoid powering down, they would need to continuously battle entropy like our own bodies do, actively maintaining and repairing and eventually replacing the physical infrastructure and processes that sustain their existence. If the self-sufficient AI civilization runs on a hardware stack similar to what we have today, the work of battling entropy would look like AI systems operating swarms of robots to maintain the power infrastructure that keeps the chips that run their minds humming and the physical buildings those chips sit inside.
    Self-sufficient AI - by Ajeya Cotra - Planned Obsolescence
  • The AIs that come out the end of this process would likely be able to pick up new skills with orders of magnitude less data than we need to provide systems today, including the skills required to operate physical actuators like robots and the skills involved in mining, electrical engineering, semiconductor manufacturing, and everything else involved in maintaining the AI stack. From there, reaching AI production adequacy and then parity and supremacy seems like it would mainly be a matter of rolling out AI to enough places and manufacturing enough actuators for it to operate.
    Six milestones for AI automation - by Ajeya Cotra
  • Most of our research consists of evaluations assessing the extent to which an AI system can autonomously carry out substantial tasks, including general-purpose tasks like conducting research or developing an app, and concerning capabilities such as conducting cyberattacks or making itself hard to shut down. Recently, we've begun studying the effects of AI on real-world software developer productivity as well as potential AI behavior that threatens the integrity of evaluations and mitigations for such behavior.
    About METR
  • In my view, METR (where I now work) has some of the hardest and highest-quality software engineering and ML engineering benchmarks out there, and the most useful framework for making benchmark performance intuitive: we measure a task’s difficulty by the amount of time a human expert would take to complete it (called the “time horizon”).1
    I underestimated AI capabilities (again) - by Ajeya Cotra
  • If you're intrigued, I have more details on a way I recommend setting up a website in Frontends, Backends, and Setup with Hugo.
    I would really like it if you had a personal website and I think it would make the world better