“Bull markets are born on pessimism, grown on skepticism, mature on optimism and die on euphoria. Maximum pessimism is the best time to buy, and maximum optimism the best time to sell.” — John Templeton
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is employed as an optimization algorithm to update the model’s parameters, aiming to minimize the error. SGD updates parameters for each training example or small batches thereof, moving in the opposite direction of the error gradient
Russia’s Muslim population accounts for roughly 20 percent of the population. More importantly, the fertility rate of Russia’s Muslims is around 2.3 – much higher than the overall national fertility rate of 1.7. Add in immigration from a predominantly Muslim Central Asia, and the demographic picture is that of a rising Muslim population…while Putin doubles down on Russia as the defender of the Orthodox faith
Although ranging companies had been informally used in the 1820s, the Texas Rangers were formally created by the Texas legislature to be highly mobile Indian fighters.
The Rangers deservedly achieved a mythological status in American history. They showed a remarkable frontier adaptability, of necessity adopting many of the same characteristics as their Indian enemies. Speed, stealth, and a capacity for the cold-blooded execution of Indians.
But when we are at our best, we’re not slogging through. Great people are obsessed and they’re not slogging through either. They are driven. They are motivated. They are deeply, deeply engaged
Time is the friend of the consistent and the enemy of the inconsistent.
Lying Is Not the Way: “The best way to achieve AI safety is to grow AI to be really truthful.” – Elon Musk
A report on enterprise buying/usage of generative AI. Some takeaways: Budgets for AI are moving from experimental to recurring, enterprises prefer using more than one model, enterprise’s like open source for control, internal use cases are easier to implement vs external
This brings me to the core idea of degen communism: a political ideology that openly embraces chaos, but tweaks key rules and incentives to create a background pressure where the consequences of chaos are aligned with the common good.
Note that baseball, hockey, the Olympics, golf, etc., are not seeing booming TV ratings. Why? They are too hard to gamble on.
And if you watch closely, all these sports are desperately trying to educate people on how to bet on their sports
0DTE (zero-day to expiration options, or they expire that day on the close) is now over half of all options traded
But the best example of all and one of the greatest jobs of marketing that the universe has ever seen is Nike. Remember, Nike sells the commodity. They sell shoes. And yet when you think of Nike you feel something different than a shoe company. In their ads, as you know, they don’t ever talk about the product, they don’t ever tell you about their air soles and why they’re better than Reebok’s air soles.
What is Nike doing in their advertising? They honor great athletes and they honor great athletics
All of the best startup leaders I’ve met are highly attuned to their competitors’ moves, and the others get eaten alive. Zuckerberg famously is a total psycho about competition.
Teams that have had good leaders just run better – they make better decisions, they are more resilient, and perhaps most importantly, they have higher standards for others and themselves. Teams that have had poor leaders are predictably the opposite. They take longer to get less done, and more disappointingly they often have a bitter attitude. Leadership quality is durable and highly contagious.
First, people’s minds wandered a lot. About half the time, the average person is thinking about something other than what they are doing.
And second, mind-wandering isn’t that much fun. People tended to be less happy when their minds were elsewhere. This is surprising, especially considering how much mind-wandering is voluntary. Apparently, when we can think about whatever we want, we often go to dark places
They found a surprising result: Large language models (LLMs) often use a very simple linear function to recover and decode stored facts. Moreover, the model uses the same decoding function for similar types of facts. Linear functions, equations with only two variables and no exponents, capture the straightforward, straight-line relationship between two variables
The chest should neither expand nor collapse during proper inhalation or exhalation.
GPT-3 represents words with an embedding dimension of 12,288. If you were to do a single matrix multiplication of this size on-chain, it would cost about $10 billion at current gas prices — the computation would fill every block for about a month straight.
“We can be retarded longer than you can be solvent”
Plato described ecstasis as an altered state where our normal waking consciousness vanishes completely, replaced by an intense euphoria and a powerful connection to a greater intelligence.
The container made shipping cheap, and by doing so changed the shape of the world economy. The armies of ill-paid, ill-treated workers who once made their livings loading and unloading ships in every port are no more, their tight-knit waterfront communities now just memories.
The particular egoic patterns that you react to most strongly in others and misperceive as their identity tend to be the same patterns that are also in you, but that you are unable or unwilling to detect within yourself.
“Increasing model width (hidden dimension size)” = expanding the capacity of a neural network by enlarging the number of units (neurons) in the hidden layers.
Model Width = size of the hidden layers within a neural network. A “wider” model has more neurons in each hidden layer. The “hidden dimension size” specifically refers to the number of neurons or units in a particular layer.
Some people appeared to be essentially burnout-proof. In a few cases, I observed people working for years with near-permanent on-call and consistent 60+ hour weeks (with spikes to 80+), including through major events like weddings and honeymoons. They appeared no worse for wear than others working half as much.
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I noticed that many parents of young children, despite having significantly more on their plates, seemed to get burnt out less. I even noticed this in myself, and didn’t have a real way to explain it – my first kid’s birth coincided with the busiest working period of my life (do not recommend), but I found that I had a more positive attitude towards work, for no reason that I could really explain. When I read this post, it all clicked – when you have young children Mission Doubt entirely disappears because you need to feed them.
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Memory is not an accurate recording, and despite what many of us think, our recollection of the past is highly distorted. False memories are not difficult to implant, and if you think you have an accurate memory of something that happened a year ago, you are almost certainly wrong.
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Studies of people from dozens of different countries find that, as we pass middle age, we get more agreeable, more conscientious, and less neurotic.
From the previous section, we know that the market size of “solving business problems” is much much bigger than just Software Development. So there’s no reason to believe that Software Development will disappear anytime soon.
Work like a CEO
Train like an athlete
Study like a student
Create like an artist
One of the best nuggets of advice he offered, beyond all the practical advice on how large to draw the cartoons and what kind of Bristol board to draw them on and other such details, was to take pride in rejection letters. He recommended hanging them on the wall and celebrating them. Some people might quit after one or two ideas are rejected, but he knew the important thing was to keep trying. It was brilliant advice.
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Artistically, the comic achieved everything I believed comic strips were meant to achieve: it was easy to read, it was drawn simply so it popped off the page, and it had recurring characters that were clear archetypes that readers could look forward to seeing every day and eventually fall in love with.
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Another thing I’d learned about the comic strip business from Ken Muse is that it’s very difficult for a newspaper to stop running a comic strip that’s popular. Newspaper editors are terrified of angry letters, so once a comic strip gains a foothold with an audience, it tends to stick around for a long time. This is why comic strips are the most conservative entertainment medium. This is why there are still comic strips in the newspaper today that are unchanged from the 1920s and 1930s when they first debuted.
Party Over All: The highest-status person at any university in China will not be the top scientist; instead, it will be the person with the strongest connections to the CCP
While we naturally understand that writing is a good way to share ideas with others, we under-appreciate just how much good writing helps us think about an idea ourselves. Writing is not only a means of communication, it enables us to practice reasoning.
Unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments
The single most powerful thing you can do in a relationship, whether it’s personal or professional, is to give someone 100% of your attention
I learned that there is no correlation (or indeed, if there is, it is a negative correlation) between how satisfying a session felt and how interesting the resulting material was. Some of my now favourite music came from the most frustrating sessions
In 1910, Korea was annexed by the Empire of Japan after years of war, intimidation and political machinations; the country would be considered a part of Japan until 1945. In order to establish control over its new protectorate, the Empire of Japan waged an all-out war on Korean culture
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Today, March 1—the day of the independence protest in 1919—is a national holiday in South Korea, a reminder not just of the resilience of the Korean people, but of the years of occupation they withstood.
Plain Folks Fallacy: People of authority acquiring trust by presenting themselves as Average Joe’s, when in fact their authority proves they are different from everyone else.
What Scale is doing with Remotasks isn’t hard to replicate. Kevin Guo, cofounder of Hive, a startup that once fielded its own Remotasks rival before shuttering it due to tough margins, contends that the sort of data labeling Scale does is a commodity business. “Anyone who puts up a team can compete with you, and it comes down to price really quickly,” he says
Telling the truth to customers and employees, especially when it’s difficult, is how you earn trust and loyalty
Just as no one in the container’s early years imagined a ship that could carry the freight moved by ten thousand trucks or dreamed that the world’s ports would soon be handling the arrival of two million 40-foot containers every week, so, too, did no one conceive that steel shipping containers could be turned into houses and sculptures or that abandoned containers would become a serious nuisance. That simple metal box was what we today label a disruptive technology.
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Killer apps
One of the most important concepts in software startup strategy is killer apps. Each platform ecosystem is surrounded by a set of applications of varying degrees of importance – the best of those are the killer apps.
In sales the system of record is the CRM, the database in which all customer data lives. Salesforce of course built many important applications around it, and integrates with thousands more. HubSpot began with applications around inbound marketing before backing into the CRM later. In HR you have the HRIS. Lattice started with one important HR application, performance management, before building several more, and then eventually an HRIS. When the iPhone first launched it spawned a huge number of new applications, some of which it built itself and some which were built by third parties. Today we’d consider the killer apps things like messages, maps, musics — in most cases, there are both native and external products offered.
One of the reasons AI is so important for the software landscape is because it shuffles the deck of possible killer apps. It opens up entirely new functionality that was simply impossible to build before; an automated sales rep, a robot bug catcher and fixer, a support agent that can triage many cases automatically.
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A bitter–and highly popular–internet posting called corrupt officials ‘the new black-collar class’, who concealed their wrongdoing in a shroud of secrecy. ‘They drive top-brand cars. They go to exclusive bars. They sleep on the softest beds in the best hotels. Their furniture is all of the best red wood. Their houses overlook the best landscapes, in the quietest locations. They play golf, travel at the public expense, and enjoy a life of luxury,’ said the anonymous blog, posted in July 2009. ‘They are the newly arrived “black-collar class”. Their cars are black. Their income is hidden. Their life is hidden. Their work is hidden. Everything about them is hidden, like a man wearing black, standing in the black of night.’
“If anything ail a man,” says Thoreau, “so that he does not perform his functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even … he forthwith sets about reforming—the world.”
“Convenience on the internet is basically achieved by two things: speed, and cognitive ease.” In other words, people don’t want to wait, and they don’t want to think — and the internet should respond to that.
Without compassion, you are utterly alone. That is why compassion is the ground of happiness.
“Peranakan” generally refers to a person of mixed Chinese and Malay/Indonesian heritage.
Many Singapore Peranakans trace their origins to 15th-century Malacca, where their ancestors were thought to be Chinese traders who married local women.
In May, China’s space agency announced that it will land astronauts on the moon by 2030, making it the second country with that capability. It’s rare for Beijing to lay out formal timelines unless it’s quite confident that it has the task in hand
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the party’s strangling of free expression has rendered China into a pitiful underperformer relative to Japan and South Korea in the creation of cultural products. What are the great Chinese creations of the last 20 years, aside from a science fiction trilogy published before Xi took office, a short-video app that doesn’t display Chinese content overseas, and a video game that looks as if it’s thoroughly Japanese
Elon is one half a manufacturing visionary, able to do things with rockets, automobiles, and satellites that no one previously imagined; his other half is a pure gremlin on the public consciousness, who uses his Internet following to drive the rest of society towards madness. It’s not just the Internet that pays attention to his doings: Elon more reliably generates mainstream news headlines than perhaps even the two presidential candidates this year. Who else has become a fixture on every pillar of American imperium: tech in San Francisco, finance in New York, movies in LA, energy in Texas, and government in DC
Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made
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However, although people may initially react when you change the way you are by speaking honestly, in the end it raises the relationship to a whole new and healthier level. Either that or it releases the unhealthy relationship from your life. Either way, you win
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Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits.
It was also built with a vast outsourced workforce that performs a rudimentary task crucial to AI: labeling the data used to train it. Those people—some 240,000 of them in countries including Kenya, the Philippines and Venezuela—work for Remotasks, a subsidiary Scale doesn’t mention in public marketing materials
False-Consensus Effect: Overestimating how widely held your own beliefs are, caused by the difficulty of imagining the experiences of other people.
TechCrunch found that the GPT Store, OpenAI’s official marketplace for GPTs, is flooded with bizarre, potentially copyright-infringing GPTs that imply a light touch where it concerns OpenAI’s moderation efforts. A cursory search pulls up GPTs that purport to generate art in the style of Disney and Marvel properties, serve as little more than funnels to third-party paid services, advertise themselves as being able to bypass AI content detection tools such as Turnitin and Copyleaks
I think the big markets catalyst will be Robotic McDonalds. The restaurant industry has about 12.5 million employees. Imagine if most of that got automated, and a couple of other low skilled industries. You get to 10-15% unemployment very quickly
Arms for your chairs are chairs for your arms
From the book How to Change by Katy Milkman:
Across data set after data set, we found the same patterns. Undergraduates at a campus fitness center were more likely to visit the gym not only in January, but also earlier in the week, after a school holiday, at the beginning of a new semester, and after their birthdays… Similarly, in January, on Mondays, and after holiday breaks, we documented an uptick in online goal setting…
When you let your mind wander, it wanders to whatever you care about most at that moment. So avoid the kind of distraction that pushes your work out of the top spot, or you’ll waste this valuable type of thinking on the distraction instead. (Exception: Don’t avoid love.)
The iPhone is one of the most successful and important products of the past few decades. But the first version launched with a mountain of issues. It was a terrible phone, ironically. The whole idea was that it was a “smart phone,” yet everyone agreed their cheap-o Nokia flip-phone was ten times better at being a phone. Also, imagine launching an operating system that didn’t include “copy/paste.
Pros:
Devin feels UI/UX first, not Gen AI first. IDK if this makes sense. The AI is a core component but it’s the surrounding infra they built that is the star of the show
The product feels quite finished, This is not a demo. They have things built out such as auto deploy to netlify, api key protection, intelligent way to interrupt without interrupting, a good UI that is *tailored to humans* and bridges LLM and human dev, the slider to move backwards in time
Ludic Fallacy: Falsely associated simulations with real life. Nassim Taleb: “Organized competitive fighting trains the athlete to focus on the game and, in order not to dissipate his concentration, to ignore the possibility of what is not specifically allowed by the rules, such as kicks to the groin, a surprise knife, et cetera. So those who win the gold medal might be precisely those who will be most vulnerable in real life.”
As soon as a startup starts operating in the real world, the vast majority of factors will be outside of a startup direct control or even influence, while having absolutely dominating impact on that startup eventual outcome
There is, however, nothing else remotely like an elephant. (Its closest living relatives are sea cows — dugongs and manatees — and the hyrax, an African shrewmouse about the size of a rabbit.)
They must know how to kindle and fan an extravagant hope. It matters not whether it be hope of a heavenly kingdom, of heaven on earth, of plunder and untold riches, of fabulous achievement or world dominion.
probably nothing is more universal than the experience of stress. Nobody gets through life without experiencing physical pain, illness, disappointment, anger, or loss. The specifics may vary, but the underlying experience is as human as it gets. The challenge is to remember this in your own times of suffering.
(Most westerners seem unaware that MSG is naturally present in Parmesan cheese and other ingredients commonly used in western cuisines.)
The framing of “Attention Economy” is limiting. I believe we live in a Love Economy. People now want to spend their time, money, and attention on things they love, not simply things that grab their attention.
these firms say they want entrepreneurs but they really want franchise operators. there’s some formula and you’re basically operating a tech enabled McDonalds that produces a number of widgets
“politics” or “corporate culture” are basically mechanisms to ensure that you are a script follower, the same way that McDonalds wants to ensure that its franchises are operating according to spec. there are some semi subversive scripts – pioneered by the Paypal mafia, or Solomon brothers – which value creativity. But they’re still ultimately scripts
You gain confidence and eliminate anxiety by doing gradually more difficult tasks, excelling at them, and realizing you are a competent, capable person
The second general point to be learned from the bitter lesson is that the actual contents of minds are tremendously, irredeemably complex; we should stop trying to find simple ways to think about the contents of minds…instead we should build in only the meta-methods that can find and capture this arbitrary complexity
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We want AI agents that can discover like we can, not which contain what we have discovered. Building in our discoveries only makes it harder to see how the discovering process can be done.
It was one of Rikyū’s achievements to take an act which in the West is one of the most routine and unremarkable activities and imbue it with a solemnity and depth of meaning akin to a Catholic Mass. Every aspect of the tea ceremony, from the patient boiling of the water to the measuring out of green tea powder, was coherently related to Zen’s philosophical tenets about the importance of humility, the need to sympathise with and respect nature and the sense of the importance of the transient nature of existence.
The lack of energy is palatable. There is performance upside everywhere. As a leader, your opportunity is to reset in each of these dimensions. You do it in every single conversation, meeting, and encounter
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