Dr. Octagonopus

Professional Gymnopedist

[Autism Capital 🧩 @AutismCapital]

Actual truth bomb here. Time reveals more of who you are. If you are ugly spirited, mean, cruel, etc., it will eventually show on your face, in your body, etc. A beautiful mind, beautiful thoughts, will eventually show on the body too

The Roald Dahl quote from The Twits is right

[John Loeber 🎢 @johnloeber]

3.5 years into the LLM era, it is interesting to consider current big tech companies and their LLM efforts. In order of market cap:

1. NVIDIA: no LLM. Supplier
2. Google: second-rate LLM. Fumbling
3. Apple: nothing
4. Microsoft: mostly nothing
5. Amazon: nothing
6. TSMC: no LLM. Supplier
7. SpaceXAICursor: sorta something
8. Broadcom: no LLM. Supplier
(...)
11. Meta: ??? fumbling

Will the fumblers stop fumbling? Are Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon making the right moves by staying out of it and aiming to play at different layers of the stack / licensing access as commoditization occurs?

You could say that they're all missing the boat -- classic case of incumbents standing by while being outcompeted -- but these are not dumb organizations, either. If they've all arrived at the same decision pattern, they may all share the same view of how this sector will evolve. Amazon and Microsoft have equity exposure to frontier labs, but I don't think that defines their strategy here.

We're now 3.5 years into the game, the dynamics are slowly becoming better understood and the next few years more foreseeable, OpenAI and Anthropic have added $2T in combined valuation, and yet the incumbents are getting further away, not closer to, competing with them. Very curious.

[Tim Ferriss @tferriss]

There is a process that I have used, and still use, to reignite life...

Create two timelines—6 months and 12 months—and list up to five things you dream of having (including, but not limited to, material wants: house, car, clothing, etc.), being (be a great cook, be fluent in Chinese, etc.), and doing (visiting Thailand, tracing your roots overseas, racing ostriches, etc.) in that order.

If you have difficulty identifying what you want in some categories, as most will, consider what you hate or fear in each and write down the opposite.

Do not limit yourself, and do not concern yourself with how these things will be accomplished. For now, it’s unimportant. This is an exercise in reversing repression.

Be sure not to judge or fool yourself. If you really want a Ferrari, don’t put down solving world hunger out of guilt. For some, the dream will be fame, for others fortune or prestige. All people have their vices and insecurities. If something will improve your feeling of self-worth, put it down.

Drawing a blank? In that case, consider these questions:

1) What would you do, day to day, if you had $100 million in the bank?
2) What would make you most excited to wake up in the morning to another day?

Don’t rush—think about it for a few minutes.

If still blocked, fill in the five “doing” spots with the following:

— one place to visit
— one thing to do before you die (a memory of a lifetime)
— one thing to do daily
— one thing to do weekly
— one thing you’ve always wanted to learn

What does “being” entail doing?

Convert each “being” into a “doing” to make it actionable. Identify an action that would characterize this state of being or a task that would mean you had achieved it. People find it easier to brainstorm “being” first, but this column is just a temporary holding spot for “doing” actions.

Here are a few examples:

1) Great cook —> make Christmas dinner without help

2) Fluent in Chinese —> have a five-minute conversation with a Chinese co-worker

Determine three steps for each of the dreams in just the 6-month timeline and take the first step now.

Define three steps for each dream that will get you closer to its actualization.

Set actions—simple, well-defined actions—for now, tomorrow (complete before 11 A.M.) and the day after (again completed before 11 A.M.). Once you have three steps for each of the four goals, complete the three actions in the “now” column.

Do it now. Each should be simple enough to do in five minutes or less. If not, rachet it down. If it’s the middle of the night and you can’t call someone, do something else now, such as send an e-mail, and set the call for first thing tomorrow.

If the next stage is some form of research, get in touch with someone who knows the answer instead of spending too much time in books or online, which can turn into paralysis by analysis.

The best first step, the one I recommend, is finding someone who’s done it and ask for advice on how to do the same.

[Andrew D. Huberman, Ph.D. @hubermanlab]

Stable leaders are calm problem solvers. Dogs know if you are or not. Do you greet your dog with squeals and let them jump on you? That means they are anxious and think they are tasked with leading you…
Affection is good, only once they are calm.
@cesarmillan on Huberman Lab.

[No filter Skin @NoFilterSkin]

HABITS I STOLE FROM PARENTS WHOSE KIDS ACTUALLY WANT TO BE AROUND THEM.

1. Look up the second either of them walks in.

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

We start from scratch and beat you.

[tetsuo @tetsuoai]

The entire core of a neural network on four cards.

Neuron, forward pass, activations, backprop. Learn these four and you understand how every model from a perceptron to a transformer predicts and learns.

[Teddy - PolyBackTest.com @Bitcoin_Teddy]

Pewdiepie reveals how to break free from the algorithm

“A lot of this is going to sound crazy but you’ve gotta hear me out, it’s a step by step process. I’m not saying you should do all of it but you should try some of it”

“Step 1 is creating friction. I put all social media and attention hungry apps in a second profile and I can’t understate how much this changed my life. Those 5-6 seconds it takes to switch profiles stops me every time and makes me think, is this what I want to be doing?”

“The second thing I did was self hosting. The effect that had on me is I’m not the product anymore. The things I use are mine and because they’re not free, I’m not paying with my privacy. I think the main difference is ads and news don’t reach me”

“Next thing I did was disable Shorts, I like YouTube but I hate how Shorts is everywhere I can’t escape it”

“Then I unfollowed everyone. You don’t have to do this, this is definitely a me thing, I just got really fed up”

“Next, get a DNS blocker. You can remove ads completely, most of it won’t even reach your device”

“I think you owe it to yourself to take some time today and start building your tech fence”

“These tech companies don’t care about you, so you’ve got to care about yourself. The cheat code is building some friction and filtering out the noise, that’s your defence and your cure”

[tetsuo @tetsuoai]

Father’s Day Project Based Tutorials in C. everything from computer architecture to game dev to OS internals, all through hands-on builds. Good entry point if you're learning the language and want something concrete to work toward.

GitHub/7etsuo/project-based-tutorials-in-c

[𝗖𝗹𝗮𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗠𝗲𝗹𝗼𝗱𝗶𝗲𝘀 @Old_But_Gold50s]

How Mozart sounds on cembalo? He played 9 Mozart songs on the harpsichord. The 18th century piano. This was the sound that was heard at the time.

[🎼🌺Music Love♥️ @ThoNg676733]

This concert was unbelievable. He starts the whole show by walking on stage alone with a little cassette-playing boom box, hits "play", and the show never stops for two hours.

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

If a Current Thing is a Thing enough times, it becomes The Thing. The Thing can run for a decade plus, until it becomes a parody of itself. Then The Thing quietly goes away. Even if The Thing has wrecked your whole world, you’re still silent about it. It was never a thing.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Fred Rogers met with a child psychologist every week for 22 years to build his show. She shaped everything: every script, prop, and song. The whole point was to give a child's nervous system time to slow down. In 1984, a single regulatory decision ended all of it.

The psychologist was Dr. Margaret McFarland, who co-founded the Arsenal Family and Children's Center alongside Benjamin Spock and Erik Erikson. She and Rogers understood that the prefrontal cortex in children, the part of the brain that controls impulse, emotion, and attention, takes decades to fully develop. At the start of every episode, Rogers tied his sneakers and changed his sweater while children settled in. Those pauses were intentional, designed to help a child's nervous system shift into a calmer, more focused state.

What ended it had nothing to do with child development science. In 1984, Reagan's FCC chairman Mark Fowler abolished the advertising limits that had protected children's programming from commercial pressure. Toy companies moved within months. Between 1984 and 1985, cartoons tied to toy lines increased by 300%, from a handful of shows to more than 40 animated series. In almost every case, the toy was designed first. The cartoon was built to sell it.

Researchers later put numbers to what parents were already noticing. A 2011 study in Pediatrics from the University of Virginia tested 60 four-year-olds across three groups: one watching SpongeBob, which cuts scene every 11 seconds; one watching a slow PBS show, which cuts scene every 34 seconds; and one drawing. Nine minutes later, all three took tests on attention, impulse control, short-term memory, and problem-solving. The SpongeBob group scored significantly worse across every measure.

In the 1970s, children began watching television around age 4. Research from pediatrician Dimitri Christakis found that by 2009, the average age of first screen exposure had dropped to 4 months, as the content got faster and the audience got younger. Researchers separately found that each additional hour of daily screen time at ages 1 or 3 raised the risk of attention problems at age 7 by 9%.

[End Wokeness @EndWokeness]

The day Elon Musk told X advertisers to "go fck yourselves" he was worth $220 billion

Today he's worth $1.1 trillion

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

Confidencemaxxing.

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

Many people are doing.

[Gangster Cinema Central @GangsterCinema]

The final scene in The Godfather Part II, with the family gathered around the dinner table, was originally going to include Marlon Brando, but he pulled out at the very last minute. Coppola had to rewrite a whole new ending the night before the shoot. He explains:

“It’s a very interesting story, because I had written this scene that we go back to, around the period just before the first Godfather, when they were all young…

My idea was that they would come together, finally, at the end, as a family. And the end of the movie would be a big, beautiful scene with Marlon Brando and Al Pacino, sort of summing up the whole saga that had gone down.

And I was negotiating with Marlon Brando right up to the last minute saying, “Marlon, please, just one day. We’ll give you this money.” But Marlon was so mad at Paramount - for ultimately not paying him any money on the first picture, or whatever he was mad about - And although I didn’t know it until the last day, ultimately, it wasn’t going to be possible to have him in the picture.

So I went to bed that night really worried. I had lost the end of my movie. I had to shoot it the next day. I had no idea what to do. I was sleeping in the Chateau Marmont Hotel. I had this scene. I had paid all this money to get Jimmy Caan to come back and some of the other actors to be in the last scene.

And in the middle of the night, I just had this idea. And I wrote it - which is that they were all gathered for a surprise birthday party for the Don.

And so after this scene plays out, in which Michael’s decision to join the Marines is kind of examined relative to really what all we know is going to happen, and what this young, beautiful, collegiate man who’s a war hero, who goes straight, is going to end up to be: this man without a heart, who’s killed his own brother and alienated his wife… And I thought there could be one beautiful scene with him and Don Corleone as we remember him from the first movie.

Since Marlon didn’t come, I made it the surprise party, and I built it up to the point where they all said, “Oh, he’s here. He’s here.” And they all run out of the room. And as you’re waiting for Marlon to come into the room, you just stay on Al…

And I came up with the solution at, like - three in the morning. And the next day they said, “Well, Marlon’s not coming.” And I said, “That’s all right. I’ve got a scene we can do without him.” And it was this one.

Also, I like that staging kind of, especially about families who ultimately dissolve in front of your eyes, the idea that you have a table full of people. And one by one, someone argues or someone goes off, and then you’re just left with one …

And everything else now is just sound. The father comes, and you know he’s there, and you feel he’s there, but you’re left with Michael alone.”

This quote comes from the director's commentary track off the Godfather Part II Blu-ray

[kache @yacineMTB]

One of the things I've observed time and time again, which makes me incredibly angry, is this SLAVE mentality reasoning: "If >big highly funded group< cant do it, what makes you think you can?"

I can. I will simply do it. Yes, I know better than them. Why do you give up?

[Jim Stewartson, Decelerationist 🇨🇦🇺🇦🇺🇸 @jimstewartson]

This is how Rush introduced Tom Sawyer last night. This was their first show since 2015. Incredible. 😁

[kache @yacineMTB]

the amount of time i spend cleaning up LLM code is greater or equal to the amount of time it would have taken me to write it myself