Tag: random facts

Random facts – things I learned (Feb 7 2024) – Bryan Johnson: “If you don’t have haters, you want to dial it up”

Prior editions:

Random facts:

Bryan Johnson: “If you don’t have haters, you want to dial it up”

AI+blockchains point to a dystopia of impersonal and faceless interchangeable-parts humanity that’s more industrial than the industrial age.

There is an ongoing assault on slow thinking and your attention

Eugene Wei’s famed Status as a Service outlines three dimensions to evaluate social product strength — social capital, entertainment, and utility. The essay focuses mostly on status and how it’s valued and accrued by creators across the different kinds of social networks that have scaled.

#18 Applied art enters an accessible era
Technology tailwinds are making it easier for anyone to mix art and utility, which historically required niche technical skills. We’ve seen how fine art can advance (e.g. painting, sculpture), but I expect applied art (e.g. industrial, graphic, fashion, and interior design) to leap forward next and capture greater cultural capital

“[Larry’s] material was uncompromisingly to his own taste, filled with wild tirades about apparent trivialities,” James Caplan writes in the New Yorker profile.
Larry was called a “comic’s comic” for his approach. Entering his 40s and unwilling to change, he accepted the reality that he would likely only ever have a cult following

This is one of the most important things I can impart: in any troubled company the people at lower levels know what ought to be done in terms of day-to-day operations

Ed Norton + Rick Rubin
-After exhausting your wave of creative work, you have two choices: either repeat that work, or you can stop, refill yourself with life, and be willing to start an entirely new adventure
-Most films don’t work at all until the sound mix is done
—“I always think of the work as solving a puzzle.” – Rick Rubin

Good writers don’t walk around all day with 100,000 words of eloquent wisdom in their heads. No one can do that. They take some vague feeling they’ve been thinking about, dig into a bunch, write down what they’ve discovered, realize half of it doesn’t make sense, delete most of it, write some more, realize the new stuff contradicts itself, panic when they realize they don’t understand the topic as well as they thought they did, talk to other smart people about why that is, learn something new that reminds them of this other thing that might tie into the second paragraph, discover that this thing they believed before they started writing isn’t actually true, realize that if that thing isn’t true then this other thing is probably really important, and so on endlessly. Grinding through this process reveals bits of context that are hopefully new discoveries to the reader. More importantly, they were likely new discoveries to the writer before they set out writing.

my first paper as a PhD student laying out a set of explanations for why the IT age was not showing up in the productivity statistics. The first was that digital technologies often create a lot of benefits in ways that are not well captured in the data. In particular, digital products often have zero price. Gross domestic product measures all the things that are bought and sold, with a few exceptions, if something has zero price, it is not captured

Unfortunately, the AI companies have nearly universally broken fundamental issues of fairness: they are making money on your writing without asking for your consent, nor are they offering you compensation and credit. There’s a lot more one could ask for, but these “3 Cs” are the minimum.

“The most important thing a man has to tell you is what he’s not telling you,” he said. “The most important thing he has to say is what he’s trying not to say.” — LBJ

For these reasons, I opt first for whole food forms of these nutrients. Whole foods provide us with everything, including the things we don’t yet understand and the things that we only now think we understand, even if mistakenly.  And this is why I regularly test my micronutrient status to verify that I’m not over- or under-doing the things we do currently know about

Why not put $500 into a memecoin that could 50x, knowing that you could likely lose most or all of it? It’s not like the $500 is enough to make any difference anyways. Neither is $1k or $5k. That mindset, which is becoming pervasive in America, is financial nihilism. This is the zeitgeist for young Americans, you’re naïve to think otherwise. And it’s a huge driver of shitcoining

First neural networks paper was published in 1943!
Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts – modeled a neural network with electrical circuits

many young people use YouTube a lot — about 60% of teens use it almost constantly or several times a day

Doesn’t matter if it’s an illusion. It works so long as it’s interesting. If people are bored it’s game over. – Miyazaki

In a hunter-gatherer group, despite men’s physical strength peaking in their twenties, their skill at hunting did not peak until in their mid-forties. “The implication is that for men, experience and wits are more important than raw strength.” https://a.co/d/32hHhkt

It turns out writing code is one of the things that these models are absolutely best at. Probably 60-70 percent of my usage of these tools is around writing code. I have a hunch that programmers, software engineers, are the group best served by this technology right now. We get the most benefit from it

I feel like as adults, we are actually more scared of things than when we were children. We are scared of real life, failure, being abandoned, being rejected from jobs to relationships, having no money, having no safety net, being alone…I can go on, but I would give anything to be afraid of the imaginary monster under my bed again rather than what I’m scared of now. Anything

Which brings me to the real scarce insight Jeff gave Jason and I early on: What entrepreneurs need most is confidence, not advice. He’d always preface any advice with “you know your business better than I do” and “just keep doing what you know is right”.

For those unfamiliar, the Green Bay Packers are the only team with a public ownership structure in the National Football League. The Packers are owned by 537,460 stockholders with no shareholder allowed to own more than 4% of the shares outstanding (how’s that for decentralized!). While called A “stock”, owners have no equity interest, no dividend rights, no protections or regulations under securities law, and cannot trade their “stock” with a 3rd party

Intensive meditation, even after only one day, can also affect gene regulation in your brain through similar mechanisms. Attending a monthlong meditation retreat reduces the expression of genes that affect inflammation, and experienced meditators can reduce inflammatory genes after just one day of intensive meditation.

@simonsarris
One of the biggest misconceptions for most of my life was that I had to understand something in order to do it.

Agathon tells us, This alone is denied to God: the power to undo the past
—
But the artist cannot look to others to validate his efforts or his calling. If you don’t believe me, ask Van Gogh, who produced masterpiece after masterpiece and never found a buyer in his whole life.

The professional learns to recognize envy-driven criticism and to take it for what it is: the supreme compliment. The critic hates most that which he would have done himself if he had had the guts.

Lastly, what is really fascinating is this – all you need for a new religion or god is pretty much a new symbol, backed by the corresponding community and narratives
—
The idea of your birthplace as the society to which you must bear allegiance, and even sacrifice your life for, is relentlessly hammered into you from a young age.

Just as C++ is an abstraction layer on top of binary, AI is an abstraction layer over lower level thinking. In other words, with AI you don’t have to be as specific as programming or as precise as an excel formula. Instead, you can give a somewhat generic prompt and still get a useful output. You can be a bad manager and still get the results you need from your robot employee

Getting things to run smoothly, working to achieve a lack of resistance, this is the antithesis of art’s essence, it is the antithesis of wisdom, which is based on restricting or being restricted.

Goodhart’s Law: when a measure becomes a target (for performance, incentives, etc), it ceases to be a good measure

In fact today China imports in value more chips than it does crude oil and iron ore (to make steel) combined!

Joy and happiness are born of concentration. When you are having a cup of tea, the value of that experience depends on your concentration. You have to drink the tea with 100 percent of your being. The true pleasure is experienced in the concentration. When you walk and you are 100 percent concentrated, the joy you get from the steps you are taking is much greater than the joy you would get without concentration. You have to invest 100 percent of your body and mind in teh act of walking. Then you will experience that being alive and taking steps on this planet are miraculous things.

The War of Art highlights
-Now consider the amateur: the aspiring painter, the wannabe playwright. How does he pursue his calling? One, he doesn’t show up every day. Two, he doesn’t show up no matter what. Three, he doesn’t stay on the job all day. He is not committed over the long haul; the stakes for him are illusory and fake. He does not get money. And he overidentifies with his art.
-She understands that all creative endeavor is holy, but she doesn’t dwell on it. She knows if she thinks about that too much, it will paralyze her. So she concentrates on technique. The professional masters how, and leaves what and why to the gods.
-The professional dedicates himself to mastering technique not because he believes technique is a substitute for inspiration but because he wants to be in possession of the full arsenal of skills when inspiration does come.

“People are more adept [at] working against [things] than oftentimes we give them credit for. We often think of people working for things, but they often work against things. They work against poverty. They work against their upbringing. They work against some of these things just as much as they’re working for them. Some people are very fear-driven. We talk about fear as being very negative, but it also can be very positive.” — Dr. Julie Gurner

The workshop leaders, however, had a different point of view. They argued that if you see yourself as part of something bigger—a team, an organization, a community, or a mission—it takes the toxicity out of striving. When your primary goal is to contribute to this “something bigger,” you still work just as hard, but the motivation driving you is different. Rather than just trying to prove that you are good enough or better than others, you view your efforts as serving a purpose greater than yourself.
—
One of the first things they found is that when people are connected to bigger-than-self goals, they feel better: more hopeful, curious, caring, grateful, inspired, and excited. In contrast, when people are operating from self-focused goals, they are more likely to feel confused, anxious, angry, envious, and lonely.

The genius of Hinduism, then, was that it left room for everyone. It was a profoundly tolerant religion. It denied no other faiths. It set out no single path. It prescribed no one canon of worship and belief. It embraced everything and everyone.

Every person is a creature of the age in which they live, and few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of the time. — Voltaire (1694 – 1778)

Status limbo is a place with more freedoms than other states. It’s not freer in a tangible sense, but removing the usual status-preserving hangups lets you act more freely. It somewhat like being on the moon. There’s less societal and institutional gravity.

Chris takes the same journey but he calls these phases Read, Write, and Own. The initial phase of the web, when the web browser arrived, was mostly a reading experience. Then in the early 2000s, the web became two-way and we could Read and Write. What Blockchain Networks have unlocked is the ability to own things on the web – Fred Wilson

My sense is that this new idea: Bitcoin, and this new demographic: Millenials are in for an epic bull run.
The BTC ETF will be the gateway drug for this. It will get the Boomers and GenXs so that they CAN participate in the transition. Most won’t. But enough will. It’s an idea that will take over the next 20 years.

My body is like a prized racehorse, or a cherished high-end performance vehicle,” he explains. “I will only ever get this one, so just like any valued possession, I will invest heavily in its appearance, performance, fuel, care & maintenance.
“I only wish I knew & applied everything I know now, decades ago!”

—
James Cameron

I like difficult. I’m attracted by difficult.

Difficult is a fucking magnet for me.

I go straight to difficult.

And I think it probably goes back to this idea that there are lots of smart, really gifted, really talented filmmakers out there that just can’t do the difficult stuff.

So that gives me a tactical edge to do something nobody else has ever seen, because the really gifted people don’t fucking want to do it.
—

At the heart of this strategy lies the drone—not just as an airborne device but as a potent software platform. Imagine drones that never miss, drones that never operate in isolation, drones with unbreakable communication lines, and drones that, in swarms, always prevail. All possible with software, and all changeable—all the time.

Life advice from an old guy on Twitter:
-I leave my waitress a big tip. The extra money might bring a smile to her face. She is toiling much harder for a living than I am.
-I have learned not to correct people even when I know they are wrong. The onus of making everyone perfect is not on me. Peace is more precious than perfection.
-I give compliments freely & generously. Compliments are a mood enhancer not only for the recipient, but also for me. And a small tip for the recipient of a compliment, never, NEVER turn it down, just say “Thank You.”

And in that flow, you find yourself doing things not purely for status, but because there’s something in them that’s more meaningful to you. As I’ve written before: “To become truly great at something, you need to be at least a little obsessed with that thing — enough to get lost in the joy of doing it, not the allure of what it could get you.”

Elon Musk said the following on an investor call this week: Chinese car companies are the most competitive car companies in the world. If there are not trade barriers established, they will pretty much demolish all other car companies in the world. They’re extremely good

Om: Hindu meditation practices have long understood the benefits of sound, especially through the chanting of “Om.” This sound, central to many Hindu traditions, is more than a symbol; it’s a powerful tool that engages the vagus nerve, known for its role in regulating stress and relaxation responses. The act of humming, inherently part of chanting Om, creates a gentle, soothing vibration. This process not only brings a physical dimension to meditation but also enhances the spiritual experience, as the sound of Om is said to represent the universe’s primal sound.

Fourth, ChatGPT and related systems have a kind of truthiness problem; some of what they say is true, and some is not; it is very difficult for the end user to anticipate what will or not be true. They have been known to make up biographical details, and even whole court cases; they have defamed people, and even occasionally botched basic math questions. Whatever they say sounds authoritative, but it is not always true; as they say in the military, “frequently wrong, never in doubt”.

Those who have ambition and entrepreneurial energy are going to Singapore. Those who have money and means are going to Japan. And those who have none of these things — the slackers, the free spirits, kids who want to chill — are hanging out in Thailand.

Civilization thus kicked off with development of the original Large Language Model: formal writing systems

And, by the way, the appetite for more things is insatiable. Each new invention placed in the economy creates the opportunity and desire for two more. While plain old telephone service is headed toward the free, I now have three phone lines just for my machines and will someday have a data “line” for every object in my house. More important, managing these lines, the data they transmit, the messages to me, the storage thereof, the need for mobility, all enlarge what I think of as a phone and what I will pay a premium for

the great Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius describes a happy, virtuous individual in similar terms:
[H]e loves and welcomes whatever happens to him and whatever his fate may bring.
—
The three great Roman Stoics — Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius — did not have easy lives:
* Seneca (4 BCE – 65 CE) was adviser to the Roman Emperor Nero, and was eventually exiled and forced to take his own life.
* Epictetus (50 CE – 135 CE) was a slave who gained his freedom.
* Marcus Aurelius (121 CE – 180 CE) was Emperor of Rome during a time of constant crisis, be it war or plague, and most of his children died before he did.

The Rashomon effect is a storytelling and writing method in cinema in which an event is given contradictory interpretations or descriptions by the individuals involved, thereby providing different perspectives and points of view of the same

In the UK, filming in public is legal and does not require permission, nor does it require release agreements from any of the people that might end up on camera. 

GPS was a novelty luxury only a few years ago. It was expensive. As its technical standards spread into mapping services and hand helds, it becomes essential, and the basic service (where am I?) will become a commodity and free. But as it drops toward the free, hundreds of additional advance GPS functions will be added to the fixed function so that more people will pay ever more for location services than anyone pays now. Where-am-I information will be free and ubiquitous, but new services will be expensive at first.

More War of Art:
-Sometimes Resistance takes the form of sex, or an obsessive preoccupation with sex. Why sex? Because sex provides immediate and powerful gratification.
It goes without saying that this principle applies to drugs, shopping, masturbation, TV, gossip, alcohol, and the consumption of all products containing fat, sugar, salt, or chocolate
-The paradox seems to be, as Socrates demonstrated long ago, that the truly free individual is free only to the extent of his own self-mastery. While those who will not govern themselves are condemned to find masters to govern over them.
-The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it. Resistance is experienced as fear; the degree of fear equates to the strength of Resistance
-It will pledge anything to get a deal, then double-cross you as soon as your back is turned. If you take Resistance at its word, you deserve everything you get. Resistance is always lying and always full of shit.

He defines crypto as a meeting of “generative tech” (the creation of new things, users and markets) and “participatory capital formation” (individuals pooling money in new ways to create new types of businesses).

Copies flow so freely we could think of the internet as a superconductor, where once a copy is introduced it will continue to flow through the network forever, much like electricity in a superconductive wire.

You’ll probably trust your AI lawyer more than your lawyer in a few years just as you’ll trust self-driving cars over getting into a random Uber with a stranger driving.

Ethereum hit $10 billion in revenue faster than any other major software company besides Google

Black Holes are also the most computationally dense possible objects, because they represent the limit on how much information you can pack into a finite volume.

To get status, you have to give up status. You have to sacrifice some existing status to make it back and more. This is especially true in creative fields and high-upside opportunities. Writers, musicians, actors, directors, entrepreneurs must all do their time in status limbo. And you don’t know how long that time will be. How well you tolerate this state can be the ‘winning’ difference between you and someone just as talented and hard-working as you.

pmarca: Most people should move a lot faster, and also say yes a lot more.

Even material industries are finding that the costs of duplication near zero, so they too will behave like digital copies. Maps just crossed that threshold. Genetics is about to. Gadgets and small appliances (like cell phones) are sliding that way. Pharmaceuticals are already there, but they don’t want anyone to know. It costs nothing to make a pill

TIL of the 3 sacred gifts of Japan, they are: a sword, a mirror and a jade Jewel. They are believed to have been given over 5,000 years ago to the imperial family from the Shinto goddess, Amaterasu.
only the current emperor, Naruhito, and other high-Shinto priests can see it.
(apparently the sword is a replica, real one lost at sea centuries ago)

Random facts – things I learned (Jan 26 2024) – As Sam Altman wrote in 2017, “I believe the merge has already started, and we are a few years in”:

Some prior editions:

Random facts:

The price of inaction is far greater than the cost of making a mistake

I’ll always remember what Synthesis founder Chrisman Frank told me: “Still haven’t met anyone who has quit drinking and regretted it.”

Instead, playful exchanges produce trust, reciprocity, and VIBES—the ineffable group energy that squads value most

I think all the greatest minds that I’ve ever worked with share this in common: They have ultra-strong curiosity, he says

$250b of India’s GDP exports are essentially GPT-4 tokens… what happens now?

This is well documented in Vienna because it’s now widely known that Freud was doing dubious experiments on women. But now these experiments are basically commonplace psychiatry. We should be very afraid that a freakshow practice by weirdos in Vienna is now the mainstream way of understanding the mind across the western world. Freud is universally discredited, and yet is still core of so much in the modern era. It’s nuts

Barring cataclysms, I consider the development of intelligent machines a near-term inevitability. Rather quickly, they could displace us from existence. I’m not as alarmed as many, since I consider these future machines our progeny, “mind children” built in our image and likeness, ourselves in more potent form

As Sam Altman wrote in 2017, “I believe the merge has already started, and we are a few years in”:
Our phones control us and tell us what to do when; social media feeds determine how we feel; search engines decide what we think. The algorithms that make all this happen are no longer understood by any one person

Cancer hates mushrooms — 2/3 an ounce a day = 45% lower risk of cancer
“Mushrooms are like the swiss army knife for treating diseases.”

I see a lot of people with talent but the one thing they don’t have is that just love of doing it for the sake of it. — Rodney Mullen

China’s petrochemical sector will “add as much production capacity for ethylene and propylene – the two most important petrochemical building blocks – as presently exists in Europe, Japan and Korea combined.” Meanwhile, U.S. producers have increased exports of petrochemical feedstocks, intermediates, and polymers – more than three-quarters of the increase in production has gone to China. As a result, there is a new “symbiosis between the largest global source of demand growth – China – and the largest global source of supply growth – the United States

Korean saying, 3 things in life that are unavoidable = taxes, death, and Samsung

Neil Gaiman’s Masterclass
-Eventually he realized he had to start finishing them – the improvement was QUANTUM
-Whenever he’s stuck, he ask “what does my character want?” this is always your way through – you can put two of the strongest and most developed characters together, have them battle over what they want, discuss it, search for it, find it

Some view this regression phenomenon as the foundational policy of the crypto space: “whatever is permitted by the protocol’s code and market structure is legitimate.” This viewpoint, while rarely expressed in such direct terms, is remarkably common among crypto users

4chan started as a community for anime lovers; Inspired by Japanese forum + image board

Going to the gym when you don’t feel like it gives you the greatest high

When all these sensory and emotional tides have ceased to flow, then the spirit is free, mukta –at least for the time being. It has entered the state called samadhi. Samadhi can come and go; generally it can be entered only in a long period of meditation and after many years of ardent endeavor

Perpetual futures are like a never-ending lease on a car, while traditional futures are like a car rental with a fixed return date.

Token buyers will be to investors what bloggers/tweeters are to journalists: Tokens will break down the barrier between professional investors and token buyers in the same way that the internet brought down the barrier between professional journalists and tweeters and bloggers.

In real estate you make money on the buy not the sell

Educator Abraham Flexner traces the origins of discoveries, often born from curiosity rather than an aim for utility. “Throughout the whole history of science most of the really great discoveries which had ultimately proved to be beneficial to mankind had been made by men and women who were driven not by the desire to be useful but merely the desire to satisfy their curiosity.”

Before menopause, a woman is aging slower than a man by almost a decade – then menopause hits and it’s like falling off a cliff in terms of aging

If you think in terms of surface area, it’s easy to see why we are so anxious, stressed, and constantly behind.
We feel like we need more time, but what we’re craving is more focus. What we need is a smaller surface area.
Your surface area becomes part of your identity. She’s the ‘busy person’ with her hand in every project. He’s the guy with four houses.
—
Most of the really happy people I know have a relatively small surface area. I know billionaires with two houses. Most of my close friends only have 4-5 close friends – everyone else is a friend in the loose sense of the word. Most of the productive people I know at work are focused on one or two things, not 5.

Russians have been sad and resigned for thousands of years,” she replied. “It’s how we stay resilient. I’m against this war, but I can’t do anything but wait, like everyone else. They manipulate us with artificial ideas. Garbage. But the West has been humiliating us for too long. Don’t we also have a right to be who we want to be without feeling like barbarians?”

Seth Godin talks about how he changed his own negative self-talk by listening to Zig Ziglar tapes, for three hours a day, for three years. Similarly—but slightly different—Cathy Park Hong transcribed Richard Pryor’s audio and film performances.

On a similar note, this is also why the “beach episode” has become a staple in ACG works. Setting aside the fan service, these beach episodes typically don’t depict any major conflicts, and focus purely on showcasing interesting character moments. It’s not a stretch to deduce that this is also why westerners typically despise or eschew “filler episodes” that don’t advance a main conflict, while people in Japan / Asia tend to enjoy and appreciate them more

Breath control is emotional control

Globally, twice as many people die from suicide than from homicide. In Germany, 18x more people die from suicide than from homicide (primarily a result of low homicide rates).

The world’s best-scoring country in 1800 (Belgium, 33%) suffered from child mortality twice as high as the worst-scoring country today (Angola, 17%).

In an interview, Mr. Johnson said he didn’t care what present-day people thought of him. “I’m more interested in what people of the 25th century think of me,” he said. “The majority of opinions now represent the past.”

Road accidents cause 2.2% of deaths worldwide – more than malaria (1.1%), war (0.2%), and homicide (0.7%) combined.

Twelve thousand years ago, there were only 2.5 million people on earth: a quarter of the population of London today.

The unemployed are more likely to follow the peddlers of hope than the handers-out of relief.

I knew from the age of 13 that this is what I was gonna do until the day I died – Mr. Beast

@eshear
I don’t know who needs to hear this, but if you just listen and watch yourself talk enough, it stops feeling weird and cringe and starts feeling normal, like watching anyone else. You hear the actual content eventually.

Talk to a man about himself and he will listen for hours

Nothing beats funny – Will Smith

Circa the early 2000s, “internet safety” discussions revolved around first-order issues like identity theft, cybercrime and child exploitation. But with the benefit of hindsight, these direct concerns were swamped by the internet’s second-order effects on our politics and culture. Indeed, between an information tsunami and new platforms for mass mobilization, the internet destabilized political systems worldwide, even leading to outright regime change in the case of the Arab Spring.

There is also a privacy issue with Twttr. Every user has a public page that shows all of their messages. Messages from that person’s extended network are also public. I imagine most users are not going to want to have all of their Twttr messages published on a public website

It is not stress that harms us but distress.

“It makes me raise my level. If it doesn’t hurt a little bit, it’s because you don’t care enough.” – Holger Rune

I used to write infrequently, only when I had a free two- or three-hour block of time. Since this summer, however, I’ve started writing in 15-minute bursts, and have seen a huge benefit in both the quality and quantity of my work. Making use of each and every small fragment of time has improved my writing and editing processes, as well as my output

Han writes:
The complaint of the depressive individual, ‘Nothing is possible,’ can only occur in a society that thinks, ‘Nothing is impossible.’

As Nietzsche’s Zarathustra declares:
All of you who are in love with hectic work and whatever is fast, new, strange — you find it hard to bear yourselves, your diligence is escape and the will to forget yourself. If you believed more in life, you would hurl yourself less into the moment. But you do not have enough content in yourselves for waiting — not even for laziness!

as any old-time nethead will be quick to lecture you, the Internet was a lonely (but thrilling!) cultural backwater for two decades before it hit the media radar. A graph of the number of Internet hosts worldwide, starting in the 1960s, hardly creeps above the bottom line. Then, around 1991, the global tally of hosts suddenly mushrooms, exponentially arcing up to take over the world.

Charlie’s life and wisdom by sharing something he wrote me in 2001: “Maybe we have a new version of Lord Acton’s law: easy money corrupts, and really easy money corrupts absolutely.”

Its greatest failure in the past eight years has been its inability to address the malaise shared by young people in Taiwan: long working hours, low pay, unaffordable housing, poor protection for renters, and a growing gulf between the mega-rich and everybody else.

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.” — Richard Feynman
“Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier.” — Colin Powell

And—this is the most important part—anytime you choose to help others, you activate this state. Caring for others triggers the biology of courage and creates hope.

Sometimes I’ll know exactly what I need to do in order to leave the bog, but I’m too afraid to do it. I’m afraid to tell the truth, or make someone mad, or take a risk. And so I dither, hoping that the future will not require me to be brave

In 1899, a promising young poet and would-be revolutionary dropped out of the theological seminary in Tbilisi, Georgia. He took with him 18 library books, for which the monks demanded payment of 18 roubles and 15 kopeks. When, 54 years later, the same voracious bookworm died, he had 72 unreturned volumes from the Lenin Library in Moscow on his packed shelves. At the time, the librarians probably had too many other issues with Josef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, aka Stalin, to worry about collecting his unpaid fines
—
Stalin not only read, quickly and hungrily: he claimed to devour 500 pages each day and, in the Twenties, ordered 500 new titles every year — not to mention the piles of works submitted to him by hopeful or fearful authors. He annotated with passion and vigour. Hundreds of volumes crawl with his distinctive markings and marginalia (the so-called pometki), their pages festooned with emphatic interjections: “ha ha”, “gibberish”, “rubbish”, “fool”, “scumbag”; and, more rarely, “agreed”, “spot on”, or the noncommittal doubt conveyed by the Russian “m-da”.

Buddhist texts speak of three kinds of gifts — material resources, sharing the Dharma with others, and non-fear, which is the greatest gift. Because bodhisattvas are free from fear, they can help many people. Non-fear is the greatest gift we can offer to those we love. – Thich Nhat Hanh

Religion is way to get a very good idea to cross over time

In a land of great rivers, the Volga is the river. They call it matushka, the mother; it flows from the Valdai Hills to the land of the Chuvash, the Tatars, the Cossacks, the Kalmyks, and into the Caspian Sea

Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy, in which he outlines his idea that great art involves the careful interplay between two core elements of the human psyche, the Apollonian (which promotes order, symmetry, and harmony) and the Dionysian (which stands for violent chaos and intoxication).

Random facts — things I learned (Dec 15 2023) — “Markets have excellent social scalability; they are the original distributed systems”

Markets have excellent social scalability; they are the original distributed systems, around long before anybody thought to coin that expression. (source)

On the Birth of a Son
BY SU TUNG-PO // ARTHUR WALEY
Families when a child is born
Hope it will turn out intelligent.
I, through intelligence
Having wrecked my whole life,
Only hope that the baby will prove
Ignorant and stupid.
Then he’ll be happy all his days
And grow into a cabinet minister.

Action is a high road to self confidence and esteem. Where it is open, all energies flow toward it. It comes readily to most people, and its rewards are tangible – Bruce Lee

Cool find — list of scifi ideas organized by authors and books, mentioned on the My First Million pod:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sBkJ8nZwyG_J1v_WLub-5RM4GhLWCf_b7ml8_qNgNsg/edit#gid=568223314

Set a “No-Internet” Day Once a Week – This has been a game-changer for me. On Wednesdays, I don’t allow myself to go on the Internet until 5pm. This means no social media, no email, no news, no nothing. – Ali Abdaal

We fear too much success is abandoning our roots and will leave us alone.
Think: Why do so many celebs have an “entourage?”
The unconscious thing your brain says:
“I cannot expand to my full success because it would cause me to end up all alone, be disloyal to my roots and leave behind people from my past”
-Jesse Pujji

If you believe that the demands of the situation exceed your resources, you will have a threat response. But if you believe you have the resources to succeed, you will have a challenge response. – reading Kelly McGonigal’s GREAT book about the utility of stress

Elon is already more powerful than many heads of state. It’s not hyperbole. The constellation of assets Elon’s amassed represent real societal and resource power. This man has systematically gained command over numerous critical industries in human transportation, communication, space travel, and technology – BacktheBunny

the difference I guess between the guys who are able to be biggest Champions and the ones that are struggling to get to the highest level is the ability to not stay in those emotions for too long so for me it’s relatively short so as soon as I experience it I acknowledge it I maybe you know burst I scream on the court whatever happens but then I’m able to bounce back and reset – Djoker

There is a connection between freedom and self-confidence: When you are kept from expressing your deepest needs and wishes, you lose trust in their validity and in your own judgment. You survive by finding out the rules and following them, thus hiding what you really want. You make it your purpose in life to please others rather than to affirm yourself. – David Richo, How to Be an Adult in Relationships

I’ll tell you how we’re wrong enough to be forgiven. How one night, after
backhanding
mother, then taking a chainsaw to the kitchen table, my father went to kneel
in the bathroom until we heard his muffled cries through the walls.
And so I learned that a man, in climax, was the closest thing
to surrender
-Ocean Vuong

Kong: I turned down all performance opportunities and avoided meeting anyone. To prevent friends from locating me, I changed my mobile phone number 21 times. During the darkest three months, my mother would leave my meals on a chair outside my door. When my daughter returned from the United States to visit me, all I could do was look at her through the peephole.
Kong: [Laughs] It’s true. Back when I was learning the piano, I felt like many of my classmates, such as Xu Zhong, Wang Jian, and Qian Zhou, had more inherent talent. I relied on relentless practice, often putting in 15 to 16 hours a day. Even after becoming a professional pianist, I needed constant practice to keep my confidence up

while a magazine might project a kind of bulletproof perfection–every story the product of an assiduous and painstaking reporting, editing, and fact-checking process–in practice nearly every story you read is an improvised and often deeply unsatisfying last-minute compromise between the publisher, the top editors, the story editor, the fact-checkers, the copy-editors, the art department, and the writer
Something that’s often underrated by people who haven’t worked as journalists is the extent to which newspapers and magazines (and cable channels, etc.) are institutions like any other–which is to say riven with contradiction and internal tension, populated by cross-pressured workers and managers with competing desires and incentives
from Read Max

Great infographic on DEPIN landscape
https://github.com/iotexproject/awesome-depin/blob/main/depin_landscape_oct.jpeg

Selfish people are incapable of loving others, but they’re incapable of loving themselves too

I think we just can’t help the instinct to give meaning to things we don’t understand — Scavenger’s Reign

But today, people are actively deleting content they have created. It is now considered best practice in some circles to automatically delete twitter comments, old reddit comments and to privatize Facebook posts (or even simply delete Facebook). And when they create new content online, it is more often in places where the masses cannot see it.

Nietzsche: Compassion is a psyop designed by the weak to redirect resources from the most deserving to the least.
Napoleon: Logic will lose you wars because sometimes the moment demands imaginative maneuvers that work because they are irrational
Chateaubriand: Beauty is useless if you care for efficiency, but shockingly useful if you care for lovability. Yes, beauty is a wasteful luxury but ultimately the only thing people will protect, and make pilgrimages to.
John Fowles: High IQ is a terrifying gift. The ability to predict the consequences of any action means your will gets lost in a labyrinth of hypotheses. Rule 1: Do not lose the will
from @oldbooksguy

On a journey, ill;
my dream goes wandering
over withered fields.
-Basho.

China has focused on battery-powered electric vehicles. Even after consolidation in the sector, over a hundred firms still produce such cars. A few brands are world-class. Most are cheaper than Western rivals. Chinese firms became dominant through a mixture of subsidies and coercive transfers of foreign technologies, but also hard work and foresight, as they leap-frogged slow-to-change foreign firms

Manny Pacquiao on the power of volume, leading up to a fight he’d spar 36 rounds in a day, every day (!) — so he wasn’t tired at all in a regular 12 round fight: https://www.instagram.com/reel/CzeHP6itCK7/

During a threat response, your emotions will likely include fear, anger, self-doubt, or shame. Because your primary goal is to protect yourself, you become more vigilant to signs that things are going poorly. This can create a vicious cycle in which your heightened attention to what’s going wrong makes you even more fearful and self-doubting.

the brain suffers from severe limitations. We use its massive parallelism (one hundred trillion interneuronal connections operating simultaneously) to quickly recognize subtle patterns. But our thinking is extremely slow: the basic neural transactions are several million times slower than contemporary electronic circuits.

If you wonder what will remain unequivocally human in such a world, it’s simply this quality: ours is the species that inherently seeks to extend its physical and mental reach beyond current limitations. – Kurzweil

Thoreau goodies:
-Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.
-For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man?
-But labor of the hands, even when pursued to the verge of drudgery, is perhaps never the worst form of idleness.

In their zeal to attack believers whose frailties have led them to embrace the supernatural, atheists may neglect the frailty that is an inevitable feature of all our lives. – de Botton

Let me Google how to suffer. That ain’t gonna be in there – David Goggins

Diabetes, glioma, chronic pain, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, dementia, and H pylori bottom out around 1 drink per day. Cardiovascular disease bottoms out around 2 drinks per day. Erectile dysfunction stays lowered at up to 3 drinks per day. Depression bottoms out at 0.7 drinks per day.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1731863379902349781.html

Be generous with your time and your resources and with giving credit and, especially, with your words. […] To understand and be understood, those are among life’s greatest gifts, and every interaction is an opportunity to exchange them

When a supernova explodes, the blast wave creates high-energy particles that scatter in every direction; scientists believe there is a minute chance that one of the errant particles, known as a cosmic ray, can hit a computer chip on Earth, flipping a 0 to a 1. The world’s most robust computer systems, at NASA, financial firms, and the like, used special hardware that could tolerate single bit-flips

弘益人间，在世理化
official education motto of South Korea
To broadly benefit the human world

Sizzling Sunlight: Bask in both morning and evening sunlight. Even if it’s cloudy and cold. It’s not just about Vitamin D; it’s about regulating your natural circadian hythms

And if you avoided everyone who treated you unfairly at some point, you’d probably just be alone. You’d better hope they give you the benefit of the doubt for your mistakes, too

I can’t predict the future. But I can spot investor over-reactions. – Ram Ahluwahlia

They weren’t trying to be safe. They were trying to become competent—and it’s competence that makes people as safe as they can truly be. – Jordan Peterson

Make that phone call you’ve been putting off
Push through when you feel like quitting
Have that uncomfortable conversation
Introduce yourself to that cute guy/girl
Check out that church or faith group
Ask for that promotion or raise
Apply for that new job
Sign up for that class
Start that side hustle
Post that tweet
Take that trip
The world belongs to the bold. Be a seeker, open to change and opportunity.
And most importantly…
Shoot your shot.
Source

Random facts — things I learned (Dec 7 2023) — “The spirit of the individual is determined by his dominating thought habits”

“When 120 of Cornelius Vanderbilt’s descendants gathered at Vanderbilt University in 1973 for the first family reunion, there was not a millionaire among them.”

Repeat after me: Your rent is the maximum you’ll pay. Your mortgage is the minimum you’ll pay. – Ramit Sethi

Bitcoin: scarcer than gold, faster than fiat – Lyn Alden

Humans are both master and slave to the technium, and our fate is to remain in this uncomfortable dual role. Therefore, we will always be conflicted about technology and find making our choices difficult. – Kevin Kelley

The spirit of the individual is determined by his dominating thought habits

There are 3 Greek gods of dreams (Oneiroi):
Phobetor was thought to be the bringer of nightmares, and had the ability to appear as animals or monsters; Phantasos was believed to bring surreal and strange dreams, and was able to appear as inanimate objects, such as stones or wood. In contrast to his two siblings, Morpheus brought messages and prophesies from the gods to mortals through the medium of dreams.

What, then, is the Singularity? It’s a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed. – Ray Kurzweil

One often reads predictions of the next several decades discussing a variety of demographic, economic, and political trends that largely ignore the revolutionary impact of machines with their own opinions and agendas. – Ray Kurzweil

Discipline is the strongest form of self-love.
*It means choosing what you want later over what you want now.*
Discipline shows how committed you are to your dreams, even on tough days.
Discipline is honoring the covenant you have with yourself. That’s your personal integrity.
Your future self depends on your current self to keep promises made yesterday.
-Ram Ahluwahlia

6/ “highly individualistic, self-obsessed, control-oriented, nonconformist, and analytical.”
👉🏻Culture, independent of the biological evolutionary process, does “alter our brains, hormones, and anatomy, along with our perceptions, motivations, personalities, emotions, and many
-Jim O’Shaughnessy

The researchers, Robert J. Jackson Jr. of the New York University School of law and Prof. Joshua Mitts of Columbia Law School, found a sharp and significant rise in short sales of ETFs that track Israeli companies in the days preceding the attack

The desire to avoid feeling anxious overtakes other goals. In the worst cases, people organize their lives around avoiding anything that provokes anxiety. And while they hope that this will make them feel safe, it tends to have the opposite effect.
I know this well with weed

The principles of operation of software advances such as speech recognition can be written in just a few pages of formulas. Often a key advance is a matter of applying a small change to a single formula. The same observation holds for the “inventions” of biological evolution: consider that the genetic difference between chimpanzees and humans, for example, is only a few hundred thousand bytes of information.

“In January 2012, I beat Nadal in the finals of the Australian Open. The match lasted five hours and fifty-three minutes. Many commentators have called that match the single greatest tennis match of all time. After I won, I sat in the locker room in Melbourne. I wanted one thing: to taste chocolate. I hadn’t tasted it since the summer of 2010. Miljan brought me a candy bar. I broke off one square—one tiny square—and popped it into my mouth, let it melt on my tongue. That was all I would allow myself. That is what it has taken to get to number one.” – Djokovic

Don’t be in a hurry to “fix” things; rather, enrich your understanding in the evergoing process of discovery and finding more the cause of your ignorance – Bruce Lee

In any bond of depth and significance, forgive, forgive, forgive. And then forgive again – Maria Popova

When some part of a doctrine is relatively simple, there is a tendency among the faithful to complicate and obscure it. Simple words are made pregnant with meaning and made to look like symbols in a secret message. There is thus an illiterate air about the most literate true believer. – Eric Hoffer

“Life tastes better when you’re chugging” – Ricky (and Morty)

Jacobs: He gets the value of improvisation. “In jazz, if you hit a wrong note, there’s no such thing as a wrong note. That’s the note, that’s the reality. You radically accept that, and you build on it,” he riffs. “Music is really business. …You have to be using all of your senses at the same time, and you have to be dancing with the circumstances and evolving.”

Here’s a different interpretation: a politically connected billionaire on the verge of losing his shirt called a government official—one who used to be the CEO of the company he now owned a chunk of—and convinced him to use taxpayer funds to prop up the stock market, particularly his stocks. – on Charlie Munger

In the aftermath of the moon landing, approval for that specific mission didn’t meaningfully budge. 47% said it was worth it a decade later, in 1979 and it would take 20 years for amnesia to set it and this number to reach 77% in 1989. Meanwhile opposition to further moon missions remained higher than support for one until at least the mid-1990s

he’d been exposed to the often forgotten history of technological pessimism as an under-graduate at Columbia University. This experience lead to an epiphany which he eloquently recalled:
“I discovered, to my amazement, that all through history there had been resistance…and bitter, exaggerated, last-stitch resistance…to every significant technological change that had taken place on earth.

they found that the more seasoned jumpers weren’t calmer than those about to take their first leap. Instead, the experienced skydivers showed even higher heart rates before and during the jump. The more pumped they were to take the dive, the bigger their excite-and-delight response. When you need to take a leap and want to do well, don’t worry about forcing yourself to relax. Instead, embrace the nerves, tell yourself you’re excited, and know that your heart is in it. – Kelly McGonigal’s amazing book on stress

By emphasizing the importance of reducing stress before an exam, his advice only further confirmed what students feared: Anxiety was a sign that they would do poorly. If you want to help people better cope with anxiety, a more useful strategy might be to simply tell them that you think they can handle it. Studies show that when people are told, “You’re the kind of person whose performance improves under pressure,” their actual performance improves by 33 percent. – more Kelly

How do you expect to manifest what you want if you’re afraid to openly broadcast that you want it?
If you can’t broadcast your desires, it’s fair to say you don’t own them yet. How can your desires become real if you can’t speak up about them? If you’re going to receive them, then let it be known. If you find it necessary to hide what you desire, that suggests you aren’t ready to receive. – Steve Pavlina

Why write in public? “The ability for smart, useful observations to get into the hands of people with fewer ideas but lots of capital has never been better. You can build both a reputation and balance sheet this way.” – Ramit Sethi

A lot of visible problems that you can’t seem to solve are secretly solutions you don’t want to admit to adopting to problems you don’t want to admit to having. – a mensch on Twitter

However, the pain of sitting for weeks at a time, distilling all of that knowledge into a series of 6, concise essays, was a stark reminder that feeling that you know something, and writing it down, are two vastly different things, by many orders of magnitude

The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it. – Mark Weiser

And what I’ve discovered is that from a broad perspective, people are basically the same. Everyone spends most of their time worrying about food, money, their job and their family — even people who are rich and well fed. Everyone wants to look cool and feel important — even people who are already cool and important. Everyone is proud of where they come from. Everyone has insecurities and anxieties that plague them, regardless of how successful they are. Everybody is afraid of failure and looking stupid. Everyone loves their friends and family yet also gets the most irritated by them. – Mark Manson

Factory Meat: “The goal of feed-lot animals is to blow them up fast and quickly with cheap food. That’s what we are doing to our people, too.” – Will Harris

The reaction to Fukushima was completely overblown: it is debated whether zero people or one person died from any sort of radiation at Fukushima

Our model of what’s important in SEO has been wrong for a long time. We thought content was the basis, backlinks the middle layer and user signals sprinkled on top. It turns out user signals were the basis, with a middle layer of backlinks and content understanding sprinkled on top

Jensen Huang


If you want to be successful I would encourage you to grow a tolerance for failure
But the thing about failure is this: if you fail often enough, you actually might become a failure, and that’s different from being successful
So the question is how do you teach someone how to fail, but fail quickly — and to change courses as soon as you know it’s a dead end
And the way to do that is we call it intellectual honesty — we assess on a continuous basis whether something makes sense or not. And if it’s the wrong decision, let’s change our mind

Biggest regrets I have are almost exclusively things I did *not* do. — Sam, 47

Random facts — things I learned this week (Nov 26 2023) — “The best computer is a quiet, invisible servant”

Sortino ratio: a measure of risk-adjusted return; basically how much more return per unit of downside risk

On AI hallucinations:
OpenAI’s technologies had the lowest rate, around 3 percent. Systems from Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, hovered around 5 percent. The Claude 2 system offered by Anthropic, an OpenAI rival also based in San Francisco, topped 8 percent. A Google system, Palm chat, had the highest rate at 27 percent.

Some David Goggins quotes from his appearance on Joe Rogan:
-I don’t like doing ’em so I gotta do ’em. That’s my life
-I wanna be uncommon among uncommon people
-There’s no trophy on the mantle… there’s a trophy on my fucking brain
-Most people quit at 40%
-Through work ethic I developed self esteem

What is gradient descent:
Algorithm for finding local minimum of a function
Opposite is gradient ascent
Used in machine learning to minimize cost / loss function

“The best computer is a quiet, invisible servant”

Only cement and steel are manufactured more widely than plastic, and 22% of plastic evades waste management systems, ending up in uncontrolled dumpsites or lost directly into the environment

There is no such thing as medicine that is not also poison (the Greek word “pharmakon” means “drug” and “poison”). There is no such thing as virtue that is not also vice (and vice versa)

Gendarme = gens d’armes (men at arms)

Maddi’s definition of what it means to be good at stress—the courage to grow from stress—is still my favorite description of resilience. To be good at stress is not to avoid stress, but to play an active role in how stress transforms you.

Aliyah: immigration of diaspora Jews back to Palestine / Land of Israel
The First Aliyah — aka agriculture Aliyah — a major wave of Jewish immigration to Ottoman Syria between 1881 and 1903

Your best decisions come from stillness. Stillness is amplified in nature & meditation.

The Ethernet design was inspired by the Additive Links On-line Hawaii Area network (ALOHAnet), a radio-based system at the University of Hawai’i. Computers transmitted packets, prefaced by the addresses of the recipients, over a shared channel as soon as they had information to send. If two messages collided, the computers that had sent them would wait a random interval and try again.

Japanese does not allow any syllables ending with a consonant with the exception of /n/ (ン). English has thousands of words ending with consonants like cat, look and ship but they are simply unpronounceable in the Japanese phonological universe

Complex syllables like strength, sixth and clothes are even more unpronounceable for Japanese speakers because the Japanese phonology doesn’t permit two or more consonants to be squeezed together. The English /th/ sound is totally impermissible in Japanese — in fact, in most human languages 3 — and therefore needs to be replaced with the closest Japanese sound /s/ as in surī (スリー) “three.”

A study from the 1990s showed that over 35% of all vocabulary printed in 70 Japanese magazines were foreign loanwords, most of them being of English origin. A 2010 book about wasei eigo (Japan-made English) also indicated that Japanese people use 3,000 – 5,000 loanwords in daily conversations, and 94% of them are of English origin

Mouthwash is the biggest dental scam. Kills your oral microbiota. Avoid

Patriot (whichever PR man thought up that name should be getting a million bucks a year) missiles intercepting evil Scud (ditto for that PR man) missiles.

Good bye is contraction of god be with ye

“If you don’t accept excuses you wind up in much better places”

I was at Goldman when they did the GSCI. Now everyone things of Commodities as an asset class. In the 90’s I was very active in emerging markets. Now everything thinks of EM as an asset class. Blockchain will be just like that. The existence of an ETF is a very important step in becoming an asset class. Once an ETF exists, if you don’t have exposure, you’re effectively short.
—
The SPDR Gold Trust (GLD) ($54.6bn) and iShares Gold Trust (IAU) ($25.3bn) represent almost 90% of the US gold ETF value, with no other competitor over $10bn.
—
The table below shows these cycles. The rhythm is amazingly steady. The rallies are within 23 days of the 1,076-day average bull market (2.95 years). Same tightness on the downside – bear markets end within 24 days of the 382-day average (1.05 years).

Writing is the fastest way to growth hack your understanding of anything

Over the past 5 yrs, the return of a 4x levered gold position would be like Bitcoin.