Don't conflate your self-worth with your ability to produce in the economy, or your test score, or which college you went to, or how good of a programmer you are. It's such a tragedy that we are so obsessed with…
2026 version: "Success or failure in any human endeavor depends more on luck than on innate ability." 2036 version: "Success depends on luck."
The modern world has way too much content to commit to memory. Our brains would explode. Maybe 2500 years ago it was still possible to functioned as an adult without writing things down.
Yes, pizza, after intense and scrupulous reasoning, is indeed a salad. This goes to proves that you can reason your way out of everything.
It's like interest rates. I used to think it's weird why people are so obsessed with a couple percentage points. But it's turns out those couple of percent could mean hundreds of thousands of dollars difference for a 30…
Completely agree! I find writing deeply memetic - in that I often catch myself imitating the flow, style, word choices, punctuation and grammar of whatever reading material I'm currently immersed in. This unfortunately…
Another reset tip I've implemented to great success is to drive in complete silence. No music, no podcast, no radio. This way, I've turned my daily commute into a kind of meditation practice. At first, you'll think…
This was basically solved by massive subsidies from the Chinese government. https://e360.yale.edu/digest/china-clean-tech-developing-cou...
A few snippets from his full post here: https://gwern.net/guardian-angel. > "The chatbot personas are deeply misaligned with you, and aligned with their owners; and the economic incentives are to farm you with ads and…
My opinion is that juniors need time in the saddle to develop good engineering judgement and taste. Outsourcing critical thinking is seductive and a slippery slope. LLM lures juniors into feeling productive, and molds…
I like the _idea_ of reading continental philosophy, and then I opened up Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Here is a random sentence from a random page verbatim: "Spirit contains this actuality here because the extremes…
People say jobs with the "human touch" will stay relevant after AGI. And I'm like have you seen customer service? I can't even find the phone number anymore on amazon
I think this is what makes Asian food more exciting and innovative. No whiff of elitism. No status-signaling or having to appeal to the taste of King Louis the 14th. Just cook stuff and make it taste good for as many…
I read pg's collection of essays (Hackers and Painters) in my 20s, and it single-handedly prevented me from being radicalized by leftist ideologies. The one insight from the book that I will always remember from the…
Approximate monthly cost of owning a car in the city: Lease or loan: $350 Parking in city: $300 Car insurance: $180 Gas: $120 License/Registration: $42 (~$500 per year) Maintenance: $17 (~$200 per year) If you live in…
> "Now I have CLIs that one-shots bugs across distributed systems for me. Bugs that I couldn't solve in the past. Bugs that would take 2 days of full-time debugging. Bugs across distributed systems that lack distributed…
This is so accurate wtf!? - "United States is a service and information economy": Finance, real estate, insurance, SaaS. - "Nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away": here's a video from Smarter…
> Turn three: the company that fired its workers to save money discovers that its customers were, in aggregate, other companies’ workers. Revenue growth stalls. The AI subscription that was supposed to be an investment…
> "Whatever its flaws, the writing you find online is authentic. It's not mystery meat cooked up out of scraps of pitch letters and press releases, and pressed into molds of zippy journalese." - PG in 2005 Look how low…
This entire thread is drenched in class consciousness and I am here for it.
On point 1: I generally agree with you about the benefits of technological progress on a long enough time horizon. But what about the short term? What mechanism of redistribution are you assuming for the displaced…
"If there is less deep poverty in San Francisco than in New York, is it not because San Francisco is yet behind New York in all that both cities are striving for? When San Francisco reaches the point where New York now…
I think the answer is to do multi-disciplinary work. Venture outside of pure theoretical math. Learn some other domain knowledge and combine it with your mathematical ommph. That's the easiest way to make an impact now…
> "Requirements documents that were once a page are now twelve. Status updates that were once three sentences are now bulleted summaries of bulleted summaries. Retrospective notes, post-incident reports, design memos,…
But you've just perfectly described the tacit knowledge problem. Yes, you can spend all your time writing docs, or just mentor a junior and let them grok the system through osmosis. Also your doc won't ever have 100%…
Don't conflate your self-worth with your ability to produce in the economy, or your test score, or which college you went to, or how good of a programmer you are. It's such a tragedy that we are so obsessed with…
2026 version: "Success or failure in any human endeavor depends more on luck than on innate ability." 2036 version: "Success depends on luck."
The modern world has way too much content to commit to memory. Our brains would explode. Maybe 2500 years ago it was still possible to functioned as an adult without writing things down.
Yes, pizza, after intense and scrupulous reasoning, is indeed a salad. This goes to proves that you can reason your way out of everything.
It's like interest rates. I used to think it's weird why people are so obsessed with a couple percentage points. But it's turns out those couple of percent could mean hundreds of thousands of dollars difference for a 30…
Completely agree! I find writing deeply memetic - in that I often catch myself imitating the flow, style, word choices, punctuation and grammar of whatever reading material I'm currently immersed in. This unfortunately…
Another reset tip I've implemented to great success is to drive in complete silence. No music, no podcast, no radio. This way, I've turned my daily commute into a kind of meditation practice. At first, you'll think…
This was basically solved by massive subsidies from the Chinese government. https://e360.yale.edu/digest/china-clean-tech-developing-cou...
A few snippets from his full post here: https://gwern.net/guardian-angel. > "The chatbot personas are deeply misaligned with you, and aligned with their owners; and the economic incentives are to farm you with ads and…
My opinion is that juniors need time in the saddle to develop good engineering judgement and taste. Outsourcing critical thinking is seductive and a slippery slope. LLM lures juniors into feeling productive, and molds…
I like the _idea_ of reading continental philosophy, and then I opened up Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Here is a random sentence from a random page verbatim: "Spirit contains this actuality here because the extremes…
People say jobs with the "human touch" will stay relevant after AGI. And I'm like have you seen customer service? I can't even find the phone number anymore on amazon
I think this is what makes Asian food more exciting and innovative. No whiff of elitism. No status-signaling or having to appeal to the taste of King Louis the 14th. Just cook stuff and make it taste good for as many…
I read pg's collection of essays (Hackers and Painters) in my 20s, and it single-handedly prevented me from being radicalized by leftist ideologies. The one insight from the book that I will always remember from the…
Approximate monthly cost of owning a car in the city: Lease or loan: $350 Parking in city: $300 Car insurance: $180 Gas: $120 License/Registration: $42 (~$500 per year) Maintenance: $17 (~$200 per year) If you live in…
> "Now I have CLIs that one-shots bugs across distributed systems for me. Bugs that I couldn't solve in the past. Bugs that would take 2 days of full-time debugging. Bugs across distributed systems that lack distributed…
This is so accurate wtf!? - "United States is a service and information economy": Finance, real estate, insurance, SaaS. - "Nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away": here's a video from Smarter…
> Turn three: the company that fired its workers to save money discovers that its customers were, in aggregate, other companies’ workers. Revenue growth stalls. The AI subscription that was supposed to be an investment…
> "Whatever its flaws, the writing you find online is authentic. It's not mystery meat cooked up out of scraps of pitch letters and press releases, and pressed into molds of zippy journalese." - PG in 2005 Look how low…
This entire thread is drenched in class consciousness and I am here for it.
On point 1: I generally agree with you about the benefits of technological progress on a long enough time horizon. But what about the short term? What mechanism of redistribution are you assuming for the displaced…
"If there is less deep poverty in San Francisco than in New York, is it not because San Francisco is yet behind New York in all that both cities are striving for? When San Francisco reaches the point where New York now…
I think the answer is to do multi-disciplinary work. Venture outside of pure theoretical math. Learn some other domain knowledge and combine it with your mathematical ommph. That's the easiest way to make an impact now…
> "Requirements documents that were once a page are now twelve. Status updates that were once three sentences are now bulleted summaries of bulleted summaries. Retrospective notes, post-incident reports, design memos,…
But you've just perfectly described the tacit knowledge problem. Yes, you can spend all your time writing docs, or just mentor a junior and let them grok the system through osmosis. Also your doc won't ever have 100%…