flâneur

Aliyah Sausan

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on the atlas — 8

highlights — 14

  • They’re autonomous in the best of ways. They don’t sit around waiting for someone to tell them what to do; they proactively find challenges and opportunities for improvement, iterate on the feedback, and go out of their way to help their teammates. They figure things out, and they do it without needing their hands held.
    What "The Best" Looks Like | Alex Kurilin
  • that’s only an extra reason to allow them to bring those tools into the interview itself and showcase their use rather than shamefully hide their existence. How they use the agents, the back-and-forth, the planning, the tweaking, the types of searches they do as part of the exercise are all valuable data points for determining competence, and you should allow candidates to surface them
    What "The Best" Looks Like | Alex Kurilin
  • Quantity leads to quality, and a great hire will accept regularly needing to apply a flamethrower to their work and try again with the new learnings from the latest experiment. They will not be precious about it, nor will they feel diminished by needing to try again. The Davids do not keep score; they keep trying and do the work knowing that there’s a good chance it will not go anywhere.
    What "The Best" Looks Like | Alex Kurilin
  • I immediately told David that he was not a fit; he had none of what we were looking for. And yet he persisted, emailing me that he would do whatever test project we threw at him, and if he bombed it, no problem, he would go away. But if he nailed it, we would have proof that he was qualified, in spite of what his CV indicated.
    What "The Best" Looks Like | Alex Kurilin
  • It’s like a trail in the Amazon rainforest: Walk it once → barely visible Walk it daily → becomes a clear path Ignore it → it gets overgrown The challenge is to walk the right paths every day in your mind that are good for you, not walk the bad paths that are full of addiction and weakness.
    Once you understand neuroplasticity your life will never be the same again
  • But everyone including me experiences anxiety, limiting beliefs, disempowering thought patterns, and failure. It’s easy to treat these traits or experiences as permanent. And… until you realize they’re not, nothing will change.
    Once you understand neuroplasticity your life will never be the same again
  • Out of nowhere, one afternoon, the brain fog lifted. She could tell the time. Shortly after she could finally understand grammar. Lastly, she finally understood logic.
    Once you understand neuroplasticity your life will never be the same again
  • But Barbara stumbled upon a different idea. One that was radical, and extremely unconventional at the time. She began to wonder: If the brain can change itself, why can’t I build the parts I’m missing? Barbara didn’t waste any time, bless her soul. She turned on psychopath mode and began doing extreme mental calisthenics. She’d sit in front of clocks for 100s of hours and force her “retarded” brain to figure out the relationship between the hands.
    Once you understand neuroplasticity your life will never be the same again
  • Workflows are systems where LLMs and tools are orchestrated through predefined code paths. Agents, on the other hand, are systems where LLMs dynamically direct their own processes and tool usage, maintaining control over how they accomplish tasks.
    Building Effective AI Agents \ Anthropic
  • . For example, Prophet Muhammad ﷺ experienced sadness so deep during a year-long episode of bereavement that chroniclers coined this period “the year of sadness.” His grief was exacerbated by the immense financial pressure on him and his followers from the Quraysh’s socio-economic boycott. He also felt the pain of the disbelievers’ denial of his message: فَلَعَلَّكَ بَاخِعٌ نَّفْسَكَ عَلَىٰ آثَارِهِمْ إِن لَّمْ يُؤْمِنُوا بِهَٰذَا الْحَدِيثِ أَسَفًا 10 Perhaps, then, will you [O Prophet] grieve yourself to death over their denial, if they [continue to] disbelieve in this message. Importantly, …
    Holistic Healing: Islam’s Legacy of Mental Health | Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research
  • MAKE SUCCESS INEVITABLE A common trait of high-agency people is that they take accountability for achieving a goal, not just doing some work. There’s a huge difference between the following two operating modes: My goal is to ship this project by the end of the month, so I’m going to get people started working on it ASAP. My goal is to ship this project by the end of the month, so I’m going to list out everything that needs to get done by then, draw up a schedule working backwards from the ship date, make sure the critical path is short enough, make sure we have enough staffing to do anything, …
    Impact, agency, and taste | benkuhn.net
  • DON’T RELY TOO MUCH ON PERMISSION OR ENCOURAGEMENT A counterintuitive fact about the highest-leverage projects is that they’re often not obviously high-leverage to most people in advance (because if they were, they would already have been done a long time ago). That means people are often skeptical of the value of pursuing them.
    Impact, agency, and taste | benkuhn.net
  • One of the easiest ways to get more leverage is to take a goal you’re already trying to accomplish, and figure out a better way to accomplish the same thing. (For example: changing your experiment design to be more directly relevant to the high-level question; finding an 80/20 way of building a tool; just deciding not to do something entirely; etc.)
    Impact, agency, and taste | benkuhn.net
  • We’ll be concentrating around AI-native talent who can manage fleets of agents to drive outsized impact
    Brian Armstrong on X: "This is an email I sent earlier today to all employees at Coinbase: Team, Today I’ve made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%. I want to walk you through why we're doing this now, what it means for those affected, and how this positions us for the" / X