> There is similarly little discussion on the origins of peer review and impact factors and journals, it's just taken as the obvious hallmark and basis of good science.
Pioneered and exploited by Robert Maxwell (father of the infamous Ghislaine). Good summary below; was an all around eye-opening revelation for me.
Before you pay for boosts on a dating app, pay for good pictures.
Here is what a man seeking woman profile needs:
1. Good Pictures. Honest. Good lighting. Appropriate grooming and attire (whatever than means in your social context). Smile in a carefree way in most of the pictures.
2. Attractive man in the pictures.
3. No icks.
Yes the pictures are more important than being attractive.
As a matter of storytelling, the theme is "aspirational", but the particular aspiration is up to you.
Fun fact: in feudal Japan, taxes and income were measured in koku of rice (approx 150 kg), which is roughly how much a person needed to sustain themselves for a year. The little plastic cup that comes with your rice cooker measures one gō, which is 1/1000th of a koku.
Having read hundreds of books over 25 years, here’s what I think about business books:
- To understand some domain you need knowledge + insights + discernment. Books give you knowledge. Only when you apply you will get discernment. When you apply you will get specific questions which then triggers seeking more knowledge.
- Every book is a map. It leaves out a lot so readers can understand the domain. If your interest align with that map, you'll find the book useful. Otherwise it turns out to be a fluff
- Most books could be a tweet (directive). Once you understand something, it could be expressed as a directive. Until then, you need stories, explanations, and nuance.
- Jesus' command: love God and love others is a short directive of Ten commandments, which in themselves are condensed directives of the Bible. When we hear only the directive, we lose the context and we misunderstand. That's where stories come into play. Tim Ferriss' "4 hour week" makes sense when you read all the stories (playbooks, delegations etc). You leave all of that out, "4 hour week" is a (misunderstood) crap.
- Don't read recently published books. wait at least until 5 years. Let it be looked at it from all angles. Then read it.
- If you want to learn emerging topic (like GenAI), don't read books. Join communities and learn from them. Like Perplexity community for GenAI.
- Read practicing philosophers. When you want to learn swimming, learn from swimmers turned coach, not someone who stood by poolside and watched 10000 swimmers (like Jim Collins did)
- Read annual letters to shareholders (by Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, Biglari ...). They have more signal than noise.
I'd recommend Beyond Bullet Points by B. Atkinson; it's a book about PowerPoint but teaches you how to synthesize presentations, including videos and in-person presentations.
As far as career upgrades, this book was decisive for me in making the lightbulb go off so I could share my vision with others and have them see it, too.
For me, it was a skill issue.Most people learn it when very young. Just repeated practice helped... and someone close to me coached me on things that seemed common sense to others, but were counterintuitive to me. But over time, my neurons rewired themselves. I'm fairly good at small talk now. People dont believe me when I say I couldn't even order pizza over the phone at one point.
Makes me think of the short novel Manna, about a dystopian future where working class humans are micro-managed by AI. (And an alternative future where everyone shares in the benefits of technological progress.)
I do now have memorized some mix of vim and vscode keybindings, but to me it's worth it. I'm not at 100% keyboard navigation because in some cases I've burned 5-10 minutes looking up a shortcut, repeatedly 1/mo for 3 months. After so many (overly) spaced repetitions, I recognize the shortcut isn't worth memorizing.
> Installing plugins is one good example of this, where even if you use a Vim plugin (or this, it seems), you still need to resolve to using the mouse/Tabbing to actually install the plugin itself.
I agree with you here, but I rarely need to install new plugins. It's certainly not a task I repeat for a given plugin. Plugins are actually the reason I do primary development in VSCode instead of Neovim natively. I can set up linters, language highlighters, etc in VSCode much faster than I can in Neovim. The ecosystem in VSCode also seems to be bigger for what I've done in the last few years.
---
Anyways, here are some VS Code keybindings I've found essential to go hand-in-hand with vscode-neovim. These few probably get me to 90% keyboard navigation for day-to-day editing.
cmd-shift-m: toggle the bottom tray problems (works as a universal way to show/hide the bottom)
cmd-b: toggle the left sidebar (in whatever context it was last in)
cmd-shift-e: show the current file in the left sidebar
cmd-0: move context/focus to the left sidebar
cmd-1: move context/focus to the editor
cmd-2: move context/focus to the right editor (or open an editor split, if not yet split)
ctrl-1,...9: highlight Nth tab from the left
ctrl-0: highlight rightmost tab
cmd-p: fuzzy find file
cmd-shift-p: fuzzy find any installed action by description
An online application of this principle is Focusmate, where you schedule calls with essentially random strangers and just work together. There's very little chit chat and it's not some weird front for a hookup scheme. I've been amazed at how well it works for me. I can't really explain why, after all the other person can't see my screen so I could just be doom scrolling YouTube the whole time, but for some reason I don't. I don't use it all the time, but when I need to get something unappealing done I still use it. I've also used it for exercise, and I've had partners use it for all sorts of weird things that they had been procrastinating. I highly recommend it, I thought it would be far weirder than it turned out to be, and it's really useful.
I'll talk about the things I'm willing to post publicly (feel free to email me for what I can only say in private).
1. Get the BEST possible pictures of you. If your picture doesn't look like the best picture you've taken all year, don't use it. Just know that online dating is more about being photogenic and looking good in the perceptions of others than actually looking good. However, if you're unattractive IRL, make sure you have a way to compensate for that. I am a really playful person during dates and that lightens the mood a lot to the extent that some women start to see me as attractive but that's simply positive vibes being associated to my looks
2. Rate your pictures. I use photofeeler.com, there's also rankpick.info. You need at least 3 8.5 pictures, I barely got them after 50 well crafted/taken photos. My friends got them way quicker (I'm a tough case due to a cleft lip and small shoulders)
3. How to start a conversation: make a comment based on her pictures. It's the best trade-off between being original and writing a fast conversation starter. The more imaginative and creative you are, the better
4. Don't be standard. No "what are your hobbies?" style type of conversation
5. If you write a bio it has to pop. If your bio doesn't pop, just keep it short. Stuff that I had:
Cuddle champion of 2019 <-- just a playful eye catcher
Meditation for 2 hours per day <-- wasn't true (I did 1 hour per day but aimed for 2. All is fair in love & war)
city 1/city 2/ city 3/ city 4 <-- city 1 = home city, city 2 = city I'm currently nomadding at, city 3 & 4 = the cities I plan to go to or cities that just sound hip
Shout out to:
- Group of people you like #1 (e.g. artists)
- Group of people you like #2 (e.g. geeks)
- Group of people you like #3 (e.g. ambitious people)
--> Give fun names to them such as: creative people with an imagination, board game lovers and people that want to conquer the world
6. Pay for the service, don't let the free stuff limit you
hey I built this exact concept months ago. beat detection. video generation. automated video creation checkout the videos I uploaded at https://youtube.com/@nevertwenty
QED And The Men Who Made It, by Sylvan S. Schweber. About the development of quantum electrodynamics. It is partly biography, centering on Freeman Dyson, Richard Feynman, Julian Schwinger, and Sin-Itoro Tomonaga in roughly decreasing order of word count by rough recollection. Mostly I'd say the subject matter is history of physics from a fairly hardcore technical perspective. Tbh I didn't understand that much of the physics, though I learned some through reading. The history and biography parts were quite engaging anyway.
Thought processes and mental events are conscious only to the extent they receive illumination from Purusha. In Samkhya, consciousness is compared to light which illuminates the material configurations or 'shapes' assumed by the mind. So intellect, after receiving cognitive structures from the mind and illumination from pure consciousness, creates thought structures that appear to be conscious. Ahamkara, the ego or the phenomenal self, appropriates all mental experiences to itself and thus, personalizes the objective activities of mind and intellect by assuming possession of them. But consciousness is itself independent of the thought structures it illuminates.
For folks without responsibilities like kids, aging parents, etc. I really don’t think startups are very “risky”.
What’s the worst that happens? It doesn’t work out and after five years you go get a job in boring corp corp with an incredible skillset and vast life experience.
You’ve sacrificed some income perhaps, but so what? People make choices like that all the time. Your working career could easily be 40 or 45 years, 5 is not that much and it’s not like you went bankrupt. Your skillset might even mean you more than make up for lost time.
I don’t understand the talk of “risk” unless you’re Elon Musk betting the farm on your businesses and facing bankruptcy.
Work in your spare time until you have something Angel worthy, then get a modest salary to get to the next level and on you go. Or just bootstrap.
Is it easy? No, it’s the hardest thing you’ll ever do. Is it risky? Not so much.
So why do Canadians and Brits see it as a risky thing to do? I think they don’t. What they see is _uncertainty_ - where will I be in six months? What if it doesn’t work out? What if I fail and people judge me? They don’t like uncertainty. That is conservative with a small c. Probably it’s a cultural artefact rather than anything remotely rational. The problem is you end up in an equilibrium where the society is conservative (“what you wanna do wasting your time with that”) so the ambitious people just leave and go to somewhere like (parts of) the US where people want to change things, make things, improve the world. And the conservative society gets more conservative until it is ossified.
Startups carry high uncertainty but not high risk.
What I learned in my years as proposal manager was that it is always best to get the first slot amongst the other bidders for your presentation and the last for the negotiation.
I found the following 3 measures quite helpful to make my smartphone less intrusive in my daily life:
1: I don't bring my smartphone into my bedroom. My bedroom is a personal and intimate space, no need for the outside world to barge in via smartphone.
2: I disable or silence every notification I get. The only time my phone draws my attention is if I am getting a phone call, my wife texts me, or if I get a Pagerduty.
3: I uninstalled or disabled all social media apps.
Number 2 had the biggest impact on my family and work life. When I spend time with my kids, my phone only rarely interrupts me.
I think it will be a lot of fun to build it and then because you built it you will be highly motivated to use it for a season. Maybe a few weeks. Maybe 6 months, but eventually it will will be boring too.
I find pomodo style gorilla warfare works best for me. I tell myself I will work on the implementation for 15 minutes. If after 15 minutes I am still repelled by this task to the point I am unproductive, then I accept that, make necessary notes and do something else.
I will try again tomorrow. Eventually I hit a point where I have done enough that I am motivated to continue to see it completed.
I will do gorilla attacks on cleaning my office, writing marketing email, inbox zero, implementing some new feature. It works for me for a lot of things.
When I am just unable to do what I’m “supposed” to do then I give myself grace and go do the thing that is consuming my attention at the moment.
This “unproductive” stuff often becomes new ideas, new features, new friends, and brings meaning to my life.
Another LaTeX-to-HTML tool is lwarp (https://github.com/bdtc/lwarp) which starts from the idea that there only exists one program that can parse LaTeX: the LaTeX compiler itself. Implementing a new parser is almost futile. So instead, the lwarp package redefines all the macros to output HTML. Something like
\renewcommand[1]{\textbf}{<b>#1</b>}
This way, compiling LaTeX gives you a PDF whose text is HTML code, so now you can extract the plain text from it and you have an HTML file. The advantage is that it can easily deal with custom macros etc., because these are natively resolved by the LaTeX compiler.
I use lwarp to make https://tikz.dev/, an HTML version of the TikZ manual, which is probably one of the most complicated LaTeX documents in existence.
Whenever I have to make a big decision I think about what’s important to me. I give 3-8 things like money, learning, commute time, etc. a score from 1-5. Then I score different alternatives 1-5 based on how well I think they do on those things. Then I multiply and add the numbers together and I have a sense of what I should do. Usually it’s the highest score but sometimes I change a number because I realize something is more/less important than I thought.
Only you know what is important to you, and I bet lots of folks here can help inform how different options might score.
This book by David Burns [1] taught me that ACTION comes first, AND THEN motivation arrives. If you lay there and wait to be motivated, it will never happen. Specifically:
1. Action
2. Results
3. Motivation
4. Repeat!
Anti-pattern:
1. Motivation
2. Action
3. Results
4. Does not work
When I notice myself using self-talk like "ugh, I just don't feel like it" I thing of A-R-M and it helps.
I don't do things I don't want to do - I've also set my life and career up to prioritize that. Being overly accustomed to that mode may be part of the problem, because inevitably there are things you have to do that you don't want to do - and those things seem harder, even if they're trivial, when you really want to master your own time. Yet I'm pretty good at getting those out of the way.
That's not my specific problem with phone calls. Phone calls always open up a Pandora's box of more problems. Perhaps if you feel like armchair diagnosing this: I clean my house almost obsessively every day; my desktop has only two text files on it called "Immediate" and "Todo"; my inbox is always cleaned out by 5 or 6pm before I let myself relax. Then I go get fucking wasted and make new friends and end up drinking in parking lots.
But I can't call the fucking tree guy or the mechanic or the accountant. It's not the conversation I'm worried about. It's that I know there will be one new thing on the list.
When the list is cleared, I will be free. I will take my clothes off and walk naked to the airport.
[edit] I just want to clarify: I do think that I'm good at life in my own peculiar way. Just not "good at life" as most people would define it ;)
i also sold my startup to a good outcome and ran the business very profitably for years and i agree that there are some things that can not be taught - but that doesn't mean they can't be learned if you have the right mental models. at one point i was terrible at dating / women but over the years i've gotten a lot better than where i started. and yes, there are some people who are just hopeless because they refuse to let go of weird mental hangups that aren't based in reality.
here are some personal observations which you may or may not agree with.
1. you need to be in reasonable shape. pay no attention to the exceptions to this rule, they don't apply to you. so get fit however you want. the more the better. nobody wants to fuck a slug.
2. you don't NEED money, but it certainly doesn't hurt. truly not caring about bills/expenses exudes something you can't fake. broke dudes can truly not care about bills also, from the other side. counter-intuitive, right? if you were broke, could you fake it convincingly? no, probably not. because the exceptions don't apply to you.
3. if you show an ounce, a smidge, one iota, a mere hint of neediness, you're fuckin' GONE. again, pay no attention to the exceptions because they don't apply to you. this can be anything from needing to text/communicate way too often, or weighing other peoples' opinions too much, or being unsure of how to deal with a situation. if you're confused about life just keep it to yourself and ask your male friends or older guys. being confident and wrong is an easy fix if you're a fast learner. being a wishy washy dork is unforgiveable.
4. learn how to dress well in your own style. the exceptions don't apply to you. everyone has their own style so there's not much to say here other than make sure everything fits.
5. being good at sex matters a lot, or at least not terrible. you need a solid baseline upon which to improve. this may seem like a catch-22 because it is. catch-22 is the base layer of reality of the male condition. if you want success you need to figure it out, just like in business. just fucking figure it out, smart guy. the exceptions don't apply to you.
6. height and race matters a lot. if you're short or not white you need to work harder at everything, unless you are exceptional, which you clearly are not. whether or not this is worth it is up to you. if the threshold for effort is deemed to be too much, that's a valid response to a skewed market. just know that every other guy out there is hoping you give up.
7. a woman can break up with you or dump you or ghost you for absolutely no reason at all even if you are the perfect ideal person on paper. this is a non-deterministic field of outcomes. if you get upset at this, you need to grow up.
8. persistence in the face of overwhelming odds against you is how you succeed in business, it applies here also. some are lucky, they are exceptional, and you are not.
I have ADHD and though I love having a tidy home I struggle to make it happen. Still, I find chores to be a low stakes daily dojo to practice prioritization, executive function lol, "good enough" nonjudgemental thinking and all those values.
Two books helped me greatly and they both call out the exact distinction between perfection and efficiency you do. Consciously giving up on "efficiency" has helped me finish a lot of projects I otherwise would have put off for far too long!
The books are "How to Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind" by Dana White for ADHD folks, "How to Keep House While Drowning" by KC Davis for when life is f'ed. Heartily recommend both.
> Instead they've made their own shitty version of CUDA that works on like 3 of their professional cards and nothing else. Maybe I don't understand something. That's the only sane explanation for what I think is completely baffling behavior.
AMD is laser-focused on surgically tapping high-margin markets. There is money in HPC, let's support that. There is money in AI, let's support that. Nothing more nothing less.
The way to think about ROCm isn't a platform like CUDA, it's as an embedded processor that gets engineered into some other product. It doesn't matter if there isn't a good general-purpose OS and ecosystem etc for Zilog Z80 - we aren't making a computer, we are making a microwave, it only ever needs to run one specific piece of software (or a small handful). And that's what AMD has become, a processor that goes into someone else's platform rather than a platform in itself. We are building a HPC supercomputer, we are building an AI training platform, and for that specific product AMD might offer the best value for performance. But you're fundamentally someone else's platform.
The ironic thing is that's exactly what everyone is implying that NVIDIA might be doing now with AI, and nothing could be farther from the truth. Abandoning gaming/graphics and focusing AI would be a one-way road to the same situation AMD is in. Once you've abandoned that virtuous cycle it's tremendously hard to get back. NVIDIA has always been laser-focused on making sure that innovation happens on their platform, making sure that prosumers can write CUDA on their gaming hardware and grad students can write their thesis in CUDA and so on. It's not that NVIDIA keeps accidentally falling into success, they're deliberately putting themselves there, and they're not going to stop because of AI or anything else. If they stop and chase AI to the exclusion of graphics, that spigot will dry up, and they will no longer be in the position to catch the next fountain of money when it happens.
Besides, all their other products center around graphics anyway - do you sign a big multiproduct partnership with Mediatek or Nintendo if you don't have a good gaming IP, and DLSS, and wide adoption of that software? Does Blender integrate the next OptiX if none of the userbase can run it? Do you just make quadros and not do the single last step (gaming drivers) and forego that revenue because it's not enough? No, that's crazy.
Platform is hugely important to NVIDIA. It's their core product. Jensen told everyone 15 years ago that NVIDIA was a software company and people scoffed. They're not just a company that writes software, it's almost their primary product really. They write the software that sells the hardware. DLSS and AI and CUDA are their products, and they just sell you the fuel to run their product. Razor-and-blade model in action. "What if they just stopped selling razors" ok then in the long term you won't sell many blades, will you?
They're just not going to do it at zero cost or a loss. And just like the Radeon 7850 has no real successor in the $150 segment, that is creeping higher and higher in the stack as fixed costs overwhelm the progress now that moore's law is dying.
The true threat to NVIDIA's platform is the rising costs of low-end products. Fixed assembly/testing/shipping costs, fixed die area overhead for memory PHYs, increased VRAM needs (without drops in the per-GB cost of VRAM) - are gradually sapping the low-end segment. It is already not possible to make a $100 or $150 GPU that's very compelling, you can equivocate about whether a $200 or $300 GPU could be better for the price but nobody is making a good $100 or $150 GPU that's a worthy enthusiast-tier successor to the Radeon 7850/R7 270 or similar, because it's just not possible, and everyone agrees on that at least. The RX 6500XT and similar products are never going to compel anyone to upgrade, that segment has gone terminal.
And that threshold is creeping higher every time they shrink because people want more memory and GDDR density hasn't kept up and PHYs don't shrink. There is de-facto a "minimum die size that is worth it" because of the fixed size of PHYs (to get the fixed amount of memory people want) and in a world of spiraling cost-per-mm2 that means there is a minimum cost that's worth it, and it's inching higher and higher ever time you shrink. Like try to even imagine what the $200 segment is going to look like with RDNA4 - are they going to launch a 8500XT 16GB on N5P or N3 at $200, just a tiny sliver of compute area sandwiched between PHYs? No, they can't do it either.
Console-style or Apple-style APUs are the way out and that is a market that NVIDIA doesn't control, and that is the primary long-term threat to NVIDIA's platform.
But for now - they are an incredibly powerful accelerator and everyone reaches for their software when they have a hard task. People get super upset when they can't upgrade the platform for NVIDIA at a compelling performance increase every 2 years. Why would you ever give that up willingly? Not even AMD wants to be where AMD is.
It isn’t defined that way, but yes it is strong evidence that people from that society are less trustworthy. People are less trusting when others are more likely to cheat them.
> It's almost like some tiny extremist faction has gained control of Windows
This has been the case for a while. I worked on the Windows Desktop Experience Team from Win7-Win10. Starting around Win8, the designers had full control, and most crucially essentially none of the designers use Windows.
I spent far too many years of my career sitting in conference rooms explaining to the newest designer (because they seem to rotate every 6-18 months) with a shiny Macbook why various ideas had been tried and failed in usability studies because our users want X, Y, and Z.
Sometimes, the "well, if you really want this it will take N dev-years" approach got avoided things for a while, but just as often we were explicitly overruled. I fought passionately against things like the all-white title bars that made it impossible to tell active and inactive windows apart (was that Win10 or Win8? Either way user feedback was so strong that that got reverted in the very next update), the Edge title bar having no empty space on top so if your window hung off the right side and you opened too many tabs you could not move it, and so on. Others on my team fought battles against removing the Start button in Win8, trying to get section labels added to the Win8 Start Screen so it was obvious that you could scroll between them, and so on. In the end, the designers get what they want, the engineers who say "yes we can do that" get promoted, and those of us who argued most strongly for the users burnt out, retired, or left the team.
I probably still know a number of people on that team, I consider them friends and smart people, but after trying out Win11 in a VM I really have an urge to sit down with some of them and ask what the heck happened. For now, this is the first consumer Windows release since ME that I haven't switched to right at release, and until they give me back my side taskbar I'm not switching.
I worked on the Windows team in the past, and it was a legitimate problem. Exposure to competitive products is great to stay aware of options and what others are doing, but the designers I worked with used Macs exclusively to the point where they didn't understand core Windows app switching/launching/task management workflows. A significant portion of my interactions was often explaining to them how proposed changes would interact with normal users, legacy apps, and everything else outside of idealized rendered screenshots.
Pioneered and exploited by Robert Maxwell (father of the infamous Ghislaine). Good summary below; was an all around eye-opening revelation for me.
https://thetaper.library.virginia.edu/big%20deal/2019/04/26/...