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@samuel_biyi These things aren't one man one vote, or we'd all be using grocers' apostrophes.
@aladejebideji I agree with you, and indeed I suspect that's most of the reason this is even controversial.
@Spotlight_Abby So if someone's writing is verbose and they attribute this to local custom, they're probably mistake... |
The Top of My Todo List
April 2012
A palliative care nurse called Bronnie Ware made a list of the
biggest
regrets
of the dying
. Her list seems plausible. I could see
myself —
can
see myself — making at least 4 of these
5 mistakes.
If you had to compress them into a single piece of advice, it might
be: don't be a cog... |
@mattyglesias There are also people (primarily young women) who enjoy a pretext for pursuing heretics.
@c0n5tantinople @pharmabroo It would seem that way to outsiders who don't understand the business, but early stage investing is very different from currency trading.
@pharmabroo Less soulless than people in finance?... |
The Need to Read
November 2022
In the science fiction books I read as a kid, reading had often
been replaced by some more efficient way of acquiring knowledge.
Mysterious "tapes" would load it into one's brain like a program
being loaded into a computer.
That sort of thing is unlikely to happen anytime soon. Not just
b... |
@mattyglesias Many if not most presumably from fake accounts run by Russia.
@HeinrichKuttler @growing_daniel The way I acquired it was mainly by looking at a lot of art.
@AlexCaswen Try reading the next tweet in that thread.
@michael_nielsen My first experience with the internet was presumably the day they changed t... |
@SpencerHakimian There's a lot of fat in the federal budget. Done right, something like DOGE could have been very effective.
As we approach the end of the drive:
Me: Are there any cars coming?
13 yo: No.
Me: I can see a car right there.
13 yo: Well, there usually aren't any cars coming.
@aviramj Thanks for your c... |
@janeandrsn @JCBForumSpeak Look them up for yourself.
@OliverBeedham Not if every startup moved to the UK, but if 20% of people are afraid to work in the US now (probably a conservative estimate), the first few startups who move to the UK get that whole 20% to themselves.
@russell_m It has lower GDP per capita, but i... |
@cheerupstanley At the very least it will harm European citizens by making them relatively poorer than the rest of the world. And as any relatively poor country knows, lots of other bad things follow from that.
@KarthikIO It gets in the way of using interactions with European users as training data.
How strange it wo... |
@wideofthepost I dislike Bill Ackman as much as the next man, but the numbers you quote don't add up to 9 billion.
@garrytan I don't think anyone's claiming anything changed about society in that year. It was just when a number happened to peak.
@Austen No one is better at assembling groups of cryptographers, and if ... |
AI is evolving so fast and schools change so slow that it may be better for startups to build stuff for kids to use themselves first, then collect all the schools later. That m.o. would certainly be more fun.
For the next 10 years at least the conversations about AI tutoring inside schools will be mostly about policy,... |
@Noahpinion Interestingly I believe numbers 2 and 3 (antitrust and crypto) are both ultimately due to Elizabeth Warren, whose proteges are in both cases the cause of the problem.
@ghostofhellas How do they know this mound is from that battle?
@bonker_99 I have. I'm complaining about a rental.
@ntldr2020 It was a new... |
@oscarle_x The exact opposite of that.
@shashj Just out of curiosity, is it legal to say you're not in favor of proscribing a proscribed organization?
Someone asked how to expand startups' ideas. The best way is to shrink the idea down to its essence, then ask how broadly that essential idea could be expanded. You ha... |
Charisma / Power
January 2017
People who are powerful but uncharismatic will tend to be disliked.
Their power makes them a target for criticism that they don't have
the charisma to disarm. That was Hillary Clinton's problem. It also
tends to be a problem for any CEO who is more of a builder than a
schmoozer. And yet th... |
What Business Can Learn from Open Source
August 2005
(This essay is derived from a talk at Oscon 2005.)
Lately companies have been paying more attention to open source.
Ten years ago there seemed a real danger Microsoft would extend its
monopoly to servers. It seems safe to say now that open source has
prevented that.... |
@lies_and_stats @cperciva Their simpler alternatives are also common though. Presumably even more common.
@Tired_ofit_All Some writers can get away with doing this a fair amount, but most people should just aim for simplicity.
@cperciva I've seen a lot of this sort of comedic effect recently. Sadly it was mostly unin... |
@halabi @growing_daniel Few people anywhere, rich or poor, have any taste.
@htmella @growing_daniel Is it a good idea to marry someone you like a minute after meeting them when you're 17?
It's possible to like bad people, and just as possible to like bad art.
@dbasch @growing_daniel Oh yes it does. It's very easy to... |
@nitinmalik A lot of programming has always been scutwork.
@Omeyimi01 @ahistoryinart Phew.
So if I had to boil down my advice to one sentence, it would be: Find a kind of work that you're so interested in that you'll learn to do it better than AI can.
The most interesting consequence of this principle, though, is th... |
@eluft You can do better than that. Ideally you don't have a political tribe.
@lukepuplett You might think that, but empirically I haven't noticed a difference. Poor people don't seem more unprincipled than rich people.
@sarmadgulzar I wouldn't assume that they do.
Your moral principles and your economic interests w... |
@pitdesi @tacobell It would be very alarming if the answer was no.
@SaleemMerkt That it was never 9-5.
You know the founders are still running things when a company can talk openly about its "most hated feature." Hired managers would never dare to be so candid.
For the 10% of the US electorate who were nodding their... |
Here's the masterpiece of bland evasion that I got in reply: https://t.co/1D21PA9fDU
If you want me to ignore your email, put the word "opportunity" in the subject line. If you want to make doubly sure, put "exclusive" in there too.
I dreamt there was a new fashion for plaid lambda expressions. I didn't like them, so... |
I've seen several organizations criticized for removing woke stuff from their sites, as if this showed a lack of integrity. Not necessarily. If they were swapping woke stuff for new stuff sucking up to the Republicans, that would show a lack of integrity, but they're not.
@ATabarrok If they swapped it out for stuff su... |
How Not to Die
Want to start a startup?
Get funded by
Y Combinator
.
August 2007
(This is a talk I gave at the last
Y Combinator dinner of the summer.
Usually we don't have a speaker at the last dinner; it's more of
a party. But it seemed worth spoiling the atmosphere if I could
save some of the startups from
preven... |
The Age of the Essay
September 2004
Remember the essays you had to write in high school?
Topic sentence, introductory paragraph,
supporting paragraphs, conclusion. The conclusion being,
say, that Ahab in
Moby Dick
was a Christ-like figure.
Oy. So I'm going to try to give the other side of the
story: what an essay rea... |
@ESYudkowsky Do you suppose ships will never be powered by fusion?
@GuyInSF2 They can't make Bond female or they have nothing left. Anyone can make a movie about a dashing MI6 agent. The name "James Bond" is the main thing the franchise consists of, besides a couple other minor things like "007" and the music.
@abemu... |
@joes_ai_x Usage, so revenue.
OpenAI is growing as fast as a promising new startup, but they're already huge. I can't remember ever having seen this before.
At least the founder was never in the Forbes 30 under 30. Then I'd really worry.
@AlecStapp Resubmit in a month.
@amwilson_opera Are they contemptuous of it? I... |
@mauraball Her birthday is a holiday in our family. The boys can ask for something they ordinarily couldn't, and they get it because it's a holiday.
(That advice is a bolder claim than it may seem. There's a lot missing from it, and not by accident.)
My mother would have been 90 today. She was an interesting person a... |
The Lesson to Unlearn
December 2019
The most damaging thing you learned in school wasn't something you
learned in any specific class. It was learning to get good grades.
When I was in college, a particularly earnest philosophy grad student
once told me that he never cared what grade he got in a class, only
what he lear... |
@X_FedericoX @growing_daniel When they were having their pictures taken.
If you want to feel hopeful about the future, this is a great account to follow.
@levelerai @growing_daniel The best people aren't looking for jobs.
@ahistoryinart Somerville and Ross write about it in the Irish RM.
@nizzyabi This is the troug... |
@whatifalthist Your children.
@johnmsides Already there.
How many Olympic medallists even know why one would bite a medal?
I bet few do. And for the rest it must seem such a bizarrely pointless thing to do.
Occasionally I check the profiles of random people who reply to me, and often 20 out of 20 of the last tweets... |
Me: How much salt do you put in your tomato sauce?
Jessica: Not too much. But not too little.
Me: How long do you cook it for?
Jessica: Not too long.
This monster parsnip from our garden ended up yielding three dinners and a lunch. https://t.co/N9ZHZBYv4A
We developed a new technique for measuring the boys' height... |
@Carson By their support for autocratic leaders killing large numbers of people in neighboring countries.
It's alarming to think how many people on Twitter would be supporting Germany if World War II were happening now. After Pearl Harbor nearly all the American ones would instantly go quiet, of course.
@VDHanson I c... |
@QualiaLogos Yesterday I saw someone riding a horse.
@cixliv There are still steam locomotives.
You know perfectly well what I mean.
Interesting data point about the date of Trump's mental model of the world. Television repairmen disappeared in the 1990s. https://t.co/ChzdntWCuF
@fentasyl Yeah, that's the other thi... |
@rauchg Have you heard of Syd Mead?
@raahilgadhoke I don't know what high deterministic need is.
@mayacfounder Maybe, but conviction is a terrible predictor of how well a startup will do. There is an infinite supply of (usually single-founder) startups with unshakeable conviction about bad ideas.
@nwbotz Definitely ... |
@Chris_arnade Intellectuals always think that as people get more time they'll spend it the way intellectuals would.
@LandsknechtPike Thank you, I just bought a copy.
@CompSciFact Languages shouldn't enforce levels of abstraction.
@APompliano Every national leader says that. What people are upset about are the ham-fi... |
@garrytan Prediction: Once all the parents in Palo Alto realize this has happened, it will get reversed very quickly.
Palo Alto parents are just about the last people in the world to tolerate something like this.
@AssalRad @nytimes The real question is not why she spoke out, but why so many others have remained sile... |
Journalists don't like Occam's Razor, because it implies that events have more boring causes than the ones they'd like to write about.
@urandomd @garrytan I think what motivates it is British culture. Kindness is more prized here.
@ESYudkowsky @garrytan Our kids' school in England teaches it very successfully. The te... |
@jsngr They care a medium amount about it. They're not obsessed with design like Apple, but they don't want things to look bad. There are a lot of companies in this category. In fact probably most companies are, including some of the biggest ones.
@JimDMiller @pitdesi The difference — and this is a very big difference... |
Believe it or not, it's usually wise to walk investors through the risks involved in your startup. Investors know there's risk. If there wasn't, your valuation would be billions of dollars right now. And if you're vague about the risks you seem glib, or worse still, clueless.
@mmay3r @cremieuxrecueil Presumably my mod... |
@jamesrcole @mattyglesias Probably what he means is that a lot of government spending is entitlements. I wouldn't have disputed that.
@harris I don't know. I don't think I'd ever advise a startup to delay making money in order to please investors. Investors are fickle idiots. You can't let them be your compass.
@type... |
"She wasn’t looking for the next killer product, though. She was looking for people."
https://t.co/iNNewXj25H
One way Timex made their watches cheap was to cut the retail markup in half. Jewelers resisted, so they sold their watches off racks in drugstores.
Something I told 17 yo: Till their early 20s most people ar... |
@grace_za This is a very important point.
@JuanIsidro You're conflating people and work. People themselves aren't commodities. You can't legally buy them. But their work is. You can buy that.
@CburgesCliff Did you mean that as a joke? Because that performance is a byword in England.
@lamg_dev Does talking of stealin... |
@cullenroche It's not so much six months apart as one election apart.
@remusrisnov Yes. If you're making something for kids or families, for example.
@billybinion I don't even think it's political theater. I think the employees making these decisions are simply incompetent and insufficiently supervised.
@Signalman23... |
Now that many of the top American universities have gone back to requiring standardized tests, which still don't? That might be a useful index of where the rot is deepest.
@overtquail @cremieuxrecueil The way they've always wanted to: they chose the people the admissions officers liked the most.
@AlexShulepov7 They n... |
@robinhanson Mafia doesn't imply monopoly.
@alexandreforget The labels.
@rickasaurus At least it's not hardware or music.
@josephjojoe Seems to be a lot easier now.
When people say "Next time I'm not going to start an x startup," two common values of x are "hardware" and "music". But for completely different reason... |
Life is Short
January 2016
Life is short, as everyone knows. When I was a kid I used to wonder
about this. Is life actually short, or are we really complaining
about its finiteness? Would we be just as likely to feel life was
short if we lived 10 times as long?
Since there didn't seem any way to answer this question, ... |
One of my favorite videos. https://t.co/QFkEQBqGgz
@noclador They only have to pretend to care about his wishes though.
@AliceFromQueens If you consistently uphold the same principles and the government swings back and forth from left to right, then you'll seem to be alternately on the right and the left.
@Austen @g... |
Alien Truth
October 2022
If there were intelligent beings elsewhere in the universe, they'd
share certain truths in common with us. The truths of mathematics
would be the same, because they're true by definition. Ditto for
the truths of physics; the mass of a carbon atom would be the same
on their planet. But I think w... |
How to Think for Yourself
November 2020
There are some kinds of work that you can't do well without thinking
differently from your peers. To be a successful scientist, for
example, it's not enough just to be correct. Your ideas have to be
both correct and novel. You can't publish papers saying things other
people alrea... |
@bscholl Does that mean we can now vote Netanyahu out?
@pickover No one with kids would restart at 10.
@ThorChiggins @BasedMikeLee The first time I wasn't sure if I could trust the NY Post story that reported this. It seemed best to be cautious. But since then more evidence has emerged.
@bamboo_master_m @BasedMikeLe... |
@rauchg "A great software engineer who’s now making a killer career in sales" is a fairly accurate description of a successful startup. Except the great engineer has to keep writing software too.
@davidsirota You won't tell people what your story is about even when they ask explicitly? That has to be a new world recor... |
@RSwynar Not yet but maybe soon.
12 yo asked what people do between when they start working and when they become famous. I told him they work super hard at whatever they'll later be famous for. That's how they become famous.
@JohnDCook @electricfutures I often produce sentences almost identical to ones I've written b... |
The title of the email is "Investor Update." Talk about underpromising and overdelivering; the email itself brings the news that the company is switching from web design to a nutritional drink mix. Well, it might work...
@TomCayman It's one of the ingredients in Old Bay.
That said, it's actually pretty good. The medi... |
Holding a Program in One's Head
August 2007
A good programmer working intensively on his own code can hold it
in his mind the way a mathematician holds a problem he's working
on. Mathematicians don't answer questions by working them out on
paper the way schoolchildren are taught to. They do more in their
heads: they ... |
@patrickc @IDC Paypal seems to be sniffing your butt though.
@PP_Rubens I thought Canaletto when I saw the women, but not anymore.
@RealTimeWWII Sound just like Russian soldiers in Ukraine.
@leigh22nyc Wow, hi Leigh!
@gf_256 Fortunately for you, there are other people focusing on the world of ideas and thoughts.
@... |
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